Like a man who has dropped a piano from a great height, the U.S. last week began gingerly assessing the wreckage of President Kennedy's hopeful new hemisphere Alliance for Progress. The Cuban crash still echoed throughout Latin America, and much woodwork was splintered. But after examination, it seemed as if the instrument might still be made to play.
There were severe and undeniable dam ages. The U.S., for all its sincere talk and offers of bountiful aid, had put on the black mantle of the interventionist and had lost itself many amigos in sensitive Latin America. It shocked others by appearing weak in the face of a small Caribbean dictator and appalled everyone by being both indiscreet and ineffective. "If that is the kind of assistance we may expect in our fight with Communism," said a Peruvian journalist, "then it's high time we stopped being anti-Communist."
Some of the best U.S. friends in Latin America were made nervous and cautious. One indication of hidden danger was in Venezuela, where President RÓmulo Betancourt, champion of the anti-Castro left, felt forced to cancel a session of the U.N. Economic Commission for Latin America, scheduled to meet at the volatile University of Caracas. And to many of the credulous among the Latin American peasantry, as among Cubans themselves, the bearded Fidel Castro now seemed more of a hero, able to stand up to the Yanquis.
"God Bless America." Still, in the second look, Castro's surprising military strength and brutal police-state repression had alerted Latin America as no Yankee warnings could. In Argentina and Uruguay, anti-Castro rallies were almost as numerous as the more publicized mobs yowling "Cuba Si—Yanki No." In the depressed northern Brazil town of Caruarú, hundreds of students, singing "God bless America, land that I love" in bad but valiant English, broke up a Communist rally with rotten eggs, mushy fruit, firecrackers and fists. In their public and private statements, government officials showed chill concern over the four-barreled (4,000 rounds per minute) Czech anti-aircraft guns, Soviet T-34 tanks, and heavy artillery so much in evidence at the Bay of Pigs.
Castro's initial threat to execute his 1,000 rebel prisoners brought such a wave of revulsion that the Presidents of six Latin American nations sent urgent pleas to Havana asking clemency. When Castro later withdrew the threat (he would merely keep the men as hostages so as "not to sully the revolution"), his magnanimity sounded strange to Latin American ears still ringing from the sound of 700 executions to date.
Joint Action. A growing sense of common danger from Castro convinced little Honduras that it should sever relations with Cuba and call for an emergency session of Caribbean foreign ministers to consider the Castro threat. Uruguay seemed ready to break off relations, too, which would make ten hemisphere nations in all. In Washington, the nonpolitical Inter-American Defense Board voted 121, with two abstentions, to bar the Cuban representative from its meetings, and the U.S. State Department held long conferences with the ambassadors of all Latin American nations.