The Cuban Revolution

1. Mateo A. Cardenas Clarimón The Cuban Revolution

2. Castro Beginnings and Batista regime • Fulgencio Batista (1901 – 1973) was a Cuban army officer that became president twice, once in 1940 and again in 1952. He Fled Cuba on Jan. 1, 1959. Cuba became independent from that moment on.

3. Cuba ‘s only economy crop was sugar cane, and it resulted in four fifths of the entire economy. After that, it was mainly tourism, including casinos and hotels. Casinos Hotels

4. on July 26, 1953, Fidel Castro attacked the army barracks at Moncada which started the Cuban Revolution.

5. Fidel and Raul Castro. • In 1955, Fidel and Raul Castro were banished to Mexico, where they spent the next three years amassing revolutionists to take back Cuba, which they eventually did. Fidel and Raul Castro

6. When Castro returned, he dismantled the Batista Government and created a new one, naming himself prime minister. • He took control of a U.S. Telephone company, cut the phone rates and ordered the forced sale of vacant urban lots and reduced prices.

7. Castro militarized the country by establishing the committees for the Defense of the Revolution” • Anyone who criticized the revolution or were Batista loyalists were treated harshly • Many emigrated to the United States.

8. Bay of Pigs • The bay of pigs was a failed invasion attempt from the United States to Cuba. Backed by the CIA, the goal of the operation was to get anti-Castro rebels on a remote Cuban beach to start a rebellion within the island nation. The rebels needed to hold the beachhead and wait for the locals to help. Unfortunately, there was little evidence that there would be an uprising, yet to many it seemed like the best idea that they had at the time.

9. Bay of Pigs (cont.) • At the last minute, Kennedy ordered the grounding of the B-26 air support and initially forbade the U.S. Navy to interfere with the operation, even though they had a carrier battle group nearby. • Did this to avoid any hint of U.S. involvement so as not to offend Castro’s Soviet supporters. • This decision led to the failure of the operation.

10. Background on Bay of Pigs • President Kennedy inherited the CIA campaign aiming to train and equip a guerilla army of Cuban exiles from president Eisenhower. • He didn’t want what he called a “direct, overt” intervention by the American military in Cuba, as the soviets would likely see it as an act of war.

11. First plan: Bay of Pigs • The first part of the plan was to destroy Castro’s small air force, which would stop them from being able to resist an invasion. • April 15, 1961, a group of Cuban exiles in several disguised B-26 attempted to destroy the Cuban air force. • However, Castro and his advisers knew about the air raid and had already moved his planes away to keep them safe.

12. Bay of Pigs (cont.) • Rebel troops and tanks began landing early on April 17. By April 19, Castro’s armored tanks, heavy artillery and unopposed air force crushed the invaders. • 114 men of the Brigade 2506 were killed and more than 1200 were captured. Wary Cuban troops leading away a Brigade 2506 member after the failed invasion

13. Cuban Missile Crisis • On October 14, 1962, a high altitude U-@ spy plane photographed a Soviet ss-4 medium range ballistic missile being built on Cuban soil. U-2 spy plane Ss-4 missile

14. Missile crisis Cont. • The real urgency of this situation came from the fact that the new missiles were so close to the United States – only 90 miles away from Florida – and that the Cubans had such strong ties with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). • Also, as the United States was participating in a Cold war with Russia, the missiles so close to home could have tipped the balance of power towards the Russian government.

15. OPVLCastrotelevisionspeech hear the opinion of the other newsmen because this is a very important point for everybody. But this is not the only odd thing here; the strange thing is that even they say that one must not attack the revolutionary government because it is building houses for the peasants, because it distributes land, and because Trujillo was the man who launched the policy of land distribution and housing construction in Santo Domingo. That is what they say. Now, look, there is no doubt at all that there are certain movements in this hemisphere. You know that they are attacking us and that they are launching a campaign against us, on the basis of what we are producing here, that we are creating a firm foundation here, that this is supposed to be a base for rockets, in Camaguey, when we were actually only building the school city there; and so they have come up with all kinds of accusations to the effect that this movement is infiltrated by Communists, that we are creating a Communist republic in the Caribbean, that we are dividing the continent, etc, a whole series of accusations which coincide with a number of unusual movements and circumstances in this continent.   This is not the right moment but I have a little report here, I have a little report which is very well guarded, and which is certainly very interesting because I see from it that there are certain movements going on in certain foreign offices, certain foreign offices which, when the right time comes, I will reveal, backed up by documents. In other words, certain foreign offices are taking certain steps along certain lines and I can only tell you this: here, any plan of aggression against any country, any maneuver against a country, requires preparation. Nobody could possible believe that we are going to stand by and do nothing whenever we think that there is any imminent danger, any risk or any circumstance that so requires it, we will reveal everything we know because it is our obligation to foil any maneuvers that are being hatched against Cuba by certain foreign offices. But no one forget that we are a small nation in the midst of this continent, surrounded by interests and oligarchies which are the same that keep talking about democracy and that keep lying to the people, because they are minority governments which control the money, the newspapers, the news media, they control everything, just as they used to control everything in Cuba; and when we make an agrarian reform here, there are many big landowners in Latin America who worry about the agrarian reform; when adopting revolutionary measures of any kind here, there are many interests that get all worked up about this all over the continent. In reality, how many governments are there which are in the same position as Cuba is in today, and how many are able to maintain a strong posture in defense of their interests and the interests of their people? We are just one little nation, we can count on the sympathy and solidarity of the other peoples of the continent; but these peoples certainly are very poorly informed about Cuba; everybody tries to confuse them because this entire campaign against us is not just for sport; all of these magazines and periodicals, which print all this horror stuff, things that you cannot even imagine, all of these magazines are controlled by the monopolies and big interests and they are not doing this for a hobby; all of this propaganda has a very specific strategic purpose within the over-all plans against Cuba: the purpose of depriving us of the sympathy of the peoples in order to create conditions favorable to an aggression against our company. I said this in the past, in connection with "Operation Truth" and I say it again: they are trying to encircle Cuba with a curtain of slander in order to justify their subsequent acts of aggression. In other words, we are a small nation. To what extent can we influence the other governments of the continent? Well, very little. There are others who exercise much more influence than we do, there are other people who influence others much more than we do; that they do this with all kinds of offers, such as: "I am going to give you more sugar; and I am going to give more sugar to you, over there; and I am going to give you more sugar out of the amount which are going to take away from Cuba"; many times they make no offers at all; many times these other countries spontaneously want to split up our quota. In other words, there are many ways in which they can try to isolate our country. Right now we are a people fighting alone -- and we must all understand this. A small nation of 6 million inhabitants whose reserves they have been robbing, whom they exploited miserably for 50 years, from whom they extracted a billion dollars in the last 10 years; in these conditions of economic poverty, in which they left us, we must promote a national program of national liberation, against the interests that want to keep us subjugated, interests that wanted to put us under the control of the same policy that they have been pursuing all the time, continuing to plunder us, continuing to force concessions upon us, continuing to betray the interests of the country to the foreigners. But we are now recovering the land of our country, we are doing things that have never been done before, we are defending the interests of the Cubans, we are establishing definitive norms of honesty and public administration, we are defending the interests of the peasants and the workers and our people, above all the interests of those who have lived here in misery and poverty and without any culture. We are doing unheard of things and we do them simply because we have to, but they are bitter because of the effort the Cuban people are making today and this is why they are trying to force us to fail in every way they can. Now, whom can we count on in all this? We can count on the solidarity of the peoples who are situations similar to the Cuban situation although unfortunately they have very little influence on continental policy. And so we must start with the basic fact that we are a people fighting alone on this continent, where there are extremely powerful interests that decisively influence the policy of other governments, interests that decisively influence the policy of other governments and we just one little nation, alone here. Now, don't you think that it would be irresponsible on the part of the Cubans to neglect something as essential as national defense in view of this truth, in view of the fact that it is becoming each day more apparent that the attacks against Cuba are being repeated and continue, in view of the declarations by senators and vice presidents, such as Nixon, in view of a situation in which the United States State Department repeats its charges against us in its official notes, in view of a situation of hostility, a policy of hostility and a campaign of hostility against Cuba? For example, in the very beginning we entertained the hope that it would not be necessary to mobilize or train anybody. But reality shows that this preparation is becoming more and more necessary each day and that aggressions against our country are repeated day after day. And so they are burning the sugar cane from aircraft here. All of this tells us just one thing: we have to defend ourselves. What was the worst crime committed by the French leaders during the recent world war? What was the task of the Fifth Column in France? What was the task of the reactionary forces in France? The task of the reactionary forces in France was to weaken national defense, that is to say, to keep saying that there was no danger; and they also brought up the topic of Communism and they launched a campaign against Communism.

16. What that tiny tiny text actually said was: • Basically that the buildings that the united states thought were bomb ranges were actually school buildings, that the US made up a lot of lies that Cuba was Communist. • If there is any plot towards any country, we will reveal what we know of said plot to said country because we are honorable and good people. • We must be careful, as we are small and surrounded by oligarchies posing as democracies.

17. OPVL evaluation • O: A televised speech by Castro in Havana on January 20, 1960 • P: The purpose of this is to “advertise” and promote himself and his party. • V: It shows how eloquent Castro was and how effective he was at making the populace think like him. • L: This is a biased point of view that targets the Cuban populace to gain support, not to be truthful.