Always Cuba

In 1959, Fidel Castro marched into Havana and became the new leader of the Island nation. Fulgencio Batista the President of the Republic of Cuba and close ally of the United States fled the country taking most of the assets of Cuba with him.

In the middle of the Cold War against the Soviet Union the United States reacted to the Cuban Revolution with trepidation: would Cuba be an ally of Russia the enemy of the United States? Would the island nation so formerly friendly to US capitalism and organized crime become an outpost of Communism 90 miles from Florida?

When Fidel Castro announced his Socialism and drifted toward the Soviet Union the powerful neighbor to the North saw "Red" and began its Cold and Hot War policy against Cuba: regime change by any means. At first the USA adopted a hot war against the Island in the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961; when that invasion failed to topple Fidel Castro and when Cuba sought defensive assistance from the Soviet Union, the Cuban Missile Crisis between the USA and Russia almost triggered a Nuclear War bringing the leaders of the US, the USSR and Cuba to the horrifying realization that a war which could destroy the world and all its inhabitants was not one which any power would win. While that crisis was averted with the Soviet Union, Washington did not give up in its dreams of regime change. Washington then turned to acts of war by other means against Havana. In 1962 the USA established a trade and travel embargo (termed the Bloqueo by the Cubans) against the Cubans prohibiting most travel and trade with the Island in cruel attempts to destroy the economy of Cuba and the lives of the Cuban people.

In one of the longest blockades in history, 60 years later those acts of war are still in existence. While the people of Cuba are the people most hurt by these sanctions, the United States continues its cruelty toward a poor nation full of people of color in the vain hope of destroying socialism in what Washington has always considered its back yard.