Why Is The US Obsessed With Cuba?
Sources
Ferrer, Ada. Cuba: An American History (2021)
U.S. sanctions against Cuba are endangering lives and must be lifted. United Nations Human Rights Office of High Commissioner. Press Release. June 8, 2026. https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2026/06/us-sanctions-against-cuba-are-endangering-lives-and-must-be-lifted
Five Years After the July 11 Demonstrations, Cubans Deserve A Better Future. Sec. of State Marco Rubio. Press Release. July 11, 2026. https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2026/07/five-years-after-the-july-11-demonstrations-cubans-deserve-a-better-future/
Further Sanctions on the Cuban Regime’s Sources of Funding and Tools of Oppression. Fact Sheet. US Department of State. July 13, 2026. https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2026/07/further-sanctions-on-the-cuban-regimes-sources-of-funding-and-tools-of-oppression/
Welcoming Artist Who Courageously Stood Against Cuban Regime’s Oppression. Sec. of State Marco Rubio Press Statement. July 18, 2026. https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2026/07/welcoming-artist-who-courageously-stood-against-cuban-regimes-oppression/
Badshah, Nadeem. Cuban dissident artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara cleared to travel to US. The Guardian. July 18, 2026. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jul/17/cuban-dissident-artist-luis-manuel-otero-alcantara-cleared-to-travel-to-us
United States and Catholic Relief Services Send First Humanitarian Flight to Cuba Under Secretary Rubio’s New $100 Million Assistance Commitment. Depart of State Media Note. July 21, 2026. https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2026/07/united-states-and-catholic-relief-services-send-first-humanitarian-flight-to-cuba-under-secretary-rubios-new-100-million-assistance-commitment/
Rodriguez, Andrea. Caritas starts distributing US humanitarian aid in 2 towns near Havana. AP. July 23, 2026. https://apnews.com/article/cuba-aid-us-caritas-energy-embargo-crisis-food-f0420803a8207e63596a9ad94fb26abc
Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism. Department of State. July 20, 2026. https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Cuba-Report.pdf
Wiedrich, Bob. Cuba's Role In The Underground. Chicago Tribune. Nov. 20, 1981. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP90-00806R000201180042-3.pdf
Juan Orta. History of Cuba. http://www.historyofcuba.com/history/havana/Orta.htm
Entous, Adam. C.I.A. Sets Up Secret Cuba Task Force as Trump Pressures Havana. The New York Times. Aug. 5, 2026. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/05/us/politics/cia-cuba-task-force.html
Burns, Dasha. US sends more intel assets to Cuba. Politico. August 4, 2026 https://www.politico.com/news/2026/08/04/us-sends-more-intel-assets-to-cuba-01023267
Transcript
Do you guys wanna hear the story about the time the CIA partnered up with the mafia in a plot to assassinate Fidel Castro? Sit back. It’s September, 1960. Castro just led a successful revolution in Cuba, just 90 short miles from the continental United States. The Cold War is in full swing and the CIA is on high alert seeking out potential subversive or dangerous commie influences the world over. Castro represents the closest threat yet, and getting him out of power would be the surest way to stop the advancement of Soviet influence in the Western Hemisphere. Who better to do a hit job than the mafia, members of which were exceptionally cozy to Castro himself and had been enjoying Cuba for decades as a playground for booze, cigars, gambling, and more. So the CIA calls up Sam Giancana, Al Capone’s successor in Chicago, and Santo Trafficante of the Miami Syndicate, two men on the FBI’s 10 most wanted list. During a series of clandestine meetings, the CIA offers them $150,000 US dollars for Castro’s assassination, and a man high up in the Castro regime with ties to the mob is chosen to deliver a handful of CIA-developed poison pills into Castro’s food or drink. Juan Orta is the man they picked for the job. In 1960, he was director general of the office of the Prime Minister. Fidel Castro was the prime minister. By March, 1961, when the pills were finally created and handed off to Orta to finish the job, the Cuban government was on alert that the United States was planning an imminent invasion of the island. Personnel were swiftly moved around to increase security around Fidel Castro. Before Orta had a chance to administer the fatal pills, he was moved out of his position. He quickly sought refuge in the Venezuelan embassy, knowing the Cuban leadership was on to him. For three and a half years, Orta hid out in the embassies first of Venezuela, then of Mexico, before finally escaping the island to Mexico and then landing in Miami, Florida in 1965. The same city where, six short years later, a young couple of non-citizen immigrant Cubans named Mario Rubio Reina and Oriales Garcia welcomed their third child into the world, Marco Antonio Rubio, a US citizen thanks to the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship.
Last month, Marco Antonio Rubio, as Secretary of State, released a new report titled Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism. The report attempts to simultaneously paint the Cuban government as incredibly weak and inept while also being incredibly dangerous and powerful. By the Trump regime’s telling, Cuba has sustained, for nearly seven decades, quote “one of the most durable and damaging foreign intelligence penetrations in American history.” But at the same time the country is run by inept, corrupt leaders who have driven the country into the ground from their inability to properly provide for their own people. And this report, while being the pet project of Marco Rubio who has a personal vendetta against the island of Cuba, is also handy for the Trump regime’s larger attack against leftists, who they deride as “terrorists” whether they’re at home or abroad. According to this report, the rot of far left terrorism can be traced directly to Cuba.
And this isn’t your grandmother’s red scare, no no, this is a NEW type of communist leftist terrorism. See my video last week for more background on the Red Scare and how we’ve entered a new one. This report puts a finer point on just what kind of red scare we’re in. Specifically, it posits that Cuba’s form of communism is “uniquely dangerous” because it is quote “built around racial, social, and even civilizational grievances rather than economic class conflict.” The reason for it being so different and so dangerous is because quote “It was permeated by something new: The doctrine of tercermundismo (“Third Worldism”).” Under the regime of Third Worldism, the struggle included the oppressed peoples of the west, who were colonized subjects similar to the Vietnamese peasant or the Congolese rebel. According to the report, quote “the New Left was animated by Black Power, radical feminism, Third World liberation, and – above all else – the radical rejection of Western culture, history and identity in all its forms.”
The report ties Cuba and Cuban infiltration and influence to all the ills of quote unquote “leftism” and “wokism” that are outlined in Project 2025 and a number of presidential decrees, including NSPM-7, which we’ve discussed ad naseum but is the Presidential memo that directs the federal government to target “antifa” “domestic terrorists” for things like “anti-capitalism, anti-Americanism, and trying to overthrow the US government.” Those are the same epitaphs thrown at communists and socialists and according to this report the source of all of this–the communism but also the wokism, the DEI of it all, it all goes back to Cuba.
In my video last week we discussed the idea that the mid-century Red Scare blamed communist infiltrators from Soviet Russia for racial unrest in the south. This is part of a long history of white terror that the blacks will rise up and revolt, and the equally bigoted idea that the only reason why an otherwise docile, happy population of blacks would ever get it into their heads to be unhappy with their lot in life is if some outside agitator stepped in and told them to be unhappy. The same rhetoric is happening here in the Cuba report–the idea that the blacks wouldn’t think to turn to socialism or collectivism but for the nefarious penetrating influence of the Cuban regime, the idea that no one but Cuba has successfully tied racism to socialism and exported that around the world, which is betting on the fact that you’ve probably never read the likes of Frantz Fanon or WEB Dubois or other writers and thinkers who managed to come up with the idea that racism and classism and socialism are all intertwined with each other even before the Cuban revolution came to fruition.
But of course it’s not just that Cuba spread this woke third worldism, it goes deeper than that. You know the whole idea that leftists have infiltrated every aspect of US society, from universities to the media to the government and everywhere in between? Guess who’s to blame. Cuba. Quote “Through its cultivation of American activists, its infiltration of American universities, its sprawling influence and espionage networks, and its position as the spiritual hub of the Third World revolution – becoming a pilgrimage destination for generations of New Left activists and intellectuals – Cuba has played an instrumental role in shaping America’s radical left from the 1960s through to today.”
And there are many aspects of the US-Cuba relationship throughout history that are a lot like that meme of the multiple spidermen pointing at each other in a circle. Every accusation is also an admission. For example, the report posits that quote “nearly all of the notable Marxist guerilla movements in our hemisphere since 1959 have received some form of support from Havana.” Citing to no evidence and not acknowledging that nearly all the notable guerilla movements that served the US and capitalism everywhere around the world have some sort of support or meddling from the US. The report paints all the global anti-imperialist movements of the last century as merely the maniacal plans of covert Cuban-backed operatives and not the very obvious and clear outcome of centuries of violent, bloody imperialism perpetuated by the United States and other colonizing countries. Again, it's the idea that these colonized places that are being used like puppets by the major capitalist powers simply wouldn't have considered that armed struggle was the answer, that fighting back was an option, unless Cuban operatives had come in and organized them.
And of course the Trump regime has really made up this novel idea that far left terrorists are all aligned with this nonexistent group called “Antifa” and that their activities should fall under the blanket category of “domestic terrorism”--that is all made up and based on the paranoid lunacy of a few nut job goons inside the Trump regime–but the general idea that Cuba is a danger to the western hemisphere and exporting its dangerous ideology across the globe, well that’s been around since the 1959 revolution on the island. And it didn’t go so well the first time we tried to stop it…
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Earlier this month, the Trump regime leaked that it had set up a secret Cuba task force, redirecting satellites and intelligence assets toward the island in an attempt to undermine the Cuban government. This means more cyberintelligence, more intelligence analysts, and people available to manage covert influence operations. The apparent goals of the operations include infiltrating the Cuban elite to try to get influential people on the island to pressure the Cuban government to push out the anti-American hardliners and replace them with people more willing to play ball with the United States. Like how they took out Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela with the hope that someone more willing to bend to the will of the United States would take over, which appears to be generally what happened there. However, there’s a major difference between what happened in Venezuela and what is possible in Cuba. First of all, Nicolas Maduro is a much more recognizable figure than the current leader of Cuba. Could you name the President of Cuba? Fidel Castro is dead and his little brother Raul hasn’t been president since 2018. So doing a GI Joe style military operation on the island like they did in Venezuela to take out a president who isn’t really the face of the menace they accuse Cuba of being doesn’t quite have the bravado that the Nicolas Maduro operation did. The president of Cuba is Miguel Diaz Canel, for the record.
Additionally, Cuba is an island and all that water creates a pretty natural barrier to invasion. Also it is true that Cuba’s national intelligence apparatus punches dramatically above its weight–the US has struggled for decades to maintain any intelligence personnel on the ground on the island because of how efficiently they become tracked and countersurveilled by Cuban intelligence. And then, of course, there’s the history. The US tried a land invasion of Cuba before. And it went really really badly. And it is this history, the Bay of Pigs disaster, that is hanging over the creation of this new secret Cuba task force. It’s the first known secret Cuba task force since that ill-fated one was created back in the 1960s. According to these leakers, however, it is much more limited in scope than the task force that led to the Bay of Pigs invasion was, but the nature of these task forces is that they have an increased number of personnel on call to mobilize on a moment's notice, so things can change rapidly. This has a lot of people worried that the US is about to escalate things in Cuba the way it did in Venezuela and the way it attempted to do in Iran. But we’re six or seven months into the conflict with Iran, with no end in sight and at great cost both to US taxpayer dollars and to US military arsenal which is being dramatically depleted as the conflict wears on. Some insiders told Politico that that doesn’t matter, and the Cuba issue can be dealt with even as the war with Iran continues. For most Americans, however, the idea of getting embroiled in ANOTHER conflict, initiated by the man who ran on the promise of no more foreign wars, America first, focus on domestic issues, etc etc etc, is NOT what the people want. And it is the entire history of US relations with Cuba that are now hanging over this secret task force and its decision about what to do next. And it’s that history I want to examine today, because Trump didn’t just wake up one day and think I’d like to go after Cuba now. The history of relations between the US and Cuba, dating back to before the United States existed, is one with a lot of recurring themes and patterns that we’re still seeing play out today, that Trump is not the architect of but is instead conforming to. Specifically, this Cuba task force has people drawing comparisons to the Bay of Pigs, and I want to talk about that military disaster and look at how it went so horribly wrong and the very long shadow of that disaster on US-Cuba relations, because that context is super important to understanding what is happening between the US and Cuba today. But in order to understand the Bay of Pigs and how the fuck that ever came about, we need some historical context. And yeah we’re going WAY back. A lot of this information and so much more is from the book Cuba: An American History by Ada Ferrer, its a book written in 2021 that documents the history of Cuban-US relations but charts it back to Christopher Columbus through to the presidency of Joe Biden, it’s really fascinating and eye-opening. I’ve linked it in the sources which are linked in the description, as always. Obviously this video would be like 10 hours long if I got into the details of 500 years of history so there are just a few trends I would like to highlight for you over the course of that long relationship.
The US has had a relationship with Cuba since before it was its own country, since colonial times. And already, hundreds of years ago, familiar themes began popping up. Specifically, the use of Cuba as a pawn and a bargaining chip between colonial powers has been happening since Christopher Columbus set foot on Cuba’s shores. Cuba was the source of much of the world’s sugar, which required an extensive population of enslaved people to maintain. It also turned the island into a cash cow for whichever colonial power controlled it. And when the US was a colony of Great Britain, its earliest settlers saw Cuba as a potential valuable asset, one only 90 short miles off the shores of Florida. The British saw this, too, and in the 1700s invaded the island, taking control from Spain. And in the 1763 Treaty of Paris, the two colonial powers, with no input from Cubans, decided that Britain would give up Havana and, in exchange, Spain would give them Florida.
During the American revolution, as the colonies fought for independence from Great Britain, a longtime foe of Spain, they received assistance from Spain to support their war efforts often by way of Cuba. During the US war of independence, the colonies were given “most favored nation” status with Cuba, allowing for the free flow of trade, vessels, and military assets between Cuba and the mainland. Cuba, an island optimized to grow a single crop, was dependent on outside sources for everything other than sugar from very early on. And the newly united colonies relied on Cuba for sugar and as a major source of silver upon which the new country’s currency would be based. Once again, Cuba’s fate was decided without giving them a seat at the table when, in exchange for Spanish support during the American revolution via the use of Cuba, the US agreed to give Spain Florida as well as free navigation of the Mississippi river.
During the industrial revolution of the 1800s, as other Latin American countries gained their independence, Cuba remained a Spanish colony. This was in large part due to the fact that the island was managed by a group of incredibly wealthy sugar plantation owners who saw what happened in neighboring Haiti, a bloody revolt that led to the island being taken over by the enslaved population, and they were terrified the same could happen in Cuba. Staying aligned with Spain, receiving support from Spain, even if it meant giving away some of their power, was a preferable fate. Independence could empower the enslaved population and could get out of the white plantation-owners control very quickly. The status quo was far preferable. But the US also had its eye on Cuba as a possible acquisition. Thomas Jefferson, as early as 1809, was daydreaming about acquiring Cuba and Canada to create a great “empire for liberty.” Yes an empire for liberty envisioned by a slaveholding imperialist.
And even though Spain controlled Cuba, it really was the US with which the island had the closest ties during the industrial revolution. And both countries were heavily reliant on the other for their trade. Over 60% of sugar, 40% of coffee, and 90% of cigars imported into the US in 1820 were from Cuba. And Cuba relied on the US for luxury goods, basic goods like food because all the land in Cuba was used for sugar, and industrial machinery that was produced in New England and used to process the sugar crops. The two countries were also heavily reliant on each other for the perpetuation of the slave trade.
This was a fact that really blew my mind: Of all the Africans forcibly transported to the island of Cuba during the course of the slave trade, over 350 years, more than 70% of the Africans arrived in Cuba AFTER Spain had illegalized the trade in 1820. And it was Americans who assisted in the illegal slave trade, American ships that brought enslaved people to the island. By the 1850s, 90% of ships arriving in Cuba with human cargo were made in America. And it was Cuban and American slave owners who most feared Cuban independence and pushed most fiercely against any threat to the slave trade. An independent Cuba or an end to slavery in the US spelled doom for slave owners in both countries. And so, when civil war broke out in the US in the 1860s, Cuba offered extensive support to the southern rebels. Confederate vessels ran between New Orleans, Mobile, and elsewhere to Cuba, where they would dock for repairs, for protection, or to engage in trade. Southern cotton was traded for money that was used to support the Confederacy. Cuba supplied confederate ships with weapons. And as it became clear the south could lose the war, southern slaveholders began exporting humans and other “assets” to Cuba for protection. Once the south lost the war, southern plantation owners moved to Cuba to continue profiting off slave labor there, though peace was short-lived.
The Spanish-American war of 1898 is not called the Spanish-American War in Cuba. It was a war led by rebels for Cuban independence. It was Cuba’s version of the American Revolutionary War. Could you imagine if France called the American Revolution the British-French War because they intervened to help? That’s quite literally what happened to Cuba’s revolution. Prior to American intervention in 1898, the Cubans had been fighting Spain for YEARS, and they were winning, too. Cuban independence seemed imminent with or without help from the Americans. Then, in 1898, the USS Maine exploded in Havana harbor, killing 260 US sailors and giving the US a reason to declare war on Spain. The cause of the explosion was never discovered and it is often posited that the US blew up its own ship as pretext for coming in, asserting itself in Cuba’s struggle for independence, and ensuring that the US stepped into the hole left by Spain.
As part of its agreement to enter the war on the side of the Cuban rebels, the US congress passed the Teller Amendment, which guaranteed that the US would remain in control of the island and its government until “pacification” was accomplished. Within a few months, Spain admitted defeat, again a defeat that was already likely even without the intervention of the United States. But instead of Cuba and Spain sitting down to negotiate a peace treaty, it was the US and Spain, on Cuban soil, who negotiated the initial peace agreement. A few months later, representatives from the US and Spain met in Paris to sign the Treaty of Paris to formally end Spanish rule in Cuba. No Cuban was present at the negotiations. That same treaty also gave the US control over the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico, again with no representatives from any of the territories present for the negotiations.
Newly in control of Cuba, the Americans had an issue–there was a large, well trained militia on the island that had just successfully ousted Spain. In order to ensure those fighting skills weren’t turned on the US, the revolutionary army was disbanded, the US confiscated their weapons, and the US ensured that the newly formed Cuban government was made up of people sympathetic to the US. And remember how the Teller Amendment promised that once peace was established then the US would leave Cuba to its own devices? That promise lasted all of a few months. Eventually, the US changed the goal posts. Instead of pacification it was actually “self-government” that had to be achieved before the US would end its military occupation of the island. What did “self government” mean? No one really knew and it was entirely up to the US to define. And it was during this post revolutionary period of US occupation that the United States stacked the economic deck against Cubans. I mean it was already a monoculture reliant on outlawed slave labor to survive, and throughout Cuba’s history up until that point it had relied on outside sources to import necessities for daily life. That is partially the nature of living on an island but it is especially acute when all the usable land on the island has been monopolized by a single crop. In the aftermath of Cuba’s war for independence, the US refused to grant credit to Cubans, refused to expel Spaniards or expropriate their land as was done in the US after its own revolution, and only US citizens were eligible to file claims for damage to their property in Cuba during the Cuban war of independence, Cubans could not file claims for the damage they incurred. At the same time, the US controlled government in Cuba passed laws encouraging corporate development of farmland and dictating who could and could not vote. And who was ready and waiting to develop farmland in Cuba? American corporations, which swooped in and accumulated more and more land from the Cubans.
By 1901, as Cubans held a constitutional convention to write their first constitution, the US as part of an army appropriations bill introduced the Platt Amendment. This amendment once more moved the goal posts, stating that actually the only way all along that Cuba could shake the military occupation of the US was if they established a clear definition of the future relations of the United States with Cuba into their new constitution. And in order for the Cubans to prove their capability for “self government” as required to withdraw US occupation of the island, they had to accept the Platt Amendment as part of their new constitution. That was the new choice: Platt Amendment or continued US occupation. The Platt Amendment limited the Cuban government’s ability to enter into treaties with other nations or incur debt, it required Cuba to maintain certain territory for American naval bases and coaling stations, and it gave the United States the ongoing permanent right to intervene militarily in Cuba whenever it wanted. A few years later, the Cuban government attempted to get a concession out of the US by signing a treaty of commercial reciprocity. The treaty cut tariffs on US products entering Cuba as well as lowering tariffs on Cuban sugar entering the US. The problem was that by that point a huge percentage of the sugar being produced in Cuba was being produced by US companies. So it was US companies benefitting from both sides of the agreement. And lowered tariffs on US goods entering Cuba meant that Cuban companies couldn’t compete, either with the American goods or with American sugar companies on the island. By 1907, 60% of rural property was owned by foreigners, and most of that was owned by Americans. The issue was further exacerbated by a crash on the price of sugar after WWI, leading to the failure of smaller sugar plantations and closure of Cuban banks. US banks that were less vulnerable to the fluctuations of a single crop then gained control over the failed sugar plantations, so that by 1922 fully 2/3rds of all sugar being produced in Cuba was coming from US-owned mills. Meanwhile, prohibition in the United States meant that by the 1920s, Cuba, especially Havana, became the playground of wealthy US tourists, visiting the island for booze, gambling, and more. As ostentatious foreign wealth poured into Havana, the rest of the island, especially in rural areas, remained destitute. The 1920s saw the rise of the communist party in Cuba and the awakening of a new strain of Cuban nationalism, spurred on especially by hatred of the Platt Amendment and everything it represented. After the stock market crashed, then Cuban president Gerardo Machado instigated harsh crackdowns against protestors and held on to power based on elections that were widely known to be corrupt. As tensions on the island grew, threat of US intervention under the Platt Amendment intensified, and the Cuban army ultimately ousted Machado in 1933. The new president, Carlos Manuel de Cespedes, was US-born and hand picked by the US to take over as President of Cuba, complete with a cabinet hand-picked by the US. His presidency lasted less than a month. He was ousted by a popular uprising and rebels who were joined by the Cuban army to oust Cespedes and put a new president, Ramon Grau, in his place. This was the first Cuban government ever installed without oversight and approval directly from the US. So, in retaliation, the US refused to recognize the new government, especially because President Grau was intent on getting the Platt Amendment out of the Cuban constitution. That refusal to recognize Cuba increased instability on the island–with the US leading the way, other nations also refused to recognize the new government, and it gave support to those in Cuba who sought to undermine the new government as well.
One prominent member of this new government was one Fulgencio Batista, who became commander in chief of the army after the popular uprising. The new laws passed under this new government drew opposition from prominent business owners, who often disobeyed the laws, refused to pay taxes, and got support from the US government for doing so. As head of the armed forces, Batista often proved sympathetic to business owners, which created division within the new government that the US sought to exploit. The US ambassador to Cuba at the time carefully cultivated a relationship with Batista, whose power grew as he used the military to tamp down on worker unrest, opening fire on striking mill workers, and to expel and imprison foreign agitators and Cuban communists and other political dissidents. Batista’s power grew, and with the backing of the United States because of his willingness to protect business interests, Batista became the de facto ruler of Cuba. With him in place, the US beneficently agreed to get rid of the Platt Amendment in exchange for President Grau stepping down.
With Batista now as the US-backed dictator, the crackdown began in earnest. Under Batista, the army assassinated opposition leaders, threw students and workers in jail for protesting, forcibly dissolved labor unions, suspended civil rights, and proclaimed martial law on the island. But then, interestingly, once all the radicals and dissidents from the 1933 revolution were successfully murdered or run off the island, Batista seemingly changed course, embracing populism and championing changes that his own enemies had fought for in the past. He gave land back to the peasants, enacted rent control, lowered mortgage rates, he even legalized the communist party, removed union restrictions, and brought together a constitutional assembly to rewrite a new constitution. And the Cuban constitution of 1940 was undeniably progressive. Not only did it enshrine political, legal, and civil rights, it also recognized social rights, like a guaranteed national minimum wage, equal pay for equal work, paid maternity leave, the right to unionize and strike, it even outlawed latifundios, the extremely large landholdings that dominated the island. And in 1940, what was considered a free and fair election was held and Batista won it and assumed the presidency. Of course it’s one thing to write up a pretty document, its another thing to enforce it. None of the laws that would actually need to be passed to enforce this new pretty constitution ever materialized, and the presidency of Batista, as well as his two predecessors, Grau, yes the former president he got another term after Batista, and Prio, all three presidencies were plagued with corruption, including a ton of collaboration with the American mob.
By 1952, Batista decided he wanted another shot at the presidency, but the election wasn’t looking like it was going to come out in his favor. It was clear he was going to lose. So instead he staged a whole ass coup. He had maintained control of the army through all of this, after all, so the military simply took over Havana, Batista dissolved the Congress, cancelled the election he was clearly going to lose, oh and also raised the presidential salary from 2000 dollars a month to 12,000. And what do you know, within two weeks of the coup the Truman government officially recognized the Batista government in Cuba. How convenient.
In 1952 while this was all going down, a young Fidel Castro was a practicing lawyer getting involved with leftist politics who had decided it was time for a revolution. For his first act, he decided to stage what ended up being a severely botched attack on July 26th, 1953 at the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba to try to overthrow the Batista regime. In retaliation, Batista executed 50 of the rebels involved in the coup attempt, images of the executions and other punishment were front page news, and Castro was sentenced to 15 years in prison for his role. The brutality and unpopularity of the Batista regime, especially in response to the attempted coup, turned public sentiment in Castro’s favor. And in a true feat of propaganda and mythmaking, the 26th of July movement that Castro eventually rode to victory on six years later was born of that initial botched attack. It was during his stint in prison that Fidel Castro had the time to read, to regroup, to train himself and his comrades in jail with him, so that the next attempt would actually work.
After a sham election in 1954, Batista tried to curry favor with the Cuban people by pardoning the July 26th prisoners, including Castro, who fled to Mexico where he met Che Guevara. Mexico is also where he regrouped and raised funds for his next revolution from Cuban immigrants in the US and Cuban businessmen in Latin America. Books and movies have been made about the details of the Cuban revolution, but once Castro gained power in Cuba and toppled the Batista regime in 1959, he was quick to purge the island of Batista’s sympathizers. He dissolved congress, removed elected officials, dismantled political parties, disbanded the army, abolished Batista’s secret police, put a new cabinet in place, and passed laws allowing for the confiscation of property and for the death penalty. Revolutionary tribunals tried former Batista officials, many of whom were quickly convicted and executed, with wide popular support from the Cuban people.
It was these trials and executions, at the literal same time as the US was executing people like Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for less, that the US government used as fodder for condemning the new government in Cuba, saying it highlighted how ruthless and brutal the Castro regime was. Castro also passed urban reform laws cutting rents, and agrarian reform, which expropriated large landholdings to the state to create small land grants to the landless, agricultural cooperatives, or state farms. Cuba passed laws that prohibited foreigners from acquiring more land in Cuba. And many of the reforms passed at this time in Cuba weren’t frankly particularly revolutionary, many fell in line with UN recommendations at the time, and most were supported by a majority of the Cuban population. But, of course, these changes angered big business and landlords on the island, many of whom were from the US. And those business interests pushed president Eisenhower to retaliate. It was during this time that the US imposed its first embargos on the island, first an arms embargo and then pretty much everything else by 1960. Reminder that up until this point, the US and Cuba were incredibly close trading partners, with Cuba relying heavily on US imports for everything other than the few monocrops produced on the island. Because of these economic sanctions, Cuba was forced to look elsewhere for survival, and the Soviet Union was happy to fill the trade void left by the United States in Cuba. And it was these sanctions, coupled with the history of meddling and paternalism by the United States, that helped solidify the Castro regime in Cuba. Support for the Cuban government remained strong among those who stayed on the island (many fled) in large part because everyone had a common enemy: the US. So even as Castro pushed back democratic elections, shuddered newspapers, chipped away at independent labor unions, and infringed on other civil rights in the name of the revolution, his power consolidated and the Cuban people were largely supportive of the new regime. Again this is an oversimplification, many people had many difficult emotions about the new regime, and many people fled as well, but there was clear popular support for the Castro regime, despite what the US wanted the world to believe. Cuban Law 851, which authorized the Cuban government to seize US-owned property and give it back to the Cuban people, was read allowed to a crowd of thousands as they cheered. That was a favorite move of Castro’s–give long, roving speeches and read laws out loud to cheering crowds. Additionally, the Cuban revolution brought about real changes in peoples’ lives–many gained land, learned to read, saw their wages increase–this meant that huge swaths of the Cuban population gained a personal stake in the fate of the revolution on the island. And so they took it personally when the US tried to intervene.
And as popular support grew and US sanctions increased, it became a self perpetuating machine, wherein the Cuban government could justify increasingly radical reforms on the basis of anti-US sentiment, on Cuban nationalism and sovereignty. So it was US aggression against Cuba that helped to radicalize the new Cuban government.
And Cuba’s close ties with the soviet union, those agrarian reforms that could be so easily accused of being communist (even though Fidel Castro himself was far less inclined to self identify as socialist or communist during this time), during the cold war as tensions between the US and the Soviet Union mounted, meant that the US, ever intent on meddling in Cuban affairs, couldn’t help but try and stick its dirty little fingies in the Cuban pie. And so in March, 1960, President Eisenhower approved the secret project aimed quote “to bring about the replacement of the Castro regime with one more devoted to the true interests of the Cuban people and more acceptable to the US.” But the ultimate goal was to avoid any indication that regime change was instigated by the US. The goal was to undermine Castro’s popular support among the Cuban people through the use of mass propaganda campaigns as well as to establish covert surveillance networks on the island and a paramilitary force outside of Cuba that could be deployed at a moments notice to enter Cuba, connect with counterrevolutionaries on the island, and train and lead those resistance forces to topple the regime. The intent, always, was for the US to remain in the shadows, to make it look like a counterrevolutionary force made up entirely of Cuban exiles and supported by the Cuban people.
The problem was that the Cuban exile paramilitary they were training to engage in a land invasion in Cuba were stationed in Guatemala. People on the ground in Guatemala saw what was happening, informed the Soviets, and then the Soviets passed the information on to Havana. It was literally front page news that there was a US-backed exile training camp in Guatemala planning a ground invasion of Cuba. In January, 1961, JFK assumed the US presidency and was briefed on the covert plans happening around Cuba. From the start, the entire US operation was a situation of too many cooks in the kitchen. The CIA, the state department, the defense department, and the National Security Council were all meeting every week to discuss Cuba, veering from plans around guerilla warfare and covert intelligence infiltrations to air assaults and sea invasions, ultimately culminating in a CIA report to JFK when he took office in 1961 assuring the president that all of these operations would eventually result in the general uprising of the Cuban people across the island, ultimately leading to a revolt by the Cuban Army, and the Bay of Pigs would be the rallying point for thousands of armed militiamen ready to overthrow the Castro regime.
The date for the planned invasion was set for April 17th, 1961. Despite the fact that dozens of people met for months to discuss the plan, it was JFK at the final hour before the invasion, meeting one on one with a couple advisors, who ultimately made the call to change the nature of the invasion, to limit the air assault, to cut the number of invading men, to ultimately choose the Bay of Pigs, that sealed the fate of the Cuban exiles attempting to invade the island. Early in the morning, Brigade 2506 arrived at the Bay of Pigs. They thought that an air assault had already crippled the Cuban airforce, but that never happened. They were ill prepared for the location–there were coral reefs they kept running into, there were entire civilian construction crews on the beach building new resorts in the bay that they didn’t know about, and the Cuban militia was already on the ground there given that the Cuban government was well aware of the exile militia training and the imminent invasion. And the Cuban airforce, having easily survived the limited US air assault, was quickly raining down bullets on the invaders. And even if NONE of that had been an issue, the Bay of Pigs location was far from the mountains where the counterrevolutionaries were stationed that they were supposed to meet up with to march to Havana and overthrow the Castro government. Literally before they even reached the shores of the Bay of Pigs, the entire operation was doomed. 114 of the invading force were killed in battle and 1200 were captured by the Cuban forces. And the US-backed airstrikes, while ineffective against the Cuban airforce, did manage to kill 7 Cubans and injure 53. So not only was it completely ineffective and deadly, the Bay of Pigs provided an undeniable major victory for Fidel Castro’s new government. It further solidified his power in the face of the US menace. Billboards across the island touted the Bay of Pigs disaster as “the first defeat of Yankee imperialism.” Those suspected of supporting the invasion were rounded up, and some were tried and executed for treason. And given the failure at the Bay of Pigs, Castro and the Soviet Union both assumed the US would try again, and so the two powers grew closer, with Cuba actively seeking military assistance from the Soviet Union in the face of the clear and present danger of another US invasion. 18 months later, it was discovered that the Soviet Union had positioned nuclear warheads on the island, and the world came within a hairs breadth of total nuclear annihilation. And what ended what was to be known as the Cuban Missile Crisis? An agreement. An agreement between two world powers that did not involve Cuba. The Soviets agreed to remove the missiles from Cuba in exchange for the US removing its missiles from Turkey. Fidel Castro learned about the agreement from the radio, same as everyone else.
The Cuban Missile Crisis was the brink that terrified the world enough that it led to nuclear nonproliferation agreements and slowed the creation of nuclear weapons the world over. But that didn’t mean that Castro was now able to rest easy. Covert surveillance by the US on the island intensified, with regime change always on the table. Assassination attempts against Castro abounded, and the Cold War continued to rage on, with Cuba a convenient Soviet satellite. With the support of the soviet union, Cuba became the second most militarized state per capita behind North Korea. And it was with that Soviet weaponry and economic support that Cuba would attempt to export its socialist revolution around the world, with varying degrees of success.
And Cuba’s dependence on the Soviet Union cannot be overstated. By 1987, it supplied 100% of Cuba’s oil, 91% of its fertilizer, as well as a ton of other essential materials for the Cuban economy. And 85% of all exports leaving Cuba went to the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc. And so, predictably, when the Soviet Union began to crumble at the end of the 80s, the Cuban government was made incredibly vulnerable. And who was there to step in and take advantage of that vulnerability? The US, of course. In 1990, the US dangled loans and economic aid over the head of the soviets in exchange for ending aid to Cuba. In 1991, the US and Moscow held a meeting. Cuba was not invited. During the meeting, Russia agreed to end trade subsidies to Cuba and withdraw all soviet troops from the island. The troop withdrawal was publicly announced via a news conference, which is how the world, including Fidel Castro, learned of the development.
The fall of the Soviet Union was catastrophic for Cuba. By 1992, trade with Russia dropped by more than half, trade with the eastern bloc vanished, the island had no fuel to power its machinery to harvest its sugar. Mills began to close, and thousands lost their jobs. A period of dramatic economic austerity took hold on the island. Over 200 consumer products were rationed. Families spent 15 hours per week waiting in line to get food. Dietary staples from the USSR vanished. On average, in the early and mid 1990s, the daily consumption of calories on the island dropped by one third. The average Cuban adult during this period lost 20 pounds due to austerity measures. Electricity, water, and gas were all rationed, sometimes getting shut off for days at a time.
And while this was all happening, they were rejoicing in Washington, where it was assumed that the collapse of the Castro regime was just a matter of time. To speed things along, as the Cuban people were quite literally starving, Congress passed the Cuban Democracy Act, which tightened sanctions against Cuba including banning any vessel that had traveled to Cuba from landing in the US for 180 days, further alienating Cuba from its other trading partners. It allowed the US president to cut foreign aid to any country that helped Cuba. Both presidential candidates in 1992, Clinton and George HW Bush supported the measure, which was signed into law in October 1992.
Searching for a new lifeline to keep the country afloat, Castro turned to tourism, opening the island up for the first time in decades to international investment. Millions of dollars and thousands of tourists began pouring into the island. Hotels and resorts were built. Special stores catering to tourists that only accepted US dollars sprouted up. Businesses were given greater leeway–they could own a majority of their own shares, repatriate their profits, they got a moratorium on tax payments, they could hire and fire people without needing approval from the Cuban government. Up until 1993, the US dollar was illegal in Cuba. It was used by tourists and flowed freely on the black market, but by officially legalizing the dollar, the Cuban government was able to recapture the flow of money into and out of the island. Self employment was legalized, bed and breakfasts and privately owned restaurants were legalized as well. The tax revenue from these new businesses helped bolster the government, avoiding a total collapse. And in 1999, the Cuban government gained further support when Hugo Chavez was elected to power in Venezuela and became a primary source of oil imports to Cuba.
The US continued to double down, passing the Helms Burton Act of 1996 which gave Congress the right to override the President if he or she ever ended the Cuban embargo and it authorized financial support to dissident groups within Cuba. After 9/11, the US became embroiled in the War on Terror, the Cold War was a distant memory, and the communists in Cuba were less of a threat than the new Islamic terrorists the US was focused on fighting off. Even still, in 2006 when Fidel Castro handed provisional power over to his little brother Raul, the United States was ready and waiting for Cubans to take to the streets, freed from the shackles of their unwanted dictator Fidel Castro. The State Department set up a “war room”, broadcasting radio messages into Cuba advocating for a “democratic Cuba”, preparing finally for the regime change that had been such a long time coming. But other countries didn’t join in the United States’ crusade. Many sent congratulatory messages to the new leader. Cubans didn’t take to the streets or launch a new revolution. Raul remained interim president until 2008 when he officially assumed the presidency at the same time as the United States elected Barack Obama, the first black president and the first US president who seemed open to normalizing relations with the island. And over 60% of the US population also supported normalizing relations with Cuba, including 44% of Cuban Americans. And in 2016, Obama visited the island, the first time in nearly 90 years that a sitting US president visited the island. And Obama was only the second sitting US president to EVER visit Cuba, preceded only by Calvin Coolidge in 1928.
I find that fact really striking. I just spent the better part of an hour laying out hundreds of years of US-Cuban relations for you, a relationship that bordered on obsessive, especially on the part of the United States, a relationship defined by imperialism, paternalism, colonialism, a relationship that has resulted in repeated decisions made for Cuba without Cuba’s input, a relationship that stands apart from all other relationships the US has with any other country, for HUNDREDS of years, Cuba has been special. Thomas Jefferson dreamed about adding Cuba to the United States’ cap. Every president since him has as well. And despite ALL of this, the US has only ever bothered to send a sitting president over to the island twice. Over the course of hundreds of years.
Fidel Castro died in 2016, two weeks after Trump won the presidential election. The running joke at the time was that Fidel Castro would never rest until he saw the downfall of the United States and with the election of Trump he could now die in peace. Trump of course undid the work Obama had done of normalizing relations with Cuba, and now in his second term he seems intent on revisiting the age old dream of regime change in Cuba, bringing the island back under the control of the US government once more. And once again, this appears to be backfiring. He is of course being met with literal centuries of anti-US sentiment on the island. And he just took out Cuba’s top oil trading partner in Venezuela, giving the Cuban government all the fodder it needs to place the blame for the current austerity measures on the island squarely on the shoulders of the United States government. Once again, because of the actions of the US in Venezuela and increased economic sanctions against Cuba and threats against any nation that tries to come to Cuba’s aid, the island has been experiencing dramatic instability, from massive black outs, to hospitals and other basic services on the brink of failure. Most people in Cuba today are getting access to electricity and water for a few hours at a time before it is shut off again. Fuel for transport is practically non-existent. And it’s pushing Cuba to turn to new sources for survival including, for example, China, which is supplying the island with much needed alternative energy sources. In the last year alone, Chinese-built solar panels have increased the island’s solar power generation from 6 percent of the energy generated on the island to 20 percent. China has committed to nearly doubling the number of solar parks on the island by 2028. China has also extended an emergency line of credit to the island as well as 60,000 tons of rice. And there is increased evidence that China may also be supplying Cuba with new intelligence and surveillance equipment. Once again, US economic and political aggression against Cuba have simply solidified anti-US sentiment on the island and pushed Cuba into closer relations with powers the US deems a threat. And no amount of oil embargo can block the sun from powering Cuban solar panels. Though lord knows the US might just try. And of course, as history tells us, the US will simply use this new cooperation with China as pretext to increase pressure on Cuba, potentially up to and including another Bay of Pigs style military operation on the island.
The history of US-Cuban relations is a classic example of the idea that one person’s hero is another person’s villain. One country’s terrorist is another country’s independence fighter. The US is able to spin Cuba as this anti-American, anti-woke communist monster, one that hates America because they hate our freedoms, they hate our democracy, they’re jealous of our economic success, but an examination of the history indicates that Cuba might be acting more in self defense than anything else. Trump’s goons in DC love to shout that radical leftists and communists see themselves as the victims, that they should just take accountability for their lives, lift themselves up by the bootstraps, stop blaming others for all their problems. And yet when Cuba has repeatedly bootstrapped the hell out of shitty situations usually caused by the United States, the US is quick to call themselves the victim in the whole scenario. The reality of the history of relations between the US and Cuba is far more complicated, far less black and white, but the US government is betting that you won’t know any better, and that their propaganda will work on you. Don’t let it.
Here are some books you can read to educate yourself so you don’t fall for the government’s propaganda. First is the one I mentioned at the beginning Cuba: An American History by Ada Ferrer. And I’ll also recommend two books I read in college. Fun fact I have degrees in both Political Science and Latin American and Latino Studies and I visited Cuba for two weeks on a class trip in 2012 when Obama had relaxed restrictions enough to allow educational groups onto the island. Two books really stuck with me–one is called Oye Loca by Susana Pena about the Cubans fleeing Cuba during the Mariel boatlift in the 1980s, and especially of the experience of gay Cubans in Cuba and the Cuban diaspora. And then finally Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America which is one of those books that’s so eye opening that once you see it you can’t unsee it. At least that was my experience with it reading it as a 20 year old.
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Be sure to check out my video from Wednesday doing a deep dive into the Red Scare.
