Castro and the Cuban Missile Crisis
- In the 1950’s, Cuban citizens revolted against their dictator, Fulgencio Bastista due to his poor management of the country. The revolution was led by a young lawyer named Fidel Castro.
- When Castro took control of Cuba, he was at first praised for his economic and social reforms, but soon turned into a harsh dictator through his execution of political opponents, suspending elections, and tightly controlling the press.
- Due to Fidel Castro taking U.S. owned sugar mills and refineries, he eventually had to turn to Soviet military/economic aid after President Eisenhower embargoed all U.S. trade to Cuba, essentially allying himself with communism in the process.
- CIA trained Cuban exiles as a response to this. The exiles soon invaded Bay of Pigs in April, 1961 but are quickly defeated by Castro’s forces because the U.S. refused to give them air support.
- In July 1962, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev began to secretly build 42 missile sites in Cuba after being convinced that U.S. would not resist Latin American Soviet expansion; this was discovered by an American spy plane in October.
- President John F. Kennedy, seeing these sites as a threat due to them being close to U.S. mainland, demanded they be removed. This resulted in a U.S. naval blockade to stop Soviet ships from entering Cuba. While it seemed that conflict would soon erupt from this event, it eventually ended with the evacuation of the Soviet ships, along with an agreement between Kennedy and Khrushchev that the Soviets would remove their missiles from Cuba if the U.S. removed its missiles