That Month

April is the cruelest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

-T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land

John F. Kennedy could subscribe to the notion of April's cruelty--although those weren't exactly lilacs popping out about him. In April 1961, came his dismaying Bay of Pigs debacle. In April 1962, came his savage assault on the steel industry, which pasted on him an antibusiness label he has been trying ever since to peel off. And in April 1963, both steel (see jallowing story] and Cuba were back to plague him.

Cuba was most distressing: the Kennedy Administration and the Cuban exiles it had praised and supported were now fighting like fishwives. Their dispute came to a head last week with the resignation of former Havana Law Professor Jose Miro Cardona, 60, as head of the Cuban Revolutionary Council--a position for which he had been handpicked by the Administration. At issue: exile claims that the Administration had welshed on promises to help them return to their homeland and oust Castro.

The Johnstown Flood. The exiles had some cause for thinking that President Kennedy would back them all the way. As far back as Oct. 15, 1960, in a Johnstown, Pa., campaign speech, Kennedy had said: "Mr. Nixon hasn't mentioned Cuba very prominently in this campaign. He talks about standing firm in Berlin, standing firm in the Far East, standing up to Khrushchev, but he never mentioned standing firm in Cuba--and if you can't stand up to Castro, how can you be expected to stand up to Khrushchev? . . . While we cannot violate international law, we must recognize that these exiles and rebels represent the real voice of Cuba and should not be constantly handicapped by our immigration and Justice Department authorities."

Again, last December, when the Bay of Pigs prisoners were ransomed from Castro, Kennedy greeted them at Miami's Orange Bowl, and, with a fervor that set the exiles aflame, proclaimed: "I can assure you that this flag will be returned to this brigade in a free Havana."

The Last Straw. Among those Bay of Pigs prisoners was Miro Cardona's son Pepito. As for Miro himself, he was a staunch defender of U.S. policy toward Cuba. At the time of the Bay of Pigs, he publicly denied that the U.S. had played any part in the invasion, at the same time fought off bitter exile claims that Kennedy had let them down. Miro's defense of the U.S. cost him dearly among the exiles, many of whom came to consider him a self-seeking apologist for the Kennedy Administration.

The Administration's failure, after last October's Cuba crisis, to follow through on U.S. demands for on-site missile inspection and the removal of Russian troops, came as a staggering blow to Miro. The last straw came when the Administration, without advising Miro beforehand, announced an all-out crackdown on the exiles' hit-and-run raids against Cuba.

A few weeks ago, Miro flew to Washington, held an angry, four-hour meeting with Robert Kennedy and State Department Cuba Specialist Robert Hurwitch, another four-hour session with Hurwitch alone. Miro demanded that the U.S. provide $50 million for an anti-Castro military operation, get the hemisphere to join in such a drive, and give the exiles "the same kind of help that the Soviet Union gives to Castro." The result was a flat turndown: Miro was told that the U.S. remains determined to oust Castro (presumably by economic strangulation), but that the U.S. will not permit its policies to be controlled by exile "war parties." In acid Spanish, Hurwitch told Miro that the exiles must fall into line or "no Cuban exile will obtain access to U.S. Govern ment officials again."

Returning to Miami, Miro wrote out a highly emotional, 25-page statement of grievances. Instead of making it public, he sent it to the State Department and awaited the reaction--which was brutally swift in coming. State issued a statement accusing Miro of "gross distortions," threatened to cut off the $100,000-a-month subsidy it has been slipping the Revolutionary Council through the CIA.

"In the Vanguard." Miro had only one course open to him: he resigned from the Revolutionary Council, released his statement. Miro told of his "two bitter years" since the Bay of Pigs, claimed that shortly after the invasion "Kennedy planned with me the immediate future of Cuba," including "help for the clandestine forces in Cuba" and "a single Army corps" of Cuban exiles.

In another talk, on April 10, 1962, Miro said, Kennedy told him in "an emphatic, conclusive and decisive manner" that the solution to the Castro problem "was essentially military--of six divisions." Miro insists that this was a specific invasion pledge and that the exiles would be part of the operation. "I left the White House with the certainty that there was approaching the liberation of the fatherland with the Cuban presence in the vanguard of combat," wrote Miro grandly. But then came disillusion. "The struggle for Cuba is in the process of being liquidated by the Government," Miro concluded. "The U.S. of North America has been the victim of a master play by the Russians."

It would seem almost incredible that Kennedy had made any specific invasion promises to Miro, and at week's end the President told the American Society of Newspaper Editors that no one in the Administration ever promised Miro "or anyone else, that we were going to launch a military invasion with six divisions." Said an Administration aide: "Good God, we have all sorts of contingency plans, but we never could and never would spill the details to <<--Miro." A fellow exile leader, Dr. Manuel Antonio de Varona, said: "I never knew of a promise by President Kennedy for a second invasion of Cuba."

Most probably Miro's burning wish may have made him think he heard what he wanted to hear. Still, it was hard to avoid the conclusion that Miro had been treated rather shabbily and that there was only one real beneficiary of the unseemly squabble: the Castro government, which, for a change, accurately reported the news on Havana radio.

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