• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1230 0

when Castro ordered US embassy reductions in Havana. Furious, the US government broke off diplomatic relations with Cuba, banned its citizens from traveling to the island and abolished the remaining Cuban sugar quota. At the same time the government, in collusion with the CIA, began to initiate a covert program of action against the Castro regime that, according to various historical sources, included invasion plans, assassination plots and blatant acts of sabotage. Much of this aid was filtered through to counterrevolutionary gangs who – borrowing a tactic from Fidel – had set up in the Escambray Mountains in an attempt to initiate a guerrilla war against the new government. At the center of subterfuge lay the infamous Bay of Pigs invasion (see boxed text,), a poorly conceived military plot that honed 1400 disaffected Cuban exiles into a workable fighting force in the jungles of Guatemala. Deemed sufficiently armed and ready to fight, the émigrés sailed on April 14, 1961 with a US Navy escort from Puerto Cabeza in Nicaragua to the southern coast of Cuba. But military glory wasn’t forthcoming. Landing at Playa Girón and Playa Larga three days later, the US-backed expeditionary forces took a conclusive drubbing, in part because President Kennedy canceled US air cover during the landings, a decision which has been the subject of much historical analysis (and according to some of the theories that abound about his assessination, might have cost him his life).

Rocked and embarrassed by what had been a grave and politically costly military defeat, the Kennedy administration declared a full trade embargo on Cuba in June 1961, and in January 1962 it used diplomatic pressure to expel the island from the OAS (Organization of American States). To the dismay of the US, its closest neighbors, Mexico and Canada, refused to bow to pressure to sever diplomatic relations with Cuba completely, thus throwing the country a valuable lifeline which – especially in the case of Canada – still exists to this day. Spinning inexorably into the Soviet sphere of influence, Castro began to cement closer relations with Khrushchev and upped the ante even further in April 1962 when, exploiting American weakness after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, he agreed to effect the installation of Soviet-made medium-range missiles on the island.

* * *

La Rosa Blanca (the White Rose), the first anti-Castro movement to take hold in the US, was formed in January 1959 by Dr Rafael Díaz-Balart, Fidel’s former brother-in-law.

* * *

Furious and anxious not to lose any more face on the international scene, the Kennedy administration decided to act quickly and decisively. On October 22, 1962 President Kennedy ordered the US Navy to detain Cuba-bound Soviet ships and search for missiles, provoking the Cuban Missile Crisis, which brought the world closer to the nuclear brink than it has ever been before or since. Six days later, only after receiving a secret assurance from Kennedy that Cuba would not be invaded, Khrushchev ordered the missiles dismantled. Castro, who was not consulted nor informed of the decision until it was a done deal, was livid and reputedly smashed a mirror in his anger. More bad luck was on the way.

Return to beginning of chapter

BUILDING SOCIALISM WORLDWIDE

The learning curve was steep in the Revolution’s first decade. The economy continued to languish in the doldrums despite massive injections of Soviet aid, and production was marked by all of the normal inconsistencies, shortages and quality issues that characterize uncompetitive socialist markets. As National Bank president and later Minister of Industry, Che Guevara advocated centralization and moral, rather than material, incentives for workers. But despite his own tireless efforts to lead by example and sponsor voluntary work weekends, all attempts to create the New Man (an individual inspired by moral rather than financial rewards), ultimately proved to be unsustainable.

The effort to produce a 10-million-ton sugar harvest in 1970 was equally misguided and almost led to economic catastrophe,