“Fundamental to Jacksonville University’s mission is support for an environment where divergent ideas, theories, and philosophies can be openly exchanged and critically evaluated. Consistent with these principles and the concept of Academic Freedom, this course may involve the discussion of ideas that you find uncomfortable, disagreeable, or even offensive. These ideas are intended to be presented in an objective manner, they are not intended to persuade and are not an endorsement of what you should personally believe.”
This concise guide is conceived as an introductory scholarly resource. The questions advanced herein are not central to the principal debates of this course; rather, they function as elementary points of departure. The material is presented with the utmost commitment to objectivity, while recognizing that the interpretive framework is not, and cannot be, neutral. Prof. Jorge Majfud.
Table of Contents
Questions
1. What was Cuba’s historical and current political and social context before the Cuban Revolution?
2. What was the Cuban Revolution of 1959 about?
3. Arrange in chronological order the major events that preceded and followed the Cuban Missile Crisis.
4. What happened after the 1959 Revolution?
5. What was the U.S. policy known as “wet-foot/dry-foot”?
Audiovisuals and Documents
False flags
(CIA declassified):
THE JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF. WASHINGTON 25, D.C.. UNCLASSIFIED. MEMORANDUM FOR THE SECRETARY OF DEFENSE. Subject: 13 March 1962.
The Bay of Pigs Invasion and Cuba’s Shift into the Soviet Sphere
After the fall of the Washington-backed dictatorship of Batista in January 1959, the Cuban Revolution did not immediately declare itself communist. Its first great confrontation with the old order was economic. On May 17, 1959, Castro’s government passed the Agrarian Reform Law, limiting large landholdings and expropriating excess land, including properties belonging to U.S. companies. The objective was to redistribute land and reduce the concentration of ownership that had characterized Cuba’s economy. For Washington, however, land reform meant that American property was no longer protected or given special treatment.
The conflict deepened in 1960. Cuba began purchasing cheaper Soviet oil (one dollar instead of 2.80 dollars per barrel), and the three foreign companies operating the principal refineries —Esso, Texaco, and Shell— were asked to refine it. They refused. Cuba responded by taking control of the refineries, beginning with Texaco and Esso.
What followed was much larger: during the summer of 1960, the government nationalized sugar mills, oil companies, banks, telephone and electric utilities, insurance companies, hotels, airlines and other major enterprises. The stated logic was to place strategic resources under Cuban control and dismantle an economy heavily dependent on foreign capital; Washington saw the measures as attacks on American property.
The sequence matters. First came land reform; then the confrontation over cheaper Soviet oil and the refineries; then the broader nationalization of the economy. The United States had already decided that his government had to be removed.
In March 1960, President Eisenhower authorized the CIA to organize an operation to overthrow Castro; Kennedy inherited the plan and authorized the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961. Thus, the Cuban confrontation cannot be reduced to a simple story in which Washington invaded because Cuba had already become communist. The revolution’s political radicalization, the struggle over property and economic sovereignty, the old and persistent American interventions in Cuba since 1898, and the Cold War confrontation developed simultaneously.
In April 1959, only three months after Batista’s fall, Fidel Castro visited the United States and met Vice President Richard Nixon in his office in Washington. Castro was still presenting the Revolution as nationalist and independent rather than communist, but Nixon came away convinced that he was “incredibly naive about Communism,” while acknowledging that Castro possessed exceptional qualities as a popular leader.
The meeting became meaningful because at that precise moment Washington was already planning how to contain a disobedient revolution or redirect it to its own interest: before the major nationalizations had even occurred, U.S. officials were discussing Castro’s land reform and the possibility that American-owned properties would be affected. Castro, meanwhile, increasingly concluded that Washington would not accept a Cuba exercising economic sovereignty on its own terms. Che Guevara was even more distrustful of the United States, arguing that U.S. policy toward Cuba would remain aggressive regardless of which president was in the White House and, by late 1960, he was publicly saying that it made little difference to the Revolution whether Kennedy or Nixon governed Washington.
By March 17, 1960, more than a year before the Bay of Pigs, President Eisenhower had authorized the CIA to organize, train, and equip Cuban exiles for a covert operation aimed at overthrowing Castro. By April 1961, when the CIA-backed invasion landed at the Bay of Pigs, Castro had still not publicly declared himself Marxist-Leninist; the invasion preceded his May declaration that Cuba was socialist and his December 1 declaration, “I am a Marxist-Leninist.” Cuba had already begun receiving Soviet help in 1960, but the failed invasion intensified Havana’s search for Soviet military support as protection against another U.S. attack, pushing the new government of Cuba into the Soviet sphere.
During these three years, approximately 250,000 Cubans went into exile in the United States, the first and mostly upper-class wave of the post-revolutionary Cuban exodus.
Washington feared that Castro might become communist; Castro feared that Washington would never accept a genuinely independent Cuba; and the conflict over land reform, expropriations, oil refineries and nationalization transformed those mutual suspicions into an open Cold War conflict.
Related
Che Guevara radicalization
«[…] just after that tour around Latin America, where he first began to develop a pan-American consciousness, [Ernesto «Che» Guevara] wound up in Guatemala, a country that at the time was undergoing a profound democratic revolution. Che practiced social medicine in the country’s rural highlands, ministering to the country’s most marginal. He was in Guatemala during the CIA’s 1954 coup that ended that country’s democracy, and he saw firsthand the U.S. role in restoring a regime that would go on to kill hundreds of thousands of its citizens. He always cited his experience in Guatemala as a turning point. Prior to the coup, the Latin American left, including Communist groups, still believed it was possible to work with a country’s national bourgeois to achieve social democratic reform. Afterwards, it was increasingly difficult to do so. Che himself would go on to taunt the United States, saying “Cuba will not be another Guatemala” to justify the restrictions of civil liberties in Cuba, since it was through the subversion of the press, the Church, and independent political parties that the CIA did its work in Guatemala, and subsequently elsewhere.
Herper’s Magazine
http://harpers.org/blog/2007/09/six-questions-for-greg-grandin-on-ches-legacy/
La Coubre 1960
HAVANA, March 4 — Explosions on a French freighter loaded with ammunition and explosives for the Cuban Army rocked Havana today. Seventy-five to 100 were killed and more than 200 injured by the series of blasts.
La Coubre 1960 Cuba NYT.pdf – Alternative Formats
CIA report on Cuba (1963)
CIA on Cuna 1963.pdf
“It should be noted that, in 1975, when on a visit to Cuba, the American scientist Charles Henry Calisher investigated and found evidence of the existence of antibodies to dengue in the Cuban population and the lack, among Cuban people of at least 45 years of age, of antibodies to the dengue type 2 virus. “At his trial in 1984 in the United States, Eduardo Arocena, ringleader of the terrorist organization Omega 7, publicly confessed to having introduced germs into Cuba and admitted that haemorrhagic dengue fever had been introduced into the island via groups of family relatives of Cuban origin, based in the United States. “In order to determine whether or not this confession by the head of the notorious Omega 7 terrorist organization is true, regarding the groups used to introduce the haemorrhagic dengue epidemic into Cuba, we have provided below an exhaustive explanation and description of who these groups are, who organized them and in whose service they were operating.
Bioterrorism
BACTERIOLOGICAL AND TOXIN WEAPONS (UN Arocena).pdf
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