The long history of the US-Cuba conflict

With so much attention Iran In recent weeks, you may have missed the news about the tense situation with another long-time enemy of the United States – closer to home.

On April 13, while commenting on the Iran war, President Trump said, “We may go through Cuba after we’re done with this.”

The US has it blocked almost all oil shipments to Cubapushing it to the brink of collapse. Meanwhile, high-level talks between the two countries are ongoing.

Mr. Trump did not provide details, however has he said: “All my life I have been hearing about the United States and Cuba: when will the United States act? I believe that I will be honored, I will be honored to take Cuba.”

The island nation 90 miles from Florida has indeed played a major role in our foreign policy for nearly 70 years. But back in the 1950s, many Americans thought of Cuba as a magical paradise.

“It was a playground where anything went, where there were casinos, where there was prostitution … and to a large extent, that was true,” said Jorge Malagon Marquez, Cuban-American, and professor of history at Miami Dade College. “You’ve got celebrities like Frank Sinatra coming down. It’s party time.

“What the Americans didn’t see was the discontent of ordinary Cubans running underground,” he said.

Many Cubans lived and worked in American-owned factories. “Cubans loved the Americans who came as tourists or you, but it was the economic control that worried them the most,” Marquez said. And for many Cubans, the memories were still fresh from half a century earlier when, after the Spanish American War, the US achieved a “sort of” Cuban independence in 1902.

But was Cuba really independent? “It’s the same independence that I gave my teenage kids,” laughs Marquez, “which is, ‘Sure, you’re independent, as long as you’re home by 10.’

Yes, Cuba was an independent nation, but the United States could intervene whenever its interests were at stake – which it did often, until the 1930s. Thus, by the late 1950s, conditions were ripe for change.

But if other Latin American countries have complaints about the United States, what is it about Cuba that allowed a decades-long communist dictatorship to take root there? “That’s right Fidelismo,” said Marquez. “It’s a religion of humanity. If it were anyone else, this would have appeared within the first few years. “

The late Fidel Castro came to power in 1959, and became a leading actor in the Cold War, which sparked the fear of Communism that spread across the Americas. His dictatorship still exists a trade embargo that lasted for decades … missile problem which brought the world to the brink of nuclear war … again the fall of the Soviet Uniona longtime Cuban activist.

Marquez still remembers that Castro had a five-year-old child growing up in Cuba: “I was in first grade or just starting first grade. And they have something called Pioneers for the Revolution – you wear a red scarf. And they would ask, ‘Bow your heads and pray for candy to God.’ And the children would bow their heads and pray to God and ask for candy … and open your eyes.”

After the candy did not appear, the children would be told, ‘Bend your heads, close your eyes, and ask Fidel for a candy.’ … I wish I could fix this! And lo and behold, there will be candy.”

Marquez and his family fled Cuba in 1967, among more than 1.5 million people who left the island for the US since the early 1960s.

Elsa and Becky Cobo’s late father, Arturo, was a teenager in Havana in 1960 when he witnessed his father’s bank being seized by the government. “He saw the soldiers come and take the keys from my grandfather and say to him, ‘Go,’ and that’s when he said, ‘We have to do something,'” said Elsa.

Arturo fled to the US, and joined a CIA-trained group of Cuban exiles who, in April 1961, landed in Cuba’s Bay of Pigs on a secret mission aimed at overthrowing Castro. The soldiers were expecting air cover from the Americans. At the last minute, however, Democratic President John F. Kennedy pulled the plug – a turn of events that the Cuban-Americans did not forget.

“They were left there to die,” said Elsa.

Asked why so many Cuban Americans are so staunchly Republican, Marquez replied, “The Bay of Pigs. That’s all. You don’t have to go any further.”

Arturo Cobo spent almost two years in a Cuban prison. Upon his release, he settled in Key West, Fla., where his daughters still live today.

There, Arturo helped the movement after the wave of refugees that arrived from his country. Many did not survive the journey.

At the Key West Botanical Garden, you can see evidence of their desperation – makeshift rafts used by Cubans to reach America, some made of Styrofoam.

Arturo Cobo died in 2019. He, like many others who fled Castro’s Cuba, never returned. “They came with the hope that one day Cuba would be free,” said Becky, “and they never thought … they would never see the day when that would happen.”

Jorge Malagon Marquez says those waves of migration have remade South Florida. But their absence from Cuba may help explain the regime’s longevity: “Those who would have wanted to stand up? They’re gone. I mean, you have to give it to Fidel Castro. He was smart, you know, in a, like, bad way. He was a badass genius.”

But Castro died in 2016and the Cold War has long since ended. Few believe Cuba poses the same threat to the U.S. Cuba’s economy, which has never been strong under communist rule, has been collapsing since the pandemic, with nearly a fifth of the population leaving by 2021.

And now the Trump administration is turning the screws on an already failing state, exacerbating their humanitarian crisis. Mr. Trump said of Cuba, “Or I free it, take it, I think I can do whatever I want with it.”

Cubans on both sides of the Florida Straits pondered next.

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Story produced by Mark Hudspeth. Editor: Emanuele Secci.

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