Was Cuba ever really a threat to the United States?

[Judi Lynn]

Was Cuba ever really a threat to the United States?
By Pat M. Holt
Thu Jan 4, 3:00 AM ET


ARLINGTON, VA. - On New Year's Day 1959, Fidel Castro's ragtag guerrilla army marched triumphantly into Havana. Mr. Castro himself followed a few days later and began his half-century of work carrying out his revolution. This turned out to be a real revolution as distinguished from the coups d'etat that had previously characterized Cuban politics. By the time Castro turned over power to his younger brother Raúl in July 2006, he had ruled longer than any other current world leader.

We know that Castro is sick; we do not know his diagnosis.

The US intelligence community thinks he has terminal cancer. A Spanish doctor who recently examined him says he does not have cancer and can return to work after rehabilitation. Either way, it is likely that his era has ended.

Castro has outlasted nine US presidents: Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Clinton. A tenth president, George W. Bush, is halfway through his second term. All of these except Mr. Carter did everything they and their CIA directors could think of to bring Castro down - without success. (Carter took a step toward restoring diplomatic relations but did not follow through after Cuba intervened in the Angolan civil war.)

The United States would long since have come to terms with any other revolutionary Latin American government. That it has not done so with Cuba is due mainly to ideological bias in Washington and Havana as well as the baleful influence of hordes of anti-Castro refugees in Miami.
(snip/...)

http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20070104/cm_csm/yholt04

* Pat M. Holt is former chief of staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee

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Pat M. Holt
Chief of Staff for Foriegn Relations Committee
A journalist who had reported for various newspapers and for the Congressional Quarterly, Pat Holt joined the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1950. Because of his ability to speak Spanish, he became the committee's specialist in Latin American relations in 1958. Shortly afterwards came Vice President Richard Nixon's ill-fated tour of South America, ending with the storming of his limousine in Venezuela, and then Fidel Castro's revolution in Cuba. Latin American relations assumed an increasingly important position on the committee's agenda. In 1965, suspicions over the Lyndon Johnson administration's version of conditions in the Dominican Republic gave Holt a unique opportunity to examine State Department and CIA records. His findings played a part in Chairman J. William Fulbright's break with the Johnson administration. Holt later served as chief of staff under the chairmanships of Fulbright and John Sparkman

http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/oral_history/Pat_M_Holt.htm

[A Simple Game]

1. Cuba is not and never was a threat under Castro.

Castro is no fool. He well knows that a little dog can bark at a big dog, but he knows what happens to the little dog that actually bites the big dog. He knew better than to bite.

[M155Y_A1CH]

2. With or without Russian missiles?

Without missiles = no threat

[Judi Lynn]

3. The missiles didn't arrive until after the Bay of Pigs invasion.

Cuba had been attacked. They accepted the missiles Russia provided because Cubans themselves had been seriously threatened. (Russia itself was being theatened by the U.S. missiles placed in Turkey to serve as a constant threat to Russia.) They fought back fiercely because they didn't want the elitist, racist scum they had thrown out of power rushing right back in with the assistance of the U.S. military, which has always been their intention.

A poster visiting DU recently claimed they killed all the prisoners from the Bay of Pigs. This was completely erronious. They kept the prisoners and traded them back to the U.S. for food and medical supplies.

They've had over 45 years of constant terrorism from the reactionary "exile" terrorists in South Florida who still make raids on them, occassionally killing someone. Several years ago they captured some South Florida "exiles" who came ashore heavily armed and ready to blow away as many people as possible. Those men confessed on Cuban tv.

I'll bet their little nation is exhausted from having to be alert for attacks all these many years, at the mercy of an enormous hostile country only 90 miles away.

[yurbud]

4. with missiles=deterrent to attack. Launched missile=over cooked Cuba

Like Iraq, Iran, North Korea and every other country that is barely a pimple on our ass, how ever mean or crazy their leader is, he knows how to count. We have 10,000 nukes. No matter how many lucky shots some other country to get at us, we have more than enough to wipe any country originating the attack off the map.

Cuba was not a threat. The threat was losing the OPTION to invade.

[Judi Lynn]

5. I've read a couple of times that the U.S. spends more in 12 hours on defense than Cuba does

in an entire year.

If Cuba did attempt even one destructive act, as you indicate, they'd be a pile of dust.

Our right-wing is simply furious that the people themselves will not be dominated. The U.S. has been trying to get control over them since the 1800's.

"We must impose a harsh blockade so that hunger and its constant companion, disease, undermine the peaceful population and decimate the Cuban army."

John C. Breckenridge
Department of War
Office of the Undersecretary
Washington D.C.

December 24, 1897

http://www.historyofcuba.com/history/bmemo.htm

[yurbud]

6. unfortunately, it's the same thing with Haiti. If you read Uncle Tom's Cabin, two slave owners...

discuss with horror the slaves taking over that micro zit of a nation even though it had occurred decades earlier. We've been trying to put the overseer back in charge of that plantation ever since.

[Demeter]

7. Only As An Alternative Reality n/t