Examine the relationship between Cuba and the United States up yo 1870. Pay particular attention to

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1. amomipais82
   

   Hi,
   Castro’s rise to power in Cuba was initially widely proclaimed, both domestically and internationally.22 It appeared that his government would restore democracy after the corruption that had dominated the nation previously. Instead, he began to systematically consolidate power by eliminating opposition.23 He confiscated lands and the means of production. "Moderates" were forced to either join him or flee,24 and, eventually, many thousands of Cubans left their homeland, as they continue to do so today. In 1961, Castro publicly declared himself to be a Marxist-Leninist,25 and launched his "revolutionary offensive",26 a campaign intended to transform Cuba into an "egalitarian" society. He targeted this effort against "bourgeois institutions, ideas, relationships, and privileges" and, eventually, this led to the nationalization of privately owned businesses.27 In trying to understand "Cuban communism", one must consider the personal role played by Castro. As in other authoritarian regimes, Castro’s strong personality has almost completely dominated and shaped the political scene in Cuba. That is, the "...role of symbolic leader (has been) thoroughly integrated with the role of policymaker".28 Thus began the long period of conflict and discontent that has characterized the recent United States-Cuba relationship.
   
   One of Castro’s chief revolutionary lieutenants, Ernesto Che Guevara,29 helped Castro organize, train and equip his small band of guerrilla fighters. As the revolution matured, Guevara became one of Castro’s most important political advisors, Castro appointing him president of the Cuban National Bank and then Minister of Industry. Later, he became popularized as the virtual symbol and spirit of the revolution itself. Just how strongly Castro and Guevara felt about the United States, and Cuba’s need to confront the U. S., is well illustrated in the following prophetic statement by Guevara30
   
       To win something you have to take it away from somebody....This something is the sovereignty of the country: it has to be taken away from that somebody who is called the monopoly, although monopolies in general have no country, they have at least a common definition: all the monopolies which have been in Cuba which have made profits on Cuban land, have very close ties with the U.S.A. In other words, our economic war will be with the great power of the North (emphasis added).
   
   We have been locked in the continuation of that "economic war" since that time to the present.
   
   The United States has long offered safe haven in South Florida to what has become a large and vocal expatriate Cuban community.31 The members of this group, even to this day, with more or less continuous U. S. support over the years, have long harbored hopes of someday overthrowing Castro, restoring democracy in Cuba, and returning home to their "restored" property.32 This group of Cuban expatriates has made itself known in important ways,33 most dramatically, of course, in the now-infamous 1961 "Bay of Pigs" invasion.34 Moreover, as the Cuban Revolution became more and more "radicalized", its relationship with the United States continued to deteriorate, leading in 196135 to the severing of diplomatic relations, a condition that exists to the present day.36
   
   Eventually, almost entirely,37 Cuba turned to the Soviet Union for both ideological and economic support. The USSR accounted for 80% of Cuba’s international trade, becoming its principal supplier of oil, food, machinery, spare parts, chemicals, and other vital materials. It subsidized the Cuban economy through its supply of low-cost oil and its purchase of Cuban sugar at inflated prices.38 The ever-worsening relationship between Cuba and the United States culminated in the near-catastrophic 1962 "Cuban Missile Crisis", regarded by many as the closest the world has yet come to nuclear war.39 Cuba, and Castro, more and more, became players on a world stage dominated by the bipolar superpower rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union.40 From the United States’ perspective of the time, Cuba’s contribution to the Cold War was as a "surrogate" for Soviet expansionism.41
   
       From 1960 on, Cuba’s efforts to spread revolution in Latin America, its dispatch of troops to Africa, its activities in the Non-Aligned Movement -- indeed, virtually all Cuban initiatives in the international arena -- were analyzed by the United States in terms of the advantages that might accrue to the Soviet Union.
   
   That is, rightly or wrongly, the United States saw Castro as the instrument by which Soviet-style communism could, and would, be exported, especially to neighboring countries in Latin America, in this world-wide contest between ideologies. Locked into this framework, then, the United States "engaged" Castro in several ways -- including instituting, in 1963, a trade embargo which has continued unabated to this day, despite the fact that the Soviet Union has collapsed, the Cuba-Russia relationship has altered significantly, and communism is in retreat around the world.

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