ON CUBA

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

There is one aspect of our difficulties with Cuba which has received less than its due attention. Recent reports have disclosed that planning for an armed assault on Cuba was set in motion among certain U.S. agencies quite some time ago. One report has mentioned last April as marking the inception of these plans, and one can be fairly sure that they had reached the discussion stage some time before that. These preparations were undertaken under the guise of repelling a communist threat. But if they were being discussed that far back one is entitled to ask whether they did not help to create the threat they were designed to avert, by forcing Castro into Soviet arms, in order to gain assistance in repelling an invasion which his own intelligence apparatus told him was already in preparation. He was in fact better informed than the mass of Americans. Could anything be more likely to force him to seek the Soviet embrace?

It is a matter of record that in the earlier days of his revolution, Cuba asked us for arms, and that we refused. She then asked England and France, and it was reported at the time that, under pressure from us, they refused also. The Russian alternative was then sought. Here I suggest was our original mistake. If you supply a neighbor with a limited amount of arms and equipment necessary for civil order and defense, you have a way of controlling him, for rifies need ammunition that fits, and equipment needs spare parts. The pattern of our previous policy as it begins to emerge rather suggests that elements in the previous administration had determined to isolate and if possible overthrow Castro some time before he finally isolated himself from us. If as reported our C.I.A. threw its main support to conservative elements among the refugees, this would surely reinforce these tendencies and make matters still worse. Offered a choice between Batista and Castro's proletarian brand of revolution, it is possible that a majority of Cubans would prefer, however reluctantly, to stick with Castro. Eric A. Havelock,   Professor of Greek and Latin.