Havana or Bust:

The Making of “Venceremos!”:

By Chris Oakley

Rosalind Russell once said “Life is a banquet”-- and for the AH connoisseur, the Cold War is a mouthwatering feast of potential PODs. Not the least of those PODs is the Bay of Pigs invasion, one of the United States’ first attempts to unseat the dictatorial Fidel Castro regime in Cuba. Although the invasion plan was hatched in the closing days of the Eisenhower administration, it is largely tied in with the legacy of John F. Kennedy because it was on his watch that the invasion was attempted and subsequently crushed for lack of any proper air support.

In real history, the United States and Cuba managed to avoid war over the Bay of Pigs incident, though the tension between Washington and Havana remained(and will probably still be going on by the time this article is posted). But, I asked myself, suppose Castro had been spurred on by his success in squashing the CIA-backed offensive to try and take his fight with the Yanquis to Uncle Sam’s backyard? That
spurred me to create the first version of what would later become the“Venceremos!” series.

When I first became a regular contributor to Changing The Times and I was working on “It (Almost)Happened Here”, I mentioned to David Atwell that I was toying with the idea of adapting my old Florida Keys War timeline from Othertimelines.com as a multi-part series for CTT.

With his encouragement, I went back to review the original Keys War timeline, then a few days later started typing out the initial draft of what would eventually become the first chapter of “Venceremos!”

I should note here that the title is meant in a fairly sarcastic sense; “Venceremos” is Spanish for “We will conquer”, yet in my TL the Castro regime basically gets its clock cleaned on the battlefield. For those of you wondering why the Soviets don’t kick up more of a fuss in this timeline, it should be noted that the main “Venceremos!” story is set in the spring and summer of 1961 and the Soviet Union didn’t begin to establish a major military presence in Cuba until early 1962. And as long as we’re discussing connections between the “Venceremos!” main storyline and OTL history, I should note that much of my narrative for the battles between US and allied forces and the Cuban Communists is taken partly from actual news reports of US coalition engagements with Iraqi troops during Operation Desert Storm.

As for the Turkish crisis subplot, the inspiration for that came from two sources: A) the OTL Cuban Missile Crisis and B) the Peter G. Tsouras-edited AH anthology Third Reich Victorious, which includes a chapter titled “Into The Caucasus” about the Germans establishing an alliance with Turkey. Though in the “Venceremos!” timeline there’s no actual armed conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union over Turkey, “Caucasus” was a huge help in reminding me of the vital if sometimes overlooked role which Turkey plays in shaping the course of Russian-Western relations.

The idea of dispersing the Cuban air force was a suggestion on my editor’s part. As he pointed out in an e-mail he sent to me just after I turned in my first draft of Part 2, leaving those planes all bunched together at the start of hostilities in the Florida Keys War timeline would have been a suicidal tactical error on Castro’s part. One of my other inspirations for the dispersal concept was the actual practices of RAF Fighter Command during the Battle of Britain in 1940, when Air Vice-Marshal Hugh Dowding prevailed on his squadron leaders to scatter their planes across the length and breadth of southern England to make it harder for Luftwaffe bombers to destroy them.

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The Chinese-Soviet war which is portrayed in the middle chapters of “Venceremos!” was inspired by the essay “Fraternal Conflict: The Sino-Soviet Disaster” in the Peter G. Tsouras-edited book Cold WarHot: Alternate Decisions Of The Cold War. In OTL China and the Soviet Union were at odds for most of the 1960s, a feud which culminated in the now-infamous Siberian border skirmishes of 1969; having the Soviet Union lose its Cuban ally as a results of the Florida Keys War in my ATL would have stung its pride in a way that might have prompted it to adopt an even more confrontational attitude towards its huge southern neighbor than it took in real history. The biggest difference between my Manchurian War timeline-within-a-timeline and “Fratenal Conflict” is that my Sino-Soviet war stops short-- albeit barely --of escalating into nuclear conflict.

As for the Iranian war that spans many of the final chapters of the series, that particular subplot was influenced by a variety of OTL events in recent Persian Gulf history, not the least of which was the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. The idea of Iranian secret service agents being responsible for 9/11 in the “Venceremos!” timeline was inspired by the movie Black Sunday, in which Palestinian radicals try to wipe out a crowd at the Super Bowl using darts. It also reflects some of the rumors and worst case scenarios that were being considered in the first few days after the World Trade Center was destroyed. Finally, it alludes to the real-life ties between the Ahmadinejad regime and some
of the insurgent militias that have been waging war on U.S. troops in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein.

I originally conceived “Venceremos!” as a four-part series, but as I was working on the final draft of Part 4 I realized that it would probably take more than four chapters to complete my story of the war between the United States and Cuba and the shape of the postwar world.

Considerably more, as it turned out. In fact, up until I started doing the “Slipping The Surly Bonds Of Earth” series, “Venceremos!” held the record for being the longest multi-part article submitted in the five years since I first became a regular contributor to CTT. Every time it
looked like I might be ready to call it a day with the series, I found myself being inspired to take the story just a little bit further. And in any case I got a huge kick out of seeing just how far I could take my scenario once the chapters about the war with Cuba were finished.

For me, the finale of “Venceremos!” brought mixed emotions. On one hand I was glad to wrap up the series and be able to get on with some of the other AH article ideas I wanted to tackle. On the other hand, though, I realized I was going to miss the fun of exploring how the trajectory of the Cold War and the post-Cold War era might have been affected if Fidel Castro’s regime had collapsed in the face of a
war with the United States during the JFK era. Those mixed feelings as the original “Venceremos!” series was winding down were one of the first things that inspired me to write the companion to that TL, the“Bear’s Teeth, Dragon’s Claws” series.

And in all fairness, I still have ideas percolating in the back of my brain for other sequels to and spinoffs from my Florida Keys War timeline. When or if I’ll actually put those ideas down on paper, only God knows. But you can be sure of this much: on the day I actually do start to set them down on paper, I’ll tackle them with every ounce as much of enthusiasm as I poured into writing the original “Venceremos!” series.