Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (11 page)

As mentioned already, Allende’s victory sparked intense debate in Havana. A month before Chileans had gone to the polls, Castro had finally acknowledged that the ballot box could lead to socialism.
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But there were still serious doubts within the Cuban leadership. Now that “the miracle” had taken place, various questions were still on the horizon: Would the Chilean congress confirm Allende’s victory, and would he be allowed to assume office? Would the UP be able to consolidate the “illusory power” of government if the real reins of power were still in the hands of the oligarchy, the bourgeoisie, and the military? How would the president-elect protect himself against counterrevolutionary forces and their international backers?
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While this debate ensued in the fortnight after Chile’s election, Allende’s daughter and his private secretary arrived in Havana. Beatriz Allende (or Tati) and Miria Contreras Bell (or La Paya), with whom Allende was romantically involved, were Allende’s most intimate confidants and, in the case of Beatriz, his most direct channel to the Cubans. Beatriz had spent considerable time in Cuba since her second visit to the island with her father in 1967 and had subsequently become romantically involved with the Cuban intelligence official Luis Fernández Oña, whom she married during her stay in September 1970. Moreover, she had become deeply attached to the Cuban revolution, to its emphasis on armed insurgency, and to the prospect of following Che Guevara’s footsteps. Despite her repeated requests, the Cubans had nevertheless refused her the intensive military training that she wanted because of who her father was. However, during her stays in Cuba between 1967 and 1970, she
had
learned to shoot and, more important, she had been given radio communications training. Not only was she able to assist in transmissions between Cuba and the Chilean branch of the ELN, but she also controlled the secret codes for
transmitting radio signals between Santiago and Havana before full diplomatic relations were established in November 1970.
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With these intimate ties already established, Beatriz and La Paya arrived in Cuba on 14 September 1970 to ask for assistance in guaranteeing Allende’s safety. Beatriz had little faith that the Chilean Right, together with the United States, would allow her father to assume the presidency, let alone lead a revolution by peaceful and democratic means, and on the night he had been named a presidential candidate, she had left him a note expressing her skepticism of his chances.
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Then, when Allende won, she and La Paya were among a group of close advisers who strongly believed he could be assassinated. Consequently, they wanted to provide the president-elect with a well-trained, armed personal escort.
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During his presidential campaign, Allende had relied on a small ad hoc group to protect him, which included young Socialist Party militants, members of the Chilean branch of the ELN, and close personal friends.
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But in a country of 10 million people, this was a relatively insignificant and ineffective escort, with just eight pistols, no means of transport, and only four safe houses. Because of these weaknesses, Allende is said to have had to rely on military contacts and information supplied by UP parties and the MIR for news on potential plots against him.
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Although Allende later told Régis Debray that there had been two attempts on his life, no concrete incidents appear to have sparked the fear that he was in danger. Instead, there was a general feeling that his security needed to be improved, given doubts about the loyalties of Chile’s armed police force, the Carabineros; fears about CIA plots; and rumors that the armed forces might launch a coup.
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In this context, Castro was willing to help. In the eleven years since coming to power, his security apparatus had grown to counter the persistent threat of assassination or attack by Cuban exiles and the CIA. The nature of Cuba’s policy toward Latin America in the 1960s also meant that those at the head of policy formulation toward the region were militarily trained, skilled in the art of covert operations, and experienced in practicing revolutionary internationalism.
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Indeed, after 1964, when all Latin American countries except Mexico had severed relations with the island, Cuba’s Foreign Ministry had closed its Latin American department, and Cuba’s Ministry of the Interior had taken full control of policy toward the region.
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Even so, when it came to responding to the Chileans, Castro insisted on doing so carefully. He therefore sent only three Cubans to Santiago
in the first instance to assess exactly how the Cubans could help.
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The three Cubans represented three different branches of Cuba’s intelligence and security apparatus, namely the Tropas Especiales, the Ministry of the Interior, and the Departamento General de Liberación Nacional (General National Liberation Department, or DGLN), also at Havana’s Ministry of the Interior. Led by Manuel Piñeiro and later to become the Department of the Americas, the DGLN’s mission differed from the broad intelligence work done by the Ministry of the Interior in that, instead of being involved only in information gathering and espionage destined to support Cuba, it was proactively concerned with supporting revolutionary movements and parties abroad. In the context of a more general review of Cuban foreign policy at the end of the 1960s, it had been established just before Allende’s election, replacing the Interior Department’s “Technical Vice Ministry,” which had previously been in charge of supporting revolutionary and anti-imperialist struggles in Latin America and the Third World.
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More important, it was the DGLN that ultimately coordinated Cuba’s policy toward Chile during Allende’s presidency. Below Fidel Castro, Manuel Piñeiro was personally in control of the DGLN, and beneath him was Ulises Estrada, a senior intelligence officer who was now put in charge of the DGLN’s new Chile desk.
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Of the three Cubans who were sent to Chile in September 1970, the most important was Beatriz’s new husband, Luis Fernández Oña, a member of the DGLN and long since involved in coordinating Cuba’s relations with Chile. Having departed almost immediately after Beatriz and La Paya left Cuba and taken a long circuitous route to Chile, he and his two companions arrived in Santiago clandestinely as part of a delegation to a Pan-American congress of veterinary scientists.
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Once in Chile, however, his parameters for action were minuscule. Although Oña had instructions to talk to Allende directly, finding time and a safe place to do so was difficult. For more than a month, the Cubans were frustratingly confined to a safe house in Santiago, venturing out only occasionally (mostly at night) and trying not to speak lest they revealed their Cuban accents. When Oña finally journeyed to meet Allende in a mutual friend’s home in late October, he escaped identification by armed policemen only because they failed to ask for his papers when they stopped the car he was traveling in.
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Then, after he had conducted a taped interview with Allende, it took weeks for the recording to reach Castro and Piñeiro, as it was considered safe to be delivered only by hand.
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The three Cubans’ capacity to bolster Allende’s defensive bodyguard was
therefore initially limited, despite the Cubans believing that the group—soon to be known publicly as the GAP, after the president described it as a Grupo de Amigos Personales (Group of Personal Friends)—urgently needed help. More than three decades later, Oña recalled that, when he arrived, the bodyguard “knew nothing” and had far fewer weapons than right-wing paramilitary groups. It was for this reason that he had brought ten new pistols for the GAP with him from Cuba. (They were smuggled through Chilean customs in a suitcase by a female veterinary delegate who feigned an injured leg and sat on it as it was wheeled through airport security.)
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Meanwhile, the GAP was also reinforced with new members. In the hope of benefiting from the MIR’s preparations for armed struggle and integrating it into Chile’s constitutional road to socialism, Allende had asked its leaders to join the GAP.
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As one former Mirista, Max Marambio, recalled, the MIR did not consider protecting a president who represented bourgeois Chilean institutionalism to be particularly “honorable.” Nevertheless, he was one of three members of the MIR who accepted Allende’s request. In fact, Marambio was appointed the GAP’s first leader on account of his previous military training in Cuba and, by his own recollection, his very good relationship with the Cuban leadership.
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Later, after November 1970, Cuba began supplying the GAP with more arms, while other members of Cuba’s Tropas Especiales—including members of Castro’s own bodyguard—began arriving in Chile to offer logistical training.
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For now, though, Havana’s involvement in Chile was circumscribed. Although the Cubans were able to deliver a suitcase of weapons and the promise of more meaningful assistance in the future, Castro was effectively restrained by sensitivity to “intervention” in Chilean affairs. He also wanted more information about Allende’s future plans and strategies for consolidating his revolutionary road to socialism before acting. In this initial and hastily organized phase of Cuban support, communication was also problematic and the three intelligence officials sent to Chile had inadequate cover stories to justify their prolonged presence in Santiago.

While the parameters of Cuba’s collaboration with Allende were being worked out, the fundamental principle governing Chilean-Cuban relations over the next three years was nevertheless established. As the democratically elected leader of Chile and a longtime Cuban ally, Allende would be in charge, and Cuba would respect his sovereign authority.
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Aside from this central relationship, Havana would also maintain separate relations with Chile’s left-wing parties: the Communist Party, the Socialist Party, the
MIR, and MAPU. Of course, historical ties and shared views meant that relations with the PS and the MIR were closer than those sustained with others (the PCCh had far closer relations with communist parties in the East, primarily in the Soviet Union and East Germany). The decision to simultaneously maintain good relationships with these different parties would also become complicated if their revolutionary paths diverged.

For the time being, the Cubans were both hopeful and uncertain about the UP’s chances. Although Havana judged Allende to be supported by the majority of Chile’s armed forces, the Cubans feared that he faced potential danger from right-wing paramilitaries and/or the CIA.
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While the Cubans suspected that the United States was already involved in undermining Allende’s victory, and although rumors of a possible coup to stop Allende hung loud and heavy over Chilean politics, Havana also lacked definitive intelligence on CIA activities, let alone an ability to counteract them. Certainly, Oña recalls that no one contemplated a scenario in which the Right—aided or not by the United States—would kill the commander in chief of Chile’s army in a botched attempt to provoke a coup.
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Although Nixon’s foreign policy team was notoriously divided, all U.S. officials had instantly agreed Allende’s victory was “bad news.”
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What they differed on was
how
bad it was and what to do about it. Policy makers quickly also found themselves torn between their instinctual desires to intervene and fears that, by doing so, U.S. prestige in Latin America and beyond could be damaged. Indeed, State Department officials voiced concerns that misguided intervention could be worse than doing nothing. The president and his national security adviser vehemently disagreed. In an essay on foreign policy formulation in 1969, Kissinger had already advocated acting first and thinking later when faced with crises in a revolutionary period.
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Moreover, he had
already
rejected a modus vivendi with Allende back in August. In his view, the idea that Allende might want accommodation—something that was never studied in great detail—was “so doubtful” it was “meaningless.”
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Nixon, too, believed he had to act quickly. As he later recalled, he perceived Allende’s victory as a test of U.S. power comparable to the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War, and tensions in the Middle East, albeit a more subtle one.
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It was this subtlety that made efforts to overturn Allende’s election so difficult. Persuading international and domestic audiences that a small,
far away, democratic Chile threatened U.S. national security would obviously be challenging. What is more, it was particularly awkward for the world’s self-proclaimed champion of democracy to challenge a democratically elected president, especially at a time when the Nixon administration was trying to extricate itself from Vietnam “with honor” and prove its commitment to replacing an era of Cold War confrontations with negotiation and dialogue. Nixon certainly did not want “a big story leaking out that we are trying to overthrow the Govt.” Yet, in his own words, he believed that he had to take risks to stop Chile “going to hell so fast.”
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He thus approved a variety of haphazard, desperate—and ultimately disastrous—covert efforts to stop Allende’s inauguration. As it turned out, however, the Chileans the United States relied on could not be secretly bought, cajoled, or effectively controlled. And it was only when this became obvious, and covert operations were failing, that the administration finally began articulating the precise threat that Allende posed and how to systematically counteract it in the long term.

Although the White House retrospectively believed an Allende victory could have been avoided, it had paid little attention to Chile’s elections before it was too late. True, the U.S. ambassador in Santiago had been warning that an Allende victory “would mean the emergence of a Castro-type government in Chile” for over six months before Chileans went to the polls. In addition Kissinger had ordered an interagency study on the ramifications of an Allende victory (National Security Study Memorandum 97, or NSSM 97), but less than a month before the election those who compiled it had concluded that “no vital interests were at stake” in Chile. While it did acknowledge the “considerable political and psychological costs” that would follow an Allende victory together with the “definite psychological advance for the Marxist idea” that it would bring, reports from Santiago predicted Allende would lose. Consequently, policy makers postponed discussion of what they would do if he won, and Kissinger decided to sit back and wait.
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