In 1987, Cuba released a mini series called “La Guerra de la CIA contra Cuba” outlining every single thing that the CIA had done in Cuba...with video evidence. What was the Global community’s response to this? Did this have a strong impact on America’s perceived ability of intelligence work?

by banaza715

While reading “Talking to Strangers” by Malcolm Gladwell he discussed America’s failed attempt at intelligence collecting on Cuba during the Cold War, that culminated in La Guerra de la CIA contra Cuba. “Then he released on Cuban television an astonishing eleven-part documentary entitled La Guerra de la CIA contra Cuba—The CIA’s War against Cuba. Cuban intelligence, it turned out, had filmed and recorded everything the CIA had been doing in their country for at least ten years—as if they were creating a reality show.”

I just have so many questions about this, but I’ll start with the questions listed in the title.

amp1212

Short answer:

The series had little impact at the time.

Discussion:

"What was the Global community’s response to this? "

What "global community" are you referring to? Everyone on the planet? What do you mean by "response"?

The series passed without notice for most of humanity. It was covered in Cuba and its allies, got some coverage in leftist European and Latin American circles. You can find some coverage of the series in US newspapers at the time-- it wasn't a particularly significant story; the Los Angeles Times ran a story "Duped CIA, ‘Double Agents’ Claim : U.S.-Cuban Tensions Rise as Spying Charges Spiral" (July 26,1987) so it wasn't unknown, but it wasn't seen as particularly dramatic or new.

That the US was hostile to Cuba was hardly a secret; US forces had recently fought Cuba in Grenada (1983). There was nothing unusual about denunciation of US intervention in this period; the Iranians had made this a tentpole of the regime, and did so with more drama, hostage taking and name calling ("The Great Satan"). There was no "response" in the sense of meaningful policy actions by other states resulting from the Cuban series, nor from the Iranian publications; "revealing" that someone is doing something that most people already knew they were doing doesn't make much of a splash.

In terms of how US covert intervention was perceived elsewhere, a more important event of the period was the Iranian Revolution and subsequent hostage crisis (1979-81). In 1987, the world was thinking about Chernobyl and the rapidly evolving state of the Soviet Union under Gorbachev; this is the glasnost/perestroika era -- a change in Soviet policy that was very challenging for Fidel Castro and Cuba. It's in 1988 that we first see that Soviet economic support for Cuba has declined -- the first notice we have of this comes from documentation submitted by the Cubans to international lenders as they try to get debt rescheduled.

Did this have a strong impact on America’s perceived ability of intelligence work?

"Perceived" by whom? The "customer" for the CIA's intelligence is, ultimately, the President of the United States. The CIA's intelligence and analytical capacity was more severely challenged in this period by a series of notable failures in the prior decades-- the failure to foresee the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the failure to foresee the Iranian Revolution, and (soon after) the failure to foresee the collapse of the Soviet Union (the latter is controversial-- the CIA had detected rising tensions in the USSR, and later writers suggest that assertions of "failure" are off base, but it's fair to say that informed opinion in the early '90s was that the CIA wasn't doing a great job.

Partly as a result of the deficiencies in human intelligence and analysis, you see a steady increase in investment in communications intelligence (eg the National Security Administration), a different agency and different method from the CIA.

The series attracted notice among those who were already hostile to the US, and is of some anecdotal interest to those who study US covert interventions, but I don't see it moving the needle on policy or opinion. That the US was trying to undermine the Cuban regime wasn't a secret from anyone. In terms of world and domestic perceptions of of US covert action, the "Iran Contra" scandal was more visible and of much greater political consequence.

In the summer of 1987, if someone was upset about US covert action - it was more likely to be over links to Central American death squads. Progressives were more oriented to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras than Cuba -- there was a decade long civil war of exceptional brutality amounting to genocide; more dramatic from an international humanitarian perspective than the overt hostility to Cuba.

From a US Government perspective, there were more dramatic events in the reasonably recent history of US relations with Cuba, among them the "Mariel boatlift" of 1980 and battle in Grenada. That the US was hostile to Cuba was official US policy, hardly a secret to anyone listening to "Radio Marti" -- a Spanish language US based radio station hostile to Castro which began broadcasting in 1985.

At the time this series was broadcast, the most dramatic Cuban-US news story would have been the defection of Brigadier General Rafael del Pino, the Deputy Chief of Cuba's Air and Air Defense Forces. He was a significant internal critic of the Castro regime's foreign military interventions -- this is a period where there are relatively large Cuban military commitments overseas, from nearby Grenada to a very long and costly involvement in Angola. He defects to the United States in 1987.

So in terms of "response", stories like "Cuba Is Mired in Angola, Top Defector Says" had more mindshare than the Cuban series in the US.

Further reading

Valenta, Jiri. “The Soviet-Cuban Alliance in Africa and the Caribbean.” The World Today, vol. 37, no. 2, 1981, pp. 45–53.

Edward George, "The Cuban Intervention in Angola, 1965-1991: From Che Guevara to Cuito Cuanavale" (Frank Cass: 2005)

Duncan, W. Raymond. “The Odd Partners.” The Wilson Quarterly (1976-), vol. 12, no. 5, 1988, pp. 75–83.

Berkowitz, Bruce D., and Jeffrey T. Richelson. “The CIA Vindicated: The Soviet Collapse Was Predicted.” The National Interest, no. 41, 1995, pp. 36–47.

Pérez, Louis A. “Fear and Loathing of Fidel Castro: Sources of US Policy toward Cuba.” Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 34, no. 2, 2002, pp. 227–254.

Boren, David L. “The Winds of Change at the CIA.” The Yale Law Journal, vol. 101, no. 4, 1992, pp. 853–865.

Kornbluh, Peter. “Test Case for the Reagan Doctrine: The Covert Contra War.” Third World Quarterly, vol. 9, no. 4, 1987, pp. 1118–1128.