raharris1973
Gone Fishin'
What if there is no Cuban revolution of 1959? How will this impact not only Cuba, but the United States, a presumed Kennedy Administration, and global geopolitics of the early 1960s?
That's where I want to go with this speculation. But of course, I need to rewind things back, to illustrate how there is no Cuban revolution. While I did some digging in the archive of the late, great David T, on alternatives to Castro (worth a look if you're curious about pre-revolutionary Cuban politics), I decided not to use the material and go for something much simpler, avoiding the Cuban Revolution of '59, by forestalling the March 1952 coup that installed Fulgencio Batista for his second run at power, in a dictatorial fashion.
What happens instead is over the holiday season in 1951-52, while partying with friends and a young mistress, he responds over-sportingly to her and her friends goading to act cool in dancing, drinking, and possibly getting high, and slips and breaks his neck. No Batista, no coup. A new man, with less prestige among soldiers and officers alike, needs to move up to be head of Cuba's armed forces, not one who is anticipating stepping down to run in the 1952 Cuban elections like Batista was (and polling behind like he was). The 1952 election proceeds along civilian, democratic lines in Cuba, with the populist Ortodoxo Party candidate, Roberto Agramonte, favored. Their party wins based on populist appeals, and anti-mafia and anti-corruption sentiment, and the martyrdom of the party founder Eddy Chibas, who committed suicide while broadcasting an anti-corruption jeremiad over Cuban radio in 1951.
The Agramonte Administration makes an effort to translate its populist and reformist rhetoric into reality, with mixed success. The Ortodoxo administration increases public works, labor protections, and begins pushback on the Mafia, following the example of the American Kefauver committee. There's a degree of anti-American rhetoric and compensated (at times exorbitantly) nationalization of foreign, including US, owned utilities or properties. Fidel Castro is an attorney and firebrand junior official of the Ortodoxo administration. However, Communist politicians are not granted any posts even comparable to what they had in the Batista Cabinets, and reforms are measured, paced, and compensated enough to avoid a domestic and foreign sponsored coup. Also, Agramonte cannot succeed himself as President under the Cuban constitution of the time. At the next election later in the 50s, he is replaced by another politician of his own party, or the slightly more conservative Autenticos.
In any case, the Cuban electoral system continues to function regularly for the remaining decades of the 1950s, and while there is a definite ongoing intermixing of Party politics and military officer politics, there is not a figure that so dominates the military and presumes to own the Presidency whenever he wishes like Fulgencio Batista in charge of the military, at least not for several more years.
Moving over to the United States, my default assumption is that the modest recession and cyclical layoffs of 1960, and the youth energy, and telegenic appeal of "getting the country moving again", and Eisenhower's lame praise of Nixon "If you give me a week I'll think of an accomplishment", help Kennedy prevail in the 1960 election as in OTL.
But for the incoming Kennedy Administration, the lack of rising tensions with a rapidly radicalizing, and apparently Soviet-aligning, Cuba, changes the menu it is being served drastically. No pre-cooked (if only half-baked) exile invasion to consider in its first four months. No summit with Khrushchev right in the shadow of that, no crisis over missiles on that island in the 3rd quarter of the Administration's second year. Cuba certainly, and really the western hemisphere as a whole, is an extremely backburner issue set for the Administration. It's probably not on the stove. If it's in the kitchen, it's in the pantry at best. The Congo and Middle East are bigger deals.
Certainly, the Administration's brain space for domestic issues - tax cuts, civil rights, education and science funding, expanded medical insurance, is wider.
Beyond that with Latin America seemingly quiet and "harmless" Nasser's antics and the Congo can get more attention, but it is really Europe and expecially Asia that get the most foreign policy attention.
Regarding Europe, there's the slow motion Berlin crisis, and then the interlude of the Vienna Summit. How will that go, and how will Khrushchev and Kennedy interpret, when it is not done in the shadow of the Bay of Pigs invasion debacle? The Soviets and East Germans like OTL are going to decide to solve their labor exodus problem by building the Berlin Wall. Will Kennedy be under any greater pressure to do anything about it? And would he be responsive to such pressure?
The tactic recommended by some at the time was for the Americans (and other western occupying powers if they were willing, I suppose), was to knock over the wall as it was being constructed, I suppose ramming bull-dozer scoops onto concrete blocks. That always seemed a bit aggressive and risky to me.
In any case, besides the binary choice of using blunt or explosive or potentially lethal force against Western Allied anti-wall sabotage, and potentially escalating things to military confrontation and World War Three starting in Berlin on the one hand, and not building the wall at all, on the other, it seems to me like the East Germans have a relatively *easy* option to still have their interzonal wall, *and* avoid escalation with the the Western Allies. That is simply to mark the interzonal boundaries in Berlin down to the centimeter with markers and tape and guards, and only build there wall up to a half meter or so *behind* it, so that any Western Allied sabotage of the building wall involves unambiguous aggression on what GDR regards as its own and even the West regards as the Soviet zone of Berlin, not any shared boundary.
In Asia, flashpoints in spring 1961 will be Laos. In OTL the US went into a negotiating process and settled on neutralization, but it might consider resisting any political concessions to Communist or Communist-aligned Neutralist forces. Also, deteriorating circumstances in Vietnam led to a boost in aid and a mass expansion in the number and role of advisors. And, lesser known and appreciated, but the Chiang Kai-shek regime in Taiwan was reacting to China's post Great Leap economic and political distress and famine by seriously stepping up its mobilization for Operation National Glory, its cross-straits campaign to retake the mainland. Additionally, by fall 1962,the Sino-Indian War would break out, and in this TL, without the contemporaneous Cuban Missile Crisis, it could engage much more US attention. The US may pay more attention to the build-up to that crisis in terms of Indian and Chinese post-building and some warning rhetoric ongoing since 1961. Another 1961 event that might rise higher in American headlines might be Iraqi dictator Kasem's threats to unify with Kuwait by force in the summer of 1961.
This all assumes a JFK administration, but a plan B, and look at a hypothetical Nixon administration could be valid as well. The lack of a Cuba clearly trending defiant and favorably towards American enemies could theoretically be something having a positive knock-on effect *just good enough* to help throw the 1960 election to Nixon, in an election that close. Nixon, although having different ideological priors, a different coalition to manage, and different intra-party pressures, would have the same alternate set of domestic and international events to deal with, although relieved of Cuba as a source of worry. Ironically, he might be more sensitive than Kennedy to Latin America, simply because of him getting nastily heckled by crowds in Bogota in 1958 during his tour of the region, serving as a reminder. What he does with that reminder is hard to say.
That's where I want to go with this speculation. But of course, I need to rewind things back, to illustrate how there is no Cuban revolution. While I did some digging in the archive of the late, great David T, on alternatives to Castro (worth a look if you're curious about pre-revolutionary Cuban politics), I decided not to use the material and go for something much simpler, avoiding the Cuban Revolution of '59, by forestalling the March 1952 coup that installed Fulgencio Batista for his second run at power, in a dictatorial fashion.
What happens instead is over the holiday season in 1951-52, while partying with friends and a young mistress, he responds over-sportingly to her and her friends goading to act cool in dancing, drinking, and possibly getting high, and slips and breaks his neck. No Batista, no coup. A new man, with less prestige among soldiers and officers alike, needs to move up to be head of Cuba's armed forces, not one who is anticipating stepping down to run in the 1952 Cuban elections like Batista was (and polling behind like he was). The 1952 election proceeds along civilian, democratic lines in Cuba, with the populist Ortodoxo Party candidate, Roberto Agramonte, favored. Their party wins based on populist appeals, and anti-mafia and anti-corruption sentiment, and the martyrdom of the party founder Eddy Chibas, who committed suicide while broadcasting an anti-corruption jeremiad over Cuban radio in 1951.
The Agramonte Administration makes an effort to translate its populist and reformist rhetoric into reality, with mixed success. The Ortodoxo administration increases public works, labor protections, and begins pushback on the Mafia, following the example of the American Kefauver committee. There's a degree of anti-American rhetoric and compensated (at times exorbitantly) nationalization of foreign, including US, owned utilities or properties. Fidel Castro is an attorney and firebrand junior official of the Ortodoxo administration. However, Communist politicians are not granted any posts even comparable to what they had in the Batista Cabinets, and reforms are measured, paced, and compensated enough to avoid a domestic and foreign sponsored coup. Also, Agramonte cannot succeed himself as President under the Cuban constitution of the time. At the next election later in the 50s, he is replaced by another politician of his own party, or the slightly more conservative Autenticos.
In any case, the Cuban electoral system continues to function regularly for the remaining decades of the 1950s, and while there is a definite ongoing intermixing of Party politics and military officer politics, there is not a figure that so dominates the military and presumes to own the Presidency whenever he wishes like Fulgencio Batista in charge of the military, at least not for several more years.
Moving over to the United States, my default assumption is that the modest recession and cyclical layoffs of 1960, and the youth energy, and telegenic appeal of "getting the country moving again", and Eisenhower's lame praise of Nixon "If you give me a week I'll think of an accomplishment", help Kennedy prevail in the 1960 election as in OTL.
But for the incoming Kennedy Administration, the lack of rising tensions with a rapidly radicalizing, and apparently Soviet-aligning, Cuba, changes the menu it is being served drastically. No pre-cooked (if only half-baked) exile invasion to consider in its first four months. No summit with Khrushchev right in the shadow of that, no crisis over missiles on that island in the 3rd quarter of the Administration's second year. Cuba certainly, and really the western hemisphere as a whole, is an extremely backburner issue set for the Administration. It's probably not on the stove. If it's in the kitchen, it's in the pantry at best. The Congo and Middle East are bigger deals.
Certainly, the Administration's brain space for domestic issues - tax cuts, civil rights, education and science funding, expanded medical insurance, is wider.
Beyond that with Latin America seemingly quiet and "harmless" Nasser's antics and the Congo can get more attention, but it is really Europe and expecially Asia that get the most foreign policy attention.
Regarding Europe, there's the slow motion Berlin crisis, and then the interlude of the Vienna Summit. How will that go, and how will Khrushchev and Kennedy interpret, when it is not done in the shadow of the Bay of Pigs invasion debacle? The Soviets and East Germans like OTL are going to decide to solve their labor exodus problem by building the Berlin Wall. Will Kennedy be under any greater pressure to do anything about it? And would he be responsive to such pressure?
The tactic recommended by some at the time was for the Americans (and other western occupying powers if they were willing, I suppose), was to knock over the wall as it was being constructed, I suppose ramming bull-dozer scoops onto concrete blocks. That always seemed a bit aggressive and risky to me.
In any case, besides the binary choice of using blunt or explosive or potentially lethal force against Western Allied anti-wall sabotage, and potentially escalating things to military confrontation and World War Three starting in Berlin on the one hand, and not building the wall at all, on the other, it seems to me like the East Germans have a relatively *easy* option to still have their interzonal wall, *and* avoid escalation with the the Western Allies. That is simply to mark the interzonal boundaries in Berlin down to the centimeter with markers and tape and guards, and only build there wall up to a half meter or so *behind* it, so that any Western Allied sabotage of the building wall involves unambiguous aggression on what GDR regards as its own and even the West regards as the Soviet zone of Berlin, not any shared boundary.
In Asia, flashpoints in spring 1961 will be Laos. In OTL the US went into a negotiating process and settled on neutralization, but it might consider resisting any political concessions to Communist or Communist-aligned Neutralist forces. Also, deteriorating circumstances in Vietnam led to a boost in aid and a mass expansion in the number and role of advisors. And, lesser known and appreciated, but the Chiang Kai-shek regime in Taiwan was reacting to China's post Great Leap economic and political distress and famine by seriously stepping up its mobilization for Operation National Glory, its cross-straits campaign to retake the mainland. Additionally, by fall 1962,the Sino-Indian War would break out, and in this TL, without the contemporaneous Cuban Missile Crisis, it could engage much more US attention. The US may pay more attention to the build-up to that crisis in terms of Indian and Chinese post-building and some warning rhetoric ongoing since 1961. Another 1961 event that might rise higher in American headlines might be Iraqi dictator Kasem's threats to unify with Kuwait by force in the summer of 1961.
This all assumes a JFK administration, but a plan B, and look at a hypothetical Nixon administration could be valid as well. The lack of a Cuba clearly trending defiant and favorably towards American enemies could theoretically be something having a positive knock-on effect *just good enough* to help throw the 1960 election to Nixon, in an election that close. Nixon, although having different ideological priors, a different coalition to manage, and different intra-party pressures, would have the same alternate set of domestic and international events to deal with, although relieved of Cuba as a source of worry. Ironically, he might be more sensitive than Kennedy to Latin America, simply because of him getting nastily heckled by crowds in Bogota in 1958 during his tour of the region, serving as a reminder. What he does with that reminder is hard to say.