Of course, The Nation’s November 19, 1960, report on covert preparations to invade Cuba was news. More important, it was an act of responsible political journalism. Not only did The Nation scoop the rest of the American press; it issued a direct challenge to “all U.S. news media with correspondents in Guatemala” to further expose the CIA’s counterrevolutionary operations— a challenge that the Times couldn’t ignore. “Public pressure,” as The Nation’s editors declared with prescient clarity five months before the failed paramilitary assault, “should be brought to bear upon the Administration to abandon this dangerous and hare-brained project.”
The Nation’s pre-emptive effort to inform and mobilize public opinion before the Bay of Pigs is illustrative of its long history of coverage and editorial positions on Cuba. Again and again, the magazine has run groundbreaking stories and potent editorials to influence the public discourse over Cuba and US foreign policy. At the height of the Cold War, when the Cuban Revolution became a central concern, The Nation even played a key role in back-channel diplomacy to improve US-Cuba relations. Looking back over the course of a century and a half of reports, analysis and editorials on Cuba, it is clear that The Nation’s brand of responsible, progressive journalism not only helped to shape history; it has helped to make it as well.
EARLY COVERAGE
Just two weeks after its inaugural issue, on July 20, 1865, The Nation published its first Cuba story. “Emancipation in Cuba” promoted a plan for “the important matter of the extinction of slavery in this island”—a moral, social and political issue that culminated with Spain decreeing the abolition of slavery in Cuba in 1886.
As the Cuban insurrection against Spanish colonial rule escalated at the end of the nineteenth century, The Nation opposed the rush to intervention, condemning the propaganda of the “yellow journals” calling for the dispatch of US troops to the island. But the magazine recognized the inevitability of US involvement to end the civil strife and bloodshed in Cuba’s war for independence. “Our declared purpose is to pacify the island, to make it free and independent, to establish a stable government and then to take hands off,” the editors wrote in “The War and After,” a commentary published on April 28, 1898. Three years later, the imperial-minded McKinley administration imposed the Platt Amendment on the Cubans as the price of their “independence”—a law bestowing extraordinary US power over the island’s future, including the eternal right to intervene. The Nation insisted that the amendment and its incorporation into the Cuban Constitution “do not bind anybody” to future incursions of US force or military occupation.