philip brenner

BOOK REVIEW The Power of Metaphor: Explaining U.S. Policy toward Cuba
Louis A. Prez Jr. Cuba in the American Imagination: Metaphor and the Imperial Ethos. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. xii + 274 pp. Notes, index, illustrations. $34.95 (cloth). Howard Jones. The Bay of Pigs. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. xvi + 174 pp. Notes, index, illustrations. $24.95 (cloth).

Louis Prez has given us an indispensable study of U.S. policy towards Cuba. Cuba in the American Imagination is a necessary preface for all other analyses of the subject. It does not replace the wealth of studies that have illuminated a variety of explanations for U.S. policy or U.S.-Cuban relations. But his latest book does provide the context for these other analyses, by exposing the core assumptions on which U.S. policies towards Cuba have rested. Its value is immediately evident if one reads it alongside Howard Joness recent study of the Bay of Pigs invasion. The central premise of Cuba in the American Imagination is rst that the metaphors U.S. ofcials used to describe Cuba dened their reality regarding Cuba. Second, while the depictions of Cuba changed over time, their messages were roughly constant: the United States is superior to Cuba, has a natural right to possess it, and is morally responsible for shaping Cubas affairs. Political leaders do not use metaphors merely to make their speeches more lively. They are an efcient means of communicating a complex reality in commonly accepted terms that then provide the basis for acceptable action. As George Lakoff observes, they limit what we notice, highlight what we do see, and provide part of the inferential structure that we reason with.1 While ofcials may not always use metaphors with intentionality, Prez notes, in the case of Cuba they were not deployed randomly. . . . Metaphorical constructs provided a normative grounding for a version of reality and validation of conduct (p. 36). The domination of Cuban affairs became the reasonable discharge of North American moral conduct. This mode of relating to Cubans
1. George Lakoff, Metaphor and War: The Metaphor System Used to Justify War in the Gulf, in Thirty Years of Linguistic Evolution, ed. Martin Ptz (Amsterdam, 1992), 481. Diplomatic History, Vol. 34, No. 2 (April 2010). 2010 The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR). Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc., 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK.

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became so normal that Americans rarely questioned whether it was appropriate, which Prez argues provides corroboration of the power of metaphor to reproduce premise as proof (p. 22). Metaphors alone do not explain U.S. policy. But they are an appropriate starting point for considering political and economic factors, because nearly all of the metaphors, Prez concludes, functioned in the service of U.S. interests. . . . Americans came to their knowledge of Cuba principally by way of representations entirely of their own creation (p. 22). Their Cuba, he remarks, was, in fact, a gment of their own imagination and a projection of their needs (p. 23). Most of the metaphors themselves are well known. Prez has culled examples from many sourcesofcial documents, public speeches, private correspondence, secret cables, magazine and newspaper stories, cartoons, lms demonstrating how widespread and embedded they have been in the American narrative about Cuba. (Indeed, reproductions of cartoons and posters inserted throughout the book both reinforce its argument and add a measure of fun in reading it.) Perhaps the most famous and enduring metaphor is the early nineteenth-century image of Cuba as a piece of fruit that would fall into U.S. arms when ripe, by virtue of a natural law as certain as the law of gravity. While John Quincy Adams invoked ripe fruit as a device for urging patience in the conquest of Cuba, its evocative signicance was of Cuba as a natural U.S. appendage. In this vein, but less well known, was Sen. William Sewards portrayal of Cuba as an island formed from U.S. soil that had washed down the Mississippi River into the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean, much as a baby emerges from its mothers loins. The characterization of Cuba as the child of the United States became increasingly popular after the 1898 routing of the Spanish. But leading up to the U.S. intervention in Cubas independence war, the dominant image was of Cuba as a woman. The power of this metaphor, Prez contends, lay in its capacity to summon moral indignation (p. 81). Cuba was a damsel in distress, whom the gallant United States was obliged to save from the Spanish. The immediate implication was that the United States was not only stronger; seen in patriarchal terms, it was superior to Cuba. The collateral implication was that Cuba was effeminate and therefore was unworthy of male prerogatives associated with power, self-governance, and independence (p. 85). Still, this metaphor was inadequate to the task of portraying a Cuba in need of supervision once the United States occupied the island. Very quickly the prevailing image that emerged was of a helpless child. Prez notes that evidence for the depiction of Cuba as a child was bizarrely circular. U.S. ofcials at the turn of the century asserted that Cubas very demand for self-government was proof of incapacity for self-government, because evidently Cubans did not even know enough to understand that they lacked preparation for self-government (p. 103). They were considered immature, ignorant, and untutored in the ways of civilized people, like young

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children. And as the parent, the United States had the duty to protect and nurture Cuba (p. 113), and to have a presence on the island in order to guide Cubans on their journey to maturity. In this way, early twentieth-century Americans justied their domination of Cuba as a seless fulllment of parental duty. Embedded in the parent-child metaphor, George Lakoff explains, is the expectation that the parent has the responsibility to teach the child right from wrong. And so, when children are disobedient, they must be punished in order to instill them with discipline.2 To spare the rod was to spoil the child. Prez offers ample evidence of this attitude, especially when the United States sent troops to Cuba to subdue the unruly, impulsive children, who, as he quotes Woodrow Wilson remarking, require the discipline of being under masters. . . . They are children and we are men in these deep matters of government and justice (p. 120). Thus, a crucial reciprocal responsibility that emanated from the parent-child metaphor was discipline and obedience. Another was the adults obligation to act selessly in the childs interest and the offsprings duty, in turn, to be appropriately grateful and deferential to the parent. But to the victorious leaders of the 1959 Revolution, playing their proper role as children would have been snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. They refused to be either compliant or appreciative. In response, U.S. ofcials, editorial writers, and cartoonists soon began to depict the new Cuban government, and Fidel Castro, as a screaming, ranting, temperamental childthe kind of nuisance President Theodore Roosevelt had castigated in 1906, when he called the country that infernal little Cuban republic. But even the image of a wayward child seemed too benign by 1960. Castro was more the juvenile delinquent than the errant boy, a menace more than an irritant. Incapable of being disciplined, and unwilling to acknowledge that Cuba owed gratitude to the United States because it had liberated the island from Spain in 1898, Castro became the outcast, the pariah who led Cuba to betray its parents heritage and upbringing, and who had to be destroyed. At that point President Dwight Eisenhower endorsed a proposalwhich ultimately became the April 17, 1961, Bay of Pigs invasionto overthrow the new Cuban government. In The Bay of Pigs, Jones relies on the most current research and makes use of the latest documents to provide a clear summary of both the operationincluding its genesis and aftermathand the problems that
2. George Lakoff, Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision (New York, 2006), 5758. A 2006 study offers some empirical verication for Lakoffs claim that a source of the ideological liberal-conservative dichotomy may rest on the meaning a person gives to the metaphor of the nuclear family. See David C. Barker and James Tinnock III, Competing Visions of Parental Roles and Ideological Constraint, American Political Science Review 100, no. 2 (2006): 24963. Michael Paul Rogin demonstrates how the idea of punishing Native Americans supposedly to foster their development into adults enabled U.S. leaders to reconcile the elimination of the Indians with the liberal self-image. See Michael Paul Rogin, Liberal Society and the Indian Question, in The Politics and Society Reader, ed. Ira Katznelson et al. (New York, 1974), 12.

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led it to become the perfect failure.3 A popular explanation for its failure had long been that the tiny and battered Cuban air force was able to sink the invaders resupply ships, dooming the operation, because President John F. Kennedy refused to order an air strike on the morning of the invasion (D-Day). But the October 1961 Central Intelligene Agency (CIA) Inspector Generals Report, which was declassied due to the efforts of Peter Kornbluh and the National Security Archive, concludes that the D-Day air strikes would have made little difference as a result of a myriad of other problems.4 In fact, as Cuban historian Juan Carlos Rodrguez points out, one of those problems was that the preinvasion air strikes on April 15 (D-2) warned Cuba that the invasion was imminent, and so the Cuban military dispersed the surviving planes to make them more secure and fortied all of the airelds, which had remained operational despite the attacks.5 These preparations would have vitiated the impact of a strike on the day of the invasion, and they undermine the claim that President Kennedys decision was crucial to the outcome. While Jones acknowledges the judgment in the Inspector Generals Report, he gives credence to the assessment that absence of D-Day air strikes was determinative: the President never grasped . . . the interconnected importance of the D-2, D-1, and D-Day strikes to the invasion (p. 127). Still, Jones does focus appropriately on two truly signicant reasons the invaders were defeated. First, the sine qua non of the operation was the assassination of the Cuban leadership and/or the manipulation of President Kennedy into launching a U.S. military invasion, neither of which was successful. Second, the plan was based on a awed assumption that the invasion would trigger an uprising against the revolutionary government. U.S. attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro have been acknowledged ofcially since the 1975 Church Committee hearings. But only in the mid1990s did it become certain that murdering the Cuban leadership was an essential component of the Bay of Pigs attack. As Michael Warner wrote in a now declassied study, CIA Director Allen Dulles and Deputy Director Richard Bissell were unconcerned about the logistical shortcomings of the exiles attack because they believed Castro would either be assassinated or President Kennedy would send in the Marines to rescue the Brigade.6

3. The moniker comes from Theodore Draper, Castros Revolution: Myths and Realities (New York, 1962), 59. 4. CIA Inspector General, Inspector Generals Survey of the Cuban Operation, October 1961, Document No. CU00223, National Security Archive, Washington, DC, reprinted in Peter Kornbluh, ed., Bay of Pigs Declassied: The Secret CIA Report on the Invasion of Cuba (New York, 1998). 5. Juan Carlos Rodrguez, The Bay of Pigs and the CIA, trans. Mary Todd (Melbourne, 1999), 13334. 6. Michael Warner, Lessons Unlearned: The CIAs Internal Probe of the Bay of Pigs Affair, Studies in Intelligence, 40, no. 2 (1996), declassied in 1997, https://www.cia.gov/library/ center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/docs/v42i5a08p.htm#ft0 (accessed January 27, 2009).

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Jones does well to highlight this link between the assassination attempts and the invasion. Jacob Esterline, the CIAs operational director for the invasion, quickly understood the implication of the assassination strategy when he rst saw the documents about it at a 1996 conference. As tears welled in his eyes, he said, Ill tell you what really bothers me about this. This stupid cockamamie idea may well have compromised serious support and backing of the brigade operation that was the main event, or should have been. . . . Maybe [Bissell] didnt even care much about whether my people made it or not.7 Indeed, many of the Americans devising and carrying out the plan had contempt for the exiles. One reason the plan moved forward, Jones aptly notes, was the fear that if it were called off there would a disposal problem, that is, ofcials viewed the exiles as things which they had to dispose of one way or another (p. 58). Even the CIAs Inspector Generals Report critically observed that some project ofcers considered the Cubans untrustworthy and difcult to work with. Members of the Revolutionary Council have been described to the inspectors as idiots. . . . Some of the contract employees, such as ships ofcers, treated the Cubans like dirt.8 Jones suggests that a similar lack of respect for the adversarys defensive capability was a second major reason for the failure (p. 124). A factor commonly overlooked, he reports, was the erce determination of Castro and his followers to resist the invasion . . . Bissell and others grossly underestimated the tenacity of those Cuban people remaining loyal to Castro (p. 125). In writing this, Jones seems to imagine that Castros support was minimal, though intense. From his perspective, the popular insurrection did not materialize mainly because Castro clapped thousands of [dissidents] in prison a week prior to the invasion (p. 126). He does not address the likelihood that ordinary people who lived in the Bay of Pigs vicinity, who were not necessarily Castro loyalists, might have fought against the invaders because they genuinely supported the revolution and believed they had something to protect. Consider that the area had been without a hospital until the new government built one in 1959, and farmers there had felt isolated because there were no roads until 1960. Notably in January 1961, a contingent of volunteer teachers was assigned to work throughout the [Zapata] swamp, and for the rst time thousands of children who lived on the Zapata Peninsula began to go to elementary school.9 The Bay of Pigs unwittingly adopts the U.S. narrative about the revolution, that Cuba was a child who longed to return to its parent, and whom Castro had betrayed by ungratefully rejecting the benevolence of the country that had

7. James G. Blight and Peter Kornbluh, eds., Politics of Illusion: The Bay of Pigs Invasion Reexamined (Boulder, CO, 1998), 85. 8. CIA Inspector General, Inspector Generals Survey of the Cuban Operation, 9596. 9. Rodrguez, The Bay of Pigs and the CIA, 11821.

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spawned and nurtured Cuba.10 It is a powerful metaphor because it reinforces a largely uncontested popular view in the United States that the Cuban revolution did not have widespread support. Thus, Jones sets the context for the invasion by painting a distorted picture of Cuba, focusing on Castros elimination of moderates from power and his hysterically abusive tirades against the United States (p. 16). The U.S. narrative blinds Americans to the reason a U.S.sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion was bound to fail, and Jones tells the American story from the narrow perspective of Washington decision makers. Cubans, both the invaders and the invaded, are largely absent from the book. Jones is correct that a big problem with the invasion plan was the awed assumption that it would spark a mass insurrection. But it was awed not because of a misjudgment about Cubas military might or Castros ruthlessness. The aw was a political misjudgment about what a large majority of Cubans wanted. They were rejecting the form of democracy the United States had supported in Cuba from 1940 to 1952characterized by tainted elections and by politicians who did the bidding of the United States and U.S. corporationsand the brutal dictatorship the United States tolerated under Fulgencio Batista that gave free rein to organized crime. In contrast, the 1959 Cuban revolution was a nationalist uprising. It had serious problems, but these were Cuban problems that Cubans were beginning to be proud they would solve themselves. The ultimate intention of The Bay of Pigs is laudable. Jones relies on the case to argue that the United States should neither use assassination to pursue its interests nor intervention to produce forceful regime change (p. 174). But that conclusion needed to rest on a rmer base of analysis. He reasons that the ultimate source of the Bay of Pigs debacle was the pathological animosity that the Kennedy brothers had for Castro, which blinded them to the dangers of this ill-conceived action (p. 129). Yet their obsession can hardly explain the U.S. hostility toward Cuba that continued largely unabated for the next ve decades. Jones speculates that subsequent U.S. policy was a consequence of the Bay of Pigs invasion itself, which shattered relations with Cuba (p. 172). But Cuba in the American Imagination provides a richer explanation, rooted in the continuing U.S. attitude about Cuba that has served easily enough to dismiss Cubans pretensions to agency. As Prez explains, The idea of a people possessed of an internal history and the thought of Cubans endowed with proper aspirations to independence and sovereignty were prospects that the Americans rarely considered plausible and never deemed tenable (p. 38).
10. Though some in the CIA were aware that the Cuban revolution was more popular than ofcial U.S. rhetoric stated, two months before the invasion Col. J.C. King told a high-level group of presidential advisers that our best information indicates that the civilian population and campesinos would probably be friendly to the invasion force, as they currently are to the guerrillas who have been operating in the hills. He added that intelligence also discloses that there is widespread dissatisfaction among eld workers, who have been taken from their labors to serve in the militia. See, Memorandum for the Record, Meeting on Cuba, February 7, 1961, Document No. 38, in U.S. State Department, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 19611963 (Washington, DC, 1997), 10: 8182.

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Those skeptical about the value of the kind of cultural analysis Prez presents should suspend their doubts briey to ponder how pervasive the parent-child metaphor remains in U.S. thinking about Cuba. Consider the two reports from the Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba that guided U.S. Cuba policy in the last four years of the Bush administration.11 Both proposed draconian measures intended to hasten regime change. The bulk of the 2004 report, though, was a series of chapters on how to transition all aspects of Cuban society, including education and health care. Cubas renowned successes in these elds were ignored, as if the Cubans were children desperately in need of U.S. parental guidance, and nothing they had done on their own was worth saving. The reports, and resulting U.S. policy, not only betrayed ignorance about Cuba, but also contempt for Cubans. President Barack Obamas campaign comments about Cubathat as president he would cease punishing the U.S. ward when Cuba demonstrated that it had matured enough to warrant lifting the embargo12emanated from the same narrative. As in the past, U.S. policymakers continue to act as if the United States really does not need to understand Cuba or consider Cubans as equals.

11. Colin L. Powell, Chair, Report to the President, Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba, May 2004, http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/32334.pdf (accessed January 26, 2009); Condoleezza Rice, Chair, Report to the President, Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba, July 2006, http://www.cafc.gov/documents/organization/68166.pdf (accessed January 26, 2009). 12. In a speech to the Cuban American National Foundation, then Sen. Barack Obama said, I will maintain the embargo. It provides us with the leverage to present the regime with a clear choice: if you take signicant steps toward democracy, beginning with the freeing of all political prisoners, we will take steps to begin normalizing relations. See Remarks of Senator Barack Obama: Renewing U.S. Leadership in the Americas, Miami, FL, May 23, 2008, http://www.barackobama.com/2008/05/23/remarks_of_senator_barack_obam_68.php (accessed January 31, 2009).

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