Nation: Carter Defuses a Crisis

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Temporarily at least, he was off the hook. As a key adviser put it, "Cuba was not a serious foreign policy problem, but it grew into a major domestic problem." Added a top State Department official: "The President got his priorities in order again. For a while, they were upside down." The trouble started in August, when Senator Frank Church, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, called a press conference and insisted that the brigade be withdrawn. Otherwise, he said, the Senate would not approve SALT. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance made matters worse by declaring that the U.S. would "not be satisfied with the maintenance of the status quo," a statement that he had worked out with Carter. The Administration was off on a course that nobody intended or wanted, one that could have resulted in a nasty and needless confrontation with the Soviets and the defeat of the SALT II treaty in the Senate.

The problem was how to repair the damage. For weeks the Administration pressed Moscow in behind-the-scenes negotiations to back down. But the Soviets would not budge. In a letter to Carter, Brezhnev promised only that the training unit would not change its function or status. No matter how distasteful, the Administration would have to accept the status quo.

Concerned that the White House was reacting too slowly and indecisively, White House Counsel Lloyd Cutler and Senior Adviser Hedley Donovan urged Carter to seek help from the nation's veteran foreign-policy makers. Fifteen prominent men, including Presidential Troubleshooter Clark Clifford, former Secretaries of State Dean Rusk and Henry Kissinger, former Under Secretary of State George Ball and Panama Canal Negotiator Sol Linowitz, were summoned to the White House. First, they were given an intelligence briefing that established the existence of the Soviet brigade. It comprised 2,600 soldiers assigned to two garrisons under the command of a Soviet army colonel. The unit was equipped with 40 tanks, 60 armored personnel carriers and other military hardware. Said an official: "It is clear that the brigade is not there to train Cubans. There is no substantial interplay with Cubans. If it were really a training unit, it was training itself." Though the brigade's purpose remains unclear, the unit does provide a degree of protection for the island while Cubans are busy elsewhere. There are now some 35,000 Cuban troops, technicians and civilian advisers in Africa. In the Caribbean, there are about 450 Cuban advisers in Jamaica, 250 in Nicaragua, 75 in Grenada, 70 in Guyana and 30 in Panama.