Jose Basulto
Interviewed by Gonzalo Porcel on July 5, 1999
Gonzalo Porcel: It’s 5th of July of 1999 and we’re at the offices of Brothers to the Rescue here in Miami with José Basulto, its founder and president. When and where were you born? Where are your parents from?
Jose Basulto: I was born in Santiago de Cuba Oriente, that’s a province that is east of the island, August 8, 1940. My parents are Cuban. Both of them are from Oriente, Cuba.
GP: Tell me a bit about your early life. What was it like being a kid in Havana at the time?
JB: It was fun. I enjoyed my life there. I studied high school in a school called Baldor, then I was sent by my parents in 1959to the US, to Massachusetts. I went there to a school called Chancey Hall – it was a prep school – to have a year of English before I went to the university. I ended up going to Boston College for just about a semester that I went there, because I then decided to join the underground in Cuba. I had friends in the underground fighting against Castro who had taken over in ’59, so I went back to the island. At that time, I was instructed by the leaders of the underground to come back to the United States to be in training for what was to become later on the Bay of Pigs Invasion.
GP: Did you have a lot of conversations with your family about what was going on in Cuba at the time when you were growing up?
JB: Yes we did – because my mother, my step-mother actually; my mother died when I was four. My step-mother worked for the University of Havana, and the university students were always very much in contact with – as a matter of fact they were part of the political situation in Cuba. They were a factor in protests and that type of thing. So I came into contact with the political situation in Cuba since very early as a result of her being there at the University of Havana. I would say when I was eight or nine years old and one day she had to come home, rushing out of the University because there was shooting in the air. And the students had taken the University.
GP: It seems that this, obviously, had a big impact on your commitments and on the choices that you’ve decided to make later on in life. Do you remember any specific teachers who maybe had a positive impact?
JB: I felt very close to my school and to the teachers I had there. I think it was an influence on my life. As a matter of fact, such was the influence that I’m not the only one there that decided to act against the Government of Cuba. Quite a few of my school buddies joined the same movement that I did and participated in the attempt to overthrow it in 1961.
GP: How did you find the US when you first came here?
JB: I found the US fascinating. I had been here before as a tourist, but specially the city of Boston, to me it was something very special. I found that the people there are very different from the people in the rest of the country. They had culture, tradition, and, things that I think are important to the society.
GP: And how did you end up going back to Cuba again-
JB: I went back to Cuba, and in Cuba, I was sent by the underground to the United States, where they had made arrangements with the CIA at that time to train a group of us to be sent back to Cuba again and assist in the preparations that were being made to simply overthrow the government of Castro. I was 19. I came to the US with a group of thirty-some of us and began receiving training on, I think it was around March 1960 in an Island called Useppa, West of Florida. I was trained as a radio operator in cryptography, communication. Then I was sent to Guatemala and later to Panama and later to a base here in Virginia at the CIA to be cross-trained in different things like demolitions, foreign armaments, and intelligence, propaganda, and a few other things that were pertinent to the type of work we were doing, like psychological operations and so forth. I was then sent back to Cuba by myself. I entered Cuba via the airport of Havana pretending to have been rejected as a student here in Boston College. I said I wanted to train in physics. There were two places where physics was given in Cuba. One was the University of Villanova in Havana, which was run by priests, and the other one was the University of Oriente, which was my target area. I had been assigned to Oriente -which I had also chosen, by the way. And since I could more or less document this participation in studies here and so forth, I went right through with no difficulties from Customs in Cuba and went around the fifth of February to about the 23rd of March in Oriente as a radio operator sending back information on military installations and things that were necessary for the preparations for the invasion of Cuba.
GP: What was the atmosphere in university circles at the time when you went to the university? Did you think that people would be receptive of the preparation for the operation that would later take place?
JB: They were receptive but I think there were two sides, like always, you know. How much of one side versus the other it was hard to tell, because the side with Castro was already taking action against anyone that opposed him, so people kept it to themselves. So there were people very active in the underground in Oriente, but even more in Havana.
GP: It seems to me that in some ways you were very idealistic at an early age. Do you think this idealism played a part in your involvement in the Bay of Pigs operation and why would you say that it was not successful?
JB: It does. I guess at that age just about everybody’s idealistic and then you end up finding yourself so much entangled with a problem that it becomes part of you. It overtakes your entire personality and either you make a commitment or you just walk out of the situation and I made the commitment to continue to the end.
The operation was not successful for a very simple reason. We as a nation – the Cubans, made a bad error of judgment. We trusted the United States Government at the time that they were going to provide us with everything they had promised and when the time came they backed out. They backed out in the middle of the battle, abandoning those that he had sent, they had trained, they had armed. Had we not, placed all our eggs in that basket, we would have been successful in defeating Castro probably within five years.
GP: What happened after the Bay of Pigs?
JB: I jumped the fence of the Guantanamo Naval Air Station to come back to the US for a debriefing with the intention of going back to the island. As it came out to be, the very same people I was working with – the CIA – believe me, I was not working for them. I was working with them – let me establish that difference. (The CIA) were under investigation by Congress for what had happened at the Bay of Pigs, so everything here was in disarray. So I had to accept that they were looking for another solution – or leaders. And I kept working with the – with them. And I went back on, I think it was November ’61, into Havana to destroy a missile base. As it happened, the information and everything that we had prepared was not accurate and I went with a search-party that was going to be the reconnoitering of the target, and it was determined that the mission could not be done, so the mission was aborted. It was a very dangerous mission. We almost lost it there. The raft that I left the island with punctured -it was thirteen of us on a raft that was meant to be for eight, and we were losing buoyancy. We were a few hours like that. We lost the engine. We had it and we were almost sinking when a CIA gunboat finally found us and picked us up and brought us to safety.
After that mission, I came to the conclusion that there was no serious purpose on the part of the Government of the United States to assist the freedom fighting people of Cuba.
GP: How do you keep Cuba alive?
JB: It’s an uncompleted mission. We found out in 1990 that our people were so desperate that they were leaving the island in whatever they could find that could float and the whole thing came back to me and I said “Well, maybe we can’t overthrow Castro, but at least we can expose him and save the lives of the people that are leaving the island. And a friend of mine came to me one day and said “We should do something about this.” He was proposing to get the fisherman boats in the Keys and try to convince them to go out and do patrolling. And I told him that the idea was impractical, but I had an airplane, and that I think what would not be feasible in boats, could be feasible using airplanes flying low.
And I started making trial runs to see if I could identify an object at low altitude and if I could transmit the position of the object and establish the position of the object. And that was1990. That was the birth of “Brothers to the Rescue.” I think it was on March 13, 1991. It was two weeks after that we found the first group of rafters.
GP: I assume that was at the time when the Coast Guard would pick them up and bring them in to stay in the United States and face no problems, right?
JB: There was the Cuban Adjustment Law passed by President Lyndon B. Johnson, which permitted any Cuban that intended to find freedom in the US to do so. And, it was something that I believe was owed to the people of Cuba for a very simple reason. 1962, the very same president that abandoned us in the Bay of Pigs, negotiated the retrieval of missiles, intercontinental missiles, ballistic missiles that were placed by the Soviet Union, pointed toward the United States, He negotiated the removal of those missiles by promising the Soviet Union that the US would not interfere with Castro in Cuba. In other words, that they were not going to take any efforts to overthrow him or permit anybody else to do it.
GP: So, you think the act was a way of compensation?
JB: In a way. It so happened that without any political change to this date the political situation in Cuba hasn’t changed at all yet. The United States chose to sanitize its action of returning the Cuban refugees back to the island simply by renaming them as migrants, now. What were previously refugees now are migrants. The US Government sanitized its decision to send back people that they themselves had a part in making them slaves of the Castro Government.
GP: Why do you think that change of policy has taken place?
JB: Simply because they were fed up with us. There were too many of us. The Cubans that were coming now were a little bit darker than the ones before, that these were not intellectuals, that these were regular people, peasants.
GP: The Cuban community has obviously been very successful in Miami, Do you think that has helped the case of other Cubans as far as how Cubans are portrayed in the rest of the United States?
JB: Well, the US benefited from the exodus of the Cubans at the beginning, because the Cubans that were coming in at the beginning were people that were pro-democracy, that were totally against Communism, that were of the higher intellectual classes, if not the economic classes too. The economic classes, of course those are the ones that leave the boat before anybody else. It’s not surprising to see the progress of Miami. Miami took 10 percent of the Cuban intelligentsia and made good use of it by providing the opportunities of freedom, capital, and that’s why you have the impact of the Cubans in Miami. I wish that all of us had stayed in Cuba. But our leaving left him with the possibility of controlling the remaining group and we, in other words, we simply abandoned our civil society and allowed Castro to take over and take a firm grip on the Cuban population.
GP: Why do you say abandoned?–
JB: We did abandon our people, because we should have all stayed, that’s how I feel.
In the midst of everything. We should have stayed there and faced our conditions, our situation, which in a way was our very own condition – Castro was not a foreigner, he was one of us, and we should have done whatever it took to overthrow him and bring the situation back to normal. But we depended on a crutch – on a foreign crutch – namely that the United States was going to do the job for us, and that was a horrible mistake.
GP: What does Brothers to the Rescue become if there is a possibility of an opening in Cuba?
JB: Let me tell you, Brothers to the Rescue has not only be involved in assisting the refugees at sea, by saving their lives. We have also been very helpful by providing the opposition within the Island with an instrument of change, namely non-violence – strategic non-violence. We have been sending training material to the Island on how the people of Cuba can act on their own, oppose the government, and even overthrow it, and create a new government there. This will take time, but I believe we are making headway in the Island with this proposal that we have made. And we have sent tremendous amount of material there, which the opposition has acknowledged as very good material for their intended purposes at this time.
However, what is going to happen, like you said, assuming that Castro dies today – Well, I think if Castro dies today the people of Cuba will have to face the danger of a – not of a transition to democracy, but of a succession in power – initiated by the close supporters of Castro and supported by the United States which feels that they can deal much better with a dictator than they can deal with a free Cuba. Their favor is let’s keep the status quo there the best we can and if we have to pay for that in dollars, we’ll do so.
GP: What do you make of all the recent declarations regarding human rights violations and so forth that the Clinton Administration has made.
JB: They’re giving lip service. When it comes to taking some action against Castro, they really haven’t. And this time, the only thing that is in place is the embargo, and this embargo, that is here today, the US is willing to give it away in exchange for nothing. The embargo is just a political tool. It’s just how you use it that makes it good or bad. And it would be a good embargo if they are willing to trade it for something like civil liberties in Cuba, respect of human rights, the freeing of political prisoners, the permit to organize politically in the island – to have political parties, and eventually to have free elections.
GP: What would you say to those people that say that opening up those markets it’s bound to lead to democracy like in other places like Central Europe where the opening up of the economy somehow led to the dismantling of the old system.
JB: I would tell them that Cuba is not China or Eastern Europe. That Cuba has always been a nation very much in concordance to the United States. That part of Cuba is here in the United States – the Cuban exile community, and that someday they will get to regret this because we are putting in notice, everybody that is doing investments in Cuba at this time, that the Cuban labor force, which is who they’re taking advantage from, the Cuban labor there played by the Government. So in other words, you don’t hire the labor yourself – you hire the government to provide you the labor and the government pays in pesos less than what they receive in dollars. And we’re saying that we will make accountable those people that dealt in Cuba under those terms in the future, to pay for the balance that did not go to the workers. So the benefits they are receiving today, they will have to pay for tomorrow. Especially on investments that are done in the Island in physical form – you know, they will be confiscated by the future Government – if it takes that to get payment back to those who suffered on account of these investments.
GP: Let’s suppose there’s a democratic government on the Island. Do you thin that you would be able to carry out legislation of this nature and how far back are you willing to go?
JB: I think there is even precedence to this type of thing and right now I believe that the Swiss are having tremendous troubles with German Jews on account of the way they handled their fortunes that were in Switzerland. So there would be an international legal precedent for this.
GP: Do you think that when this happens the path is going be without bloodshed, or do you think that the extremes are so far apart that it’s very hard to avoid?
JB: Nobody knows what’s going to happen there. It just depends on how it develops.
We are sending to the Island a methodology of non-violence in a very pragmatic way and teaches people how to organize themselves – how to reorganize the civil-society in terms of how to oppose the government and create a viable opposition.
GP: How did you personally make that change from the mindset of someone who trained for demolition to a believer in nonviolence?
JB: Simply because I am not married to an instrument – I am married to a solution. And we are looking for a solution, and the endgame here is the democratization of Cuba. The endgame does not have to be military, or putting bombs or shooting rifles. So if you have something better than that to solve the problem, and I think we do have it – which is non-violence – I’d rather go that way. Some years back when I realized it was impossible for us to confront a government with the weapons it had, and a territory in the north which is hostile to our intentions. Every time that we organize something armed, the arms were confiscated, people were put in jail.
GP: Lets focus on the Miami Community for a moment. When you first arrived in Miami, wheredid you live?
JB: OK, I have lived just about all over the place here in Miami before South Miami. In Coral gables among other places. I had a house and then I decided to move because of the house we had was not sufficient for the family that we had. We had five children – two girls, three boys. We started looking for a place to build a home. I am a builder, by training, and almost an engineer – I graduated from the University of Miami. And my wife, she’s a licensed realtor, and one day she said to me (1990), “Jose, I found a lot for $18,000. As a matter of fact, I found two lots for $18,000.” And I said, “That lot’s simply too good. It’s too good to be true.” So I disregarded it until finally she took me there to see them. We bought them. But the neighbor, John Shaw, and his mother, Margaret Shaw, decided that they wanted to trade with us, because one of our lots was in the middle of their property – it divided their property – and then they said “Well, we’ll trade lots. We’ll give you the corner lot for the one in the middle of the street.” And that was the beginning of a very good relationship with John Shaw and his mother, and the neighbors in the area, which for the most part, where I live which is 57ave and 84th Street. They were for the most part Anglos that had been there for a very long time and they never moved – you never saw a for sale sign in the area. The situation has changed to this day – but that was the situation at the time. The Shaw’s introduced us to the neighbors and they accepted us, and we worked with the City of South Miami.
GP: Would you say that it’s generally been a good experience?
JB: Very good people. And I love them – all of them. There was one elderly gentleman there that already passed away, which lived like three houses away from us, and he came to see everything that I was doing everyday – so I said that he was my inspector.
I’ve had very good relationships with my neighbors. I think they’re all lovely people.
GP: Tell me a little bit about how you made a living?
JB: I’m an engineer – I was a builder. I built underground facilities, like water, sewage pump stations, sewer lines. I was also-and this is the time that Brothers to the Rescue started- building homes in Cocoa Plum, which is this very expensive area in Coral Gables. And eventually to the point that this got to be such a thing that it took all of my time. And since you can’t have your heart in two places at the same time, I decided to put it in the one that gave me less money but gave me a very good personal feeling and reward.
GP: Do you find that the city of South Miami has enough parks and that the public space that there is used widely?
JB: I have a park a block away from me, the Dante Fascell Park. And my grandchildren love it. And I take them there, and I can do it walking. So far as I’m concerned. I don’t know if people are so far away from parks in South Miami that they complain about it, but I really have no complaint. I am very satisfied.
GP: What do you do daily, do you have a corner store that’s a favorite place etc.?
JB: We have a Winn-Dixie nearby which is where we do our shopping. There is also a Farm Stores where we buy milk and other things. There is a Venezuelan bakery nearby. I eat Venezuelan things and we get to chat there and talk and so forth, and – So South Miami has, to me, has many attractive areas.
GP: You studied engineering at UM. What was UM like at the time?
JB: I came to study to UM because, first of all I had already married. I had two children at the time and it was the closest thing to Cuba that I could find. I love Boston. I love it – I used to say that was my second home. But I came to Miami because of the unresolved situation in Cuba. I was in the Army, after the Bay of Pigs Invasion – the US Army. I received a – commission as a Second Lieutenant in 1962 and stayed in the Army a little over a year. I left the Army and then went to study at the University of Miami.
GP: Describe the physical area of South Miami.
JB: The one beautiful thing about South Miami is that they don’t want people outside messing up South Miami. They don’t want for instance Sunset place. Not everybody was very happy with that. In the beginning – the first few days, everybody was raising hell in South Miami because of the traffic and the parking problems and now everything was going to cost more. And, I give you my own personal experience – when I built my home, my home was the most expensive one in the neighborhood -it was a six bedroom home – two story. And some of the neighbors complained that, on account of the tax assessment on my home, it was going to hurt theirs too. So they weren’t that happy that such a large home was being built in the area. But they’ve come to live with it, and again, I don’t consider that as a drawback or anything – it worked out fine, and they were very kind with us.
GP: Do you think something like Sunset Place is going to be in the long-term good for South Miami?
JB: It’s something that – progress and change is something that is unavoidable. In South Miami or elsewhere you have to contend with it. It’s something that is going to happen. So you might as well accept it and – while it happens, try to make it as pleasant as you can. But, hey, we keep growing as far as population and so forth and the quiet city of South Miami isn’t going to be that quiet in the future.
GP: Have you had any involvement with local politics?
JB: No. No. Never.
GP: Why is that?
JB: I feel that my place is in Cuba. And if I ever go into politics as such, as a candidate – it will be in Cuba. It’s in my nature. I don’t know. I’ve never gotten involved in any political activity here. And I wonder why at times people say that my actions are political.
This is a humanitarian, pro-democracy organization. We do civic work. We try to provide the conditions under which the Cuban people can manifest themselves politically. But we, in ourselves, are not political as such. This is something – there’s a thin line there that has to be well-defined.
GP: Besides your Christian beliefs, what other things have influenced you?
JB: The death of our companions. I have lost many people along the way. Good friends. People that were my peers. That was at first. Many of them were sent to the firing squad and some of them were sent to jails. Some of them, they never came out of the jails of Cuba. And now recently, the situation gets even deeper into me when these four young men were killed in 1996. That, if anything, solidified even more my commitment with the cause of Cuba. These young men died serving the Cuban people.
GP: Basically the main criticism is that the actions of Brothers to the Rescue is an infringement of Cuban sovereignty what do you say to those people?
JB: First of all, I am a Cuban. Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that every citizen is allowed to go in and out of his own country freely. So I’m not a foreigner there. And that sovereignty belongs to the people of Cuba, and not to the ruler, Fidel Castro in this case, and I’m not infringing on the sovereignty of my country, namely Cuba, by being there. So I have a right there. Second, if I have any kind of infringement there, perhaps it would be with aerial regulations or something that I may – but that has a civil consequence in a court – there are civil remedies for that type of thing – not a criminal act like the one that took place – an air execution of pilots, which by the way did not go into the Cuban territorial air – waters. So they were murdered in international airspace.
GP: Who is behind that Clinton administration’s Cuba agenda?
JB: I can tell you to go ask Mr. Samuel Berger of the National Security Council. You can ask him who gave the order to prevent the shoot-down. And they did not warn us that we were getting into such problems. They were preparing to monitor it since a week before. There was a spy in Brothers to the Rescue, his name was Juan Pablo Roque. Juan Pablo Roque was working for the Government of Cuba, but he was also working for the FBI. He was a member of Brothers to the Rescue. He had defected from the Air Force of Cuba. And came to see us, and I said “Sure, we’re welcoming everybody.” It’s not that we were infiltrated – I would be wrong to say – we’re a very open organization. And we took him, and we felt that it was more important – the message we were giving to the Cuban people, especially the armed forces there, that we open our arms to everybody who resigns their participation with Castro to have him with us and show him to his own former comrades in arms. Later we realized the risk that we were undertaking by having him with us and the possibility that he may be an agent.
The day before the shoot-down, he was ordered to go back into Cuba, and the first declarations made in Cuba after the shoot-down in the international press was that they had with them a survivor of the shoot-down, namely somebody that had participated and was alive. And that was Mr. Juan Pablo Roque, who was going to be used as the person to give the truth of what had happened after all of us were dead. It so happens that four of us survived and they had to eat up Mr. Roque, they couldn’t use him for anything and they exposed him.
GP: Why was the FBI working with this guy?
JB: Simply because he had offered his services to the FBI and the FBI was paying him as an informant. And he’s not the only informant we’ve had from the FBI in Brothers to the Rescue. We didn’t run any background check on these people that were flying with us – we’ve been, of course, much more careful after the shoot-down. But it is the FBI’s mission precisely to detect these types of individuals and they have the counter-intelligence burden of the nation, and they should have known better when they used his – information, to perhaps create the impression within the Government of the US, that Brothers to the
Rescue was going to do a political action that day – in other words, he’s the one that started the frenzy of that day by stating that we were going to do something and then –
GP: What do they mean by a political action?
JB: They expected us to go into Cuba – into Cuban territory and do something – drop leaflets or do something – because that was the day of Concilio Cubano which was the gathering of Cuban organizations on the Island to oppose the Government, and they had called for a reunion on February 24, 1996. We weren’t going to do anything that day. Just like we didn’t interfere with the visit of the Pope. We felt that it was the Pope’s time to give his message and whatever could come from it, so be it. So we abstained from acting, and this time, we even announced it – that we weren’t going to do anything.
GP: Are you working with anyone as far as press or other media in Cuba right now?
JB: Well there is, what is called Independent Press in the Island. They are people who take it upon themselves to collect information on certain things that take place there and they phone them here to an Independent Group of Press that publish and put it on the Internet. But most Cubans don’t have access to the internet – simply. There are only a few in the government that are allowed to go into the internet and that is very closely monitored.
GP: Would you like to make any concluding remarks?
JB: That I love the City of South Miami. It’s a fine City. I believe that my life has been pleasant in the City of South Miami. And I intend to continue living there so long as I’m here in the United States. I like my neighbors, and I like the services that the city has provided, and I consider myself a permanent resident of the City of South Miami.
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