Covert City: The Cold War And The Making Of Miami, Vince Houghton and Eric Driggs, Public Affairs, 211 pages
When Miami-based exiles conducted a series of raids on Cuban vessels in 1963, the Department of State and the Department of Justice issued a joint press statement condemning the attacks. “The sympathy of this Government and the American people is with those Cubans who hope to see their country freed from Communist control,” it stated. “But this understanding does not mean that we are prepared to see our own laws violated with impunity or to tolerate activities which might provoke armed reprisals, the brunt of which would be borne by the Armed Forces of the United States.”
Of course, such statements from U.S. officials were issued long before the island’s turn to Communism. In the 60 years prior to 1959, the chief cause of Cuban exiles was the overthrow of U.S. occupations and U.S.-backed dictatorships.
In Covert City, NSA National Cryptologic Museum director Vince Houghton and Southcom Congressional Liaison Eric Driggs offer a blob-approved history of Miami certain to please all save the most bloodthirsty of the city’s residents. The two Miami natives’ reading is both informative and elegant. Rather than a comprehensive history of America’s shadiest city, the utility of the authors’ account derives from their practical insight into both Cuban America and the deep state’s self regard in Miami’s long Cold War.
From the very first chapter, the Cuban-American Driggs casts Miami’s fate as intrinsically tied to that of his ancestral home. The chapter revolves around a time-honored allegory within the community: that of the “apostle,” José Martí, and his life’s struggle for Cuban independence from Spain. On January 12th, 1895, U.S. authorities in Fernandina Beach, Florida, confiscated a host of weapons from ships commissioned by Martí to resupply rebels on the island. As in 1963, the 1832 Neutrality Act compelled American officials to take action against Martí’s best laid plans. Not three months later, Cuba’s would-be philosopher-president set sail from the Dominican Republic to Cuba’s eastern shores where he sought to link up with rebel forces. On May 19, Martí was gunned down by Spanish troops at the Battle of Dos Rios.
Driggs and Houghton write: “One can understand how many forced to flee to Miami could have envisioned themselves as patriots called upon by destiny to retrace Martí’s steps and organize stateside to regain Cuba’s freedom.” They conveniently omit the fact that the regime in Havana also claims Martí as a martyr of Cuban liberation. Indeed, as the authors grudgingly admit in Chapter 6, in 1956, Fidel Castro was one such exile leader who embarked on the righteous cause of restoring Cuban freedom from the tyrannical dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista.
Martí is revered by both the Cuban regime and much of the Latin American left for his prescient warnings regarding the threat of U.S. imperialism in the region. Another of the authors’ many sins of omission is a recognition of the factors that contributed to anti-Americanism on the island and Castro’s revolution more broadly.
The Miami neocon myth of a “Free Cuba” prior to 1959 simply does not comport with the facts. Between 1898 and 1902 and again between 1906 and 1909, Cuba was subject to U.S. occupation, with a third, less comprehensive military intervention between 1917 and 1922. Until 1934, Washington exercised constitutional control over the island’s trade policy and reserved the right to intervene in Cuban affairs under the Platt Amendment. The island likewise ceded its monetary sovereignty to Wall Street bankers. The institution charged with central banking, the National Bank of Cuba (BNC), was in reality a private firm run by financiers from Chase, Citi Bank, and JP Morgan, many of whom engaged in rampant speculation in the island’s sugar market.
The dictatorship of Gerardo Machado (1925–1933) was followed by the abrogation of the Platt Amendment and FDR’s Good Neighbor Policy. Thereafter, Batista ruled through puppet presidents until his election in 1940. He then seized power in a 1952 military coup with the support of both Washington and the Mob. For those keeping track, that leaves, at best, just 12 years of a nominally sovereign and democratic Cuban Republic. Much as American vassalship over Puerto Rico has contributed to its descendants’ overwhelming preference for the Democratic Party, so too did U.S. meddling foster the rise of myriad leftist, populist, and nationalist movements in Cuba prior to 1959. None of this is to justify the many atrocities of a regime with over a thousand political prisoners. It does however, raise important questions as to the lens with which the authors color their readings of Cuban and Miami history.
Covert City’s assessments of Miami-based efforts in Nicaragua and Guatemala are comparatively nuanced. The book describes in sordid detail the self-interested way CIA director Allen Dulles and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles toppled the non-communist Jacobo Árbenz in 1954. At the time, United Fruit owned more than a third of the country’s arable land, most of which was left unused in order to regulate supply and keep prices high for the firm. Hoping to execute a modest land reform, the government offered to pay United Fruit for its land. “But no dice…[The Dulles brothers] were shareholders in United Fruit. From there it was a quick transition from Árbenz was a nationalist trying to help his country, to Árbenz is a stooge of the communists working directly for Moscow.”
The CIA operation based out of the Miami suburb of Opa-locka proved highly effective in discrediting Árbenz through its sponsorship of anti-government propaganda. Then on June 16, 1954, a group of CIA-backed exiles arrived in Guatemala, precipitating the president’s downfall with the support of the country’s military. A spectacular success for the agency, no doubt, but one that the authors rightly question as sparking a decades-long civil war that destabilized Guatemala and killed hundreds of thousands.
Similarly, in Nicaragua, Driggs and Houghton critique the villainy of U.S. support for the vicious Contra rebels via the infamous Iran Contra scandal. “The Enterprise,” the entity charged with funneling the proceeds of Iranian arms sales to the Contras, was based out of Miami and run by NSC staffer Oliver North. “It would be one thing if Ronald Reagan was supporting a peace-loving, ragtag group of free-market capitalists… But they weren’t. Many of the Contras were former soldiers or members of the security services of Somoza’s repressive dictatorship.” Much the same could be said of the former soldiers from the Batista regime that participated in covert efforts against Castro—a fact predictably ignored by the authors.
Quite literally, the Guatemalan coup served as a blueprint for Bay of Pigs, with the notable difference that Washington drastically underestimated grassroots support for Castro and Kennedy made multiple unwise, last-minute alterations to the plan of invasion. Unlike the Guatemalan coup, the authors concur with contemporaneous sources that the central fault of the intervention in Cuba—and post-1959 interventionism more broadly—was that it did not succeed. They go as far as to laud the “principled” interventionism of famed historian and Kennedy advisor Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who proposed ousting right-wing Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo and Fidel Castro simultaneously as a way of saving face.
Given Griggs and Houghton’s professional background, it’s safe to say that their contrasting assessment of covert action in Cuba versus Guatemala is sanctioned by much of the intelligence community (IC). Since the end of the Cold War, the foreign policy elite’s approach towards interventionism has shifted from one that largely condemns regime change in democratic states (1953, Iran; 1954, Guatemala; 1973, Chile) to one that views regime change in autocratic countries as fair game (2001, Afghanistan; 2003, Iraq; 2011, Libya).
Covert City reifies this perspective and all but glorifies the countless efforts by both Cuban-Americans and the CIA to unseat Castro. After all, the two have been joined at the hip for almost six decades. It’s hard to overstate the immense influence that the agency has had on Cuban-Americans in Miami and vice versa. Much of the book stands as a testament to the outsize role that Cuban-Americans continue to play within the IC.
While the exact figure could be much higher, at one point the agency’s Miami station, code-named JMWAVE, was thought to have a budget of $500 million in inflation-adjusted dollars. Through the use of a revolving door of more than 50 front companies, the CIA was involved in just about any legal enterprise you could think of in the city, including publishing offices, boat shops, leasing firms, and travel agencies. Griggs and Houghton write, “In the 1960s, the CIA became one of—if not the—largest employers in Miami, and one of the largest employers in the State of Florida.” It also operated the third largest navy in the Caribbean.
Among the regime change plans devised by JMWAVE’s Operation Mongoose was a Mob hit against Castro. Through an intermediary, the agency sought to commission a “gangland-style” killing of the communist leader from Chicago bosses “Sam” Giancana and Santo Traficante Jr. At the time, both men were on the attorney general’s ten most wanted list. Castro had undertaken a broad campaign against vice on the island and the mob resented the influence that they had lost since Batista’s fall. Giancana and Traficante refused any use of firearms, proposing instead a poison pill to be delivered by a Castro staffer. The pill developed by the agency proved ineffective, and the staffer in question was purged in January 1961.
More consequential was Mongoose’s campaign of state-sponsored terrorism by exile groups. JMWAVE recruited and/or directed an army of up to 15,000 Cuban exiles from an alphabet soup of anti-Castro organizations to sabotage Cuban vessels and, in some cases, target civilians. After the Cuban Missile Crisis, the operation was drastically reduced in scope for fear of escalation with the Soviets. Washington began to clamp down hard on exile raids, though JMWAVE continued more targeted sabotage operations with less raucous exile groups the agency could better control.
As our later support for the mujahideen during the Soviet-Afghan War taught us, the trouble with sponsoring terrorism is that, once unleashed, the proverbial CIA-trained genie is hard to put back in the bottle. This was exactly what happened with Mongoose exiles in Miami. Many came to curse both the U.S. and British-Bahamian governments for the crackdown. In a particularly colorful case in December 1964, a timed rocket launcher bearing a Cuban flag fired just outside UN headquarters in New York. Had the weapon been aimed slightly upward, it may have achieved its intended goal of killing Che Guevara, as well as over 50 other world leaders. Griggs and Houghton rightly condemn the incident as counterproductive. Yet the true scale of exile terrorism is mostly—or perhaps deliberately—glossed over in Covert City. To give an idea, in 1974, Cuban exiles were responsible for 45 percent of the world’s bombings.
The most illustrative perpetrators were the homicidal Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles. Both men were trained and recruited by the CIA during the early to mid-1960s. In and outside the CIA, Bosch and Posada conducted numerous bombings, killing an untold number of civilians including insufficiently anti-communist exiles in Miami. The two men collaborated in the infamous 1976 bombing of Cubana Aviación Flight 455, killing 73 civilians on board (an event unmentioned by the authors). Both men served time in Venezuela for the crime until Posada escaped from prison and a military tribunal acquitted Bosch in 1986. Upon returning to the U.S., President Bush pardoned Bosch. Posada continued his terror campaign well into the 1990s and played a pivotal role in Iran-Contra.
By far the most glaring omission in Covert City pertains to drugs. Barring the inevitable discussion of the negative stereotypes portrayed in Brian De Palma’s Scarface, the book makes only passing references to the city’s connection to the drug trade. This is no coincidence. To this day, the IC has long favored political goals, namely regime change, over drug enforcement. The CIA later admitted that it turned a blind eye to the Contras’ drug trafficking in the 1980s. Similarly, the aforementioned Posada Carriles was also alleged to have engaged in drug trafficking both before and during Iran-Contra.
Then there’s the thorny issue of the real-life Scarfaces, such as Sal Magluta and Willy Falcón, that tarnish Covert City’s mostly one-sided portrait of the Cuban-American community. Griggs and Houghton laud the remarkable gumption with which Cuban-Americans mounted businesses and achieved political power within Miami. It just so happens that some of that entrepreneurialism and political influence was directed in the service of local and foreign kingpins, oligarchs, and world leaders. Regarding the former, “Cocaine Cowboys” Falcón and Magluta ran a Miami-based drug empire that conspicuously evaded authorities for more than three decades thanks to local political connections.
As for the latter, the book dedicates its final chapter to a brief overview of some of the more notable cases of local corruption involving, ironically, Miami neocons and their symbiotic enemies abroad. Per the authors, “Russia’s elite have more than $1 trillion in offshore accounts, which [experts] say is ‘disproportionately held in South Florida property.’” Much of it is used to launder countless illicit proceeds including from Venezuela. This may come as a surprise given the level of #resistance-esque Russia derangement in Miami. As with narcotics trafficking, political leaders in the city are more than willing to turn a blind eye to ideological nemeses—for a price.
The avatar of this philosophy is one-term congressman David Rivera (R., Fla.). A Miami neocon if ever there was one, Rivera was a self-styled Cold Warrior that just so happened to accept a $50 million consulting contract from the freedom-loving regime of Nicolás Maduro. This is not necessarily a contradiction. Cynical actors such as Rivera know full well that the policies he and other Miami neocons advocate have helped perpetuate the rule of dictators such as Castro, Maduro, and Diaz-Canel.
This is most obvious with regards to the open border that Miami neocons have espoused towards Cuba since the 1960s. In their telling, the totality of Cuba’s 11 million residents are eligible for asylum in the United States on account of the island’s condition as a communist country. Yet if you ask recent arrivals, the vast majority will readily admit that they are economic as opposed to political migrants.
As Phillip Linderman has argued, mass migration from Cuba to the United States serves as an escape valve that the regime has repeatedly used to ease pressure from the domestic population. Similarly, it is self-evident that Cubans’ preferential access to parole, residency, and welfare—now drastically expanded under Biden’s open border extremism—incentivizes migration to the United States. Today, virtually all Cuban immigrants are eligible for Medicaid and qualify for residency after one year of living in the United States, per the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act.
But don’t take my word for it. Throughout the book, Driggs and Houghton note that “the Cuban government has used the Cuban people and mass migration as a weapon against the United States.” They even acknowledge the security risk posed by allowing Cubans spies effectively unfettered access to U.S. citizenship via the Cuban Adjustment Act, though they predictably avoid any discussion on the topic of revoking the legislation.
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Quite obviously, these policies have allowed Miami neocons to replenish their ranks and maintain political influence in both the city and the state of Florida over the course of decades. Under the current paradigm, both parties embrace open borders with regard to Cuba, Democrats because they fetishize the delusion of a “cosmopolitan,” stateless society, Republicans because Cubans overwhelmingly vote for the GOP.
To be fair, it’s understandable that the authors would choose to omit a more substantive discussion of Cuban immigration policy given the book’s intended audience: in large part, South Floridians. They are also correct to note the centrality, gumption, and cultural impact of Cuban-Americans in both Miami and its extended Cold War.
Like many of their Latin American peers, Cuban-Americans display a love towards their adopted country that in many cases exceeds that of native-born Americans. This should not, however, eclipse the reality that current policy towards Cuba has not and by no means seems likely to achieve its intended goal. At minimum, the combination of maximum pressure via sanctions and open border policies towards Cubans must be revised. Until then, neocons in and outside South Florida, as well as Americans more broadly, will need to resign themselves to the perpetuity of Miami’s long Cold War.
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Publish date : 2024-08-11 17:01:00
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