Cuba and the US - A Brief History

For the younger readers, here is a bit of background on why the mighty United States still "fears" tiny little Cuba.

In 1940, Fulgencio Batista won the Presidency of Cuba in an election tainted with massive vote fraud. Batista was very popular with American interests such as United Fruit and PepsiCo to whom he sold Cuba's agricultural produce at below-market prices, and with organized crime, which built the infamous casinos in Havana.

Batista lost the election of 1944 because of his unpopular policies, but ran again in 1952. Polls showed him in last place. With the backing of his American supporters, Batista staged a coup and took over the government. He held elections in 1954 and easily won, being the only candidate on the ballot.

Batista continued to impose tighter and tighter controls on the increasingly angry Cuban people until finally forced to leave office, and fleeing Cuba on January 1, 1959.

Cuba came under control of revolutionary leader Fidel Castro, a former lawyer. Having studied in the United States when young, Castro approached the US to normalize relations, but US interests still wanted favorably trade deals, and Castro refused. Cuba's produce would be sold at prevailing international prices. Castro also wanted the Mafia's activities in Havana, in particular the excesses like the "donkey shows" (women performing sexual acts with animals before an audience), shut down.

So, the US decided to blockade Cuba and cut off their trade, to starve the new government into surrendering Cuba back into the hands of the favored US thug, Batista. Castro refused. The irony is that it was this very blockade which forced Cuba into their relationship with the USSR, giving the soviets a key base right at America's doorstep and handing the US a disastrous foreign policy blunder.

Working with the remnant's of Batista's regime, now holed up in Miami, the CIA and Mafia began to plan a counter-revolution to place Cuba back under Batista's rule. Claiming that the Cuban people were having second thoughts about Castro, the CIA enlisted President John F. Kennedy's assistance for an invasion, as well as support from prominent businessmen such as George H. W. Bush, who provided three ships for logistical support. The claim was that the people of Cuba would rush down to the beach to join the invaders in overthrowing Castro. In reality, the Cubans preferred Castro to anyone the US was going to back, rushed down to the beach at the Bay of Pigs, and pounded the invaders into the sand. When JFK realized he had been lied to regarding the popular sentiment on Cuba, he pulled the plug on the invasion. The USSR responded to the attempted invasion of their ally by placing nuclear ICBMs in Cuba, triggering the Cuban missile crisis, and bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war over cheap sugar and donkey shows.

Kennedy fired CIA director Allen Dulles for the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and shortly thereafter, Dulles sat on the Warren Commission "investigating" Kennedy's assassination. There was a brief attempt to link the assassination to Cuba in order to build support for a new invasion, but President Lyndon Johnson was well aware that the USSR had pulled their nuclear missiles out of Cuba with the express understanding that another invasion would result in an immediate nuclear strike by the USSR on the US. At the time, the USSR had an advantage in long-range ICBMs and a working anti-0missile system as well, so Johnson quickly shifted the blame to the "lone nut" Oswald.

Since that time, the US has maintained a blockade against Cuba not because the island nation is any kind of a threat to the US but because it is an embarrassment. Little Cuba has withstood the covert might of the United States for half a century now, a beacon to the world that the US is not always able to select who will rule other peoples' countries. The Cuban blockade is not a military necessity; it is a grudge, written in steel and signed in the blood of the Cuban people.

And it is an antiquity the world can live without.