Venceremos!

Venceremos!
The Florida Keys War
Part 2

Fallen Citadel: July 7th-July 13th, 1961

Around 10:30 AM on the morning of July 7th, the last remaining
Soviet citizens in Cuba, a group of less than two dozen employees
of the official news agency TASS, boarded a freighter in Havana
Harbor to make the journey home. They left behind the wreckage of
what had been Latin America’s first Marxist state and a sense of
regret that Moscow’s efforts to establish a bridgehead in the
United States’ own backyard had come to nothing. One sight that
would particularly haunt them in years to come was the deserted
shell of their country’s former embassy, which they passed on the
journey to Havana Harbor.

Once the ship had cleared the harbor and was safely out on the
open sea, US and British marine units began coming ashore to help
relieve some of the pressure on the US-Mexican forces pushing
towards Havana from the west. Most of Mariel was under coalition
control, but there were still a few pockets of Cuban Communist
resistance in that port city.

To clear those pockets out, General Harkins ordered a squadron
of F-105 Thunderchiefs to bomb Mariel’s southern districts. The
bombing began just after noon Eastern Daylight Time and lasted
until 1:15 PM, by which time the Cuban Communist forces’ armored
vehicles in that area had been either destroyed or seized by the
anti-Castro insurgents.

By 2:30 PM the Havana suburbs of Mariano, Guanabacoa, and Reglia
were all in U.S. coalition hands; a CIA covert team was flown to
Bauta ready to enter Havana on a moment’s notice and place Fidel
Castro under arrest. The socialist paradise he had spent almost
six years working to build was coming apart at the seams, and he
could do nothing to stop it.
******
Just before dusk that evening, U.S. and allied forces in and near
Havana were ordered to temporarily halt all operations. The White
House had learned from Pentagon intelligence sources that Raul
Castro was on the verge of being overthrown as president of the
Republic of Cuba by a group of dissident generals who wanted
to establish a new provisional government that would negotiate
a peace treaty with the United States and its allies. The Choque
y Temor disaster had all but killed the last shreds of support
for Fidel’s war within the top echelons of his armed forces, and
the dissidents were also convinced that Raul Castro was totally
incapable of resolving that the dangerous state of unrest within
those parts of Havana still under Communist rule.

At 9:22 AM Eastern Daylight Time on the morning of July 8th,
President Kennedy received confirmation that Raul Castro had in
fact been toppled and a new provisional government headed by
former Camaguey provincial governor Huber Matos was in power in
Havana. Matos himself sent a cable to the U.S. embassy in Mexico
City indicating that he was ready to talk peace terms with the
U.S. coalition; at 1:15 PM the embassy sent back a reply stating
that Washington was willing to listen to any cease-fire offers
the new government made.

For the next 48 hours the world watched anxiously as the two
sides tried to work out a mutually satisfactory peace treaty.
Finally, late on the afternoon of July 11th, President Kennedy
went on television to report that a cease-fire accord had been
reached and would take effect at 7:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time
that evening; as part of the agreement, US and Mexican troops
would occupy the rest of Havana immediately.

Just 54 days after it had started, the Florida Keys War was
over.
******
Within an hour after the cease-fire had gone into effect,
the CIA arrest team out of Bauta had taken Fidel Castro into
custody and made arrangements to transfer him to the hospital
wing of a military prison in the southern United States. The
Matos government and the anti-Castro shadow administration in
Cabo san Antonio were in talks to form a so-called “unity
administration” that would work with U.S. coalition occupation
authorities to run Cuba until national elections could be held
to choose a permanent head of state.

News of the war’s end was greeted with relief and euphoria in
the West, but nowhere was the joy at the U.S. victory more
apparent or enthusiastic than within Florida’s Cuban exile
community. For them, Castro’s downfall meant they could finally
go home to the country they’d been forced to abandon when the
Communist warlord had seized power in 1959.

For the Kremlin, the collapse of the Castro regime meant an
end to the dream of securing a Soviet foothold in America’s
backyard. It nearly also ended Andrei Gromyko’s tenure as Soviet
foreign minister; two days after the cease-fire went into effect
in Cuba, he went to Brezhnev’s private office and offered his
resignation, blaming himself for the Cuban Communists’ downfall.
Had he instructed his people in Havana to be more forceful about
discouraging Operation July 26th, he said, the war could have been
averted— or at the very least, delayed until the Castro regime
was in better shape to prosecute it. But Brezhnev, mindful of
Gromkyo’s diplomatic skills and dedication to the Soviet state,
eventually convinced him to stay on.

In the months after the last shots were fired in the battle for
Havana, historians and political analysts constantly argued over
the question of why Castro didn’t turn to guerrilla tactics when
his armies were so disastrously defeated trying to carry on a
conventional war with the United States and its allies. It was
widely agreed, however, that three critical factors had combined
to make the prospect of using such tactics slim if not nil:

(1)Castro’s health
Given the stomach and cardiac problems he
developed as a result of the stress brought
on by the Florida Keys War, Castro’s ability
to lead an effective guerrilla army against
U.S. and allied forces was considered to be
questionable at best. Even before the war,
his prodigious daily smoking of cigars was
taking a grim toll on his body that would
one day have come back to haunt him even if
the war had never happened.

(2)The loss of over 50% of the Cuban Communist armed
forces’ ammunition supplies to US and British air strikes
In order to conduct even the most rudimentary
defensive operations, a rebel army needs to
maintain an adequate stockpile of munitions at
all times. Constant US and RAF bombing of the
Castro forces’ supply dumps cut deeply into
their reserves; raids on the ground by anti-
Castro insurgents diminished them even further.
Thus any Cuban Communist partisan effort would
have been operating at a severe if not fatal
disadvantage.

(3)The swiftness of the U.S. coalition forces’ advance once
they established a foothold in Cuba.
Even setting aside the other two factors, it
remained an indisputable fact that the speed
with which U.S. and allied forces in Cuba moved
inland once their beachheads were secure caused
major disruption to both the military and political
elements of the machinery of the Castro regime. The
extent of this disruption inevitably complicated
the regime’s efforts to organize an asymmetrical
war on the invaders.

In addition to these, there was the issue of lingering dissent
among certain sectors of the civilian population. Fidel Castro’s
harshness in dealing with critics of his government had alienated
these sectors from the very ideals of socialism that he meant to
instill in his people; this in turn sharply reduced the pool of
manpower from which he could have drawn potential recruits for a
partisan campaign against US occupation troops.

Falling Dominoes: July 15th, 1961-March 3rd, 1962

Though Gromyko was able to keep his job in the aftermath of the
Florida Keys War, many other top-level Soviet officials weren’t
as lucky. On July 15th, Brezhnev fired defense minister Radion
Malinovsky; in the CPSU leader’s eyes, despite his status as a
World War II hero Malinovsky had demonstrated by his handling— or
rather mishandling –of the Turkish crisis that he was unfit for
his post. Following his dismissal, Malinovsky’s health went into
steady and irreversible decline, and he died on April 23rd, 1965
of heart failure at the age of 86.

Within two months of Malinovsky’s departure, more than a dozen
senior officers in the Soviet armed forces would be driven into
early retirement as the political fallout from the war and the
Turkish standoff continued to reverberate through the Kremlin.
The KGB wasn’t left untouched either; two of Alexander Shelepin’s
senior aides committed suicide in September of 1961, and by mid-
October Shelepin himself had been replaced as the agency’s chief
by his most vocal critic, Vladimir Semichastny.

Alexander Alekseyev, whose spirit had been drained by the turmoil
of the final days of the Florida Keys War, took a brief vacation
on the Black Sea to restore his psyche. Six months later he would
return to Cuba to begin talks with the post-Castro government on
reopening the Soviet embassy in Havana.

U.S. and allied occupation forces had a tough task ahead of them
in the first months after the war ended. People had to be fed,
homes had to be rebuilt, the war-ravaged Cuban economy had to be
revived— and there was also the small but important matter of
tracking down Fidel Castro’s brother Raul. The erstwhile Cuban
defense minister and six of his fellow Communists had escaped
from an American POW camp and fled into the wilds of the Sierra
Maestra mountains; there, according to CIA reports, the seven
escapees had set up a temporary base in an abandoned Cuban army
training barracks. Raul’s precise plans were uncertain, but it
was generally agreed that he and his comrades hoped to rally
their fellow Cubans to rise up against the U.S coalition forces.

US and allied troops, and police of the new post-Castro Cuban
government, spent more than two months searching for this crude
hideaway. They found it late on the afternoon of September 23rd
and hastened to surround it; Raul and his companions fought a
gallant and relentless struggle to keep them at bay, but with the
US-led forces enjoying a considerable numerical advantage over
Castro’s tiny cell the outcome was never in doubt. By nightfall
all seven men were back in US custody.
******
Like the Army-McCarthy hearings that had preceded it, and the
Watergate investigation that would follow it, the war crimes
trial of Fidel and Raul Castro was a riveting television event
for the American public. More than 60% of all TV sets in the
continental US were tuned in to the October 2nd, 1961 indictment
of the deposed Cuban dictator and his brother; even greater
numbers of viewers would watch when the actual trial began four
months later.

“History will absolve me.” Fidel had boasted in 1953 during
his trial for the Moncada barracks raid, but this boast would
soon be proven dead wrong— if anything, history would serve as
the prosecution’s most effective weapon in making its case
against the Castros. Indeed, when the prosecution delivered its
opening statement on February 5th, 1962, the chief prosecutor
made it a point to show the jury photographs of two political
prisoners who’d been executed on Fidel’s orders during his first
months as ruler of Cuba. Those photos, the prosecutor said, were
a clear illustration of the brutal depths to which Fidel had been
willing to sink in order to hold on to power in Cuba.

For almost a month, dozens of witnesses were paraded through the
Pentagon conference room where the trial was held. Ex-POWs, Cuban
civilians who’d been jailed by Castro’s secret police during his
rule, diplomats and intelligence officers who’d charted his slide
towards tyranny— all them painted a damning picture of a modern-
day Richard III who had ruled Cuba with an iron fist and almost
no regard whatever for basic human rights or international law.
Raul Castro fared no better: members of the combined US-UK-Cuban
task force assigned to hunt him down gave macabre accounts of
how pro-US Cuban civilians unfortunate enough to run across him
had been shot or knifed in cold blood.

On March 3rd, 1962 the war crimes tribunal rendered its verdict:
of the 79 criminal counts Fidel and Raul had been charged with,
the tribunal found them guilty on all but one. The brothers’
reaction to the verdict was one of shock mixed with despair as
the MPs led them back to their cells to await sentencing. Their
last faint hope of reviving socialist rule in Cuba had once and
for all been crushed.

By contrast, most Americans rejoiced when news of the verdicts
broke; this was particularly true in southern Florida, whose
residents— whether or not they were of Cuban heritage –saw Fidel
Castro as the devil incarnate and felt he deserved the harshest
possible punishment the tribunal could inflict on him. One Miami
Beach citizen even personally offered to lend the US government
rope with which to hang the Castro brothers.

Gone Too Soon: March 4th, 1962-October 22nd, 1963

The day after the tribunal found the Castro brothers guilty
on 78 of the 79 counts against them, it reconvened to begin
deliberations on their sentence; on March 8th it unanimously
recommended execution for both of them. President Kennedy,
however, chose instead to commute their sentences to life
imprisonment— some of Kennedy’s harsher critics had charged
that his decision to go to war with the Castro regime was
motivated largely or even solely by a vengeful desire to get
even for the Bay of Pigs, and the President was understandably
concerned that letting the executions go forward might lend
weight to his critics’ charges.

With the remnants of Castro’s tyranny being swept up into what
presidential advisor Theodore Sorenson had dubbed “the dustbin
of history”, the White House could now turn its attention to
implementing a practical policy for relations with post-Communist
Cuba. Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon made several visits to
Havana in late March and early April of 1962 for discussions with
the Matos provisional government on laying the groundwork for a
plan to revive the Cuban economy; FBI director J. Edgar Hoover
sent advisors to the island that summer to help Cuban police deal
with organized crime syndicates that were attempting to reassert
their former territorial privileges from the Batista era. Even
the Surgeon General made a tour of Cuba to check up on efforts to
repair the battered Cuban health care system.
******
In contrast to the wholesale housecleaning that went on among the
top ranks of the Soviet armed forces after the Florida Keys War
ended, only one senior American military officer left his post—
and he did so entirely by his own choice. On July 11th, 1962, US
Air Force chief of staff General Curtis LeMay submitted his
resignation to President Kennedy, who was only too glad to
accept it— he’d come to regard LeMay as a hothead at best and
a would-be Napoleon at worst. LeMay would fade from the public
eye for a while, only to return to it with a vengeance in 1968
when notorious segregationist and presidential candidate George
Wallace picked the ex-general as his running mate.

General Paul D. Harkins, head of US and allied expeditionary
forces in Cuba, continued in that capacity long after the war
ended; when UN peacekeepers began arriving in January of 1963
to replace the occupation forces, Harkins worked with the
peacekeeping units to ensure a smooth transition. The following
year, after the last US occupation troops had left the island,
Harkins was reassigned to head the Military Assistance Command
in Vietnam(MACV); there he would be responsible for taking the
lessons the US armed forces had learned in jungle combat during
the war in Cuba and applying them to the task subduing the small
but dangerous Viet Cong insurgency.

In August of 1963 Cuba held its first democratic elections of
the post-Castro era; despite fears of ballot tampering or even
civil unrest, the voting went surprisingly well, with a newly
formed centrist political party called Alianza de Cuba Nueva
winning a majority of the available seats in the country’s new
national assembly. Party chairman Reynaldo Ochoa, who prior to
the Castro regime’s collapse had been an obscure ex-university
professor, was voted into office as the new Cuban president. In
a congratulatory letter to Ochoa, President Kennedy said: “Two
thousand years ago, the proudest boast a free man could make was
‘civis Romanus sum’…today, the proudest boast he can make is ‘Soy
un Habanero’.”

In early October the Cuban foreign ministry announced that Ochoa
and Kennedy would meet in Havana on November 1st for a summit that
was intended to crown the restoration of normal diplomatic ties
between the United States and Cuba. But tragically, this meeting
would be prevented by a pair of sudden gunshots in Dallas…
******
To this day, no one knows for sure what drove ex-Marine and ex-
Communist Lee Harvey Oswald to kill President Kennedy in Dallas
on the afternoon of October 22nd, 1963. Was he, as most press
accounts of Kennedy’s death insisted, a cold-blooded monster
guilty of premeditated murder? Or was he, as his brother Robert
later told police, a heartbroken widower whose grief over his
wife Marina’s suicide in the final days of the Florida Keys War
had gradually driven him insane and finally led him to shoot the
President in a moment of blind fury? Oswald himself isn’t around
to answer these questions; two days after he shot Kennedy to
death, he was himself gunned down by a mentally disturbed local
nightclub owner named Jack Ruby. To complicate things further,
Oswald’s personal journals, which could have shed some light on
his motives for shooting Kennedy, disappeared shortly before the
President’s death and have never been recovered.

But one fact is beyond dispute— that Oswald held Kennedy fully
responsible for the soul-crushing depression that overcame his
Russian-born wife Marina when the war began and ultimately drove
her to hang herself in their Dallas apartment the same week that
U.S. coalition forces made their final assault on Havana. In a
statement made to the Texas Rangers shortly after Lee’s arrest,
Robert Oswald acknowledged that his brother had thought about
killing Kennedy at least once prior to the actual assassination;
a photograph that the prosecution had planned to use as evidence
in Oswald’s trial(and eventually made the cover of Life magazine)
shows Lee holding a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle and standing beside
a cardboard target with the initials “JFK” crudely scrawled in
its center.

However, when Oswald committed the actual killing he ended up
using a .44 handgun; as the President’s motorcade was turning
up Dealey Plaza and making its way past the Texas School Book
Depository just after 1:00 PM on the afternoon of October 22nd,
Oswald charged across a grassy knoll and fired four shots at
Kennedy’s limousine. The first shot sailed past the limousine
and struck down a local TV reporter who was filming the motorcade
for Dallas’ NBC affiliate; the second wounded Texas governor John
Connally; the third and fourth shots hit Kennedy squarely in the
heart.

The president was rushed to Parkland Memorial Hospital, but there
was nothing doctors could do for him; at 2:27 PM, less than 90
minutes after Oswald’s attack on the motorcade, a somber Walter
Cronkite broke the news to a stunned America that Kennedy was
dead. By that time Lyndon Johnson had been sworn in as the 36th
President of the United States and flags were being lowered to
half-mast at General Harkins’ command HQ in Havana.

Flags were also lowered at the newly reopened Cuban embassy in
Washington, where the next day Reynaldo Ochoa would give a short
but moving address eulogizing Kennedy as “the father of the new
Cuba”.

“You Killed My President, You Rat!”: October 1963-November 1964

Lyndon Johnson’s first full day in the White House was a busy
one indeed; in addition to leading the American people in
mourning for his slain predecessor, he had to oversee the day-
to-day business of running the government and reassure nervous
allies— Reynaldo Ochoa in particular –that Kennedy’s death would
not affect America’s commitments to its friends abroad. Even as
people were filing past Kennedy’s casket in the Capitol rotunda
to pay their final respects, Johnson had already requested that
the Defense Department write up a contingency plan for conducting
a possible ground war in Vietnam should circumstances require
direct American intervention.

In Dallas, Jack Ruby had a busy day himself. Posing as a writer
for a local newspaper, he infiltrated the police station where
Oswald was being detained and learned the timetable for Oswald’s
scheduled transfer to the county jail; he then drove to a gun
shop in Fort Worth and bought a .45 automatic and two clips of
ammunition. Back in Dallas, he stopped for lunch at a hamburger
stand before returning to his club to attend to his customers. He
went to bed around 9:00 PM with the .45 at his side.

On October 24th, around 11:00 AM, Ruby confronted Oswald just as
police were leading the accused presidential assassin to the van
which was supposed to take him to the Dallas County jail; before
anyone realized what was happening, Ruby whipped his .45 out of
his pocket and shot Oswald through the head at point-blank range,
shouting: “You killed my president, you rat!”

A hero to some, a dangerous lunatic to others, and an enigma to
all, Ruby was arrested on the spot and charged with manslaughter;
he was found guilty on that charge in March of 1964 and sentenced
to ten years in prison. Ruby served less than four years of that
sentence before dying of cancer on February 3rd, 1968.
******
Despite personal scandal, Lyndon Johnson cruised easily to his
party’s nomination for a full term as President at the 1964
Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City; as the Kennedy
Administration’s domestic point man during the Florida Keys War,
Johnson had built up a very solid power base that enabled him
to rack up an almost unbroken string of primary and caucus wins.
The only blemish on that record was a second-place finish in
Minnesota to the man who ultimately became his running mate:
Senator Hubert Humphrey.

The general election, however, would pit the President against
dynamic Arizona Republican senator Barry Goldwater, who clinched
his party’s nomination at their 1964 National Convention in San
Francisco. Knowing that Johnson would be hard to touch on issues
relating to national security, Goldwater opted instead to focus
on domestic concerns such as crime and health care; as a result,
he was able to cut significantly into LBJ’s lead in the polls. By
the time Johnson and Goldwater met in Chicago in early September
for their first presidential debate, many Republicans actually
held out hope that the eloquent and forceful Arizona senator
would prove to be the man who could take back the White House
for the GOP.

But when the chief moderator questioned him on whether he
would have used nuclear weapons to stop Castro’s attempt to
invade the Florida Keys, he made a gaffe that would prove
fatal not only to his own presidential aspirations but also
to many of his fellow Republicans’ Congressional campaigns.
“Extremism in the defense of liberty,” he said, “is no vice.”
Johnson seized on that remark as proof that Goldwater was too
belligerent to engage in any real diplomacy; the President’s
campaign team then prepared a series of attack ads portraying
the Republican candidate as a trigger-happy warmonger who’d
push the button at the drop of a hat.

The most famous(or notorious, depending on your viewpoint) of
these ads depicted an eight-year-old girl counting down from
ten while picking leaves off a dais. As the count reached five,
the girl abruptly gave way to a blank screen; when it hit zero
the blank screen abruptly lit up with a mushroom room cloud
superimposed over the New York City skyline.

Thanks in part to that 30-second spot, and to solid Democratic
voter turnout in Florida, Louisiana, Alabama and Georgia, LBJ
crushed Goldwater in the November general elections. In one of
the most lopsided results in US electoral history, Johnson took
47 of 50 states— not surprisingly, his biggest win was in his
home state of Texas, where he won every county by an average
margin of 6-1.

Having secured a full term as President, Johnson could now
begin setting the agenda for his next four years in office.
Near the top of that agenda was the guerrilla war in South
Vietnam; after two US destroyers had been attacked in the Gulf
of Tonkin in July of 1964, he had come to the conclusion that a
direct US confrontation with the Viet Cong and their backers in
Hanoi was inevitable. The day after his resounding defeat of
Goldwater, he invited a group of top military and intelligence
officials to the White House to discuss how the lessons of the
Florida Keys War could be applied to Vietnam…

Goodbye My Darling, Hello Vietnam: November 1964-March 1966

On November 21st, 1964 the US Congress authorized President
Johnson to begin deploying combat troops to South Vietnam. The
initial contingent was to consist of 200,000 Army and Marine
Corps soldiers; Johnson’s goal was to have 500,000 men in-
country by February of 1965. To critics who charged that this
was an excessive number of troops to commit to a brushfire war
against a seemingly low-grade insurgency, Johnson countered that
overwhelming force was necessary if America were to win its fight
against the Viet Cong. Overwhelming force, he said, had been the
key to victory against the Cuban Communists in the Florida Keys
War and would likewise make the difference in defeating the Viet
Cong’s efforts to topple the pro-Western government in Saigon.

But the VC would prove to be a tougher nut to crack than the
Castro regime— unlike the Cuban Communists, they had neutral
Cambodia and Laos as sanctuaries through which to move their
supplies and men. They also had a leader, North Vietnamese
Communist ruler Ho Chi Minh, whose gift of oratory and long
background of successful guerrilla warfare against another
Western power— France –could inspire them to continue their
fight even against seemingly impossible odds. On top of this,
their ingenuity led them to devise homemade weapons and an
extensive tunnel network with which the more high tech-oriented
Americans had serious trouble coping.

Last but not least, they had the backing of Communist China— a
country that since the end of the Florida Keys War had been
moving swiftly and steadily to supplant Russia as the primary
Marxist influence in the Third World. The loss of prestige
Moscow had suffered as a result of its miscalculations in the
Turkish crisis had created a leadership vacuum in the socialist
bloc Mao Zedong’s regime was only too happy to fill. While the
USSR might still hold sway over eastern Europe, Communist
movements in Africa, Asia, and Latin America now took their
cues from Bejing.

And it wasn’t just spiritual and political support the Chinese
gave Hanoi; about the same time that Washington was deploying its
first combat troops to defend the Saigon government, Beijing was
dispatching weapons to North Vietnam to bolster the NVA and VC
arsenals. The Mao regime also stationed two full divisions of the
People’s Liberation Army along the China-North Vietnam buffer to
act as a kind of rapid reaction force should Hanoi find itself
in danger of invasion by the Americans or the South Vietnamese.

Inevitably, Johnson ordered B-52 strikes against North Vietnam,
and these strikes prompted concerns on both sides of the Pacific
that the guerrilla conflict being fought in Indochina might soon
escalate into a wider regional war between China and the United
States. By the time Johnson started his official four-year term
as President on January 20th, 1965 the US Air Force had dropped
more bombs on the port of Haiphong in a single week than it had
on Berlin in the entire final two months of the Second World War.

The fighting in Vietnam wasn’t the only Asian crisis confronting
Johnson as his new term began; relations between the Soviet Union
and China, which had been steadily deteriorating since the late
1950s, were mutating into open hostility as an age-old ownership
dispute over the Ussuri River territories along the Russo-Chinese
border flared up anew under the pressure of Beijing’s campaign to
replace Moscow as the standard-bearer for the Marxist world.

In mid-February of 1965 Johnson convened a special session of the
National Security Council at the White House to discuss the
question of whether the Ussuri quarrel could affect American
interests in Southeast Asia. Then-Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman
General Earle K. Wheeler told the President bluntly that if the
Soviets and the Chinese were to go to war over the Ussuri border
region, it could all too easily escalate into full-scale nuclear
conflict into which the United States would inevitably be drawn.
The next day, Johnson sent Secretary of State Dean Rusk to UN
headquarters in New York to meet with UN Secretary General U
Thant in hopes Thant could arrange a diplomatic resolution to the
border disagreement.

But Rusk was in for a rude awakening when he was admitted into
Thant’s office: the UN secretary general told him that Sweden had
already made mediation offers to Moscow and Beijing only to be
flatly rejected by both capitals. Furthermore, Chinese foreign
minister Chou En-Lai had warned in a speech before the CPC that
any intervention by outside parties would be opposed by what he
described as “bayonets of fire”.

This did not sit well with Johnson; he understood perfectly that
a Sino-Soviet regional conflict, even if it didn’t go nuclear,
had the potential to hurt US allies in the Far East— especially
Japan, which had the misfortune to be sitting within range of
both Soviet and Chinese bombers and whose already-scarce material
resources would be further strained by the flood of refugees that
a Sino-Soviet war would inevitably bring about.

Throughout all of the spring and most of the summer of 1965, the
Johnson Administration continued to play a tricky balancing act,
seeking to effect a peaceful resolution to the Sino-Soviet border
crisis while at the same time maintaining pressure on the Viet
Cong to end its guerrilla war against South Vietnam. As part of
the administration’s full court press to head off armed conflict
along the Sino-Soviet border, then-US ambassador to the UN Arthur
Goldberg proposed three separate resolutions calling for China
and the Soviet Union to accept a diplomatically mediated solution
to their territorial standoff.

******

With most of the world’s attention focused on the fighting in
Vietnam and the mounting friction along the Chinese-Soviet
border, few if any observers noticed that a quiet rebellion
was building in the Kremlin’s own backyard. Moscow’s failure to
aid the Castro regime during the Florida Keys War had caused
millions of eastern Europeans to rethink their countries’ ties
to the Soviet Union; though publicly men like East Germany’s
Walter Ulbricht, Czechoslovakia’s Antonin Novotny, and Bulgaria’s
Todor Zhivkov continued to proclaim the Warsaw Pact’s unshakable
solidarity, behind closed doors many had come to wonder if that
solidarity might be more trouble than it was worth.

The first public expression of this discontent came in August of
1965, when workers at the Bratislava factory of the Czech auto
manufacturer Skoda went on strike to demand higher wages and a
liberalization of the Prague government’s policies on political
dissent. On both sides of the Iron Curtain the Skoda workers’
walkout was greeted with outright shock; not since the ill-fated
June 1953 Workers’ Uprising in East Germany had a Warsaw Pact
government’s authority been so openly defied.

Novotny demanded that the strikers return to work immediately and
was sharply rebuffed; two days after the strike began, the leader
of the walkout personally gave the Czech Communist Party general
secretary a three-page typewritten manifesto declaring that the
walkout would end only when their demands were met. Adding insult
to injury, a group of amateur performers led by young playwright
Vaclav Havel began staging satirical plays in Prague that mocked
Novotny’s regime and openly backed the strikers.

Within a week after the walkout began, martial law had been
imposed in Prague and Bratislava— but if Novotny had hoped to
crush the uprising with this act, it backfired in the most
ironic way possible. Czechoslovakia was soon riddled with a
wave of sympathy strikes; even some members of the country’s
armed forces and secret police mutinied against their officers
as Czech citizens vented nearly two decades of frustration
with the harshness of Communist rule. Riots became an almost
daily occurrence in many Czech cities; Western embassies in
Prague were swamped with asylum requests.

Two weeks into the Skoda strike, it finally became clear to
the Prague government that the walkout’s leaders had meant
every word they said. Novotny’s regime was now faced with an
unpleasant choice: either concede the strikers’ demands and
risk undermining socialism in Czechoslovakia, or smash the
walkout by force and risk starting a civil war. Both of these
actions carried the additional risk of Soviet intervention in
Czech internal affairs.

By early September the situation had become intolerable, and
the members of Czech national assembly had concluded that it
would continue to deteriorate as long as Novotny were still in
charge. On September 6th Novotny was removed from office and
replaced as head of state by Slovak parliamentarian Alexander
Dubcek. Dubcek’s first official act as new Czech Communist Party
general secretary was to begin negotiations with the Skoda
strikers; after three days of exhaustive (and sometimes heated)
discussion, the two sides finally reached a compromise and the
walkout ended without further incident.

But a seed had been planted in the minds of the subject peoples
of eastern Europe. Where armed revolt had failed to crack Soviet
tyranny in the region in the 1950’s, a peaceful rebellion was
starting to achieve that goal less than a decade later. Brezhnev
was rightly worried about the long-term implications of the Skoda
strike; what had happened in one socialist country could happen
in others— including his own. Sure enough, barely three months
after the Skoda strike ended Polish shipyard laborers in Gdansk
staged a similar protest urging greater economic and political
freedom for Poland.

Unlike the Skoda walkout the Gdansk strike was swiftly quelled.
Like the Skoda strike, however, the Gdansk protest gave notice
that the day was coming— albeit slowly –when one-party rule would
end in most if not all of the nations of the Soviet bloc. Indeed,
within the Soviet Union itself long-dormant voices of opposition
were beginning to re-awaken and call for lasting reform of Soviet
political, economic, and social policies.

******

New Year’s Day 1966 saw little celebration either in the White
House or the Kremlin. Despite President Johnson’s best efforts
to maintain the upper hand in Vietnam, the Viet Cong were still
giving American troops a hard time and regular North Vietnamese
forces were beginning to make their presence felt as well. As
for CPSU General Secretary Brezhnev, he was confronted with a
possibility no Soviet leader had even contemplated since the
1918-21 civil war— the genuine if still distant prospect that
Communism might collapse within his lifetime.

The Sino-Soviet border situation took a decided turn for the
worse during the second week of February when a Soviet fighter
jet collided with a Chinese spy plane over Damansky Island, one
of the most fundamental points of contention in the dispute. The
Soviet aircraft was forced to make an emergency landing at an
airfield in Siberia; the Chinese plane crashed, killing its two-
man crew.

Mao Zedong and his chief military advisor, General Lin Bao, were
enraged by the incident and demanded an immediate apology from
Moscow. Leonid Brezhnev coldly dismissed their demands with the
assertion that the Chinese pilots had brought it on themselves by
violating Soviet airspace. When word of the incident reached the
White House, President Johnson ordered all US military personnel
in Japan and South Korea placed on DefCon 3 as Washington braced
itself for further trouble in Asia.

Fearing that the United States and its allies in the Far East
might be caught off-guard if war did break out between China and
the Soviet Union, Secretary of State Rusk arranged an eight-
nation summit in Los Angeles for the purpose of hammering out a
common strategy for containing Sino-Soviet armed conflict before
it could spread to their own borders.

Unfortunately, this summit coincided with another confrontation
between Soviet and Chinese military personnel. On February 26th,
the second day of the eight-nation conference, Chinese border
guards opened fire on Soviet troops who were conducting a regular
patrol along the shores of Damansky Island; the Soviet soldiers
immediately shot back, resulting in a firefight that left eight
Chinese and eleven Soviets dead.

Within hours after the first reports of the skirmish went out
over the UPI wire, any hope of a peaceful resolution to the Sino-
Soviet border dispute was effectively dead. Both China and the
Soviet Union put their respective armed forces on full alert, a
move which prompted Japan’s Diet to convene in special session
for a debate on whether to suspend Article 9 of the country’s
1947 constitution. In Washington, President Johnson ordered all
US military assets in Japan and South Korea placed on DefCon 2;
British prime minister Harold Wilson directed the Royal Navy to
begin evacuating civilians as quickly as possible from Hong Kong.

On March 2nd, 1966 four PLA infantry divisions and three armored
divisions seized the Siberian town of Khabarvosk; simultaneously,
Chinese commando teams in the Pacific port of Vladivostok set off
limpet mines in the city’s harbor, sinking eight Soviet warships
at anchor. The Soviets retaliated with bombing raids against
Beijing and Port Arthur-Dairen; by 1:23 PM Moscow time that
afternoon Leonid Brezhnev had formally declared that a state of
war now existed between the Soviet Union and China.

The Manchurian War: 1966-1970

As bloody as the Vietnam War may have been, the carnage of the
Manchurian War was far worse. Fought between two rival world
powers who had little if any respect for the Geneva Convention,
it not only witnessed very bloody conventional battles but also
saw the first major use of chemical weapons in combat since World
War I. Speechwriter and political commentator William Safire may
have put it best when he wryly described the conflict as “World
War I battles fought with World War III technology”.

Indeed, millions around the world feared that the Manchurian War
might well escalate into World War III before too long; as Soviet
and Chinese forces clashed in Mongolia and PLA troops struggled
to contain a massive Soviet thrust aimed at retaking Khabarovsk,
Beijing and Moscow threatened to incinerate each other’s cities
with nuclear weapons. Moscow, however, was in considerably better
position to make good on its nuclear threats than Beijing; it
held a particularly strong edge over the Chinese in the field of
missile technology. Whereas China had almost no IRBM inventory
whatsoever, the Soviet Union boasted an IRBM arsenal second only
to that of the United States.

The Kremlin first started to flex its nuclear muscles on May Day
1966, when they deployed more than a hundred medium-range SS-4s
along the Chinese-Soviet border. Two weeks later, Soviet missile
submarines began taking up patrol stations in the Yellow Sea,
their commanders authorized to fire at will on Chinese targets
in the event communications with Moscow were disrupted.

North Korean ruler Kim Il-Sung, one of the few heads of state
to main diplomatic ties with both the Soviets and the Chinese,
sent letters to Brezhnev and Mao in late September of 1966 urging
them to end the fighting at once and agree to mediation of their
border dispute; by then the total combined number of casualties
in the Manchurian War had already surpassed 200,000 and Western
military analysts were estimating that it would reach 500,000 by
the spring of 1967. Kim’s letter declared that such internecine
bloodletting could only hurt the Marxist cause: “No matter who
wins this war,” he said, “all socialism will lose.” That a man as
belligerent as Kim could have qualms about the Manchurian War is
a clear illustration of how seriously he took the danger that the
war posed to his own country.

However, his surprising plea for peace fell on deaf ears. Neither
Moscow nor Beijing was particularly interested at this point in
any kind of negotiation over the contested territories; in fact,
at the time Brezhnev received it the Soviets were openly planning
to annex Manchuria as part of what they called “reparations” for
China’s aggression.

******

Chemical weapons first came into play in the Manchurian War in
March of 1967, when Chinese fighter jets dropped mustard gas
bombs on Soviet troop positions east of Khabarovsk. The Red Army,
having expected something like this would occur sooner or later,
had taken every possible precaution to safeguard their soldiers
against such attacks, and as a result the men at the Khabarovsk
front survived with only minimal casualties.

The citizens of Shanghai had no such luck a week later when the
the Soviets retaliated by firing missiles armed with nerve gas
warheads at their ancient city; 50,000 people were killed and at
least 100,000 more were left homeless, further exacerbating the
already horrendous toll the war was taking on China’s civilian
population.

In a frantic attempt to keep his borders from being overwhelmed
by swarms of refugees, Kim Il Sung closed North Korea’s borders
to all Chinese nationals and ordered his border guards to fire
without warning or hesitation on any Chinese civilians who tried
to cross the border without a passport. Thousands of refugees
came anyway, deciding that if they had to choose between a quick
death from North Korean bullets or a slow death from Soviet nerve
gas, quick death was better.

Warned by his foreign policy advisors that his blanket refusal
to let the refugees in was hurting North Korea’s standing in the
socialist bloc, Kim finally relented and allowed those Chinese
civilians already in the country to stay as full citizens; all
future asylum seekers would be handled on a case-by-case basis,
with the terminally ill and those known or suspected to have what
were called “anti-social tendencies” automatically refused entry.

His neighbors to the south, though further from the battlefront
than he was, were just as much affected by the war; South Korea’s
economy had taken a beating due to the fact that the Sino-Soviet
conflict had disrupted many of the international trade routes on
which it depended. Furthermore, some of the Chinese refugees
previously refused entry into North Korea had illegally emigrated
to the south by boat, and their numbers were putting a massive
strain on the foundations of South Korean society.

Even the United States wasn’t immune to the consequences of the
Sino-Soviet war. President Johnson’s “Great Society” program, his
ambitious plan for tackling domestic problems like poverty and
racism, was being endangered by the growing need to channel funds
into the US defense budget as both the Vietnam and Manchurian
conflicts continued to drag on. Asian-Americans held mass rallies
in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Honolulu protesting what they
saw as the White House’s reluctance to take more decisive action
in halting a conflict that had the potential to ravage or even
destroy their ancestors’ homelands.

In July of 1967 the Soviets finally recaptured Khabarovsk from
the Chinese and mounted an aggressive three-pronged assault on
Chinese occupation troops in the Mongolian capital, Ulan Bator.
The fight for Ulan Bator was so brutal and drawn out that by the
time the last pockets of Chinese resistance were finally snuffed
out nearly a month later, there was literally almost nothing left
of the city.

In September, China’s rainy season forced both the Chinese and
the Soviets to temporarily halt all combat operations on the
Manchurian front; once those rains let up, however, the fighting
resumed with a vengeance. By Christmas Day Soviet tanks were
shelling Chinese positions in the Manchurian provincial capital
of Harbin.

In desperation, Mao Zedong drafted young people from the Chinese
Communist Party’s paramilitary wing, the Red Guard, to form what
were euphemistically designated “special action detachments” to
wage guerrilla war against the Soviets. In reality these units
were essentially suicide squads whose function was to sacrifice
themselves in mass assaults on the Red Army and thus buy time for
the PLA to strike en masse at the weakest points along the Soviet
front lines.

In the short term, this gambit proved remarkably successful; the
Soviet offensive in Manchuria was halted about ten miles north of
the industrial city of Shenyang and the PLA began to regain some
of the ground it had lost on the Manchurian front; in Mongolia, a
cadre of pro-Chinese Mongolian rebels inspired by the example of
the “special action detachments” began an uprising against Soviet
occupation forces in the Hyargas Lake region, compelling the Red
Army to transfer some of its reserves from the Manchurian front
to quash the revolt.

In the long run, though, these suicide squads had the paradoxical
effect of stiffening Soviet resolve to defeat the Chinese. For
Brezhnev, the straw that broke the camel’s back vis-à-vis Mao’s
“special action detachments” came in early January of 1968, when
one such group slaughtered a Naval Infantry rifle battalion as
they were finishing their breakfast; when word reached Moscow of
the massacre, an infuriated Brezhnev ordered five Red Army tank
divisions transferred from Warsaw Pact duty in East Germany to
the Manchurian battlefront to begin an immediate mass assault on
Chinese positions around Shenyang.

******

1968 marked a crucial turning point in both the Manchurian and
Vietnam conflicts. At about the same time the Soviets and the
Chinese were struggling for control of the Shenyang region, the
Viet Cong launched a tactical assault on American and ARVN bases
near Quang Tri and Da Nang; timed to coincide with the start of
the cease-fire traditionally observed by both sides during the
Vietnamese lunar New Year holiday, the attacks became known in
the American press as “the Tet offensive” and provoked an angry
reaction from President Johnson. In a televised address from the
White House just hours after the Quang Tri attack began, Johnson
thundered: “The enemy has very deceitfully taken advantage of the
Tet ceasefire to launch a major new offensive against us and our
South Vietnamese allies…this cannot and will not stand.”

It wasn’t quite as major as Johnson thought; indeed, the scope of
the attacks was rather modest compared to what the VC had hoped
to pull off. Their original campaign plan for the Tet offensive
called for large-scale assaults on every major military target in
South Vietnam, including a strike by suicide squads on the United
States embassy in Saigon. But with the Viet Cong’s two principal
foreign allies at war with each other, they had been obliged to
sharply rethink their strategy.

In Hanoi, North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh vetoed a proposal
for the NVA to cross the DMZ and occupy the historic city of Hue
on the Perfume River; there simply weren’t enough supplies for an
operation of that kind, he regretfully told his top generals, and
more to the point such an assault at that juncture might provoke
the Americans to retaliate by invading North Vietnam. Better, he
suggested, to let events down in Quang Tri and Da Nang take their
course and wait for a more favorable political situation to arise
before undertaking any new large-scale offensives.

******

The pro-Chinese rebellion in Manchuria collapsed in early May of
1968 after Soviet saturation bombing of the rebel headquarters. A
few weeks later, Soviet troops entered the city of Shenyang for
the first time— and ran head-on into the most savage firefight
the Red Army had encountered since Stalingrad. Regular PLA units,
Red Guards, and civilian volunteers had all joined forces to set
up a murderous defensive gauntlet in Shenyang’s streets.

The commander of the main advance column immediately called in
air strikes on the heart of the city; within minutes, Su-7s and
Tu-16s were raining bombs down on Shenyang, touching off a wave
of fires that destroyed half the city. The remaining defenders
surrendered less than 12 hours later.

Now Bejing itself was directly threatened; there were even hints
that Soviet forces might move into North Korea as retribution for
the Kim Il Sung government’s recent shift from its former stance
of neutrality towards a more overtly pro-Chinese position in its
policy regarding the Manchurian War. Mao’s response was to order
a mass assault by the PLA against Kazakhstan in hopes of creating
a diversion while the Chinese capital finished shoring up its
defenses against Soviet attack.

The Chinese assault on Kazakhstan began on June 2nd, 1968 and
provoked an immediate Soviet counteroffensive; consequently, the
already grotesque casualty count for both sides in the war would
mount still higher. Within a month after the first shots were
fired in the Kazakhstan campaign, Soviet battle deaths had passed
the 200,000 mark while Chinese losses were close to 2 million.
Even nations as populous as China and the Soviet Union couldn’t
sustain such casualty rates forever.

******

Things weren’t going entirely smoothly for American troops in
South Vietnam either; the Tet offensive had come as something of
a shock to them, given that both President Johnson and new MACV
commander-in-chief General William Westmoreland had assured them
the Viet Cong was on its last legs. By the time the Chinese began
their Kazakhstan offensive, American battle deaths in Vietnam
had reached 40,000 and that total was certain to get even higher
before the end of the year. The war had become a major issue in
the 1968 presidential campaign, sufficiently so that political
experts were predicting the Democratic National Convention, being
held that summer in Chicago, would take four or even five ballots
to nominate the party’s presidential candidate.

Lyndon Johnson’s re-nomination, which before the Tet Offensive
had seemed like a sure thing, had been put in jeopardy as his
conduct of the Vietnam War came under increasing scrutiny. Former
US Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and Minnesota senator Gene
McCarth were his two most prominent and vocal critics within the
Democratic Party; Kennedy was particularly adamant in calling for
an American withdrawal from Vietnam, asserting that political and
social rifts over the morality of the war effort were the main
cause of the unrest which was plaguing many of America’s major
cities at that time.(Kennedy had more reason than most to be
concerned about domestic unrest, having narrowly survived an
assassination attempt during the 1968 California Democratic
primary.)

Matters came to a head on August 27th, the second day of the
Democratic convention. As the delegates were debating on whether
to amend the party platform to include a call for peace talks
with Hanoi, riots broke out on the streets outside the convention
hall as anti-war demonstrators clashed with Chicago police. In a
desperate effort to calm things down before the situation plunged
into total chaos, Gene McCarthy went to personally speak to the
demonstrators only to get his skull fractured when a brick aimed
at a Chicago mounted patrolman instead hit McCarthy squarely on
the back of the head; despite doctors’ best efforts, he died at
the University of Illinois Medical Center two days later.

The Republican presidential nominee, former Vice-President
Richard Nixon, was quick to cite the riots and McCarthy’s death
as proof that neither the Democrats in general nor Johnson in
particular were fit any longer to govern America. He asserted
that the country’s, and the world’s, best hope for peace lay in
a Nixon presidency; in his first campaign appearance following
the riots he pledged to work tirelessly to bring a swift and
honorable end to the Vietnam War and rally world opinion to
pressure China and the Soviet Union into accepting a negotiated
solution of the border disagreement that had triggered the
Manchurian conflict.

Within Johnson’s own party, the consensus had now been reached
that it was time for change at the top. On their fourth ballot,
the Democrats nominated Robert Kennedy as their presidential
candidate, with South Dakota senator George McGovern acting as
Kennedy’s running mate. Johnson was devastated by the news and
spent a week in his seclusion at his Texas ranch before finally
returning to the White House to begin serving out the last months
of his presidency.

******

In early October of 1968, Soviet artillery battalions started
shelling Chinese defensive positions along the southern banks of
Kazakhstan’s Lake Balkhash. General Lin Bao and his senior staff
braced themselves for the worst, knowing that massive artillery
barrages usually preceded major Red Army offensives; sure enough,
within 48 hours Soviet troops were crossing Lake Balkhash in the
first phase of a four-pronged offensive initiated with the short-
term goal of pushing the Chinese out of Kazakhstan and the long-
term objective of creating a strategic foothold for Soviet forces
in China’s Xinjiang province.

The attack succeeded outstandingly on both counts; three weeks
after it began the Soviets had driven all but a handful of PLA
units out of Kazakhstan and the Red Army had captured the Chinese
village of Aksu in a pincer movement using troops from Kazakhstan
and neighboring Kyrgyzstan. Despite Herculean efforts by Mao’s
propaganda machine to conceal the truth from the Chinese people
about the PLA’s defeat in Kazakhstan, word of the setback managed
to reach them in dribs and drabs(aided in no small measure by
Radio Moscow’s Chinese-language broadcast service); the news of
the Soviet victory in Kazakhstan proved to be just as unpleasant
a shock for the Chinese masses as the Tet offensive had been for
the American public.

Consequently, ordinary Chinese citizens began to do what until
had been unthinkable until then and criticize the Mao regime. On
November 4th, 1968 students began gathering in Beijing’s Tienanmen
Square to hold a ‘sit-in’ meant to prod the Chinese government
into starting peace negotiations with the Soviets. Mao took this
and other such protests as a personal insult; in his view, anyone
who questioned his handling of the war with Russia was committing
treason— and there was only one of handling those guilty of that
offense.

Five days after the Tienanmen Square sit-in began, Mao’s secret
police attacked the demonstrators, killing 200 and wounding at
least 500 more; more than four dozen people were arrested before
the raid was over, and an untold number of others were forced to
flee mainland China never to return.

If Mao had hoped to silence the demand for peace with the Soviet
Union, however, his tactics boomeranged on him; the calls for a
negotiated end to the war grew even louder, and much to Lin Bao’s
dismay those calls gained support in some sectors of the Chinese
military. At least two PLA division commanders resigned their
commissions in the wake of the Tienanmen Square tragedy, and an
anti-Mao mutiny aboard the flagship of the Chinese navy’s East
Sea Fleet was suppressed only after the ship’s political officer
shot the ringleader.

By New Year’s Day 1969 Soviet forces held at least a third of
Xinjiang province and Red Army advance units were less than 15
miles from the outskirts of Beijing. Across the Taiwan Straits
Mao’s ancient rival, Chiang Kai-shek, viewed this turn of events
with mixed emotions; while on one hand he was ecstatic at the
prospect of seeing his ideological nemesis finally toppled from
power after nearly two decades, on the other hand he feared the
possibility of having Soviet nuclear forces within striking range
of Taipei.

After weeks of deliberation on the matter, he finally flew to
Washington two days after Nixon’s inauguration and met with Nixon
at the White House. Following the conclusion of that meeting, the
new president instructed his National Security Advisor, former
Harvard professor Dr. Henry Kissinger, to contact the Chinese and
Soviet embassies in Tokyo and request a meeting with envoys from
both countries for the purpose of agreeing on a common framework
for peace talks.

Ten days later Kissinger secretly met with the Soviet and Chinese
ambassadors to Japan in a conference room at the Swiss consulate
in Osaka. Understanding the two sides’ cultural sensitivities, he
had gone to great lengths not to draw too much attention to his
mediation efforts; his circumspection and his unrelenting work to
bring Beijing and Moscow to the bargaining table finally paid off
in early March when Soviet and Chinese negotiators met in Geneva
to begin discussing cease-fire terms for ending the Manchurian
War.

The Geneva talks— and the war –went on for almost a year. Twice
the negotiations were suspended over accusations by one side that
the other was violating international law; they were also briefly
put on hold when the head Chinese envoy took ill during a visit
home for consultations with Chinese foreign minister Chou En-Lai.
But in spite of everything progress was slowly made towards a
settlement of hostilities, and in late February of 1970 the war
finally came to an end as a cease-fire accord was signed under
which China and the Soviet Union agreed to accept UN mediation
of their common frontiers along the Ussuri River.

Brave New World: 1970-1977

The Manchurian War left both victor and vanquished alike in a
state of exhaustion. The USSR, however, recovered from that
exhaustion more quickly than the Chinese could and were soon
working to reclaim their old position as the flagship of the
Communist bloc. They also sought to gain wider influence with
non-Communist countries; by the spring of 1972, over a decade
after the Florida Keys War ended, the Soviets had re-opened
their embassy in Havana and were in discussions with the United
States about a nuclear arms pact, the Strategic Arms Limitation
Treaty(SALT), whose goal was to reduce and eventually eliminate
strategic nuclear weapons stockpiles on both sides of the Iron
Curtain.

With the Sino-Soviet conflict ended, world attention turned back
to the war in Vietnam. Although the Americans and their Saigon
allies still hadn’t managed to eradicate the Viet Cong, by the
same token the VC had been unable to make much more headway in
their struggle to overthrow the South Vietnamese government. The
prevailing consensus in most corners of the world was that the
the best either side could hope to achieve at this point was a
stalemate.

South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu thought otherwise,
however, and in early 1973 authorized his military to launch
Operation Quóc Hõn(“soul of the nation”), a combined air and
ground thrust across the DMZ that recalled the German blitzkrieg
offensives of the early years of the Second World War. In Thieu’s
judgement the North Vietnamese were ripe for the plucking; the
Soviets and the Chinese, he insisted to the skeptics among his
cabinet, were still picking up the pieces from the Manchurian
War and unlikely to respond to Quóc Hõn with much more than a
few angry words.

In strictly military terms the assault was a brilliant success,
as it cut the VC off from many of their normal supply routes and
eliminated the best part of five divisions from the NVA’s order
of battle. Politically, however, it was a disaster as it played
right into Communist propaganda stereotyping about the supposed
“war-mongering” tendencies of the US and its allies.

Inevitably, the NVA struck back; with the Manchurian War ended,
both China and the USSR had resumed regular arms shipments to
Hanoi, and consequently the North Vietnamese were in a better
position to deal with ARVN than they had been at the time of the
Tet offensive. The NVA’s counterthrust sent South Vietnamese
forces reeling back across the DMZ and made it clear that Thieu
had badly miscalculated Soviet and Chinese ability to resupply
the NVA; by the spring of 1974 there were open calls throughout
South Vietnam for Thieu’s resignation.

Thieu appealed to Nixon for further help, but the American
president could do little to relieve his South Vietnamese ally’s
plight. Nixon’s own political base was crumbling in the face of
a scandal over revelations that he had sanctioned a plan by his
White House staff to bug the Democratic National Committee’s
headquarters at Washington’s Watergate hotel complex. Even as
NVA and ARVN troops were trading shots a few miles south of the
DMZ, the US Congress was drafting articles of impeachment against
him; in late July of 1974, Nixon became the first president in
American history to resign from office. His vice-president, ex-
Michigan congressman Gerald R. Ford, succeeded him and oversaw
the final withdrawals of American military personnel from South
Vietnam.

On April 30th, 1975 the last remaining US troops in Vietnam flew
out of Tan Son Nhut Airport in Saigon on board a C-130 transport
plane just after 3:30 PM local time. The previous day Thieu had
been forced out of office and the new South Vietnamese president,
famed general Duong Van “Big” Minh, had reached an agreement with
Hanoi whereby North Vietnam would end its war with South Vietnam
and formally recognize the Saigon government in return for Minh’s
acceptance of a coalition with the Communists and an end to the
American military presence in Vietnam.

In martial terms the Vietnam War might have ended in a draw, but
on the political side it was a huge triumph for Communism; the VC
and their Hanoi backers had faced the worst the West could throw
at them and survived. There was some grumbling over the fact that
the reunification of Vietnam had been postponed once more, but it
was counterbalanced by optimism that it would happen eventually
on the Communists’ terms.

******

In fact, it would take another full decade before Vietnam was
finally reunified— and it would not work out in the Communists’
favor. No one realized it at the time, but the Vietnam War was
Communism’s last major strategic triumph; voices of dissent in
eastern Europe that had been silenced in the early years of the
Manchurian War were starting to speak up again, and those voices
would slowly eat away at Soviet power until the USSR finally
disintegrated in the late 1980s.

In the meantime, China sought to rebuild its tattered reputation
as a world power and line up allies to help guard itself against
Soviet geopolitical pressure. It found one such ally in a most
unexpected quarter— the United States. The 1976 presidential
elections had swept Gerald Ford out of office and replaced him
with former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter, who in spite of his
disagreements with Nixon and Ford’s politics shared their desire
to restore normal diplomatic relations with Beijing.

In February of 1977, about a month after his inauguration, Carter
wrote a letter to the Chinese UN mission in New York City asking
for their help in arranging a meeting between his Secretary of
State, Cyrus Vance, and new Chinese foreign minister Hua Guo-Feng
at the earliest possible date…

Last Hurrahs: 1977-1981

When Cyrus Vance and President Carter asked Robert Kennedy to
accompany them to Beijing for Carter’s historic October 1977
summit with Chinese head of state Deng Xiaoping, Kennedy didn’t
hesitate to say yes. Since his brother’s assassination Senator
Kennedy had been working constantly to help ease the perpetual
tensions between East and West, and he was eager to play a role
in ending the 29-year-long estrangement between Beijing and
Washington.

The trip to China also provided a good opportunity for Kennedy
to take stock of his political career and start thinking about
what direction he wanted to take when his current Senate term
expired in 1983. Despite the failure of his 1968 presidential
bid, he’d never entirely given up hope of one day reaching the
Oval Office— and with his surviving brother Edward in disgrace
as a result of Chappaquiddick, RFK sensed that he might be his
family’s last hope for regaining the presidency.

By the time Carter, Kennedy, and Vance left Beijing six days
after the summit began, their work had resulted in the historic
Joint Communiqué on the Establishment of Diplomatic Relations,
the agreement that officially restored diplomatic ties between
the United States and China. When the Carter delegation returned
to Washington, Senator Kennedy phoned his brother at his Capitol
Hill office to set up a meeting between them at the family’s
Hyannisport estate in early November at which they would discuss
whether RFK should seek a fourth term in the Senate or make a
run at the 1980 Democratic presidential nomination.

But three days before that meeting was scheduled to take
place, Edward Kennedy got earth-shattering news from a family
friend: RFK had been killed in a helicopter crash while en
route to New York City for a 60 Minutes interview. In some
respects, the wreckage from the crash would prove an accurate
omen for the post-Beijing fortunes of the Democratic Party—
once the afterglow of the summit had faded, Americans would
gradually come to see President Carter as being out of his
depth in many respects, and he would be just one of dozens of
Democrats to be voted out of office in the next few years…

******

The first real warning sign that Carter would be a failure
as president came in the summer of 1978, when North Vietnam
fired Katyusha rockets across the 17th parallel in violation
of its 1975 cease-fire pact with South Vietnam. The rocket
strikes were a clumsy attempt on Hanoi’s part to intimidate
Saigon into cancelling its planned intervention in what was
by then an 11-year-old civil war in neighboring Cambodia.

Duong Van Minh had made a great many compromises in order
to secure the 1975 cease-fire agreement; for the sake of
keeping South Vietnam independent he had acceded to Hanoi’s
request to remove American military personnel from his
soil and to form a coalition government with leftists who,
while not directly connected with the old Viet Cong or with
Pham Van Dong’s Marxist regime, did tend to lean noticeably
in favor of their ideological program. In return the North
Vietnamese government had pledged to pull all NVA units back
from the DMZ, terminate material support of the Viet Cong, and
maintain a truce with Saigon pending UN-sponsored negotiations
to finally settle the question of Vietnamese reunification.

But when Hanoi learned that ARVN battalions were being readied
to cross the Cambodian border to aid the besieged Pnomh Penh
government against the battered but still dangerous Khmer Rouge
insurgency, any hope of preserving that truce without outside
pressure vanished. Vo Nguyen Giap, C-in-C of the North Vietnamese
armed forces, ordered three NVA rocket battalions stationed north
of the DMZ and within a week of their deployment, Katyushas were
being lobbed into the open countryside of Quang Tri and Thua Tien
provinces.

Had Carter acted more decisively, chances are the rocket attacks
would have been stopped within days, if not hours. But he and his
advisors dithered for two critical weeks while South Vietnam’s
ambassador to the UN chastised his fellow diplomats for not doing
more to force Hanoi to end the Katyusha strikes. By the time the
Carter Administration finally got around to doing something about
the rocket attacks, Hanoi and Saigon were rattling sabers at each
other once more and the three-year-old truce was on the verge of
collapsing.

In the meantime, the Khmer Rouge spread chaos and death across
Cambodia, with the worst massacres happening at Pnomh Penh and
Kampong Cham. As one former Cambodian army officer put in his
introduction to an Australian history book marking the twentieth
anniversary of the start of the Cambodian civil war: “The Kravanh
Mountains(Cambodia’s principal mountain range) turned red with
innocent blood.”

It took stiff diplomatic and economic pressure from China to
finally motivate North Vietnam to end its rocket broadsides
against its southern neighbor. Carter was seen as having done
almost nothing to alleviate South Vietnam’s problems— in some
quarters, in fact, he was accused of having made them that much
worse. Former California governor Ronald Reagan, increasingly
being touted as the most likely Republican challenger to Carter’s
bid for a second term, was quoted in a Los Angeles Herald-Tribune
interview as saying “Thank God he wasn’t in the White House when
the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor or Castro tried to invade Key
West”.

As embarrassing as the Vietnam rocket fiasco was for the Carter
Administration, it would pale in comparison to the black eye that
Washington was about to be dealt in the Persian Gulf…

******

In the spring of 1979 President Carter pulled off what even his
toughest critics had to concede was one of the finest diplomatic
achievements in American history: he mediated a peace treaty that
ended three decades of antagonism between Egypt and Israel. Known
as “the Camp David pact” because most of the talks were held at
the presidential retreat, the treaty led to Egypt becoming the
first Arab nation to extend diplomatic recognition to Israel. And
it wasn’t just a major international triumph for Carter; it gave
him a considerable political boost on the home front too— one
New York Times poll released shortly after the treaty was signed
listed his approval rating at close to 80%.

But even as Carter was being lauded for his accomplishments at
Camp David, a crisis was brewing in Iran. A month before the Camp
David talks ended, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi had been expelled
from his throne in a dramatic though relatively peaceful uprising
spurred in large part by fears that the traditional Persian way
of life was becoming extinct in the face of the Shah’s aggressive
campaign to Westernize his country. In the wake of his ouster,
the revolutionaries had become locked in a heated dispute over
what direction the new Iranian government should take; some, like
interim prime minister Shapour Baktiar, thought Iran should
adopt a secular parliamentarian form of government, but many
others— among them radical Muslim cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini –felt this was incompatible with traditional Persian
culture. Before long, the Baktiar and Khomeini camps were in
direct opposition to one another and it seemed as if Iran was
about to plunge headlong into full-scale civil war.

Iran’s neighbor and frequent adversary, Iraq, had also seen
a dramatic political upheaval; Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, the
military dictator who had ruled the country since 1968, was
killed in a plane crash near Basra under what were mysterious
circumstances to say the least. An ambitious Iraqi army general,
one Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti, quickly moved to fill the vacuum
left by al-Bakr’s demise and was soon making plans to wage war
against the Iranians no matter how the power struggle between
Baktiar and Khomeini turned out.

Like many of his fellow Iraqis, Saddam had long been envious
of Iran’s prosperity. He was also suspicious about Tehran’s
territorial ambitions concerning the Shatt al-Arab waterway,
even though Iran and Iraq had signed a 1974 agreement evenly
dividing this vital sea lane between them. Once he had crushed
the last remaining internal opponents to his rule, Saddam called
his top military commanders together and instructed them to begin
preparing a strategy for executing pre-emptive attacks on vital
military and industrial targets on the Iranian side of the Iran-
Iraq border.

That strategy went into effect in late July of 1979 as Iraqi air
and ground forces attacked Iranian oil facilities at Abadan and
Khorramshahr, starting the Iran-Iraq war and further aggravating
the already intolerable political turmoil within Iran. With their
civilian leadership effectively paralyzed by the Khomeini-Baktiar
split, the Iranian armed forces were steamrollered by the Iraqis’
blitzkrieg offensive and within two weeks the Iraqis had managed
to penetrate almost 300 miles inside Iranian territory. One Iraqi
artillery battalion succeeded in getting within firing distance
of Tehran before the war was ten days old; its barrages, combined
with a constant rain of Scud missiles upon the Iranian capital,
struck terror into the hearts of Tehran’s population and stirred
up fears worldwide that a new Middle East war was just around the
corner.

President Carter made numerous attempts to arrange cease-fire
talks between Iran and Iraq, but they came to nothing; Saddam
Hussein was determined to fight until he’d won, and the Iranians
couldn’t even maintain a cohesive government long enough to give
a definitive response one way or the other regarding Carter’s
peace proposals.

Then the already grim situation took a sharp turn for the worse.
On September 4th, a little over a month after the Iran-Iraq war
began, security forces loyal to Baktiar and pro-Khomeini student
demonstrators clashed in the streets outside the American embassy
in Tehran. At the height of the confrontation, one of the leaders
of the demonstration was shot and fatally wounded; just who fired
that shot remains unclear to this day, but as certainly as if a
signal flag had been raised it sparked off the worst riots in the
city’s history. The American embassy was burned to the ground and
most of its staff lynched; the Iranian defense, oil, and foreign
ministries were sacked; more than two dozen foreign news bureaus
and the offices of Tehran’s largest domestic newspaper came under
attack; and much of the city’s main airport was laid waste as the
rioters stormed its gates.

Through the still-functioning Swiss embassy in Tehran, Carter was
able to arrange the evacuation of the surviving US diplomats. But
his administration had begun its long and inexorable slide toward
oblivion; he was now widely perceived as being too weak to steer
the American ship of state through the hazards resulting from the
war and the civil unrest in Iran. He wasn’t having much luck on
the domestic front either— inflation was wildly out of control,
the country was in the midst of an energy crisis, and violent
crime had risen to levels not seen in the US since the Prohibtion
era.

By the time the 1980 Democratic primary in New Hampshire came
around, it seemed to be no longer a question of if but when
Carter’s bid for a second term would end. His approval rating
had dropped into the mid-20s, his foreign policy was being
roundly criticized by Americans of all political stripes, and
some pundits were predicting that even if Carter did win his
party’s nomination for another term he’d get pasted in the
November general elections either by GOP frontrunner Ronald
Reagan or Reagan’s main rival for the Republican nomination,
former CIA director George Herbert Walker Bush.

Nonetheless, a number of key Democratic figures threw the full
weight of their support behind Carter as the primary season wore
on. The general consensus within the party establishment was that
abandoning the president would send the wrong message to voters
and even ran the risk of shattering the Democrats as a viable
political party. Therefore, the only choice was to fight tooth
and nail to try and get him his second term.

It turned out to be a losing battle; disgust with Carter’s
perceived ineptitude combined with the persuasive and hopeful
oratory of GOP nominee Ronald Reagan would drive most Americans
to vote Republican in the November elections. After two decades
in exile, the Grand Old Party was returning to the White House—
and America’s friends and foes alike would be faced with a new
geopolitical reality.

******

When Reagan was officially sworn into office as the 41st
President of the United States in January of 1981, people
immediately searched the text of his inaugural address for
signs of the more assertive US foreign policy he’d promised
to implement when he reached the Oval Office. They didn’t
have to look very hard— in his second paragraph alone the
new chief executive warned bluntly, “Those who think that
Washington will continue to stick its head in the sand in
the face of today’s threats to peace and stability are in
for a rude awakening.”

Those words exhilarated his supporters, who considered his
forceful approach to foreign affairs a welcome change from
the appeasement-minded policies of the Carter era; on the
other hand, his critics found them alarming, viewing them as
a sign that America had entered an era of belligerency on
the world stage.

Three weeks into his first term Reagan got his first opportunity
to put words into action. While most of the world’s attention had
been focused on the Iran-Iraq war, Soviet forces had invaded
Afghanistan in an effort to shore up that country’s pro-Moscow
socialist regime, sparking a guerrilla war. Sensing a golden
opportunity to undermine Soviet power, President Reagan and his
CIA directory, Admiral William J. Casey, contacted Pakistan’s
ISI counterintelligence service and struck a deal with them in
which the ISI would funnel arms, munitions, and other supplies
from the US to the Afghan rebels.

With the new American aid, the Afghan rebels(widely known as
mujahideen because most of them belonged to Islamic guerrilla
groups) shifted from their previously defensive tactics to a
more offense-oriented style of warfare, throwing the Soviets
off-balance. Brezhnev, by then in his mid-70s and less than
two years away from the heart attack that would eventually kill
him, was infuriated by what he saw as an underhanded move by
the West and vowed to retaliate by any means possible.

In the meantime, Reagan and his Secretary of State, George
Shultz, worked to bolster US ties with the Caribbean and Latin
America; to that end, they invited former Cuban president
Reynaldo Ochoa to visit Washington when Ochoa came there on a
scheduled public speaking tour in the spring of 1981. Though
officially Ochoa had been retired from politics since his
second term as president of Cuba expired in 1973, unofficially
he still commanded a great deal of influence both at home and
abroad— and Reagan understood that this influence would be
helpful in enlisting Cuba’s aid to battle resurgent Soviet
efforts to set up a foothold in Latin America. On a more
personal level, the President looked forward to renewing
a long-standing friendship with Ochoa, whom he’d met during
his second term as governor of California when Ochoa was
speaking at a San Francisco Chamber of Commerce banquet.

However, the former Cuban president’s visit would end in
tragedy; on March 30th, 1981, as Ochoa and Reagan were exiting
the Washington National Hotel following a breakfast with a
group of Cuban-American Florida Keys War veterans, an unstable
college dropout named John Hinckley, Jr. pulled out a revolver
and opened fire on the two leaders. Quick-thinking Secret Service
agents were able to save President Reagan and his press secretary
James Brady, but they were too late to help Ochoa; he was hit
twice in the chest and died less than two hours after being shot.
The attack shook Reagan to the core and left millions in mourning
on both sides of the Florida Straits. Ochoa’s funeral, which drew
hundreds of thousands into Havana’s streets, was broadcast live
to America from start to finish, with Reagan personally leading
the US contingent among the foreign dignitaries who attended the
memorial service.

******

Besides costing him the loss of a friend and political soulmate,
the Hinckley attack’s most lasting effect on Reagan was to make
him keenly aware of the vulnerability of high-profile people and
institutions on US soil. The gun Hinckley held that day could as
easily have been wielded by a KGB assassin or Islamic terrorist—
and next time it might very well be. Upon his return to the US
following Ochoa’s funeral, Reagan began calling for reforms of
the country’s intelligence network that would make it easier for
the FBI and the CIA to co-operate in handling internal threats
to American national security.

With Congress largely in Democratic control at the time, and
with memories of the Church Committee scandal still fresh in
the public mind, few of Reagan’s proposals made much headway;
one idea, however, won substantial bipartisan support— the
establishment of a Transportation Security Administration(TSA)
to guard the nation’s major transport systems against sabotage
or terrorism. Founded in June, 1981 as the joint responsibility
of the Justice and Transportation Departments, the TSA took over
jurisdiction of the Coast Guard and the Federal Air Marshals’
Service.

Two months later Reagan flexed his political and diplomatic
muscles again with a show of force directed at Libyan dictator
Muammar Khadafy. Since 1973 Khadafy had been asserting that
Libya’s territorial boundaries included the entire Gulf of
Sidra, an expanse of more than 200 miles off the Libyan coast;
most countries, including his ally the Soviet Union, only
recognized maritime boundaries of twelve miles. Previous US
presidents had done little or nothing to challenge Khadafy’s
claims; Nixon had been preoccupied with Vietnam, Ford had
had his hands full trying to clean up the mess left behind
by Watergate, and Carter had been worried that even token
military action against Khadafy might lead to full-scale war
with Libya.

Reagan, on the other hand, was eager to confront the Libyan
strongman; he ordered a carrier battle group dispatched to
the Mediterranean to enforce the traditional 12-mile limit
and enlisted the aid of his UN ambassador, Jeane Kirkpatrick,
to push for tough economic sanctions against Libya. When
Libyan SAM batteries fired on two F-14 Tomcats during a routine
patrol, the United States responded by bombing the sites from
which the missiles had been launched. A week later, two Libyan
fighter jets were shot down after violating US airspace.

The standoff between Washington and Tripoli over the Gulf of
Sidra would continue for the rest of Reagan’s first term in the
White House and well into his second. But the message sent by
his deployment of the carrier group was not lost on Khadafy—
unlike previous American presidents, this one was both able and
willing to use force to oppose Libya. By the time Reagan finally
left office in 1989, Libya had reduced its maritime territorial
claim over the Gulf of Sidra from 200 miles to a considerably
more modest 35 miles; while still not strictly in accordance with
international maritime law, the 35-mile limit at least allowed
room for some sort of diplomatic resolution of the territorial
dispute.

Nicaragua Si, Marxismo No: 1982-1984

In 1979, Nicaragua had at last achieved full democracy as
40-year dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle resigned to make
way for an elected centrist prime minister and parliament.
Shortly after taking office, however, the new government’s
survival came into question as a Communist insurgent group
led by Daniel Ortega began a guerrilla war aimed at putting
a Moscow-style one-party regime in power. The insurgent
forces, calling themselves Sandinistas after martyred 1930s
revolutionary Augusto C. Sandino, were aided in no small degree
by the Brezhnev regime, who saw in them the chance to regain the
Latin American bridgehead the Soviets had lost when the Castro
regime in Cuba was overthrown two decades earlier.

Reagan made it clear to his top military and diplomatic aides
that subversion of a US ally in Central America could not be
tolerated. George Shultz went on a “shuttle diplomacy” tour of
eight Latin American states to seek their assistance in battling
the Ortega insurgency, while Reagan’s defense secretary, Caspar
Weinberger, appeared before Congress in April of 1982 to call
for a massive increase in US military aid to the Nicaraguan
government. That same month, in response to a request by prime
minister Eden Pastora, the CIA began a discreet surveillance of
Nicaragua’s harbors in an effort to identify those areas through
which Moscow was smuggling arms and ammunition to the Sandinista
forces.

Critics of US policy in Central America feared that Reagan’s
assistance to the Pastora government was just the first step in
a long-term course of action that would end only when American
soldiers were fighting and dying in Nicaragua’s jungles. One New
York Times editorial warned that the Pastora government’s fight
against the Sandinistas was coming close to becoming “the Vietnam
of the Reagan White House”.

But in reality even the most hawkish members of Reagan’s cabinet
were loath to suggest direct US intervention in the guerrilla war
in Nicaragua. Memories of the Vietnam debacle were still fresh in
the minds of the American public; furthermore, the Soviets were
once again rattling their sabers in Europe and hopes for peace in
the Middle East, which had been high when the Camp David pact was
signed, had been dealt a severe blow as the Iran-Iraq war dragged
on and the civil war which had been raging in Lebanon since 1976
entered its most horrific phase yet. Getting involved in a large-
scale military operation in Central America at that point hardly
made much sense.

However, there were few if any disagreements within Reagan’s
inner circle about opposing the Sandinistas indirectly. Even
as CIA surveillance teams were setting up shop along Nicaragua’s
coast, U-2 recon flights out of neighboring El Salvador were
helping the Nicaraguan army track down and eliminate Sandinista
hideouts and US Army Special Forces personnel were training
Nicaraguan soldiers in the finer points of counterinsurgency
operations.

******

Within a year after Weinberger’s testimony before the Senate,
the flow of Soviet arms to the Sandinistas had slowed to a thin
trickle. Joint US-Nicaraguan interdiction of these arms was one
of the major reasons for this decline; another was that the
situation in Afghanistan was deteriorating for the Soviets and
their Afghan Marxist allies, and Soviet occupation forces in
Afghanistan were being given top priority when it came to the
delivery of new weapons.

In the summer of 1983, seeing the handwriting on the wall, the
Sandinistas began cease-fire talks with the Pastora government.
The long, arduous negotiations lasted more than seven months and
were interrupted twice by outbreaks of renewed fighting in the
jungles of Nicaragua; eventually, however, a workable peace pact
was hammered out and was signed in Washington on February 7th,
1984— just in time for Reagan to notch convincing victories in
the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primaries as he began his bid
for a second term.

Reagan’s re-election campaign came against the backdrop of
accelerating internal disintegration within the Soviet Union.
The nerves of the Soviet masses had been stretched raw by a
plethora of factors: the continuation of the war in Afghanistan,
the nearly terminal state of the Soviet economy, the escalation
of US-Soviet tensions after the destruction of Korean Airlines
Flight 007 and the Able Archer scare , and the fraying of what
remaining ties existed between the USSR and its Warsaw Pact
allies.

Ex-KGB chairman Yuri Andropov, who’d assumed leadership of the
CPSU following Brezhnev’s death in November of 1982, was trying
to keep the Communist ideal alive in his homeland amidst all the
internal and external pressures that threatened to crush it. But
his health, which had been poor even before he took up the mantle
of CPSU First Secretary, had by now completely self-destructed;
less than 48 hours after the treaty ending the Nicaraguan civil
war was signed, Andropov died of kidney failure. His passing
would prove to be the straw that broke the camel’s back for the
crumbling Soviet empire….

To Be Continued

A flaw I find in your otherwise good scenario:

Mexico would never get involved (much less on the United States side) in a war against Cuba because:

a) The Estrada Doctrine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estrada_Doctrine) which postulates:

that foreign governments should not judge, for good or bad, governments or changes in governments in other nations, because it would imply a breach to its sovereignty

Click to expand...

This would include, of course, armed interventions and

b)Mexico would never ally with a foreign power against a latinamerican country.


Cheers.

No offense, Arturo, but I think Estrada himself would have been the first one
to say that Castro should be stopped from attacking his neighbors. Besides,
you might recall that in Part 1 of this TL I make reference to Castro trying to provoke an uprising among the Mexican working class and the Mexican president being concerned that Cuba might try to seize Mexico's oil fields if the Florida Keys invasion is successful.

BTW: I'll be posting Part 3 of "Venceremos!" in 10-14 days if not sooner.

Honestly I like this timeline and they way you've fleshed it out. But the initial premise seems off.

Cuba attacking the Florida Keys has got to be the stupidest move in the history of the world. I still can't see how Castro could think that this could work nevermind his generals and aides going along with it. Is there any historial evidence suggesting such an attack might take place in OTL?

This is impressively detailed, but even if Castro were to try to invade the US, wouldn't that immediately butterfly away Kennedy's assassination, Watergate, etc.? I accept the idea of including it to avoid the 'what if JFK had lived' problem.

Something that you didn't really touch on in TTL that I've thought of. How might this effect British de-colonization in the region. At this time, the Bahamas, Belize, and I think Jamaica are all British colonies, as well as several other individual islands such as Barbados and Grenada.

Might this show of force and showing an interest in protecting their colonies have any small butterflies in this area?

Also, what about the two other NATO countries that have territories in the region, France and the Netherlands. Might they be willing or able to provide some support?