Word: castros
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Harvard University Center for International Affairs; $9.95 paperback), a timely new historical survey by British Diplomat Robin Renwick. The book dispassionately examines numerous episodes of economic warfare, including the League of Nations trade restrictions against Italy following its 1935 invasion of Ethiopia and the U.S. embargo of Cuba after Castro came to power in 1959. As a former head of the Rhodesia department of the British Foreign Office, Renwick brings particular insight to his discussion of the 13-year United Nations effort to topple Rhodesia's white government through a trade embargo...
Publicly we made it clear that the U.S. would not invade Cuba if the Soviet missiles were withdrawn. The President never shared the view that the missile crisis should be "used" to pick a fight to the finish with Castro; he correctly insisted that the real issue in the crisis was with the Soviet government, and that the one vital bone of contention was the secret and deceit-covered movement of Soviet missiles into Cuba. He recognized that an invasion by U.S. forces would be bitter and bloody, and that it would leave festering wounds in the body politic...
From 1977 to 1979 Smith served as director of the State Department's Office of Cuban Affairs; he then went to Havana to head the U.S. interests section before resigning last month. While acknowledging that no U.S. Administration has ever devised an effective policy for dealing with Fidel Castro, Smith especially blasts the rigid, confrontational approach of the Reagan White House. From the start, Smith contends, the Reaganauts were obsessed with forcing Cuba to stop meddling in Central America and, in particular, to quit supplying arms to the guerrillas in El Salvador. But U.S. attempts to pressure Castro backfired...
Smith argues that over the past 18 months Washington spurned at least three separate diplomatic initiatives by Havana. Last November, then Secretary of State Alexander Haig met secretly with a Cuban official in Mexico City; U.S. Ambassador-at-Large Vernon Walters conferred with Castro in Havana four months later. Both meetings were unproductive. As a good-will gesture, Smith contends, the Cubans also informed the U.S. in December that they had stopped shipping arms to Nicaragua, implying that they had turned off the weapons flow to the Salvadoran guerrillas. Washington responded by further lambasting the Havana regime in public. Smith...
...Professor Stephan A. Thernstrom, then a first-year instructor and a Hughes organizer, recalls that Tocsin sympathizers "had a horrible sinking feeling everyone would rally around the flag and move us closer to war." The Crimson agreed, editorializing that Kennedy should have dealt more directly with Cuban leader Fidel Castro rather than flying "on wings of war into an ambiguous 'quarantine'" against the Soviets. "I really thought at the time that this was part of Kennedy's macho-jocko routine to prove American resolve," says Thernstrom. But he adds that his political views were not widely held on campus. Several...