320. Memorandum From the President’s Special Assistant for National
Security Affairs (Bundy)
to the Standing Group of the National Security Council0
Washington, April 21,
1963.
THE CUBAN PROBLEM
The attached papers are circulated as background material for the meeting of
the Standing Group now scheduled for Tuesday, April 23, at 5:00 p.m.1 This meeting will not aim at reaching agreed
conclusions, but rather at an initial and wide-ranging discussion of the
prospects and alternatives for American policy in Cuba.
The papers attached are intended mainly for reference, and much of their
contents will be familiar. Except for Tab 1, which is a White House summary
of the problem and of alternative approaches to it, these papers are
forwarded from the Office of the Coordinator for Cuban Affairs. Through no
fault of the Coordinator, these papers are not fully-up-to-date on certain
special aspects of contingency planning, and they omit certain covert plans
and operations on which there will be oral briefing Tuesday. The papers are
as follows:
- Tab 1—White House summary
- Tab 2—(Annex 3), Current Situation2
- Tab 3—(Annex 4), Multilateral Efforts to Isolate Cuba and Combat
Castro-Communist Subversion3
- Tab 4—(Annex 5), Cuban Hemisphere Subversion3
- Tab 5—(Annex 6), Economic Restrictions4
- Tab 6—(Annex 7), Exile Problems5
- Tab 7—Military Contingency Planning6
- Tab 8—The Cuban Situation in Eighteen Months or Two Years
(prepared by State Department Bureau of Intelligence and
Research)7
By separate distribution I am also circulating an unclassified compilation of
the President’s statements on Cuba.8
Tab 1
SUBJECT
- A Sketch of the Cuban Alternatives
I. Present Policy and
prospects
Present U.S. policy toward Cuba has the following elements:
- (1)
- Prevention of a direct military threat to the U.S. or the
Hemisphere from Cuba. To this end it is clear that all necessary
measures will be taken.
- (2)
- Elimination of Soviet military presence from Cuba. Currently
our level of effort here is limited to quite diplomatic pressure
and careful public statement. Decisions on further action are
deferred pending the result of current efforts.
- (3)
- Isolation of Cuba from the rest of the free world. To this end
we are ready to exert considerable diplomatic and economic
pressure on Western Allies.
- (4)
- Counter-action against Cuban/Communist subversion in the
Western Hemisphere. We are developing an extensive program of
cooperation with Latin American governments in this field, and
it is clearly our policy to develop this program
energetically.
- (5)
- Surveillance to Cuba by all appropriate intelligence
operations. It is clear that the maintenance of this
surveillance is essential in support of objective 1,
above.
- (6)
- Covert action to damage the Cuban economy. The possibilities
of such action appear limited, but they have not been fully
explored. It is current policy to develop additional resources
for selective action in this field.
Opinions differ as to the probable result of this policy in the absence
of major shifts inside Cuba or in Soviet or Cuban behavior. At Tab 8 is
an informal memorandum from the Bureau of Intelligence and Research of
the State Department on this topic. This memorandum is to be
supplemented soon by a community-wide intelligence assessment. The
probability is that in the absence of new developments, the policy
outlined above will not lead to early major change in Cuba.
II. Possible New Directions
Broadly speaking, major changes in the situation can be produced in one
of two ways: either we can await events which would permit or require
new action by the United States Government, or we can initiate actions
designed to produce major change, whether or not the actions of others
produce crisis opportunities.
- 1.
-
Contingency Planning
Contingency planning currently envisages three kinds of cases in
which stepped-up action is intended:
- a.
- Interference with U.S. surveillance
- b.
- Any new major Soviet military intrusion or any
significant military move from Cuba against the
Hemisphere
- c.
- Possible general action against Cuba in the context of
an international crisis originating elsewhere.
Contingency planning for b. and c. is limited so far to straight
military planning on a wholly hypothetical basis. Planning for
a. is primarily directed toward the immediate objective of
insuring continued surveillance by a minimum necessary force.
The broader political question is whether these or other
contingencies should be regarded as opportunities for
deliberately enlarged action aimed at a major political result.
On the one hand, contingency planning can be based on the
premise that we wish to protect and restore the situation
existing immediately before the
[Page 777]
new crisis; this was essentially the
purpose of U.S. policy in the October missile crisis.
Alternatively, contingency planning can be developed with the
purpose of using a given critical development as a means of
changing the situation in ways advantageous to us. It is obvious
that greater commitments of force and greater risks are
inevitable in such alternative planning, and it is equally
obvious that these greater commitments and risks may not be
desirable in any given case. The point here is simply that such
choices are a necessary element of the choice of responses to
any particular contingency. Perhaps the Standing Group should
give some attention to the question whether wider contingency
planning—or at least contingency thinking—is needed.
- 2.
- Possible New Initiatives
- a.
-
A decision to force a non-Communist
solution in Cuba by all necessary means.
Such a decision would imply the development of pressures
which would insure gradual escalation of the
confrontation in Cuba to whatever point was necessary to
produce the overthrow of the present regime. Such a
policy would not exclude the use of contingencies as a
means for advancing U.S. policy, but it would require
that the pace be forced and that pressures be sustained
in such a way, at every stage, as to prevent solutions
short of overthrow of the regime. A program of this kind
might or might not be openly avowed at the outset. It
might proceed at varying rates of speed and with varying
concern for public support here and abroad. Probably its
dominant feature would be a willingness to use military
force to invade Cuba, and it seems probable too that
this invasion would have to be carried
through.
- b.
-
A decision to insist on major but
limited ends.
The United States could deliberately adopt a policy of
gradually increasing pressure designed to produce more
limited results at least initially. Possible objectives
are the total withdrawal of Soviet military forces, the
verifiable abandonment of subversive training in Cuba,
the reopening of the island to peaceful on-site
visitation and inspection by non-Communists—or all
three. Such a program again might be developed at
varying rates of speed and with varying combinations of
political and military pressure. Probably it would
require a clear willingness to move to the level of a
POL blockade, and at a guess such a blockade might in
fact have to be established at some point.
- c.
- The U.S. could move in the direction of
gradual development of some form of accommodation with
Castro.
Faint hints of this possibility appear in Donovan explorations and elsewhere. There is always the
possibility that Castro or others currently high in
the regime might find advantage in a gradual shift away from
[Page 778]
their present level of
dependence on Moscow. In strictly economic terms, both the United States
and Cuba have much to gain from reestablishment of relations. A Titoist
Castro is not inconceivable, and a full
diplomatic revolution would not be the most extraordinary event in the
20th century. The Special Group may feel that this possibility also
should be explored.
In conclusion, it should be noted that the three possibilities sketched
above are not wholly exclusive of one another. In particular, the
process of gradual pressure outlined in b. could be developed in support
of both course a. and course c. Indeed, it is possible to begin on
course b. without deciding between a. and c., and conceivably the
process of gradual pressure could be so developed that Castro could be
made to confront a decisive choice between his overthrow and an
accommodation on terms acceptable to us.
