Word: cuba
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Washington was uncertain how seriously to take a tip from a friendly intelligence service that Cuba had asked South American terrorist groups to attack U.S. targets, presumably citizens and embassies. Nonetheless, the U.S. twice warned Havana that it would hold Cuba responsible for any such attacks. Alarcon said Cuba had asked only for "expressions of solidarity of a political nature...
Internally, as the airport ceremony for the wounded demonstrated, Castro is appealing to patriotic fervor rather than revolutionary enthusiasm to maintain his hold on the populace. There is, in fact, little of the old guerrilla spirit left in Cuba: like Castro, the revolution has gone middle-aged and gray. Visitors to Havana are struck by the similarity to most Communist countries: a rigid bureaucracy, a once lively press that is now dismissed even by sympathetic leftists as boring, buildings that are shabbily maintained...
Another factor that dismays even some leftists visiting Cuba is the extent to which Castro has militarized the nation. The official force of 127,500 is one of the largest in the Western Hemisphere, but that is only the beginning. Estimates of the number of Cuban troops (usually called "military advisers") stationed in Nicaragua, Angola, Ethiopia and South Yemen range from 33,000 to 61,000; almost 7,000 Cuban civilians are believed to be in those countries too. At home, Castro plans to double the size of the territorial militia from the 1981 count...
...Pigs fiasco, however, came early. Kennedy had inherited the plan from the Eisenhower Administration, which, according to Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright, had already sunk $40 million into the training of a band of Cuban exiles who were supposed to sweep ashore in Cuba, join forces with the grateful, disenchanted islanders and dislodge Fidel Castro. Kennedy was skeptical of the idea, but allowed himself to be talked into it by men who seemed so sure of what they were doing. The mission, of course, was an utter disaster, and it taught Kennedy several important lessons. One was that truculently self...
Kennedy's tenure was littered with messy crises-in Laos, Cuba, the Congo, Latin America, Algeria, Viet Nam and Berlin-and his record in dealing with them is decidedly uneven. Revisionists like to say that Kennedy was a cold warrior who sought confrontation, but in the early '60s, the Soviets busied themselves around the world in ways that no American President could ignore...