EX-CIA HEAD SAID CASTRO WAS NO COMMUNIST

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Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): 
CIA-RDP91-00901R000500110013-0
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RIPPUB
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K
Document Page Count: 
2
Document Creation Date: 
December 19, 2016
Document Release Date: 
December 9, 2005
Sequence Number: 
13
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Publication Date: 
March 28, 1982
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NSPR
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PDF icon CIA-RDP91-00901R000500110013-0.pdf147.09 KB
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AP,T y j' lift 3Proved For Relea f}2WR/($'U9QL3/IYCfk.MEP91-00901 R000500110013-0 28 ;March 1982 head saad,,_Gistro was no comur~s united press international WASHINGTON A few weeks after Fidel,Castro"A rise to power in 1959~ CIA .chief-,.Allen Dulles told the-Senate in a secret, briefing the Cuban leader. _did : not, have "any, ccommunist leanings, " according to a reportreleased-yesterday.. ', He has certainly> shown: great cot rage . Dulles said or Castro be-' fore thee SenateForeign Relations Committee on^ Jari; 26, 1959. The committee, yesterday released a 900-page.declassified report on hearings held. In 1959. "We do. . not. think that Castro himself has=any. communist lean- ings," Dulles told the panel 25 days after Castro overthrew dictator Fulgencio Bastista~ ,"We do not be- lieve Castro is in the pay of or working for the. communists." : I "We believe, however, that this,' is a situation on which the commu- nists could capitalize If there is not: a moue to get'control of the situa-^, I tion more fully than Castro has control of it now.' - ,' "American intervention there at,this time, or even before, would' have had a disastrous effect throughout the whole hemisphere and I see no alternative - that is a ,matter of policy," he told the com- mittee. Dulles was less generous about., Castro's brother. Raul, now Cuba's =j defense minister,.and about Argen- 1 tina-born revolutionary Ernesto (Che) Guevara, the head of Castro's' agrarian reform program who was killed' in Bolivia in1967 _,'His brother..is.more irresponsi- ble," Dulles said. "This fellow 'Che' Guevara, the Argentinian who has been fightingwith him, we are. rather. suspicious about him." Dul- les also was less than complimen-' tart' about Batista, who fled Ha- vana- for Miami on Jan. 1, 1959. "We felt that Bastista was on the~i losing end of the stick weeks before; it came to an end," Dulles said. "In fact, an effort. was made; through extradiplomatic. means,,i quietly.. to see whether he would=; not depart, and an effort was made s to see if one could put in an inter'ini government that would at leastf permit negotiations with Castro.", ' t "'He stayed on too Long,'sa that was impossible and Castro -came in," Dulles said, in talking of ?a de- velopment replayed 20' years. lateta when Nicaragua's Anastasio Soo-( moza Debayle did not Ieave Mana- gua until it was too late. Approved For Release 2006/01/03 : CIA-RDP91-00901 R000500110013-0 Approved For Release 2006/01/03: CIA-RDP91-00901R000500110013-0 STATINTL 7~,~,r,eA ~e1 '~vCF i r oly (,JiAl7~, /7 O -~ 1 Guatemala as Cold War RICHARD H. IMMERMAN With the increasing accumulation of interpretive scholarship on international relations following World War II, most episodes in the cold war have been written and rewritten, evaluated and reevaluated. One striking excep- tion, however, is the 1954 American intervention in Guatemala, which led to the overthrow of Jacabo Arbenz Guzman's constitutionally elected government. This article studies the antecedents, events, and consequences of that coup. Analyses of hitherto unavailable archival data and of interviews with Ameri- can participants in the coup who were privy to the covert aspects of the opera- tion suggest that this event was a significant link in the unfolding chain of cold war history. Writings to date on the overthrow of Arbenz tend to be short on detailed documentation and analysis and to treat the coup illustratively. These accounts depict the United States intervention in Guatemala either as a back- ground incident in the escalating cold war, as an example of the inordinate in- fluence of economic interests (in this case the United Fruit Company [UFCO]) on American foreign policy, or as a way station in the evolution of the Central Intelligence Agency. These treatments fail to emphasize sufficiently that the coup typified the foundations of cold war diplomacy, providing a model to be emulated, and resisted, in subsequent years.' ' The most widely cited source remains Ronald Schneider, Communism in Guatemala, 1944-1954 (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1958), although more recent studies such as Cole Blasier, The Hovering Giant: U.S. Responses to Revolutionary Change in Latin America (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Uni- versity of Pittsburgh Press, 1976), pp. 151-77; Max Gordon, "A Case History of U.S. Subversion: Guatemala, 1954," Science and Society 35 (Summer 1971): 129-55, and Stephen Schlesinger, "How RICHARD H. IMMERMAN is associate director of the Presidency Studies Program in Princeton University's Politics Department. He is currently completing a book on the CIA's 1954 intervention in Guatemala as well as collaborating on a biography of Milton Eisenhower and a comparative study of the Eisenhower and Johnson presidencies.