Afghanistan collapse recalls a Cuban pastor’s call to arms

Bud Herron is a retired editor and newspaper publisher who lives in Columbus. He served as publisher of The Republic from 1998 to 2007.

One sweltering afternoon in August 1977, I stood on a beach overlooking the Bay of Pigs on the southwestern coast of Cuba, talking to a Protestant Cuban pastor.

This was not the first time the pastor had been to the bay. Sixteen years earlier, he had been part of a militia brigade called to support the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces against an invasion centered on this bay.

The invaders were 1,500 Cuban exiles from Florida — organized, trained and backed by the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States. The pastor was studying at the Matanzas Evangelical Theological Seminary when he joined the militia to repel the invasion.

He and I — along with two other American journalists, three Roman Catholic nuns and five Russian tourists — had arrived on a timeworn, 1950s-era bus from Havana that afternoon.

The 100-mile trip, with stops at every crossroads village, was supposed to take about four hours. However, the bus broke down about halfway, stranding us for an additional four hours in a little cantina while repairs were made.

Finding the pastor ’s near-erfect English to be a good asset when matched with my stumbling, guidebook Spanish, I sought him out for conversation over some cerveza (beer). He said he was pastor for a “house church” in Havana — one of scores of such Christian alternatives for worship during this time when the government of Fidel Castro had clamped down on organized religion.

Although the regime was aware of these churches, Castro generally left them alone as long as pastors did not publicly speak out or recruit members.

As the bottles of cerveza gradually lowered the pastor’s inhibitions and also lessened my concerns that he might be a government agent assigned to keep an eye on foreign journalists, we began sharing views of Cuba’s past and future.

He told me his interests had never centered on politics, although his Christian beliefs as a young man had left him with disgust about the rule of Fulgencio Batista, the U.s.-backed military dictator who ruled before Castro’s takeover. Filling his own pockets, Batista cut deals with American corporations and the American underworld that kept common people poor, uneducated and without hope of improvement.

He said the Castro regime was correcting many of the wrongs — greatly reducing poverty and providing free education and health care for the populace. But, he also cautiously said much needed to be done to give Cubans more personal freedoms and a voice in their government.

Later, we stood on one of the beaches overlooking the Bay of Pigs, where 2,000 of his fellow militiamen had been killed or wounded. In addition, nearly 500 Cuban exiles were killed or wounded and another 1,000 captured and imprisoned at this and several other landing points. (Some sources claim “hundreds” of these captured troops were executed.) While American motivations for the invasion were more about the Cold War with the Soviet Union than freedom for Cubans, most of the Cuban exile army combatants who died on the beaches had given their lives precisely for what they saw as the cause of freedom. Why had he, a man studying to be a Christian minister, fought to oppose the overthrow?

While I cannot remember the pastor’s exact words all these years later, I do recall the tears in his eyes as he answered me with a question of his own. The gist was — if an army organized by a foreign government invaded the United States, wouldn’t you join with your fellow citizens to oppose the invader, regardless of your political beliefs?

The pastor’s question resurfaced in my mind recently. This time the issue was not Cuba but the tragic end of our nation’s 20-year war in

Afghanistan; a total and immediate collapse of the army we trained and the cause we believed a majority of Afghans supported.

As I struggled to figure out how our leaders — spanning administrations from both national political parties — could have so miscalculated the complexity that is Afghanistan’s history and cultures, the pastor’s words challenged me again.

As despicable as Taliban rule had been in the view of the Western democracies, did we have the right to decide which faction in a multisided civil war should be in power and then use military might to accomplish such?

At the Bay of Pigs, most Americans thought the battle was against communism — an extension of the cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union. The pastor thought the battle was between his country and mercenaries of a foreign nation. In the early days of the war in Afghanistan, most Americans thought the war was between the coalition of western democracies led by the United States and international terrorists led by Al-qaida. But the war soon returned to the long-running civil conflict between neighbors — the Taliban, various other factions and an army organized and trained by the western coalition.

Ultimately, no matter how honorable we saw our intentions, many Afghans still saw us as just another invader.