the power of metaphor explaining us policy toward cuba

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p h i l i p b r e n n e r

BOOK REVIEW

The Power of Metaphor: Explaining U.S. Policy toward Cuba

Louis A. Pérez 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 Pérez 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 ofthe subject. It does not replace the wealth of studies that have illuminated avariety of explanations for U.S. policy or U.S.-Cuban relations. But his latestbook does provide the context for these other analyses, by exposing the coreassumptions on which U.S. policies towards Cuba have rested. Its value isimmediately evident if one reads it alongside Howard Jones’s recent study of theBay of Pigs invasion.

The central premise of Cuba in the American Imagination is first that themetaphors U.S. officials used to describe Cuba defined their reality regardingCuba. Second, while the depictions of Cuba changed over time, their messageswere roughly constant: the United States is superior to Cuba, has a natural rightto possess it, and is morally responsible for shaping Cuba’s affairs.

Political leaders do not use metaphors merely to make their speeches morelively. They are an efficient means of communicating a complex reality incommonly accepted terms that then provide the basis for acceptable action. AsGeorge Lakoff observes, they “limit what we notice, highlight what we do see,and provide part of the inferential structure that we reason with.”1 Whileofficials may not always use metaphors with intentionality, Pérez notes, in thecase of Cuba they “were not deployed randomly. . . . Metaphorical constructsprovided a normative grounding for a version of reality and validation ofconduct” (p. 36). The domination of Cuban affairs became the “reasonabledischarge 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 theGulf,” in Thirty Years of Linguistic Evolution, ed. Martin Pütz (Amsterdam, 1992), 481.

Diplomatic History, Vol. 34, No. 2 (April 2010). © 2010 The Society for Historians ofAmerican 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 Pérez argues provides “corroboration of the power of metaphor to repro-duce premise as proof ” (p. 22).

Metaphors alone do not explain U.S. policy. But they are an appropriatestarting point for considering political and economic factors, because nearly allof the metaphors, Pérez concludes, “functioned in the service of U.S. interests.. . . Americans came to their knowledge of Cuba principally by way of repre-sentations entirely of their own creation” (p. 22). Their Cuba, he remarks, “was,in fact, a figment of their own imagination and a projection of their needs”(p. 23).

Most of the metaphors themselves are well known. Pérez has culled examplesfrom many sources—official documents, public speeches, private correspon-dence, secret cables, magazine and newspaper stories, cartoons, films—demonstrating how widespread and embedded they have been in the Americannarrative about Cuba. (Indeed, reproductions of cartoons and posters insertedthroughout the book both reinforce its argument and add a measure of fun inreading it.) Perhaps the most famous and enduring metaphor is the earlynineteenth-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. WhileJohn Quincy Adams invoked “ripe fruit” as a device for urging patience in theconquest of Cuba, its evocative significance was of Cuba as a natural U.S.appendage. In this vein, but less well known, was Sen. William Seward’s por-trayal of Cuba as an island formed from U.S. soil that had washed down theMississippi River into the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean, much as a babyemerges from its mother’s loins. The characterization of Cuba as the child ofthe United States became increasingly popular after the 1898 routing of theSpanish.

But leading up to the U.S. intervention in Cuba’s independence war, thedominant image was of Cuba as a woman. The power of this metaphor, Pérezcontends, “lay in its capacity to summon moral indignation” (p. 81). Cuba wasa damsel in distress, whom the gallant United States was obliged to save fromthe Spanish. The immediate implication was that the United States was not onlystronger; seen in patriarchal terms, it was superior to Cuba. The collateralimplication 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 needof supervision once the United States occupied the island. Very quickly theprevailing image that emerged was of a helpless child.

Pérez notes that evidence for the depiction of Cuba as a child was bizarrelycircular. U.S. officials at the turn of the century asserted that Cuba’s “verydemand for self-government was proof of incapacity for self-government,”because evidently “Cubans did not even know enough to understand thatthey lacked preparation for self-government” (p. 103). They were consideredimmature, 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 protectand nurture Cuba” (p. 113), and to have a presence on the island in order toguide Cubans on their journey to maturity. In this way, early twentieth-centuryAmericans justified their domination of Cuba as a selfless fulfillment of parentalduty.

Embedded in the parent-child metaphor, George Lakoff explains, is theexpectation that the parent has the responsibility to teach the child right fromwrong. And so, when children are disobedient, they must be punished in orderto instill them with discipline.2 To spare the rod was to spoil the child. Pérezoffers ample evidence of this attitude, especially when the United States senttroops to Cuba to subdue the unruly, impulsive children, who, as he quotesWoodrow Wilson remarking, “require the discipline of being under masters.. . . They are children and we are men in these deep matters of government andjustice” (p. 120). Thus, a crucial reciprocal responsibility that emanated from theparent-child metaphor was discipline and obedience. Another was the adult’sobligation to act selflessly in the child’s interest and the offspring’s 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. Theyrefused to be either compliant or appreciative. In response, U.S. officials, edi-torial writers, and cartoonists soon began to depict the new Cuban government,and Fidel Castro, as a screaming, ranting, temperamental child—the kind ofnuisance President Theodore Roosevelt had castigated in 1906, when he calledthe country “that infernal little Cuban republic.” But even the image of awayward child seemed too benign by 1960. Castro was more the juveniledelinquent than the errant boy, a menace more than an irritant. Incapable ofbeing disciplined, and unwilling to acknowledge that Cuba owed gratitude tothe United States because it had liberated the island from Spain in 1898, Castrobecame the outcast, the pariah who led Cuba to betray its parents’ heritage andupbringing, and who had to be destroyed.

At that point President Dwight Eisenhower endorsed a proposal—whichultimately became the April 17, 1961, Bay of Pigs invasion—to overthrow thenew Cuban government. In The Bay of Pigs, Jones relies on the most currentresearch and makes use of the latest documents to provide a clear summary ofboth the operation—including its genesis and aftermath—and the problems that

2. George Lakoff, Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision (NewYork, 2006), 57–58. A 2006 study offers some empirical verification for Lakoff’s claim that asource of the ideological liberal-conservative dichotomy may rest on the meaning a persongives 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 ScienceReview 100, no. 2 (2006): 249–63. Michael Paul Rogin demonstrates how the idea of punishingNative Americans supposedly to foster their development into adults enabled U.S. leaders “toreconcile 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 Katznelsonet al. (New York, 1974), 12.

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led it to become the “perfect failure.”3 A popular explanation for its failure hadlong been that the tiny and battered Cuban air force was able to sink theinvaders’ 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 General’sReport, which was declassified due to the efforts of Peter Kornbluh and theNational Security Archive, concludes that the D-Day air strikes would havemade little difference as a result of a myriad of other problems.4 In fact, as Cubanhistorian Juan Carlos Rodríguez points out, one of those problems was that thepreinvasion air strikes on April 15 (D-2) warned Cuba that the invasion wasimminent, and so the Cuban military dispersed the surviving planes to makethem more secure and fortified all of the airfields, which had remained opera-tional despite the attacks.5 These preparations would have vitiated the impact ofa strike on the day of the invasion, and they undermine the claim that PresidentKennedy’s decision was “crucial” to the outcome.

While Jones acknowledges the judgment in the Inspector General’s Report,he gives credence to the assessment that absence of D-Day air strikes wasdeterminative: “the President never grasped . . . the interconnected importanceof the D-2, D-1, and D-Day strikes to the invasion” (p. 127). Still, Jones doesfocus appropriately on two truly significant reasons the invaders were defeated.First, the sine qua non of the operation was the assassination of the Cubanleadership and/or the manipulation of President Kennedy into launching a U.S.military invasion, neither of which was successful. Second, the plan was based ona flawed assumption that the invasion would “trigger an uprising” against therevolutionary government.

U.S. attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro have been acknowledgedofficially since the 1975 Church Committee hearings. But only in the mid-1990s did it become certain that murdering the Cuban leadership was anessential component of the Bay of Pigs attack. As Michael Warner wrote in anow declassified study, CIA Director Allen Dulles and Deputy DirectorRichard Bissell were unconcerned about the logistical shortcomings of theexiles’ attack because they believed “Castro would either be assassinatedor President Kennedy would send in the Marines to rescue the Brigade.”6

3. The moniker comes from Theodore Draper, Castro’s Revolution: Myths and Realities (NewYork, 1962), 59.

4. CIA Inspector General, “Inspector General’s Survey of the Cuban Operation, October1961,” Document No. CU00223, National Security Archive, Washington, DC, reprinted inPeter Kornbluh, ed., Bay of Pigs Declassified: The Secret CIA Report on the Invasion of Cuba (NewYork, 1998).

5. Juan Carlos Rodríguez, The Bay of Pigs and the CIA, trans. Mary Todd (Melbourne, 1999),133–34.

6. Michael Warner, “Lessons Unlearned: The CIA’s Internal Probe of the Bay of PigsAffair,” Studies in Intelligence, 40, no. 2 (1996), declassified in 1997, https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/docs/v42i5a08p.htm#ft0 (accessed January 27,2009).


Jones does well to highlight this link between the assassination attempts andthe invasion.

Jacob Esterline, the CIA’s operational director for the invasion, quicklyunderstood the implication of the assassination strategy when he first saw thedocuments about it at a 1996 conference. As tears welled in his eyes, he said, “I’lltell you what really bothers me about this. This stupid cockamamie idea maywell have compromised serious support and backing of the brigade operationthat was the main event, or should have been. . . . Maybe [Bissell] didn’t evencare much about whether my people made it or not.”7 Indeed, many of theAmericans devising and carrying out the plan had contempt for the exiles. Onereason the plan moved forward, Jones aptly notes, was the fear that if it werecalled off there would a “disposal problem,” that is, officials viewed the exiles asthings which they had to dispose of one way or another (p. 58). Even the CIA’s“Inspector General’s Report” critically observed that some project officers“considered the Cubans untrustworthy and difficult to work with. Membersof the Revolutionary Council have been described to the inspectors as ‘idiots’.. . . Some of the contract employees, such as ships’ officers, treated the Cubanslike dirt.”8

Jones suggests that a similar “lack of respect” for the adversary’s defensivecapability was a second major reason for the failure (p. 124). “A factor commonlyoverlooked,” he reports, “was the fierce determination of Castro and his follow-ers to resist the invasion . . . Bissell and others grossly underestimated the tenac-ity of those Cuban people remaining loyal to Castro” (p. 125). In writing this,Jones seems to imagine that Castro’s support was minimal, though intense.From his perspective, the popular insurrection did not materialize mainlybecause “Castro clapped thousands of [dissidents] in prison a week prior to theinvasion” (p. 126). He does not address the likelihood that ordinary people wholived in the Bay of Pigs vicinity, who were not necessarily Castro loyalists, mighthave fought against the invaders because they genuinely supported the revolu-tion and believed they had something to protect. Consider that the area hadbeen without a hospital until the new government built one in 1959, and farmersthere had felt isolated because there were no roads until 1960. Notably inJanuary 1961, “a contingent of volunteer teachers was assigned to work through-out the [Zapata] swamp,” and for the first time “thousands of children who livedon 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 hadbetrayed 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 InvasionReexamined (Boulder, CO, 1998), 85.

8. CIA Inspector General, “Inspector General’s Survey of the Cuban Operation,” 95–96.9. Rodríguez, The Bay of Pigs and the CIA, 118–21.


spawned and nurtured Cuba.10 It is a powerful metaphor because it reinforces alargely uncontested popular view in the United States that the Cuban revolutiondid not have widespread support. Thus, Jones sets the context for the invasionby painting a distorted picture of Cuba, focusing on Castro’s elimination ofmoderates from power and his “hysterically abusive” tirades against the UnitedStates (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 Americanstory 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 flawedassumption that it would spark a mass insurrection. But it was flawed not becauseof a misjudgment about Cuba’s military might or Castro’s ruthlessness. The flawwas a political misjudgment about what a large majority of Cubans wanted.They were rejecting the form of democracy the United States had supported inCuba from 1940 to 1952—characterized by tainted elections and by politicianswho did the bidding of the United States and U.S. corporations—and the brutaldictatorship the United States tolerated under Fulgencio Batista that gave freerein to organized crime. In contrast, the 1959 Cuban revolution was a nationalistuprising. It had serious problems, but these were Cuban problems that Cubanswere beginning to be proud they would solve themselves.

The ultimate intention of The Bay of Pigs is laudable. Jones relies on the caseto argue that the United States should neither use assassination to pursue itsinterests nor intervention to produce “forceful regime change” (p. 174). But thatconclusion needed to rest on a firmer base of analysis. He reasons that theultimate source of the Bay of Pigs debacle was the pathological animosity thatthe “Kennedy brothers” had for Castro, which “blinded them to the dangers ofthis ill-conceived action” (p. 129). Yet their obsession can hardly explain the U.S.hostility toward Cuba that continued largely unabated for the next five decades.Jones speculates that subsequent U.S. policy was a consequence of the Bay ofPigs invasion itself, which “shattered relations with Cuba” (p. 172). But Cuba inthe American Imagination provides a richer explanation, rooted in the continuingU.S. attitude about Cuba that has “served easily enough to dismiss Cubans’pretensions to agency.” As Pérez explains, “The idea of a people possessed of aninternal history and the thought of Cubans endowed with proper aspirations toindependence and sovereignty were prospects that the Americans rarely consid-ered plausible and never deemed tenable” (p. 38).

10. Though some in the CIA were aware that the Cuban revolution was more popular thanofficial U.S. rhetoric stated, two months before the invasion Col. J.C. King told a high-levelgroup of presidential advisers “that our best information indicates that the civilian populationand campesinos would probably be friendly to the invasion force, as they currently are to theguerrillas who have been operating in the hills. He added that intelligence also discloses thatthere is widespread dissatisfaction among field workers, who have been taken from their laborsto 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 theUnited States, 1961–1963 (Washington, DC, 1997), 10: 81–82.


Those skeptical about the value of the kind of cultural analysis Pérez presentsshould suspend their doubts briefly to ponder how pervasive the parent-childmetaphor remains in U.S. thinking about Cuba. Consider the two reports fromthe Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba that guided U.S. Cuba policy inthe last four years of the Bush administration.11 Both proposed draconian mea-sures 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. Cuba’s renowned successes in these fieldswere 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 Obama’s campaign commentsabout Cuba—that as president he would cease punishing the U.S. wardwhen Cuba demonstrated that it had matured enough to warrant lifting theembargo12—emanated from the same narrative. As in the past, U.S. policy-makers continue to act as if the United States really does not need tounderstand Cuba or consider Cubans as equals.

11. Colin L. Powell, Chair, “Report to the President,” Commission for Assistance to a FreeCuba, May 2004, http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/32334.pdf (accessed January26, 2009); Condoleezza Rice, Chair, “Report to the President,” Commission for Assistance toa Free Cuba, July 2006, http://www.cafc.gov/documents/organization/68166.pdf (accessedJanuary 26, 2009).

12. In a speech to the Cuban American National Foundation, then Sen. Barack Obamasaid, “I will maintain the embargo. It provides us with the leverage to present the regime witha clear choice: if you take significant steps toward democracy, beginning with the freeing ofall political prisoners, we will take steps to begin normalizing relations.” See “Remarks ofSenator 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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the power of metaphor explaining us policy toward cuba

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