What if the US had taken a strong stance in support of national self-determination during the Cold War and supported various nationalist rebels? Both Ho Chi Minh¹ and Fidel Castro² indicated pro-American sentiments at the beginning of their respective political projects. Could they have effectively recruited such leaders in the fight against the Soviets, and thereby changed the course of history? Or would it have inevitably clashed with American corporate interests and the need to keep Europe on its side?
The US was in fact far from universally hostile to Third World nationalists during the Cold War--however annoyed the US sometimes was over Nehru's neutralism, it did give India economic assistance, and in 1952 it urged the British not to try to reverse the Free Officers' coup against Farouk (not that the British were likely to do so anyway). And although Nasser was to disappoint the hopes the CIA had placed on him in 1952, still the US famously opposed the Anglo-Franco-Israeli actions in Suez in 1956.
Even with Fidel Castro, the US was far from uneqivocally hostile to him until late 1959 and early 1960 (when Castro was clearly moving in a pro-Communist direction both domestically and internationally):
"The attitude of the U.S. government toward Castro’s movement against Batista was ambiguous at first. On the one hand, there were those officials who believed that Castro always had been a communist and should therefore be destroyed as soon as possible. This group included Ambassador Gardner; his successor, Earl T. Smith, who was ambassador from 1957 to 1959; and Admiral Arleigh Burke, the U.S. Chief of Naval Operations. Gardner suggested to Batista in 1957 that he should try to have Castro secretly murdered in the hills, where the civil war already had begun. Though Batista replied, “No, no, we couldn’t do that, we’re Cubans,” there was at least one attempt on Castro in the Sierra Maestra, and presumably it was Batista’s doing.
"But many members of the American government took a different line: Roy Rubottom, Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs, had high hopes for Castro, as did the State Department’s Director of the Office of Caribbean and Mexican Affairs, William Wieland. These friendly attitudes were shared by some officials within the CIA. Indeed, the second-ranking representative of the CIA in Havana had an open row with Ambassador Smith on the subject of whether Castro was, or was not, a communist, in 1957, and both J. C. King (Chief of Western Hemisphere Affairs of the CIA) and Lyman B. Kirkpatrick (Inspector General of the CIA) were, for a time, hopeful that Castro might turn out to be a liberal.
"The United States thus presented a divided front toward Castro. He, in turn, was able to employ, to good effect, these divisions among both American policymakers and various molders of public opinion. A notable example was his use of the visit to Cuba of Herbert Matthews, a high-minded correspondent of the New York Times , in February, 1957. Castro saw Matthews in a remote part of the mountains and persuaded him that he was a moderate, nationalist reformer and that he had much more of a following than was really the case. Matthews’ reporting was friendly to Castro and helped to create in the United States widespread sympathy for the rebellion. That sympathy, in March, 1958, enabled Rubottom and his friends in the State Department to ensure an embargo on the sale of arms to Cuba, an action as important for its psychological effect upon Batista as for its actual disservice to the Cuban army. Until then, Batista had assumed that the United States automatically would support him even if he used against his internal enemies American arms that had been supplied to him for “hemisphere defense.”
"By the end of 1958, Batista’s position had begun to disintegrate, due largely to the corruption and inefficiency of his army rather than to the military skill of Castro—though it would be foolish to underestimate Castro’s ability to make the most of a propaganda advantage in Cuba. The U.S. government made an attempt to get Batista to resign and hand over power to a junta of generals, which, in the words of the CIA’s Kirkpatrick, seemed then to offer the United States “the best possibility of bringing peace” and avoiding “a blood bath.” The task of trying to persuade Batista to agree to this plan was entrusted to William Pawley, an American with long-established business interest in Cuba (he had founded Cubana Airlines and was a personal friend of Batista’s). Pawley’s mission failed, possibly because Rubottom had told him to avoid saying that he was acting in the name of President Eisenhower. A week later, however, Ambassador Earl Smith, with the greatest personal reluctance, told Batista that the United States government judged he had no alternative save to leave, that the State Department thought he could now only be a hindrance to its hastily devised plans for a transition. Batista agreed, partly because he now had a great deal of money outside of Cuba, and partly because his heart was not in the fight, though he complained at the same time that the United States was carrying out still another act of intervention—and one which did, indeed, seem like a repetition of Sumner Welles’s intervention in 1933 against Machado.
"Before Batista finally left Cuba, one of his generals, Cantillo, tried to reach an armistice with Castro and even attempted to make himself the leader of a caretaker government. At the same time, the CIA was busy bribing the jailer of another officer, Colonel Ramón Barquín, a nationally respected enemy of Batista, to let him out of prison so he could assist in the formation of a new government. These and other last-minute plans all came to nothing. Batista’s army was crumbling fast, and public enthusiasm for Castro and his allies was growing enormously, as Barquín and Cantillo in the end recognized. Batista left Cuba in the early morning hours of January 1,1959. The U.S. government then realized that it had to choose between allowing Castro to take power and “sending in the Marines.” The latter course was favored by Admiral Burke and probably by Allen Dulles, the Director of the CIA, but nothing was done. In the meantime, men and women from Castro’s organization took over the maintenance of public order in the Cuban cities. Castro himself was in Havana by January 8, 1959. A new, progressive government was formed. In the beginning, Castro did not figure in this. Even when he did take over as prime minister, in February, the majority of the members of his government were well known to be liberals.
"American reactions continued to be ambiguous, but in the Eisenhower administration those willing to give Castro the benefit of the doubt were predominant. The new ambassador to Havana, Philip Bonsai, concluded before arriving in Havana in February that “Castro was not a communist” and, at a meeting of the U.S. ambassadors in the Caribbean region on April 11, 1959, commented privately that Castro was a “terrific person, physically and mentally, he was far from crazy [and] he was not living on pills.” Most press comment in the United States early in 1959 thought much the same.
"There was, of course, some expressed hostility to the new Cuba in the United States, and Castro exploited it to strengthen his position with the reawakened Cuban public opinion. For example, when Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon and various American newspapers and newsmagazines protested against the public trial of Batista’s police, Castro suggested that their opposition constituted another variation on the theme of intervention. He also made the most of his visit to the United States in April, 1959, as the guest of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, to arouse further support for himself among the American people. Many Americans were even angry that President Eisenhower refused to meet him on that occasion, preferring to leave the task to Vice President Nixon.
"The transition in Cuba from an open to a closed society, after that visit, came fast. In early 1959 Castro was still talking of the desirability of an “entirely democratic revolution.” The Cuban revolution would be as “autochthonous as Cuban music,” with no place for extremists or communists. In May, 1959, however, a classical agrarian reform, taking over large estates and giving land to squatters and peasants, was promulgated. This inspired a curt but polite U.S. note of protest, demanding compensation for all dispossessed landowners, Cuban and American alike. The reform caused a political upheaval in the countryside, though accounts of what happened are hard to find. Certainly it was then that the first resistance to Castro began to be organized by Cubans of the Right. Some politicians began to criticize Castro for failing to call elections. But Castro himself was busy directing abortive expeditions against the dictatorships in the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and Haiti.
"In May, also, Castro dismissed several liberal ministers from his cabinet and had his first clash with the Cuban judiciary over a habeas corpus case. A month later the chief of the Cuban air force fled to the United States and told the Internal Security Subcommittee of the Senate that communism was beginning to take over in Cuba. A few weeks after that, in mid-July, Castro hounded out of office his own nominee as President of Cuba, Judge Manuel Urrutia, accusing him of treason and anticommunist expressions. Others who, like Hubert Matos, the military chief of the province of Camagüey, continued to criticize communism in public were shortly afterward arrested. Most of the other liberal cabinet members were then dismissed or were cowed into humiliating betrayals of their old faiths. The attitude of those who remained in office, like that of many liberals caught up in other revolutionary circumstances, is easy to condemn but important to judge objectively. The Cuban liberals who stayed with Castro in 1959 (like Raúl Roa, the Foreign Minister; Osvaldo Dorticós, President of Cuba for many years; Armando Hart, the Minister of Education; and Regino Boti, the Minister of Economics) were clearly men whose dedication to liberal ideology was not as firm as was their previously submerged desire for a strong nationalist state, which would break absolutely with a past in which none of them personally had been very successful.
"Next, the truant former chief of Cuba’s air force flew over Havana in a U.S. B-25 bomber converted to a cargo carrier, dropping pamphlets on the city. Antiaircraft guns fired at his plane, and some of their shell fragments fell to the ground and killed a few Cubans—an event that heralded a several months exchange of insults between Cuba and the United States. In February, 1960, only a year after Castro had taken power, Anastas Mikoyan, Deputy Premier of the Soviet Union, arrived in Havana to conclude the first commercial arrangement between Russia and Cuba, and in March, President Eisenhower gave his approval to the training of Cuban exiles by the CIA for a possible invasion of the island. In the course of the first half of 1960, the independence of the judiciary, press, trade unions, and university was destroyed, and the flight of middle-class Cubans and liberals began in earnest. By then, a clash with the United States was inevitable..."
https://www.americanheritage.com/us-and-castro-1959-1962
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With regard to Ho Chi Minh, I'll repeat what I posted here recently:
Hi Chi Minh was not a "left-leaning nationalist" who just happened to be a Communist. He had been part of the world Communist movement since he had helped to found the
French Communist Party in 1920. He never wavered in his loyalty to Leninism, which means that to him, national liberation, however important, was only the first step to building socialism and crushing capitalism and imperialism. This doesn't mean that in 1945 he wasn't open to compromise with France and the United States. But so, at that time, was Stalin!
For two attacks on the theory of Ho as "more nationalist than communist" see
(1) The views of Pierre Asselin
https://www.wilsoncenter.org/person/pierre-asselin have been summarized as follows:
"Professor Asselin (Ideology, The Vietnamese Communist Revolution, and the Origins of the American War in Vietnam) looks at the American War in Vietnam through the perspective of North Vietnam. His paper highlights the importance of ideology and explains how Marxism-Leninism and the influence of Mao and Stalin helped shape North Vietnamese domestic and foreign policies, from 1954 to 1960, which “effectively set Hanoi on an irreversible collision course with the United States.” While the bulk of the paper focus on those “six years period,” it lays a valuable foundation for understanding the causes of the war and Hanoi’s determination “to fight to the end, regardless of the sacrifice required. . . [until] final victory.”
"The author faults “American standard accounts” of the war and American historians, with “limited language skill,” for “long understating or ignoring [communist] ideology as a motive force of the Vietnamese effort against Western intrusion,” therefore, leading to the mistaken conclusion that North Vietnamese leaders may be “avowed communists [but] they were really nationalists.” For him, Ho Chi Minh is not a nationalist, but a true communist who, together with his comrades, incited “class struggle” to reinvent society immediately upon gaining control of the north after the 1954 Geneva Accords. He points out that, as the first president of an independent Vietnam in 1945, Ho was “chiefly responsible for popularizing Marxism-Leninism in Vietnam,” and that “No single person played a more important role than Ho in adapting communist thought to Vietnamese circumstances and in spreading its ideas.” To the communists, national liberation is not as important as communist revolution.
"Professor Asselin maintains that, for them, defeating the Americans and their collaborators in South Vietnam was necessary “less for the sake of the people of South Vietnam” than for the ultimate goal of “annihilating imperialism and capitalism” and to fulfill Vietnam’s “moral obligation” before the “international Communist movement.”..."
http://vietusactivities.com/remarks/nguyen-manh-hung-s-comments.html
(2) Ton That Thien's "Was Ho Chi Minh a Nationalist? Ho Chi Minh and the Comintern"
http://www.tonthatthien.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/1990-Was-Ho-Chi-Minh-A-Nationalist.pdf Yes, of course he was biased
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tôn_Thất_Thiện but he still brings out many facts on the primacy of Communism over nationalism to Ho. As he notes, Ho's line in 1939-45 (and especially after 1941--"waving high the flag of national independence, postponement of the social revolution, carefully concealing the Communist aims of the Party, broad national united front, etc."--far from being a deviation from the Comintern line was exactly what the Comintern wanted.
"Another widespread view about Ho is that in 1945-1946, Ho pursued a moderate and conciliatory policy toward France. They cited as concrete manifestation of this attitude Ho's agreement of March 6, 1946 by which he accepted for Vietnam the status of Free State - instead of independent state - member of the Indochinese Federation and the French Union. Jean Sainteny, the French representative who negotiated this agreement with Ho, asserted that Ho sincerely wanted friendly relations with France, and even liked the idea of being vice-president of the French Union..." But again this was completely in accord with Soviet policy, which wanted a friendly France (the Communists were after all participating in the French government):
"The CPF, which the CPI had always considered a senior party since the days of its foundation, warned the Vietnamese to make sure that their actions met the criteria of the current Soviet line and avoid any "premature adventures". Maurice Thorez stressed in 1946 that "under no circumstances" the CPF wished to be considered as "the eventual liquidator of the French position in Indochina".89 And in April 1946 he told a stunned Sainteny that the March 6, 1946 agreement was "very satisfactory" and if the Vietnamese did not respect it "we know what necessary measures to take, make the cannons talk if need be”.90
"...Ho knew perfectly what Soviet policy at the time was, and he had to conform to it. This, and not the weakness of his government alone at the time, explains his seeming moderation towards the French in 1945-1946, and well until the end of 1947. But in 1947 the situation changed. In May, the French communist ministers were out of the French government, and in September, in Poland, Zhdanov, on behalf of Stalin, announced a new policy: that of confrontation with the West. In Indochina, full war had already developed, and Ho did not have to make any turnaround to meet the demands of Moscow...
"...in the first week of January 1950 Ho went secretly to Moscow to have a meeting with Stalin. Khrushchev has said in his memoirs that Ho had a meeting with Stalin while the latter was alive, but gave no specifics.94 We now know, from Hoang van Hoan’s memoirs, that in the first days of January 1950, three weeks before China’s recognition of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and one month before that of the Soviet Union, Ho made a secret visit to Peking to discuss Chinese recognition and aid. At this meeting with the Chinese leaders, Liu Shao-chi suggested that he went to see Stalin also. The Soviet ambassador, Nikolai Roschin, was asked to send a message to Stalin. The Soviet leader agreed, and two days later Ho flew to Moscow to request Soviet aid. At the Stalin-Ho meeting, the Chinese ambassador, Wanh Jia-hsiang, was present, and he told Hoan afterwards that at that meeting it was agreed that the main task of aiding Ho's government would be shouldered by China.95
"Ho had definitely chosen side. This was one month before the United States recognised the State of Vietnam, two months before it gave economic aid to the Saigon government, and six months before President Truman decided to give full military aid to the French for their war in Indochina following the outbreak of the Korean War. The prevalent view in current literature on the Vietnam War is that June 1950 marked the American involvement in Indochina, and was the start of the train of events leading to Vietnam being dragged into the cold war and to America's woes in the following years. That view must be abandoned today, because it is undisputable that it was Ho who has plunged Vietnam into the East-West confrontation by being the first to choose side...
"Paul Mus,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Mus