Word: cuba
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Caught off-guard by the depth of hostility to Somoza's corrupt reign, the Carter Administration has floundered in its pursuit of a response. U.S. intelligence officials did produce evidence that Havana has supplied some weapons to the rebels, several of whom were trained in guerrilla tactics in Cuba. Nonetheless, reports TIME Washington Correspondent William Drozdiak, "the obsessive concern with Cuban involvement struck some OAS members as blind paranoia. Panama, Mexico and Costa Rica even discerned a more sinister motive in the ill-substantiated attacks: to find an excuse for robbing the Sandinistas of their victory by sending...
Washington's program was aimed in part at preventing the creation of a Cuban-style Communist government in Nicaragua. Declared Vance: "There is mounting evidence of involvement by Cuba and others in the internal problems of Nicaragua." That charge drew an angry reply from Cuba's foreign ministry, which released a statement accusing the U.S. of "pressuring several Latin American diplomatic representatives to come to an agreement in the OAS that would facilitate a military intervention in Nicaragua" in order to "preserve the essence and basis of the bloody and corrupt neo-colonial regime dominated...
...President Somoza, Nicaragua's uprising is nothing more than a Communist plot aimed at unseating him. "As long as the Communists in Cuba and Panama continue to supply the weapons, there will be a battle," he maintains. The Carter Administration is also concerned about Fidel Castro's influence on Nicaragua's civil war and on the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), a broadly based collection of Marxist and non-Marxist leftists held together mainly by hatred for Somoza's regime. The evidence of such influence is scant, though U.S. intelligence reports indicate that since late...
...voted 52-41 in favor of a measure sponsored by Virginia's Harry Byrd to lift the sanctions. South Carolina Republican Strom Thurmond caught the mood of the Senate's conservatives when he thundered that the guerrilla movements "are armed and guided by the Soviet Union, China, Cuba and other Communist states. We must not give aid or comfort to guerrillas who would overthrow a democratic government and install a Marxist government...
...mounting carnage served only to strengthen Somoza's determination to hang onto the presidency. "I have no reason to abandon my constitutional post," he declared from his bunker last week. The uprising, Somoza maintained, "was the work of Cuba and Panama," which he claimed had armed and trained the guerrillas. To prove the point, Somoza brandished the identification papers of three Panamanians, including a former Deputy Minister of Health, who was said to have been slain last week by national guardsmen near the Costa Rican border...