Cuban Dilemma

As with Laos, the Cuban conflict had become a war of words. After listening to witnesses before his Foreign Relations Committee last week, Arkansas' Fulbright, who has been against U.S. intervention from the start, concluded that the Cuban disaster was a "collective responsibility" of the entire Administration, not just of the CIA. In response to a Castro declaration that Cuba is officially "Socialist," the State Department issued a statement saying that the Castro regime is actually "Communist"--a fact that had long been as plain as the beard on Fidel's face (TIME, July 27, 1959 et seq.). State Secretary Rusk repeated earlier assurances that the U.S. is not planning "armed intervention in Cuba," and President Kennedy said that "we are not now training and are not now planning to train" an invasion force of Cuban exiles.

Amid the first pained reactions to the Bay of Pigs fiasco, thoughts of sending in the Marines had occurred to many Americans, even including some New Frontiersmen. But within the Administration, the impulse quickly faded away. For a while at least, Castro is safe from any invasion by U.S. armed forces--unless he foolishly gives the U.S. an excuse for intervention by trying to seize the Guantanamo naval base.

Rising Expectations. With direct military intervention ruled out, the Administration inevitably turned to that old standard remedy for cold-war frustrations: more money for economic aid. Secretary Rusk declared that the "real issue" in Latin America was not Castroism but the "rising expectations" of the poverty-pinched masses. President Kennedy told his press conference that the U.S. was urging a special meeting of the Inter-American Economic and Social Council in mid-July to draw up a program of "realistic economic development in the Americas."

Spending more dollars in Latin America is at best an iffy way of fighting Castro. Are more direct means available to the U.S. for breaking the Communist grip on Cuba? One possibility lies in the Monroe Doctrine--President James Monroe's 1823 warning to "the European powers" that the U.S. would "consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety."

Ingrained Taboo. For generations, the world looked on the Monroe Doctrine as bedrock U.S. foreign policy. But the U.S. itself saw a need for supplementing the unilateral Monroe Doctrine with a system of hemispheric collective security. The result was the 1947 Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance, better known as the Rio Pact, which provides that "an armed attack by any State against any American State shall be considered an attack against all the American States." The principle of inter-American collective security against aggression was reaffirmed in the charter of the Organization of American States, drawn up at Bogota in 1948.

Recognizing that the Rio Pact and the OAS Charter, with their focus on "armed attack" and "aggression," could not cope with Communist subversion in Latin America, an American conference in Caracas in 1954, under the leadership of U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, voted to broaden the concept of collective security. At Dulles' urging, the conference adopted a resolution declaring that "domination or control of the political institutions of any American State by the international Communist movement . . . would constitute a threat to the sovereignty and political independence of the American States, endangering the peace of America, and would call for a meeting of consultation to consider the adoption of appropriate action . . ."

The Caracas declaration unmistakably applies to Castro's Cuba. But in order to invoke the declaration against Castro, the U.S. must persuade a majority of Latin American nations to agree to take "appropriate action"--or at least endorse such action by the U.S. In trying to get the Caracas declaration translated into action, the U.S. runs smack up against the old, ingrained Latin American taboo against "intervention."

Compelling Task. Persuading Latin American governments to abandon that taboo and recognize that intervention in Cuba is necessary to the peace and safety of the Hemisphere is the Administration's most compelling diplomatic task in Latin America. Last week State Department officials in Washington and U.S. envoys all over the Hemisphere were urging upon Latin American leaders the need for an inter-American conference to draw up new rules that will enable the Hemisphere to cope with Communist subversion and rebellion.

But it is more than possible that too few Latin American leaders will agree. If so, the U.S. may have to fall back upon unilateral action under the Monroe Doctrine. President Kennedy recognized that point in his speech on Cuba shortly after the Bay of Pigs invasion. "Should it ever appear," he said, "that the inter-American doctrine of noninterference merely conceals or excuses a policy of nonaction; if the nations of this Hemisphere should fail to meet their commitments against outside Communist penetration, then I want it clearly understood that this Government will not hesitate in meeting its primary obligations, which are the security of our nation." If, in the future, the U.S. does not live up to that vow, then the Monroe Doctrine may, by default, become a dead letter.

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