Word: cuba
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...Cuba's ties go back well before Castro. In 1898, at the end of the Spanish-American war, a defeated Spain signed the rights to its territories - including Cuba, Puerto Rico and Guam - over to the U.S., which subsequently granted Cuba its independence with the stipulation that the U.S. could intervene in the country's affairs if necessary (later relinquished) and that it be granted a perpetual lease on its naval base at Guantánamo Bay (not). For the next half-century the two countries more or less cooperated, with the U.S. helping to squash rebellions and heavily investing...
...attempts on Castro's life. Between 1961 and 1963 there were at least five plots to kill, maim or humiliate the Cuban leader using everything from exploding seashells to shoes dusted with chemicals to make his beard fall out. The Get Smart-like plans never worked, and Castro's Cuba soldiered on, angry as ever at the United States...
...darkest moment in the countries' relationship came on the morning of October 15, 1962 when U.S. spy planes discovered evidence that the Soviet Union was building missile bases in Cuba. President Kennedy learned of the threat the following morning, while still in pajamas, and for the next 12 days the U.S. and Russia were locked in a white-knuckled nuclear face-off - the Cuban Missile Crisis - that ended only when Nikita Khrushchev accepted Kennedy's secret proposal to remove U.S. missiles in Turkey in exchange for the de-arming of Cuba. The Soviet missiles were gone within six months...
...through its northwestern port, Mariel Harbor. Over the next six months 125,000 Cubans clambered onto boats and made their way to the U.S. in a mass flotilla. Castro also released criminals and mental-hospital patients, of whom as many as 22,000 landed on the shores of Florida; Cuba refused to take them back...
...strengthened its embargo rules in 1992 and again in 1996 with the Helms-Burton Act, which applied the embargo to foreign countries that traded with Cuba and was issued in retaliation after Cuba shot down two U.S. civilian airplanes. The last decade has seen the U.S. tighten and then relax restrictions depending on the political climate. A 2001 agreement to sell food to Cuba in the aftermath of Hurricane Michelle has so far remained in place; the United States is now Cuba's main supplier of food, with sales reaching $710 million...