With Fidel Castro having at last passed off power permanently, C-VILLE decided to pillage the audio archive at the Miller Center to take a trip back in the presidential time machine. Bypassing the more well-known Kennedy era, we opted to pull a few telephone tapes from Lyndon Johnson’s administration, and found this exchange with Senator Richard Russell (D-Georgia) about the Guantanamo Water Crisis. Remarkably, the U.S. military base used Cuban workers and water even after the Castro revolution, but in February 1964, Castro cut off the water supply. Johnson talked with Russell about his decision to fire 2,500 Cuban employees and ship in water.
 So long, Fidel. Now U.S. presidents and senators will have to discuss being urinated on by a new generation of world leaders. |
Lyndon Johnson: I don’t like to see them so split and so divided, state and defense and CIA. What do you think the attitude of the country is, the Senate? Are they indignant about cutting this water off? I don’t guess so many of them feel as strong as Goldwater does, but I guess a great many of them—
Richard Russell: No, no they don’t, but the great many of them, they don’t know exactly what they want done, Mr. President, because they don’t know what can be done, but they want something done.
Johnson: That’s right.
Russell: Ain’t much you can do but this.
Johnson: That’s right.
Russell: They don’t know just exactly what to do. They’re not in favor of any war, I don’t think. I don’t believe 10 percent of them would vote for that right now under these circumstances. But they are just tired of Castro urinating on us and getting away with it. They don’t like the smell of it any longer and they just want to sort of show that we are taking just steps to [inaudible] our power without involving the shedding of a lot of blood. That’s my analysis of the sentiment in the Congress. And I think in the country.
Course, it’d be mighty easy to whip ‘em up to where they’d be ready to go to war with it if you cut loose and fanned it up instead of playing it low key like it’s being done now. But I approve of the low-key play, but I think there’s a latent feeling there that it may not explode right now, but one of these days they gonna say we’ve been a bunch of asses in this country to continually just back down and give away and say, ‘Excuse me,’ every time we come colliding with one of these little countries just because they’re small and particularly these communist countries. And as soon as that bell blows, somebody’s going to get hurt. …Now that feeling’s in the country, just how far it’s gotten, I don’t know. A demagogue with any strength could blow it up. I don’t know anyone who’s got enough strength. The people don’t trust Goldwater’s judgment. A lot of them like his independence.
Johnson: You think a lot of people are going to think you’re hot headed when you just fire a bunch of innocent Cubans?
Russell: I don’t think so. I don’t believe that even the Times and the Post could stir up 5 percent of the people about this. [Says that Johnson should make sure to say it’s regrettable and it’s Castro’s fault.] I’d sure throw that in there. You’d get everyone of them where he’d be a potential assassin of Castro…
Johnson: If he’s going to cut off our water, tomorrow he could cut off our people.
Russell: Sure, sure. …Regrettable as it is, we’ll have to make other arrangements for the time being in the hope that in better days, when the Cuban people and the American people are permitted to fraternize as they have in the past, and as we’re anxious to do today, we hope to be able to renew this.
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