Preface
This is not a neutral account. Neutrality is impossible when the blood of a people is still drying in the soil and the chains of an empire still tighten around their necks. The history of Cuba is the history of the United States laid bare. To follow Cuba’s path is to strip away the lies told in schoolbooks, speeches, and marble monuments, until only the raw truth remains: the United States has lived by conquest from the day it was born.
Cuba is not an accident in that story. It is the mirror that refuses to crack, the small island that reflects with merciless clarity what the United States has always been. Here, in one place, we see the whole arsenal of domination: military occupation, corporate plunder, secret police, assassins in the night, and embargoes that starve children so that presidents can smile.
What follows is not an academic exercise. It is an indictment. The pages ahead are evidence, not speculation.
Yet Cuba is also something more. It is the living proof that even against centuries of siege, a people can endure with dignity intact. The spirit of Cuban resistance, inimitable and inventive and unbroken, has become legendary. That spirit, as much as the crimes committed against it, is the soul of these pages.
The First U.S. Foreign Policy: Imperialize Cuba
Imperialism of Cuba was the U.S.'s first foreign policy.
White settler colonialism and imperial conquest have been the very modus operandi of the United States since its violent founding in 1776. Genocide of Native nations and the enslavement of Africans were not contradictions to American ideals. They were the ideals in practice.
Cuba makes this plain. It is the paradigmatic case, the first target of U.S. foreign policy where the U.S.'s colonial and imperial character is revealed in its purest form. Cuba was the laboratory in which the methods of U.S. white supremacy, military occupation, corporate seizure, and economic strangulation were tested and refined.
Cuba’s isolation and suffering is the quintessence, the textbook embodiment of U.S. criminality. It is a nation subjected to every weapon of domination for more than two centuries simply because it insisted on independence.
From Jefferson’s letters in 1805 to the embargo today, Washington has treated Cuba as something to seize, occupy, or punish. Military rule, the Platt Amendment, corporate land grabs, CIA terror, assassination plots, and global embargoes all confirm the pattern.
Cuba is not a footnote. It is the clearest proof for what the United States really is: an empire whose enduring method has been to discipline a single island for the crime of independence.
1805-1854: Jefferson, Adams, and the Imperial Blueprint
In 1805, just 29 years after the violent creation of the United States through settler colonial genocide and slavery in 1776, the new republic’s rulers were already planning their first foreign conquest.
President Thomas Jefferson wrote that year, “I candidly confess that I have ever looked on Cuba as the most interesting addition which could ever be made to our system of States.” For Jefferson, the island 90 miles from Florida was not a nation with its own culture and people but a resource to be annexed, a plantation colony-in-waiting.
Jefferson also underscored the military logic. In 1809, writing to James Madison, he declared, “Cuba can be defended by us without a navy,” treating the island as a strategic outpost already within Washington’s sphere.
In April 1823, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams formalized this outlook in his notorious “ripe fruit” letter. “There are laws of political as well as of physical gravitation,” he wrote, insisting that “Cuba… can gravitate only towards the North American Union.” This is empire stated as natural law. Adams added that the United States would never permit Spain to transfer Cuba to any other power: “You will not conceal… the repugnance of the United States to the transfer of the Island of Cuba by Spain to any other power.” In other words, Cuba’s fate would not be decided in Havana or Madrid, but in Washington.
Yet in the early 1800s the United States could not immediately invade. The barrier was not principle, but power. Great Britain remained the global superpower. Its navy dominated the Atlantic, its empire spanned continents, and its financial supremacy kept Washington in check. Open U.S. annexation of Cuba would have triggered direct confrontation with London, which still considered the Caribbean a vital artery of world trade. Imperial ambition had to wait for the balance of forces to shift.
By the 1840s and 1850s, U.S. appetite had sharpened and was now openly fused with slavery. Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, one of the most powerful defenders of slavery, declared in 1848 that “the Union can never be safe without Cuba.” To him, annexation was not optional; it was survival for the Southern slave system. Senator James M. Mason of Virginia stated in 1852 that Cuba “must belong to the United States… The question is not whether, but when.” The language mirrored Adams’s doctrine: inevitability, destiny, conquest assumed as fact.
This was not fringe opinion. In 1854, three American diplomats in Europe issued the Ostend Manifesto: “It is clear that Cuba is of transcendent importance to the United States, and… if Spain refuses to sell… by every law, human and divine, we shall be justified in wresting it from Spain by force.” This was the mafia logic of empire written in diplomatic language.
Read these statements together. Jefferson identified the prize. Adams announced that its independence would never be tolerated. Calhoun and Mason fused the annexation to the defense of slavery. The Ostend authors issued the threat of armed seizure. Britain’s naval supremacy delayed the move, but the intention never wavered. From the very first decades of the 19th century, Cuba was designated as U.S. property-in-waiting.
By 1868, nearly a century of U.S. plotting had passed, but Cuba itself was still in Spanish chains. That year began the Ten Years’ War (1868–1878), the first major uprising for independence. Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, a Cuban planter turned revolutionary, freed his slaves and declared, “Citizens, you are all free… Cuba must be independent from Spain.” The insurgents fought for land, liberty, and national dignity.
Spain responded with brutal repression. General Valmaseda issued orders in 1869: “Every man from the age of 15 years and upwards found away from his habitation… shall be shot.” He added that women and children of insurgents would be “imprisoned in fortified towns.” These were extermination orders, written down and carried out.
The war dragged on for a decade. An estimated 200,000 Cubans were killed, mostly from combat, starvation, and disease. Spain’s army burned fields and villages, executed civilians, and turned the countryside into killing zones. When the uprising finally collapsed in 1878, Spain promised reforms and amnesty, but none of substance came.
In 1879-1880, Cubans rose again in the Little War, but, without resources, it failed. The hunger for independence never disappeared. José Martí, poet, journalist, and revolutionary, declared in 1889, “The independence of Cuba is the independence of America.” In 1892 he founded the Cuban Revolutionary Party in New York, warning that U.S. designs were as dangerous as Spanish colonialism: “Once the United States is in Cuba, who will get it out?” Martí saw what Jefferson, Adams, Calhoun, and Mason had already declared: Washington would never tolerate Cuban sovereignty.
The final and most ferocious war erupted in 1895. Martí returned to the island and was killed in battle at Dos Ríos that year. His writings, smuggled across the island, lit the struggle with clarity: “To change masters is not to be free.” The enemy was Spain, but also the shadow of the United States.
Spain escalated with genocidal tactics. Spain's vicious General Valeriano Weyler, appointed in 1896, ordered civilians herded into fortified towns and camps. “The concentration of the rural population in the towns… is the only way to isolate the insurgents,” he wrote. The policy became infamous as reconcentración. Entire villages were torched. Peasants were driven off their land. Starvation and disease swept through the camps: genocide.
U.S. Consul-General Fitzhugh Lee (nephew of the Confederate pro-slavery Robert E. Lee) reported in 1897 that “the concentration… has caused the death of not less than 200,000 people, through hunger and disease.” The New York Times described scenes of “ghastly skeletons, starving women and children,” while the New York Journal decried “Butcher Weyler.” Even conservative Spanish accounts admitted catastrophic mortality.
By the late 1890s, Cuba was a graveyard. Out of a population of 1.5 million, up to 200,000 civilians had perished in reconcentration zones. But Washington’s political class saw more than humanitarian tragedy. They saw a chance. Cuban blood and Spanish cruelty became the pretext, the moral cover for a policy already drafted decades earlier: U.S. intervention and control.
Jefferson also underscored the military logic. In 1809, writing to James Madison, he declared, “Cuba can be defended by us without a navy,” treating the island as a strategic outpost already within Washington’s sphere.
In April 1823, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams formalized this outlook in his notorious “ripe fruit” letter. “There are laws of political as well as of physical gravitation,” he wrote, insisting that “Cuba… can gravitate only towards the North American Union.” This is empire stated as natural law. Adams added that the United States would never permit Spain to transfer Cuba to any other power: “You will not conceal… the repugnance of the United States to the transfer of the Island of Cuba by Spain to any other power.” In other words, Cuba’s fate would not be decided in Havana or Madrid, but in Washington.
Yet in the early 1800s the United States could not immediately invade. The barrier was not principle, but power. Great Britain remained the global superpower. Its navy dominated the Atlantic, its empire spanned continents, and its financial supremacy kept Washington in check. Open U.S. annexation of Cuba would have triggered direct confrontation with London, which still considered the Caribbean a vital artery of world trade. Imperial ambition had to wait for the balance of forces to shift.
By the 1840s and 1850s, U.S. appetite had sharpened and was now openly fused with slavery. Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, one of the most powerful defenders of slavery, declared in 1848 that “the Union can never be safe without Cuba.” To him, annexation was not optional; it was survival for the Southern slave system. Senator James M. Mason of Virginia stated in 1852 that Cuba “must belong to the United States… The question is not whether, but when.” The language mirrored Adams’s doctrine: inevitability, destiny, conquest assumed as fact.
This was not fringe opinion. In 1854, three American diplomats in Europe issued the Ostend Manifesto: “It is clear that Cuba is of transcendent importance to the United States, and… if Spain refuses to sell… by every law, human and divine, we shall be justified in wresting it from Spain by force.” This was the mafia logic of empire written in diplomatic language.
Read these statements together. Jefferson identified the prize. Adams announced that its independence would never be tolerated. Calhoun and Mason fused the annexation to the defense of slavery. The Ostend authors issued the threat of armed seizure. Britain’s naval supremacy delayed the move, but the intention never wavered. From the very first decades of the 19th century, Cuba was designated as U.S. property-in-waiting.
1868-1897: Cuba’s Wars of Independence and Spain’s Terror
Spain responded with brutal repression. General Valmaseda issued orders in 1869: “Every man from the age of 15 years and upwards found away from his habitation… shall be shot.” He added that women and children of insurgents would be “imprisoned in fortified towns.” These were extermination orders, written down and carried out.
The war dragged on for a decade. An estimated 200,000 Cubans were killed, mostly from combat, starvation, and disease. Spain’s army burned fields and villages, executed civilians, and turned the countryside into killing zones. When the uprising finally collapsed in 1878, Spain promised reforms and amnesty, but none of substance came.
In 1879-1880, Cubans rose again in the Little War, but, without resources, it failed. The hunger for independence never disappeared. José Martí, poet, journalist, and revolutionary, declared in 1889, “The independence of Cuba is the independence of America.” In 1892 he founded the Cuban Revolutionary Party in New York, warning that U.S. designs were as dangerous as Spanish colonialism: “Once the United States is in Cuba, who will get it out?” Martí saw what Jefferson, Adams, Calhoun, and Mason had already declared: Washington would never tolerate Cuban sovereignty.
The final and most ferocious war erupted in 1895. Martí returned to the island and was killed in battle at Dos Ríos that year. His writings, smuggled across the island, lit the struggle with clarity: “To change masters is not to be free.” The enemy was Spain, but also the shadow of the United States.
Spain escalated with genocidal tactics. Spain's vicious General Valeriano Weyler, appointed in 1896, ordered civilians herded into fortified towns and camps. “The concentration of the rural population in the towns… is the only way to isolate the insurgents,” he wrote. The policy became infamous as reconcentración. Entire villages were torched. Peasants were driven off their land. Starvation and disease swept through the camps: genocide.
U.S. Consul-General Fitzhugh Lee (nephew of the Confederate pro-slavery Robert E. Lee) reported in 1897 that “the concentration… has caused the death of not less than 200,000 people, through hunger and disease.” The New York Times described scenes of “ghastly skeletons, starving women and children,” while the New York Journal decried “Butcher Weyler.” Even conservative Spanish accounts admitted catastrophic mortality.
By the late 1890s, Cuba was a graveyard. Out of a population of 1.5 million, up to 200,000 civilians had perished in reconcentration zones. But Washington’s political class saw more than humanitarian tragedy. They saw a chance. Cuban blood and Spanish cruelty became the pretext, the moral cover for a policy already drafted decades earlier: U.S. intervention and control.
1898-1902: The Spanish-American War and the Betrayal of Independence
By the mid-1890s Cuba was bleeding to death under Spain’s reconcentration camps. U.S. elites seized the opportunity. The explosion of the USS Maine in Havana harbor on February 15, 1898, killing 260 sailors, became the spark. Although the cause of the blast was never proven (later U.S. naval inquiries contradicted each other), it was instantly weaponized by thee U.S.
“Remember the Maine! To hell with Spain!” screamed William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal. U.S. Senators thundered for war. On April 11, 1898, President William McKinley told Congress: “The right to intervene may be justified by the very serious injury to commerce, trade, and business of our people.” Note his words: not Cuban suffering, but American commerce. Intervention was always about empire.
Congress passed the Teller Amendment on April 20, 1898, stating the U.S. had “no intention to exercise sovereignty, jurisdiction, or control over said island [Cuba] except for pacification thereof.” It promised independence once Spain was expelled. The ink was still wet when Washington began preparing to keep the island under its thumb, contradicting its own promise.
The war lasted 16 weeks. U.S. forces landed in June. Cuban insurgents, who had already fought Spain for 30 years, bore the brunt of the fighting but were excluded from surrender negotiations. Admiral Sampson wired to the Navy Department after the destruction of Spain’s fleet: “The fleet under my command offers the nation as a Fourth of July present the whole of Cervera’s fleet.” Cubans were treated as spectators in their own liberation.
The Treaty of Paris, signed December 10, 1898, gave the United States Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines outright. Cuba was placed under “temporary” U.S. military occupation.
The occupation was absolute. General Leonard Wood was appointed the U.S. military governor of Cuba, and who wrote in 1901: “There is, of course, little or no independence left Cuba under the Platt Amendment. The only thing left to them is to run their domestic affairs, and that we control too, to a large extent.” This was the candid voice of empire.
The Platt Amendment, forced into Cuba’s constitution in 1901, legalized permanent U.S. domination. It granted Washington the right “to intervene for the preservation of Cuban independence” -- a grotesque phrase that meant intervention whenever U.S. capital or strategic interest was threatened. It prohibited Cuba from signing treaties or taking on debt without U.S. approval. And it granted land for naval bases, leading to the perpetual lease of Guantánamo Bay in 1903.
Cuban nationalists knew immediately what had happened. Manuel Sanguily, a veteran of the independence war, denounced it as “a mutilation of sovereignty, a negation of liberty, and a mockery of independence.” Writer Enrique Collazo lamented that “Cuba is free only in name… The yoke of Spain has been replaced by the yoke of the United States.”
On May 20, 1902, Washington formally declared the Republic of Cuba. But it was independence in chains. The Teller Amendment’s promise had been betrayed. The Platt Amendment was the truth. Cuba had traded one colonial master for another.
1903-1933: The Sugar State and the Return of the Marines
In Cuba of 1933, mass strikes and student uprisings culminated in the Sergeants’ Revolt, when noncommissioned officers led by Fulgencio Batista toppled the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Gerardo Machado and opened a new chapter of military dominance under Washington’s shadow.
The revolt of 1933 was the first great crack in U.S. domination. Gerardo Machado, a dictator who had faithfully served foreign capital, was overthrown by a mass uprising of Cuban students, workers, and soldiers. For a brief moment, the revolutionaries led by Ramón Grau San Martín and Antonio Guiteras held real power. They promised land reform, labor rights, and true independence.
Washington smashed it. U.S. Ambassador Sumner Welles personally refused to recognize Grau’s revolutionary government. Instead, he maneuvered in Havana’s political class until a conservative acceptable to Wall Street was found: Carlos Mendieta. Mendieta had no legitimacy among Cubans but was immediately recognized by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on January 13, 1934. The New York Times headline read: “U.S. Recognizes Mendieta as Head of Cuba”. The revolution was strangled in its crib, and a U.S. puppet was installed.
Washington smashed it. U.S. Ambassador Sumner Welles personally refused to recognize Grau’s revolutionary government. Instead, he maneuvered in Havana’s political class until a conservative acceptable to Wall Street was found: Carlos Mendieta. Mendieta had no legitimacy among Cubans but was immediately recognized by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on January 13, 1934. The New York Times headline read: “U.S. Recognizes Mendieta as Head of Cuba”. The revolution was strangled in its crib, and a U.S. puppet was installed.
Batista had initially emerged from the Sergeants’ Revolt of 1933 as pro-revolution, which at first seemed like a break with dictatorship. But instead of defending the revolution, he aligned himself with Washington. He transformed the army into the guarantor of U.S. control, crushing radicals at home while presenting himself abroad as the stabilizing hand of order.
Mendieta ruled as a facade while U.S. Marines loomed offshore and Batista (then a sergeant who had risen through the “Sergeants’ Revolt”) organized the army into his own pro-U.S. loyal enforcement machine.
Mendieta ruled as a facade while U.S. Marines loomed offshore and Batista (then a sergeant who had risen through the “Sergeants’ Revolt”) organized the army into his own pro-U.S. loyal enforcement machine.
Antonio Guiteras, the radical who had threatened U.S. interests, was hunted down and assassinated in 1935 with direct complicity from Batista’s forces. His murder symbolized the terms of Cuban politics: reformers would be killed, puppets would be preserved.
Through the 1940s, Washington permitted “democracy” as long as it guaranteed capital. Grau San Martín (mentioned above from the 1933 revolt) returned to power in 1944, but he was a shell of the radical who had defied the U.S. in 1933. Grau’s presidency was soaked in corruption, protecting U.S. sugar quotas and corporate concessions. State Department cables in the Foreign Relations of the United States series note Washington’s “satisfaction” that Cuba remained “a secure source of sugar supply.”
Through the 1940s, Washington permitted “democracy” as long as it guaranteed capital. Grau San Martín (mentioned above from the 1933 revolt) returned to power in 1944, but he was a shell of the radical who had defied the U.S. in 1933. Grau’s presidency was soaked in corruption, protecting U.S. sugar quotas and corporate concessions. State Department cables in the Foreign Relations of the United States series note Washington’s “satisfaction” that Cuba remained “a secure source of sugar supply.”
Sugar was Cuba’s lifeblood and Washington’s obsession. In the mid-20th century it was not just an export but the island’s entire economy, and U.S. control of sugar quotas meant control of Cuba itself.
Grau was succeeded by Carlos Prío Socarrás in 1948, a pliant politician who presided over a cesspool of graft and mafia penetration. FBI reports from 1950 document Havana casinos, drug routes, and prostitution syndicates operated by U.S. mobsters Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano -- all tolerated by Prío’s government because profits flowed smoothly to U.S. investors and banks. Cuba was a mafia colony guarded by police who took orders from Washington’s chosen politicians.
Behind it all stood Batista. From 1934 onward he was the strongman the U.S. trusted most. Whether he ruled directly or through puppets, his army guaranteed that labor strikes were crushed, peasants were kept off the land, and foreign (e.g., U.S.) property was safe. As a declassified CIA internal history later described him, Batista was quite literally “our man in Havana.”
In 1952, Batista dispensed with puppets altogether. Facing electoral defeat, he staged a coup. Within days, the Eisenhower administration recognized his regime. There was no pretense of "democracy" now. Batista was Washington’s dictator in uniform.
The repression was bloody. Police and military units trained and armed by the United States carried out torture, disappearances, and massacres. Cuban human rights investigations later documented over 20,000 murdered between 1952 and 1959. Havana police stations became torture chambers. Journalists described corpses dumped in ditches on the outskirts of the capital, a reign of terror enforced with U.S. weapons and diplomatic cover.
Meanwhile the economy was formally annexed. By the mid-1950s, U.S. corporations owned 90% of Cuban utilities, 80% of mines, 50% of railroads, and 40% of sugar production. The United Fruit Company, International Telephone and Telegraph, Standard Oil, and U.S. banks dominated the island’s wealth. A 1952 State Department memo admitted bluntly, “The United States has more at stake in Cuba than in any other Latin American country.”
This was not independence. It was a colony with local overseers. Mendieta, Grau, and Prío were tolerated because they bent to U.S. control. Batista was installed, armed, and preserved because he guaranteed repression when puppets faltered. Cuba in these decades was not sovereign. It was Washington’s fiefdom, with a comprador elite presiding over a population beaten, impoverished, and denied the revolution it had demanded in 1933.
1950-1961: Revolution and U.S. Retaliation
By the 1950s, Batista’s dictatorship had become synonymous with corruption and repression. Havana was carved up by U.S. corporations and mafia bosses, while the countryside remained locked in poverty. Batista enriched himself and his generals through kickbacks and concessions, and his police answered strikes and student protests with torture and massacres.
In 1953, a young lawyer named Fidel Castro launched an bold attack on the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba. The assault failed, and many rebels were killed or imprisoned, but it ignited a new revolutionary current. From prison, Castro declared that history would absolve their cause. His followers named their organization the July 26th Movement, after the date of the failed attack.
After an amnesty, Castro went into exile in Mexico, where he regrouped and trained a small band of fighters, including Ernesto “Che” Guevara. In 1956, they returned to Cuba aboard the yacht Granma. Most were killed or captured on landing, but a few survived and made their way into the Sierra Maestra mountains. From there they waged guerrilla war, slowly winning support from peasants, workers, and students as Batista’s brutality deepened.
By late 1958, the July 26th Movement had grown into a nationwide insurrection. Batista’s army collapsed under desertion and defeat, and U.S. support could no longer save him.
On January 1, 1959, Fulgencio Batista fled Havana with his family, his generals, and suitcases of cash.
The Cuban people had overthrown Washington’s most reliable dictator. Fidel Castro and the July 26th Movement rode into the capital to scenes of jubilation. For the first time in modern history, Cubans had taken power not as puppets but as revolutionaries. In that moment, two centuries of U.S. domination cracked: the island that had been treated as a plantation, a casino, and a military outpost was suddenly in the hands of its own people.
The revolution immediately moved against the structures of foreign domination. Agrarian reform laws nationalized large estates, redistributing land to peasants. U.S. sugar companies and banks were targeted for expropriation. Casinos and brothels, many owned by U.S. mob bosses, were shut down. Literacy campaigns and health programs spread into rural areas that had never seen a doctor or school.
For ordinary Cubans, it was the first taste of real independence.
For Washington, it was intolerable. Declassified CIA memos show that as early as April 1959, months after victory, the Eisenhower administration was already drafting plans for regime change. A State Department memo of March 1959 complained that “Castro has undertaken actions which will have a serious effect on U.S. economic interests.” Another noted bluntly, “The United States cannot allow Cuba to develop along the lines it has chosen.”
By 1960 the hostility had escalated into open sabotage. The CIA began recruiting exile groups in Miami, training them in Guatemala, and preparing paramilitary plans for invasion. Declassified files later revealed that in 1960 President Eisenhower approved a program “to bring about the replacement of the Castro regime with one more devoted to the interests of the Cuban people and more acceptable to the U.S.” -- the bureaucratic phrasing of empire.
At the same time, Washington imposed the first economic sanctions. In July 1960, the U.S. canceled sugar imports from Cuba, cutting off the island’s lifeline. Oil companies like Esso, Shell, and Texaco, under U.S. orders, refused to refine Soviet crude in Cuban refineries. When Cuba nationalized the refineries, Washington retaliated with a full economic embargo in October 1960. As one Eisenhower aide put it, the goal was “to make the economy scream.”
For Washington, it was intolerable. Declassified CIA memos show that as early as April 1959, months after victory, the Eisenhower administration was already drafting plans for regime change. A State Department memo of March 1959 complained that “Castro has undertaken actions which will have a serious effect on U.S. economic interests.” Another noted bluntly, “The United States cannot allow Cuba to develop along the lines it has chosen.”
By 1960 the hostility had escalated into open sabotage. The CIA began recruiting exile groups in Miami, training them in Guatemala, and preparing paramilitary plans for invasion. Declassified files later revealed that in 1960 President Eisenhower approved a program “to bring about the replacement of the Castro regime with one more devoted to the interests of the Cuban people and more acceptable to the U.S.” -- the bureaucratic phrasing of empire.
At the same time, Washington imposed the first economic sanctions. In July 1960, the U.S. canceled sugar imports from Cuba, cutting off the island’s lifeline. Oil companies like Esso, Shell, and Texaco, under U.S. orders, refused to refine Soviet crude in Cuban refineries. When Cuba nationalized the refineries, Washington retaliated with a full economic embargo in October 1960. As one Eisenhower aide put it, the goal was “to make the economy scream.”
The CIA was central in this objective. Much of what is known about the CIA’s operations in Cuba comes from the Church Committee, the U.S. Senate investigation led by Frank Church in the 1970s that pried open the agency’s record of coups, assassinations, and covert terror. Its hearings revealed CIA plots to poison Fidel Castro, to arm exiles for sabotage, and to enlist the Mafia in murder schemes. What emerged was not rogue adventurism but an official policy of state terror directed at a small island whose only crime was independence.
The CIA turned to assassination. Declassified Church Committee reports in the 1970s confirmed multiple plots beginning in 1960, many involving the mafia figures Meyer Lansky and Santo Trafficante Jr. The schemes ranged from poisoned cigars to exploding seashells. Allen Dulles’s CIA had no illusions about “democracy.” The mission was murder.
By January 1961, Eisenhower severed diplomatic relations altogether. The incoming Kennedy administration inherited not just hostility, but an invasion plan. The CIA’s secret “Cuba Project” (later known as the Bay of Pigs) was already in motion.
For Cubans, these two years marked the clearest proof that the United States had never supported independence. Batista had been Washington’s tool, but when the Cuban people removed him, Washington treated their victory as an enemy to be destroyed. As Fidel Castro said in a December 1960 speech: “What they cannot forgive is that we have made a socialist revolution right under the nose of the United States.”
On April 17, 1961, 1400 CIA-trained Cuban exiles stormed the beaches at Playa Girón in the Bay of Pigs. They carried U.S. weapons, rode U.S. landing craft, and flew aircraft painted to look like Cuban planes. The plan was simple: land, seize a foothold, call for U.S. air cover, and to trigger an uprising against Fidel Castro.
It collapsed within 72 hours. Cuban militia and regular troops killed or captured nearly all of the invaders. Fidel himself was on the front lines, directing defenses. What was supposed to be a lightning coup turned into a humiliating rout. As one declassified CIA after-action report admitted: “The Agency overestimated the willingness of the Cuban population to rise up, underestimated Castro’s forces, and assumed U.S. military intervention would occur if necessary.”
But the invasion was not the end. It was the beginning of all-out covert “war”.
The CIA turned to assassination. Declassified Church Committee reports in the 1970s confirmed multiple plots beginning in 1960, many involving the mafia figures Meyer Lansky and Santo Trafficante Jr. The schemes ranged from poisoned cigars to exploding seashells. Allen Dulles’s CIA had no illusions about “democracy.” The mission was murder.
By January 1961, Eisenhower severed diplomatic relations altogether. The incoming Kennedy administration inherited not just hostility, but an invasion plan. The CIA’s secret “Cuba Project” (later known as the Bay of Pigs) was already in motion.
For Cubans, these two years marked the clearest proof that the United States had never supported independence. Batista had been Washington’s tool, but when the Cuban people removed him, Washington treated their victory as an enemy to be destroyed. As Fidel Castro said in a December 1960 speech: “What they cannot forgive is that we have made a socialist revolution right under the nose of the United States.”
1961-1962: Bay of Pigs, Operation Mongoose, and the Brink of Nuclear War
On April 17, 1961, 1400 CIA-trained Cuban exiles stormed the beaches at Playa Girón in the Bay of Pigs. They carried U.S. weapons, rode U.S. landing craft, and flew aircraft painted to look like Cuban planes. The plan was simple: land, seize a foothold, call for U.S. air cover, and to trigger an uprising against Fidel Castro.
It collapsed within 72 hours. Cuban militia and regular troops killed or captured nearly all of the invaders. Fidel himself was on the front lines, directing defenses. What was supposed to be a lightning coup turned into a humiliating rout. As one declassified CIA after-action report admitted: “The Agency overestimated the willingness of the Cuban population to rise up, underestimated Castro’s forces, and assumed U.S. military intervention would occur if necessary.”
But the invasion was not the end. It was the beginning of all-out covert “war”.
In November 1961, President John F. Kennedy authorized Operation Mongoose, a CIA program of sabotage, assassination attempts, and psychological warfare. The declassified “Lansdale Report” spelled it out: the objective was to “help Cuba overthrow the Communist regime… generating maximum assistance to the Cubans themselves.” But the methods were terrorism.
CIA teams infiltrated Cuba to burn cane fields, blow up factories, contaminate crops, and spread disease among livestock. One declassified document describes an operation to “destroy Cuba’s sugar crop through biological agents.” Another detailed plans to ship explosives disguised as shipments of charcoal.
The assassination obsession intensified. The Church Committee in 1975 confirmed that between 1960 and 1965, the CIA attempted to kill Castro at least eight times directly and plotted more than 600 schemes in total. Poisoned cigars, lethal diving suits, exploding seashells, botulinum toxin pills delivered through mafia intermediaries -- the documents read like grotesque parody. As one Senate investigator remarked: “We were manufacturing crime.”
By September 1962, Castro denounced at the United Nations: “The United States is conducting a relentless campaign of terror against Cuba.” The island braced for invasion. It was not paranoia. The CIA’s own Mongoose files show invasion scenarios were drawn up.
The Soviet Union responded by secretly deploying nuclear missiles to Cuba. For Washington, this was treated as intolerable provocation. Yet as even the Pentagon knew, the United States had already surrounded the USSR with nuclear missiles in Turkey and Italy. What was normal domination for Washington was “aggression” if practiced by anyone else.
This confrontation became known as the Cuban Missile Crisis. For 13 days in October 1962, the United States and the Soviet Union faced off over nuclear missiles in Cuba, each preparing for war while the world held its breath.
The standoff in October 1962 brought the planet to the edge of extinction. The most terrifying moment came on October 27, 1962. The Soviet submarine B-59, trapped under U.S. destroyers near Cuba, was armed with a nuclear torpedo. U.S. forces dropped depth charges to force the Russian submarine to surface.
The standoff in October 1962 brought the planet to the edge of extinction. The most terrifying moment came on October 27, 1962. The Soviet submarine B-59, trapped under U.S. destroyers near Cuba, was armed with a nuclear torpedo. U.S. forces dropped depth charges to force the Russian submarine to surface.
Inside the Russian sub, the crew believed nuclear war had already begun. Captain Valentin Savitsky and Political Officer Ivan Maslennikov voted to fire the nuclear weapon. Only one man, flotilla commander Vasili Arkhipov, refused. His signature was required for launch. He insisted on restraint, and the torpedo was never fired.
Had Arkhipov agreed, a nuclear blast would have killed thousands of U.S. sailors, and Washington’s invasion plans almost certainly would have triggered all-out nuclear war across the world. Robert McNamara later admitted: “We came very close. Closer than we knew at the time.”
This incident captures the structure of the system: the world was seconds away from annihilation, not because of “miscalculation” on both sides, but because the United States had pursued a policy of terrorism and aggression against a small island. Cuba’s sovereignty was never tolerated, and the logic of empire pushed events to the edge. Humanity was spared not by U.S. wisdom or democratic restraint, but by the accidental courage of a single Soviet officer.
The conclusion is clear. U.S. foreign policy created conditions where global nuclear war was not just possible, but rationalized as acceptable risk. When the archives are read soberly, the lesson is unmistakable: survival was a fluke. If empire continues to dictate policy, there is no reason to believe humanity will be so lucky again.
After the Missile Crisis, Washington publicly pledged not to invade Cuba. In practice, the campaign against Cuban sovereignty intensified. The U.S. shifted from direct invasion to a mix of international terrorism, economic strangulation, and psychological warfare. The objective was to punish Cuba for defying empire and to make an example of it for the entire Global South.
The logic was spelled out in U.S. government documents. In April 1960, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Lester Mallory wrote in a secret memo: “The majority of Cubans support Castro… The only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship. Every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba.”
In other words, Washington knew that Castro’s government had mass support. Democracy was not the problem. The problem was that Cubans supported the wrong system (one that put land reform, literacy, and healthcare above U.S. corporate profits).
The Cuban elites who had fled after 1959 (plantation owners, casino bosses, Batista loyalists) became Washington’s proxy army in Miami. The CIA trained them in Florida and Central America, supplied weapons, and looked the other way as they stockpiled arms and raised money openly in the United States.
The key organizations included:
This was not “exile violence.” It was U.S.-sponsored international terrorism carried out by Batista’s displaced elite with Washington’s protection.
President Kennedy rejected the proposal. Yet the record is undeniable: the U.S. military’s highest leadership endorsed mass murder of civilians, including Americans, as an acceptable price for destroying the Cuban Revolution.
In Latin America and the Global South, U.S. propaganda demonized Cuba’s literacy campaigns, healthcare model, and support for anti-colonial movements -- for example its decisive military role against apartheid South Africa in Angola. The goal was isolation, to prevent Cuba from being seen as a viable alternative model.
The historical record shows continuity. From John Quincy Adams’s “ripe fruit” doctrine in the 19th century to Mallory’s memo in 1960, the message never changed: Cuba was not allowed to be independent. Terror and lies were the chosen instruments to enforce that rule.
Had Arkhipov agreed, a nuclear blast would have killed thousands of U.S. sailors, and Washington’s invasion plans almost certainly would have triggered all-out nuclear war across the world. Robert McNamara later admitted: “We came very close. Closer than we knew at the time.”
This incident captures the structure of the system: the world was seconds away from annihilation, not because of “miscalculation” on both sides, but because the United States had pursued a policy of terrorism and aggression against a small island. Cuba’s sovereignty was never tolerated, and the logic of empire pushed events to the edge. Humanity was spared not by U.S. wisdom or democratic restraint, but by the accidental courage of a single Soviet officer.
The conclusion is clear. U.S. foreign policy created conditions where global nuclear war was not just possible, but rationalized as acceptable risk. When the archives are read soberly, the lesson is unmistakable: survival was a fluke. If empire continues to dictate policy, there is no reason to believe humanity will be so lucky again.
1963-1990: International Terrorism as U.S. Policy
After the Missile Crisis, Washington publicly pledged not to invade Cuba. In practice, the campaign against Cuban sovereignty intensified. The U.S. shifted from direct invasion to a mix of international terrorism, economic strangulation, and psychological warfare. The objective was to punish Cuba for defying empire and to make an example of it for the entire Global South.
Why Washington Turned to Terror
The logic was spelled out in U.S. government documents. In April 1960, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Lester Mallory wrote in a secret memo: “The majority of Cubans support Castro… The only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship. Every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba.”
In other words, Washington knew that Castro’s government had mass support. Democracy was not the problem. The problem was that Cubans supported the wrong system (one that put land reform, literacy, and healthcare above U.S. corporate profits).
The solution, in Mallory’s words, was to make the people suffer until they turned against their own revolution.
This U.S. strategy required two tools: economic blockade and terrorism. The CIA’s role was to cultivate violent exile organizations, arm them, and unleash them against Cuban civilians.
This U.S. strategy required two tools: economic blockade and terrorism. The CIA’s role was to cultivate violent exile organizations, arm them, and unleash them against Cuban civilians.
U.S.-Backed Terrorist Organizations
The Cuban elites who had fled after 1959 (plantation owners, casino bosses, Batista loyalists) became Washington’s proxy army in Miami. The CIA trained them in Florida and Central America, supplied weapons, and looked the other way as they stockpiled arms and raised money openly in the United States.
The key organizations included:
- Alpha 66 (founded 1962): Launched raids on Cuban coastal villages, sank fishing boats, and shelled ports. In 1963 it attacked the port of Isabella de Sagua, firing on civilians. The group operated openly from Miami with U.S. tolerance.
- Omega 7 (founded 1974): Carried out bombings and assassinations in the U.S. and abroad. It bombed the Cuban mission to the UN in 1979 and murdered figures seen as sympathetic to Havana.
- CORU (Coordinación de Organizaciones Revolucionarias Unidas, formed 1976): An umbrella group led by exile hardliners Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch. CORU claimed responsibility for the bombing of Cubana Flight 455 in 1976, which killed all 73 passengers, including Cuba’s national fencing team and 24 Guyanese students.
This was not “exile violence.” It was U.S.-sponsored international terrorism carried out by Batista’s displaced elite with Washington’s protection.
Operation Northwoods: Terror Planned at the Top
The willingness to use terrorism was not confined to exile groups. In March 1962, the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the United States military -- the top generals and admirals of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps -- unanimously approved Operation Northwoods. The plan proposed sinking a boat of Cuban refugees, hijacking aircraft, or bombing U.S. cities to fabricate a pretext for invasion. The document stated: “A ‘Remember the Maine’ incident could be arranged…”, a reference to the 1898 explosion of a U.S. battleship in Havana harbor, which Washington used as a pretext to launch the Spanish–American War.President Kennedy rejected the proposal. Yet the record is undeniable: the U.S. military’s highest leadership endorsed mass murder of civilians, including Americans, as an acceptable price for destroying the Cuban Revolution.
Propaganda as Psychological Warfare
To sustain the siege, Washington needed a narrative. Domestically, Cuba was painted as a “dictatorship” and “Soviet satellite.” The CIA’s Operation Mockingbird pushed anti-Castro stories into major U.S. outlets. Radio was weaponized: Radio Swan in the 1960s, and later Radio Martí in 1985, broadcast nonstop propaganda into Cuba. Internal White House memos admitted Martí was not objective journalism but psychological operations.In Latin America and the Global South, U.S. propaganda demonized Cuba’s literacy campaigns, healthcare model, and support for anti-colonial movements -- for example its decisive military role against apartheid South Africa in Angola. The goal was isolation, to prevent Cuba from being seen as a viable alternative model.
The Lesson of Terror and Lies
Between 1963 and 1990, Cuba was not engaged in “war” with the United States. It was the target of state-directed international terrorism combined with economic siege and propaganda. Every bomb in a Havana hotel, every corpse from Flight 455, every child who died of dengue fever, and every hospital that ran out of antibiotics because of the embargo was a casualty of U.S. policy.The historical record shows continuity. From John Quincy Adams’s “ripe fruit” doctrine in the 19th century to Mallory’s memo in 1960, the message never changed: Cuba was not allowed to be independent. Terror and lies were the chosen instruments to enforce that rule.
1990-Present: Terror by Siege and Attrition
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Cuba lost 80 percent of its trade and entered what Cubans called the “Special Period.” Blackouts, hunger, and scarcity hit the island on a massive scale. Instead of easing the embargo, Washington escalated. For U.S. policymakers, the fall of the USSR was the chance to finish what they had tried to do since 1959: strangle the Cuban Revolution.
Torricelli and Helms-Burton: Codifying Economic Terror
In 1992, Congress passed the Cuban Democracy Act (known as the Torricelli Act). It prohibited U.S. subsidiaries abroad from trading with Cuba and barred ships that had docked in Cuba from entering U.S. ports for six months. The law weaponized the U.S.'s economic hegemony over the international economic system as a global superpower to extend the blockade of Cuba far beyond American borders.
In 1996, after Cuba shot down planes belonging to a Miami-based group called “Brothers to the Rescue” that had repeatedly violated Cuban airspace, the U.S. passed the Helms-Burton Act. This law internationalized the embargo by threatening sanctions against foreign companies that did business with Cuba. Helms-Burton locked the blockade into U.S. law, removing the President’s ability to end it without congressional approval. Human Rights Watch noted that it was the most comprehensive sanctions regime the U.S. maintained against any country.
For ordinary Cubans, these laws meant shortages of antibiotics, chemotherapy drugs, medical equipment, and agricultural supplies. Cuban hospitals reported children dying from treatable illnesses because replacement parts for ventilators and dialysis machines were blocked. The goal was identical to what Lester Mallory had written in 1960: inflict suffering until Cubans turned against their government.
U.S.-Backed Exile Terrorism in the 1990s
Even as the embargo tightened, U.S.-based exile organizations continued violent attacks with impunity. In 1997, a wave of bombings hit Havana hotels and restaurants. An Italian tourist, Fabio Di Celmo, was killed. Luis Posada Carriles, the same ex-CIA operative who organized the 1976 Cubana Flight 455 bombing, later admitted to orchestrating the attacks. When asked about the Italian victim, he replied: “The Italian was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but I sleep like a baby.”
Posada lived openly in Miami until his death in 2018. Washington never prosecuted him for terrorism. The hypocrisy was glaring. The U.S. branded Cuba a “state sponsor of terrorism” while sheltering anti-Cuban terrorists inside its own borders.
The Propaganda of “Democracy Promotion”
At the same time, Washington escalated its propaganda war. The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and USAID funneled millions into Cuban exile media and NGOs dedicated to destabilization. Radio Martí and TV Martí, launched in the 1980s, expanded their reach during the 1990s. Internal White House memos admitted that these outlets were not objective journalism but psychological operations designed to create disaffection inside Cuba.
The U.S. also funded exile groups like “Brothers to the Rescue,” which flew planes into Cuban airspace dropping propaganda leaflets and sometimes conducting reconnaissance for attacks. Their incursions were deliberately provocative. When Cuba shot down two of their planes in 1996, Washington used the incident as justification to pass Helms-Burton.
The narrative in U.S. media portrayed Cuba as a “failed state” whose hardships were blamed solely on socialism, never on the embargo itself. This propaganda was necessary to mask the fact that Washington was deliberately engineering economic collapse.
The Illusion of Thaw
In 2014, President Obama announced a partial thaw. Embassies reopened, some travel restrictions were eased, and remittances expanded. For a moment, it appeared that fifty years of siege might end. But the reality was limited. The embargo itself remained intact. U.S. banks were still forbidden to process Cuban transactions, and medical trade remained heavily restricted. The “normalization” was cosmetic.
The opening was quickly reversed. The Trump administration imposed more than 200 new sanctions, cutting remittances, blocking fuel shipments, and tightening financial restrictions. During the COVID-19 pandemic, when Cuba faced desperate shortages of oxygen and medical supplies, Washington refused to lift sanctions. President Biden has kept most of these measures in place.
Collective Punishment in the Twenty-First Century
Cuba remains under one of the harshest sanctions regimes in the world. Ships carrying oil are tracked and threatened with penalties. Companies that sell even humanitarian goods face U.S. fines. Banks refuse to process Cuban transactions for fear of Treasury retaliation. In 2021, the UN General Assembly voted 184 to 2 to condemn the embargo (the only votes against were the United States and Israel). Washington ignored the resolution.
This is not foreign policy in any neutral sense. It is collective punishment, designed to terrorize a civilian population into submission.
Conclusion: The Meaning of Cuba
Cuba’s story is not an anomaly. It is a mirror. For two centuries, the United States has insisted that independence is permitted only if it aligns with empire. When a small island refused, it was met with terror, blockade, and lies. The lesson is not about Cuba alone. It is about the world system we inhabit.
Empire does not need to conquer with armies when it can strangle with banks, when it can starve a population with embargoes, when it can train exiles to plant bombs in hotels, and then call it freedom.
The history of Cuba shows how violence and hypocrisy are normalized, how the most powerful nation on earth can commit what it condemns in others, and how propaganda makes it invisible to its own citizens.
What Cuba reveals is that the greatest crime is not only material (the deaths from dengue fever, the children denied medicine, the passengers blown apart in midair) but also moral. The crime is the systematic erasure of the truth, the inversion that calls resistance “terrorism” and calls terror “policy.”
When lies are repeated long enough, entire populations lose the capacity to recognize reality.
The Cuban Revolution has survived not because it defeated the United States militarily but because it exposed this reality. It showed that the empire cannot tolerate even a modest example of sovereignty, and it showed the world that the cost of independence is endless punishment.
That revelation is dangerous, because it forces us to ask: how many other nations, how many other peoples, are kept in line by the same tactics?
The epiphany is simple but devastating.
What happened to Cuba is not the exception. It is the rule. And if we cannot recognize it there (on an island 90 miles from Florida, punished for generations simply for being free) then we will not recognize it anywhere else, until it consumes us all.
Yet despite six decades of terror, blockade, and propaganda, Cuba has survived and thrived. The island built universal literacy, trained doctors who serve across the world, developed its own vaccines under sanctions, and offered solidarity to struggles from Angola to Haiti to Palestine.What Washington tried to crush became a model of resilience and creativity under siege. The Cuban people, carrying the revolutionary spirit of 1959, showed that a nation can not only endure empire’s punishment but live, grow, and inspire others in defiance of it.
“¡Hasta la victoria siempre!”
— Ernesto “Che” Guevara