The Cold War- Cuba vs. America
American Retaliation.
Bay of Pigs
What Is The Cold War?
1959 - Castro leads a 9,000-strong guerrilla army into Havana, forcing Batista to flee. Castro becomes prime minister, his brother, Raul, becomes his deputy and Guevara becomes third in command.
-Castro disapproved of the approach that Americans took to their business and interests in Cuba. It was time, he believed, for Cubans to assume more control of their nation. “Cuba Sí, Yanquis No” became one of his most popular slogans.
After slashing Cuban sugar imports, Washington instituted a ban on nearly all exports to Cuba, which President John F. Kennedy expanded into a full economic embargo that included stringent travel restrictions.
a state of political hostility between countries characterized by threats, propaganda, and other measures short of open warfare, in particular
Castro’s regime was considered such a threat to U.S. interests that secret American operatives even tried to have him assassinated.
1960 - All US businesses in Cuba are nationalized without compensation.
How did the Cold War Start Between US & Cuba?
How it started...
Timeline & History
Bay of Pigs: President Kennedy and The Cold War.
(The Bay of Pigs Invasion)
In May 1960, Castro established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union
United States responded by prohibiting the importation of Cuban sugar.
To prevent the Cuban economy from collapsing–sugar exports to the United States comprised 80 percent of the country’s total–the USSR agreed to buy the sugar.
-In 1959, Fidel Castro and a group of revolutionaries seized power in Havana, overthrowing Fulgencio Batista.
- Despite misgivings about Castro's communist political ideology, the United States recognized his government.
Castro's regime increased trade with the Soviet Union, nationalized U.S.-owned properties, and hiked taxes on American imports, the United States responded with escalating economic retaliation.
1960- Us severed diplomatic ties with Cuba.
1961- The Bay of Pigs Invasion.
1961: The CIA begins to make plans to assassinate Castro as part of Operation Mongoose. At least five plans to kill the Cuban leader were drawn up between 1961 and 1963
1962-Cuban missile crisis ignites when, fearing a US invasion, Castro agrees to allow the USSR to deploy nuclear missiles on the island. The crisis was subsequently resolved when the USSR agreed to remove the missiles in return for the withdrawal of US nuclear missiles from Turkey.
-Support of many Cubans for Castro.
-Batista had been a corrupt and repressive dictator, but he was considered to be pro-American and was an ally to U.S. companies.
-American corporations and wealthy individuals owned almost half of Cuba’s sugar plantations and the majority of its cattle ranches, mines and utilities.
-Batista did little to restrict their operations. He was also reliably anticommunist.
Instead, he crafted an alternative with three components: a public deal in which the United States pledged not to invade Cuba if the Soviet Union withdrew its missiles; a private ultimatum threatening to attack Cuba within 24 hours if the offer was rejected; and a secret sweetener that promised to withdraw U.S. missiles from Turkey within six months.
The Cuban Missle Crisis.
In October 1962 President John F. Kennedy was informed of a U-2 spy-plane’s discovery of Soviet nuclear-tipped missiles in Cuba.
The crisis was resolved at the last minute when Khrushchev accepted the U.S. offer.
Over an intense 13 days, he and his Soviet counterpart Nikita Khrushchev confronted each other “eyeball to eyeball,” each with the power of mutual destruction.
Barack Obama & Castro
On April 11, 2015, Presidents Barack Obama and Raúl Castro shook hands at the Summit of the Americas in Panama, marking the first meeting between a U.S. and Cuban head of state since the two countries severed their ties in 1961.
war would have meant the deaths of 100 million Americans and more than 100 million Russians.
Mongoose.
The change in the countries' relations, initially marked by a prisoner swap and Havana's release of a jailed U.S. subcontractor in December 2015, prompted some experts to point to better prospects for Cuba’s economy and U.S. relations more broadly in Latin America.
The meeting came four months after the presidents announced their countries would restore diplomatic relations, and gave rise to President Obama's March 2016 visit to Cuba, the first by a sitting president in over eighty-five years.
Operation Mongoose was designed to do what the Bay of Pigs invasion failed to do: remove the Communist Castro regime from power in Cuba.
Since the 1960s, successive U.S. administrations have maintained a policy of economic sanctions and diplomatic isolation of Cuba
But the U.S. trade embargo, which requires congressional approval to be rescinded, is unlikely to be lifted any time soon.
After a week of secret deliberations, Kennedy announced the discovery to the world and imposed a naval blockade on further shipments of armaments to Cuba.
Bay of Pigs: The Aftermath
CIA and the Cuban exile brigade believed that President Kennedy would eventually allow the American military to intervene in Cuba on their behalf.
As much as he did not want to “abandon Cuba to the communists,” he said, he would not start a fight that might end in World War III.
Mongoose entailed a wide range of activities, including intelligence collection
sabotage operations
searching for leaders within Cuba who could overthrow Castro
The Northwoods operation, which contemplated faked and real terrorist activities which could be blamed on Castro and used as an provocation for invasion, were developed in this period with Lansdale's involvement.
in November 1961, he approved Operation Mongoose, an espionage and sabotage campaign–but never went so far as to provoke an outright war. In 1962, the Cuban missile crisis inflamed American-Cuban-Soviet tensions even further.
Castro’s troops had pinned the invaders on the beach, and the exiles surrendered after less than a day of fighting; 114 were killed and over 1,100 were taken prisoner.
Castro and his advisers knew about the raid
and had moved his planes out of harm’s way
A tense second week followed, during which neither side backed down. Presented with the choice of attacking or accepting Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba, Kennedy rejected both options.
Bay of Pigs: the plan
Bay of Pigs: Invasion
April 17, the Cuban exile brigade began its invasion at an isolated spot on the island’s southern shore known as the Bay of Pigs.
In January 1961, the U.S. government severed diplomatic relations with Cuba and stepped up its preparations for an invasion
The CIA had wanted to keep it a secret for as long as possible, but a radio station on the beach (which the agency’s reconnaissance team had failed to spot) broadcast every detail of the operation to listeners across Cuba.
http://www.history.com/topics/cold-war/bay-of-pigs-invasion
-Kennedy had inherited Eisenhower’s CIA campaign to train and equip a guerilla army of Cuban exiles
-doubts about the wisdom of the plan. The last thing he wanted, he said, was “direct, overt” intervention by the American military in Cuba: The Soviets would likely see this as an act of war and might retaliate.
1- destroy Castro’s tiny air force, making it impossible for his military to resist the invaders.
2-April 15, 1961, a group of Cuban exiles took off from Nicaragua in a squadron of American B-26 bombers, painted to look like stolen Cuban planes, and conducted a strike against Cuban airfields.
Video^
-CIA officers told him they could keep U.S. involvement in the invasion a secret and, if all went according to plan, the campaign would spark an anti-Castro uprising on the island.
John F. Kennedy, maintained that Castro posed no real threat to America, but the new president believed that masterminding the Cuban leader’s removal would show Russia, China and skeptical Americans that he was serious about winning the Cold War.
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