Air University Review, July-August 1982

Psychological Warfare and the Latin American Crisis

The primary objective of guerrilla war is to destroy one's enemy psychologically. Toward this end, a supplementary objective is enjoined: to yield space in order to gain time. Implicit in the embrace of time as an objective is the assumption that the enemy is impatient, that protracted conflict will erode his will power. Similarly, the guerrilla competes with his enemy for space; then, if defeated, quickly withdraws to fight again, leaving the enemy to ponder the usually doubtful utility of the space he has conquered. Thus is the cycle completed with the guerrilla constantly occupying, then yielding, space of little value to the enemy. In the process time passes and the enemy's will fades, even as the illusive guerrilla fades into the widerness.

The military components of guerrilla strategy center around three stages: strategic defense, stalemate, and the strategic offensive.¹ As of this writing, the guerrillas in El Salvador appear to be in the early phases of the final stage while those in Guatemala are approaching the second stage of stalemate. Earlier phases are apparent in Honduras, Costa Rica, Colombia, and Peru. In Nicaragua, former guerrillas are consolidating their victory gained over the Anastasio Somoza regime in July 1979.

To one degree or another, a common denominator in all these guerrilla scenarios is Cuban involvement. Nor is this a novel situation. Since the early phases of the Vietnam War, Fidel Castro has played a dominant role as United States adversary. He formally allied his country to North Vietnam in the middle sixties and played a forceful role in bringing the United States to its first defeat. The role which Castro played so well was psychological. He capitalized on and helped galvanize domestic dissent in the United States against the war through such measures as media propaganda and providing training and indoctrination for radical forces like the Weathermen. Following Castro’s advice, various cadres of revolutionaries taunted the U.S. government with public statements of their intent to create a fortress America, unmasking what they asserted to be the latent fascism of the United States political establishment.² Evidence that some segments of the U.S. government took the bait dangled by the verbal and physical actions of the radical forces is seen in former President Richard Nixon’s belief, expressed during the David Frost interviews, that he was engaged in a war on the home front. Nixon’s forceful response to domestic terrorism through wiretapping and other measures augmented his loss of credibility— and his presidency.

It is the purpose of this article to explore various facets of United States vulnerability in the face of the psychological warfare aspects of Castroism. Suggestions will follow as to how the United States may better foster a counter-psychological warfare strategy of its own. Basically, the model for this proposed strategy lies in former President John Kennedy’s "battle for the hearts and minds" approach, a model which Castro himself has followed to a large extent. A major innovation of this study is the call for a primary focus on United States and Latin American intellectuals as conveyors of a psychological strategy. Inherent in the thrust of this proposal is the belief that the legitimacy of Castro in Latin America is derived to a large extent from his perceptual affinity with basic currents of intellectual thought in Latin America.

The inattentiveness of the United States to the psychological dimensions of strategy is in part attributable to the parochialism of much of the intellectual community in the United States, which is reflected to a large extent in network coverage of crisis areas via television from Vietnam to Zimbabwe, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. The roots of this parochialism lie in the prism of empiricism through which events in these places are viewed. By definition, a belief that the origin or knowledge lies in observable phenomena outside of man, empiricism forms the underpinning for the dominant intellectual frame of reference in the United States, that of objectivism. Objectivity places primary significance on observed phenomena along with a preoccupation with pragmatism or obeisance to the practical. Practically, in this sense, a mind-set is derived from the basic assumption of empiricial thought that controlled, objective observation of phenomena will yield the rational laws of nature.

Natural law assumes rationality and morality as essential features of man. It is in order to encourage the flowering of man’s rational and moral potential that the peculiar institutions of bourgeois democracy have been devised. One component of those institutions, civil rights, is a linear descendent of the natural law concept of natural rights. In the current vernacular, natural rights is referred to as human rights.

The intellectual roots of human rights politics, then, lie in the moralistic-rationalistic assumptions of natural law theory. It is from this perspective that the moral outrage which much of the media-intellectual complex foists upon authoritarian governments such as those in much of Latin America derives. Inherent in this moral outrage is the parochialism that demands conformity to its own standards. When members of the media-intellectual complex hurl human rights barbs at Latin Americans, however, they enter an intellectual matrix which historically has proved alien—even hostile—to the very nature of these barbs. Efforts to export United States objectivism to Latin America have consistently met repulsion due to the alien mixture of objectivism with Latin American subjectivism. History records that even Simon Bolívar, the great liberator of northern South America from Spain, had to learn this lesson the hard way. As he lay dying, Bolívar is reputed to have lamented that he had plowed the sea like those other frustrated idealists, Jesus Christ and Don Quixote.

Bolívar had attempted to prepare the people he had freed from Spain in the early nineteenth century for democracy as he envisioned it to exist in the United States. The general took as a basic premise that democracy depended on an enlightened citizenry, a situation that he felt did not generally prevail in the Latin America of his time. Consequently, as an interim measure, he advocated political systems which limited participation to a minority of the public. For example, he suggested a lifetime presidency and official censors charged with the duty of inculcating in society values and rationality consonant with democracy.³

Bolívar carved for himself an impossible task. Centuries of Spanish oppression followed by more than a decade of revolution had left most Latin Americans psychologically disoriented, rootless, and susceptible to political demigods, proponents of quick and easy solutions. The political vacuum was filled by the caudillos, strong men hungry for power, who filled the public craving for order without waiting for Bolívar’s laborious state-of-mind approach to reach fruition, creating the necessary mental base for democracy. Indeed, in many cases influential citizens whose views approximated Bolívar’s but whose patience and will were inferior to his invited the caudillos to impose order through force.

Bolívar, himself, eventually gave up the battle, dying a frustrated man. Nor was Bolívar the only leader of consummate will who gave up the task. José de San Martín, the grand leader of liberation forces in southern South America, believed the situation called for a constitutional monarchy while awaiting the inculcation of democratic values and knowledge. San Martín soon retired to Europe, as frustrated as Bolívar.⁴

Compounding his frustration had been Bolívar’s perception of the United States as "that land of freedom and home of civic virtue.’’⁵ On another occasion he had written that "as long as our countrymen do not acquire the abilities and political virtues that distinguish our brothers of the north, wholly popular systems, far from working to our advantage, will, I greatly fear, bring about our downfall."⁶

Assessing the problems of Latin America from the perspective of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, too, shared the forebodings of Bolívar and San Martin:

I wish I could give better hopes of our southern brethren. Their achievement of their independence from Spain is no longer a question, but it is a very serious one. What will become of them? Ignorance and bigotry, like other insanities, are incapable of self-government. They will fall under military despotisms, and become the murderous tools of the ambitions of their respective Bonapartes.⁷

It was this very consonance of views between people such as Jefferson on the one hand and Bolívar and San Martín on the other which festered into the sore that would burst around the turn of the twentieth century with the rise to prominence of Rubén Darío, a poet born in Nicaragua in 1867. When Darío met death in 1916, he left behind a legacy to which scholars of Latin American literature have referred as modernism: it is, essentially, an emphasis on themes native to Latin America and its Indian and Hispanic heritage over those of European and United States origin. One of Darío’s works that provided a catharsis for Latin American intellectuals was his "Letanía de nuestro Señor Don Quixote." In this classic poem, the master Darío magically united Latin America with its Hispanic roots. Immersed in the trappings of Miguel de Cervantes’s immortal character, Don Quixote, Latin Americans could take an apocalyptic leap out of the haunting shadow of what was for them a stale preoccupation with the stoicism inherent in objective analysis. With such references to Don Quixote as "one to whom classic glories were scarcely from law and reason," and with homage to the same Quixote who, "crowned with the golden helmet of illusion no one has been able to conquer," Darío cast reason in the classic Western mold to the backwaters of intellectual fashion in Latin America while catalyzing a decided tilt toward subjective or intuitive analysis.⁸ In the process, he augmented trends already apparent throughout Latin America which would become evident in the works of such scholars as José Vasconcelos and Octavio Paz of Mexico, Frantz Fanon from Martinique, and José Martí of Cuba.⁹

Marti, a contemporary of Ruben Darío, stated in his classic essay, "Nuestra América," that most Latin Americans, relegated to centuries of ignorance under Spain, were unrealistically expected by various intellectuals in the aftermath of revolt against the mother country to suddenly take on the rationality characteristic of Europe and the United States in pursuance of democracy. This, Martí held to be absurd. He prophesied that Latin America’s poor downtrodden masses, possessors of subconscious truth untainted by objective reason, would one day rise in revolt, ushering in an era characterized by sociopolitical patterns consonant with the true heart of Latin America.¹⁰

Known as the father of the Cuban Revolution, José Martí left a philosophical legacy that is reflected in elements of Castroism. Before analyzing those elements, it should be established that the subjectivism of the Castroists not only exhibits similarities to the views of Martí and others already mentioned but that it also has roots in Latin America’s indigenous Marxist tradition. From his writings in the l920s, the late José Carlos Mariátegui of Peru, the most notable of Latin America’s Marxists before Castro, bequeathed to Castroism the insight that "Neither reason nor science can satisfy completely the need for the infinite that exists in man. . . only myth has the rare power of filling the depths of his being. . . an irrational mythos of some sort—is an undeniable concomitant of the human condition.¹¹ In Castroism, irrationality is reflected in the glorification of subjectivity in its most pronounced form, armed struggle, along with a concomitant revulsion of the objectivity inherent in political strategies placing a high value on reasoned compromise.

Fidel Castro collaborated with the French intellectual, Régis Debray, in the latter’s book Revolution in the Revolution? published in 1967. Debray’s basic premise was the myth that the Latin American oligarchies, whether democratic or dictatorial, were evil while Castro and his armed revolutionaries were good. He then proceeded to attack those who challenged his premise. His special targets were the honest revisionists who, attempting to compromise with their situation, claimed that armed struggle was unsuited to their countries. Debray attempted to woo revolutionaries away from the revisionists’ approach and toward armed struggle.

Debray’s general approach was to attack two fundamental, interrelated principles of the revisionist position. One of these was the Clausewitzian concept that war was only one of several tactics of any given government or political group among a basically political continuum of actions. Debray was concerned that practical application of this concept would result in placing too much control in an urban-based political vanguard at the expense of armed cadres in the countryside. He believed the urban-based political vanguard to be a security risk. He argued that urban groups were vulnerable to capture during liaison attempts in the city. Debray found that the urban environment distorted the political vanguard’s perception of information — information considered germane might be totally irrelevant in the rural environment. Additionally, dependency on directions from the city induced a lack of self-sufficiency in the guerrilla; he developed a passive character, an inferiority complex.

The city vanguard’s tendency to engage a popular front strategy which called for constant political maneuvering with allied, but alien, partners constituted the second principle of the revisionists which Debray attacked. He argued that the popular front necessitated compromise tactics that created a tendency for the vanguard to forget the urgency of the guerrilla situation and become soft. Debray called this phenomenon "urban embourgeoisment." Those who sought to gain their goals through reasonable negotiations, then, were in Debray’s view inferior to the guerrilla who gave vent to his passion for violence with little pause for objective analysis.

Debray then described the uniqueness of the Latin American situation within the context of the broad thrust of communist theory. He believed a political vanguard, as advocated by Lenin, Mao, and Ho Chi Minh, to be inappropriate in Latin America because, unlike the U.S.S.R., China, and North Vietnam, Latin America’s existing Communist parties were not linked from their inception with the armed struggle; purely objective theoretical training was no substitute for the purifying catharsis of armed conflict on the scene.¹²

Debray developed his argument by moving through several loop-holes in the Communist theory that the Soviets had created. One of these appeared in their debates with the Chinese when the Soviets disagreed with Mao’s contention that the Communist Party should gain control of the first stage of a revolution. This position enabled the U.S.S.R. to label Castro a "revolutionary democrat." Debray agreed with the U.S.S.R. that the party should not be immediately involved. It was his contention that armed cadres should preempt the party.

Debray then took advantage of a second Soviet loophole. Moscow had placed the mantle of legitimacy on Castro’s party in 1965 when he changed its name from the United Party of the Socialist Revolution to the Cuban Communist Party. That party, however, came under the domination of Castro’s 26th of July Movement; therefore, if Castro and his original revolutionary followers were a legitimate communist vanguard, he could, in turn, place the mantle of legitimacy on the armed cadres in other countries which copied his style.¹³

In light of the Debray-Castro interpretation of these two loopholes, it is proper for Castro-supported guerrilla forces seeking their goals through armed struggle to be labeled communists, whatever they might call themselves. Furthermore, it follows that communists, in the Castroist connotation of the term, are those whose prestige and power relate directly to an uncompromising embrace of subjectivism wedded to a disdain of objective reason. This attachment to subjectivism, in turn, puts Castroist communism in the philosophical mainstream of Latin America’s intellectuals, as summarized earlier. Among much of Latin

America’s idealistic youth, acclaim for Castroism continues to be ignited through its identity with the legacy of its great practitioner Ernesto "Che" Guevara’s Quixote-like struggle against both the capitalist and the pragmatism — or penchant for compromise — of the communist establishment.

Operating from a guerrilla foco (base of operations) in Bolivia which he established in 1966, the legendary Che, who had once been outranked only by Castro in the Cuban revolutionary movement, attempted to create "two, three, many Vietnams" in Latin America. Even as Debray’s book reached the final stages of publication in late December 1966, Guevara engaged the Bolivian Communist Party leader, Mario Monje, in a dramatic debate that indicated a similarity of views between Che and Debray while marking a decline in the traditional Communist Party’s hegemony over the left.

Che belittled Monje’s objective of fighting only for limited national aims and called for Latin American revolution on a continental scale. Whereas Monje believed Latin American countries exhibited various degrees of revolutionary potential, Guevara proclaimed that broadly similar objective conditions obtained in all the hemisphere and that Castro’s revolution in Cuba provided the true model for all would-be revolutionaries on how to exploit those objective conditions; he declared that military cadres were more capable of creating subjective conditions for revolution than the traditional Communist vanguard that Monje exemplified.¹⁴

Che’s rebuttal, the "Grito de Murillo," only formalized the atmosphere of derision that permeated relations between the followers of Che and those of Monje. As a result, desertions from Guevara weakened his forces. Acting on information from these deserters, U.S. Green Berets began training Bolivians in appropriate counterinsurgency techniques in April 1967. These forces trapped and mortally wounded Che the following October.

Far from fading into oblivion, Guevara’s death made him a martyr to the cause of armed struggle. In 1969, the Brazilian, Carlos Marighela, published Manual of the Urban Guerrilla, an immediate best seller among those concerned with violent revolution. Marighela’s basic premises reflected Guevara’s views. He argued for revolution on a continental scale, labeled U.S. imperialism and the U.S.-dominated Latin American oligarchies the primary and secondary enemy, respectively, and argued that the main struggle should appear in the rural areas. It was on the last point that a tactical modification of Guevara’s views ensued: adapting his strategy to the vastness of Brazilian territory and the consequent diminished likelihood of outside assistance, Margihela called for preliminary guerrilla forays in the cities as a practical measure to gain monetary resources and experience. Having proved themselves under fire in the urban sphere, selected guerrilla vanguards could then move to the country to engage the primary battle.¹⁵

Marighela’s urban emphasis, then, coupled with Che’s defeat in the countryside, set the stage for Castroism’s continental and world revolution against U.S. imperialism from the environment of the city. Simultaneously, the Tupamaro guerrillas of Uruguay were harvesting the Guevara legacy, as summarized by Professor Donald Hodges:

Although the original application of Che’s Bolivarian strategy was to Bolivia and Brazil, the Tupamaros’ Roundtable of May 1970 effectively transformed Uruguay into a third radiating center of a Latin American Vietnam; the Roundtable led directly to an escalation of guerrilla activity in both Argentina and Uruguay; to the smuggling of arms into neighboring Paraguay . . . to the financing by the Tupamaros of both the Chilean MIR and the Bolivian ELN (the remnants of Che’s foco) for the purpose of escalating armed actions in those countries. A general commitment to Che’s Vietnam strategy is likewise evident in the case of several other guerrilla movements that did not participate in the Round-table. ¹⁶

The heirs of Che unleashed terror in Argentina through the loose coalition of two guerrilla organizations, the Montoneros and the People’s Revolutionary Army, ERP. The periodical, Latin America, claimed in its November 28, 1975, issue that the "ERP remains an essentially military operation conceived in the last analysis in terms set out by Régis Debray in Revolution in the Revolution? . . . all their urban operations were designed as preparations for establishing a rural base."

By December of 1981 the U.S. Department of State could report that,

Unlike Che Guevara’s attempts during the 1960’s, Cuban subversion today is backed by an extensive secret intelligence and training apparatus, modern military forces, and a large and sophisticated propaganda network . . . . a major difference from the 1960’s is that, instead of throwing up obstacles, the Soviet Union generally has backed Cuban efforts.¹⁷

Solid Soviet support surfaced in the late seventies when, after intervening and at least qualified successes of Cuban forces in Angola and Ethiopia, Cuban-supported and -trained guerrillas—the Sandinistas—obtained power through armed struggle in Nicaragua. On the eve of that victory, Thomas Borge, the only surviving member of the original leadership of the Sandinista movement of the early sixties inspired by Castro’s then recent revolutionary victory in Cuba, made a prediction: He asserted that a Sandinista victory would herald the "revolutionary transformation of Central America . . . and upset the correlation of forces in Latin America."⁸ When in the immediate aftermath of the Sandinista victory, Régis Debray met the press in Nicaragua with Mario Eduardo Firmenich, a leader of the Montoneros, reporters on the scene recorded the parting statement of the revolutionaries to one another: "See you in Guatemala and El Salvador."¹⁹*

* It should be noted that evidence is emerging that the guerrillas in Guatemala " have abandoned the delusions of the Guevarist foco theory and have concentrated on building firmer political bases among the populace." See Richard Feinberg, "Central America: No Easy Answers," Foreign Affairs, Summer 1981, pp. 1121-46.

As it did during the Nicaraguan Revolution, Cuban radio propaganda continues to lend encouragement to Central American revolutionaries through a heavy infusion of poetry and song in praise of the noble guerrilla. Similarly, the Cuban media continue to glorify the poet as harbinger of subjective truth through frequent reminders of José Martí’s title, father of the Cuban Revolution. Through his preference for armed revolutionaries over objective vanguard forces, Castro has projected an image reminiscent of Darío’s version of Don Quixote, thereby identifying with the Hispanic ideal of freedom.

Another side of Castro’s strategy relates to his portrayal of the United States and U.S. values as, in effect, contrary to those of the noble Quixote. Many U.S. government officials and intellectuals play the role in which Castro has cast them. Particularly ironic is the fact that many intellectuals who inveigh the loudest in favor of reasoned, negotiated solutions to conflicts such as in El Salvador are Castro apologists; the irony lies in the rational nature of their appeal to guerrilla leaders whose very legitimacy derives from their disdain of bourgeois objectivity. It is more than coincidental that those least interested in elections in El Salvador—unless they could have been guaranteed of victory—have been the Castro-oriented guerrillas.

If one accepts the thesis of this study that what success Castro has enjoyed in Latin America is due, in large measure, to his attention to the literary and philosophical state of mind of his audience, it follows that United States policymakers should consider enjoining battle in those same literary and philosophical realms. Such a policy could entail a critique showing that a Castro-type system in practice does not really live up to the ideals of Quixote. The freedom with which Castro attempts to identify is in fact an illusion. Instead of freeing the poet in man to soar like Quixote, far from the constraints of the State, Castroism enslaves one’s spirit to the State. Empirical confirmation of this is seen in the revulsion of Castro’s Cuba, which led Che Guevara to seek subjective fulfillment in the jungles of Bolivia in true Quixote fashion. The figurative swords of Che, though aimed directly against the windmills of the communist establishment in Bolivia, were pointed obliquely at the stultification of imagination seeping into Castro’s entourage.

Instead of epitomizing the liberal ideal of free thought, Castroism advances conservative reactionism: it approximates Spanish Colonialism complete with the Spanish Inquisition, along with more than a sprinkling of the Nazi brand of fascism. Nazism and Spanish Colonialism are united in the abhorrence of critical thought among Castro and his guerrilla cohorts, which leads them ceremoniously to execute deviants from the principle of duty overall. As in the inquisition, many of these executions occur after the victim has repented of his sins. The preoccupation with death, heroism, and martyrdom is symptomatic of a traditional Latin American fatalism similar in many respects, to elements of Nazism. The guerrilla society, whether in the stage of insurgency or in control of the government, is also militarized, divided into various brigades. The cult of personality in the caudillo-like adoration from the masses which Castro demands is strongly reminiscent of Hitler.²⁰

Freedom under such circumstances flows not from soaring like Quixote above the rabble but by identifying with and conforming to the vulgarities of the mob. In a Castroist system—as in Nazi Germany—the highest form of treason lies in retrieving and communicating messages from one’s inner, and real, self which do not conform to truth as interpreted by the State. The supreme irony of Castro’s Cuba, from which emanates so much "antifascist" propaganda, is that Castro himself is one of the foremost proponents of the active ideology in today’s world that most closely resembles the radical—or Nazi brand—of fascism!

Inculcation of these ideological components of a psychological warfare strategy requires several practical changes in U. S. policy. One of these would involve inviting teachers, writers, poets, and philosophers, both from the United States and abroad, to U.S. defense consortiums and educating them to the relationship of such fields as poetry and philosophy to national security. "In Spanish America the intellectual component—the influence generated by teachers, philosophers, and men of letters—weighs much more heavily than it does in the United States."²¹ The point may be demonstrated in several ways: the concept in Latin America, alien to the U.S. mind, of national universities; the prevalence of part-time university teachers, which blurs the distinction between academia and the general public; the greater impact of students on Latin American society and politics; and the considerable number of thinkers and literary men who have gained high office in these nations.²²

High priority should also be given to educating United States and Latin American journalists of the press, television, and radio to their inadvertent but critical role in their respective country’s defense establishments. From a psychological warfare perspective, their role is comparable to both the general in the strategy planning room and the soldier on the front lines of battle for Latin America’s mind. For example, the tendency of the U.S. media to lay the primary blame automatically on the United States for lack of successful negotiations in places like El Salvador puts the U.S. government on the defensive to the advantage of guerrillas who, as we have seen, actually have little interest in negotiations. Also, current efforts to fashion a "Radio Free Cuba" and emphasize more anti-Castro propaganda in the Voice of America broadcasts should be encouraged. In addition, Cuba’s blatant violation of the air waves of neighboring countries should be given maximum publicity.²³

Another overdue change which would enhance U.S. capability for psychological warfare would be a reversal of the trend away from training foreign military personnel in the United States. Those numbers declined by two-thirds over the last decade while foreign military personnel trained in the U.S.S.R. increased tenfold.²⁴ Repercussions of this trend have been serious; it partially accounted for U.S. timidity in the face of the Sandinista drive for power in Nicaragua in 1979. Enrollment in the United States Army’s School of the Americas in Panama had dropped from an average of 1700 per year for 1974-76 to 901 for 1977. Only a vigorous recruitment drive kept the figure above 700 in 1978, when no students registered from Guatemala, El Salvador, Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Haiti, or Uruguay.²⁵

United States direct influence on the Latin American military has declined dramatically since it successfully countered Castro’s Latin American forays in the early sixties through a military civic action policy, combining military force with a diplomatic and economic offensive aimed at influencing the Latin American’s state of mind. Even before the death of Che Guevara in 1967, the United States had begun to phase out the policy. In the seventies and early eighties, Castro opted for essentially this same policy with which the United States had earlier weakened his appeal. He has been rushing teachers, doctors, engineers—and even priests—to susceptible clients such as Guyana, Grenada, and Nicaragua, along with proferring them assurances of military security.

In order to reemphasize psychological warfare in Latin America the United States must initiate a positive tone, continuing to cultivate the military hierarchies in Latin American countries as the Reagan administration currently appears to be doing. The immediate focus in Central America should be on salvaging the remnants of the Central American Defense Council, CONDECA, weakened by the Nicaraguan Revolution. There is cause for optimism since, due to the Sandinista victory in Nicaragua and the chaos in El Salvador, Central American regimes are now in a receptive mood to cooperate to head off a Castro-supported war of national liberation against them. For example, on 19 January 1982, Honduras, Costa Rica, and El Salvador birthed the Central American Democratic Community "to defend their values and seek the support of other democratic states." The "other democratic states" of Venezuela, Colombia, and the United States responded on 27 January, agreeing to meet regularly with the three Central American allies.²⁶

Another positive sign for the Reagan administration is the "Declaration of San José" of February 1982. Forty-five delegates representing twenty-two nations of the Americas convened in the Costa Rican capital to fashion an official statement reflecting affinity with the views of the United States President. For example, the declaration maintained in part that "it is false to attribute present political agitation solely to internal economic causes; subversion and terrorism are of foreign origin, supported by the communist regimes of Soviet Russia and Cuba." Furthermore, the declaration stated that "international pressure groups and communications media, ‘acting in good or bad faith,’ have twisted facts and given a distorted picture of Central American reality.²⁷

The United States thus has many positive factors from which to mold an effective psychological offensive in Latin America. What is needed is a spark, a catalyst. One means to ignite that spark is to emphasize the role of the Latin American business and military community in combining economic development and propaganda with military security, in conjunction with visits to U.S. defense consortiums of journalists, poets, philosphers and the like from the United States and Latin America, The United States can again compete successfully with Cuba for Latin America’s state of mind and, if handled properly, it can do so without raising the phobia of "no more Vietnams."

Notes

1. John Pustay, Counterinsurgency Warfare (New York: The Free Press, 1965), pp. 25ff; E. L. Katzenbach, "The Time, Space, and Will," in T. N. Greene, The Guerrilla and How to Fight Him (New York: Praeger, 1962), pp. 11-21.

2. See for example, Georgie Anne Geyer and Keyes Beech, "Cuba, School fo US Radicals," nos. 5, 6, 7, Chicago Daily News-Sun Times, quoted in the Houston Chronicle, October 16, 18, 20, 1970; and Cuba’s Renewed Support for Violence in the Hemisphere, a research paper presented to the Sub-Committee on Western Hemisphere Affairs, Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Washington, D.C., December 14, 1981, p. 6.

3. See Bolívar’s letter, "Message to the Congress of Bolívar," May 25, 1826, in Harold Bierch, Jr., editor; Vicente Lecuna, compiler, Selected Writings of Bolívar (New York: The Colonial Press, 1951), vol. II, pp. 596-606.

4. Victor Andres Belaunde, Bolívar and the Political Thought of the Spanish American Revolution (New York: Octagon Books, 1967), pp. 188-94.

5. Bolívar, "Essay on Public Education," (1825 or 1826), Selected Writings of Bolívar, vol. II, pp. 555-60.

6. From Bolívar’s "Jamaica Letter," September 6, 1815, in ibid., vol. I, pp. 103-22.

7. Jefferson’s Correspondense, vol. IV, p. 304.

8. For a discussion of modernism followed by a sampling of Darío’s poetry, including the poem quoted, see Margarita and Ernesto Da Cal, editors, Literatura Del Siglo XX (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1955), pp. 289-301.

9. See, for example, Stephen Homick, "Soledad y Communion: Octavio Paz y el desarrollo de la idea Mexicana de la historia," Cuadernos Americanos (Mexico, D. F.), January-February 1980, pp. 99-114 and Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963).

10. José Martí, "Nuestra América," Cuadernos Americanos, November-December 1979, pp. 67-74.

11. Martin Stabb, In Quest of Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967), pp. 114-15.

12. Régis Debray, Revolution in the Revolution? translated by Bobby Ortiz (New York: Grove Press, 1967) and Bruce Jackson, Castro, The Kremlin and Communism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1969). See Robin N. Montgomery, Cuban Shadow over the Southern Cones (Austin: Tyler Publishing Co., 1977), pp.75-76.

13. Montgomery, pp. 76-77.

14. Richard Gott, Guerrilla Movements in Latin America (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1971), p. 433.

15. Donald Hodges, The Latin American Revolution: Politics and Strategy from Apro-Marxism to Guevarism (New York: William Morrow, 1974), pp. 187-93.

16. Ibid., p. 215.

17. Cuba’s Renewed Support for Violence in the Hemisphere, pp. 2,8.

18. Times of the Americas, 4 October 1978, p. 4.

19. James N. Goodsell, "Nicaragua: War for Export?" Christian Science Monitor, July 25, 1979, p. 1; Alan Riding, "A Reporter’s Notebook: Managua Relaxes," New York Times, July 23, 1979, p. A3.

20. My views on Castro as a reactionary figure are similar to those found in H. C. F. Mansilla, "Violencia e identidad. Un estudio critico-ideologco sobre el movimiento guerrillero latino-americano," Cuadernos Americanos, March-April 1980, pp. 14-40.

21. Stabb, p. 3.

22. Ibid., pp. 3-4

23. "Local Radiomen Plan Defense of Airwaves," The Tico Times (Costa Rica), February 26, 1982, p. 8.

24. Anthony Cordesman, "US and Soviet Competition in Arms Exports and Military Assistance," Armed Forces Journal, August 1981, pp. 65-68, 70-72.

25. Alan Riding, "Latin America Turning Away from US Military Guidance," New York Times, July 1, 1978, p. A2.

26. "Democracy and Security in the Caribbean Basin," statement by Thomas O. Enders, Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, before the Sub-Committee on Western Hemisphere Affairs, Senate Foreign Relations Committee, February 1, 1982.

27. "Businessmen Call for Continental Aid for Region," The Tico Times, February 26, 1982, p. 8.

Robin Navarro Montgomery (M.A., Sam Houston State University; M.A., Ph.D., University of Oklahoma) is associate professor of political science and Director of the Center for Regional Studies at Southwestern Oklahoma State University, Weatherford. He served as an assistant professor in Troy State University’s European graduate-degree program in International Relations from 1974 to 1976. Dr. Montgomery is author of Cuban Shadow over the Southern Cones, and he has published articles in Parameters and National Defense.

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.

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