Books in Brief: The Losers

The Losers, by Paul D. Bethel (Arlington House, $10). When Fidel Castro and his barbudos set up shop in Havana January 1, 1959, he hoisted the gates and out surged a flood of books about how it—and the shabby prelude and postlude happened. Paul Bethel’s big book is the latest, and perhaps the best. Bethel leaves no doubt that Castro got his job through Herbert Matthews and others, who had, and have, heavy emotional investments in Castro’s brand of anticapitalism. He painstakingly picks through the pieces of the Bay of Pigs and the missile crisis, showing that John Kennedy flubbed the former through a failure of will and flubbed the latter— wherein the U.S. guaranteed the perpetuation of Communism in Cuba—through a lack of smarts. Sad to say, however, it was propaganda as usual in the American press, and each flub brought JFK more popularity. Bethel has loaded his book with documentation, especially about the effectiveness of Cuban-based Communist operations in the Western Hemisphere— and notably in the American Negro movement. Who are the losers? The sour-pusses of free society, those unable to achieve the status or power to which they think their intellectual gifts entitle them—in short, the pro-Communist apologists who make people such as Castro possible. And you and I.

RM

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R. Mackenzie

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The Losers, by Paul D. Bethel (Arlington House, $10). When Fidel Castro and his barbudos set up shop in Havana January 1, 1959, he hoisted the gates and out surged a flood of books about how it—and the shabby prelude and postlude happened. Paul Bethel’s big book is the latest, and perhaps the best. Bethel leaves no doubt that Castro got his job through Herbert Matthews and others, who had, and have, heavy emotional investments in Castro’s brand of anticapitalism. He painstakingly picks through the pieces of the Bay of Pigs and the missile crisis, showing that John Kennedy flubbed the former through a failure of will and flubbed the latter— wherein the U.S. guaranteed the perpetuation of Communism in Cuba—through a lack of smarts. Sad to say, however, it was propaganda as usual in the American press, and each flub brought JFK more popularity. Bethel has loaded his book with documentation, especially about the effectiveness of Cuban-based Communist operations in the Western Hemisphere— and notably in the American Negro movement. Who are the losers? The sour-pusses of free society, those unable to achieve the status or power to which they think their intellectual gifts entitle them—in short, the pro-Communist apologists who make people such as Castro possible. And you and I.