The aging Cuban Dictator reappeared recently to make a few interesting comments on Cuban television. After listening to his speech, I decided it was time for me to return the favor and make a few overdue comments of my own.Fidel Castro, the despot who came very close to starting a nuclear war in 1962 between the United States and the Soviet Union, made several public appearances this week to predict imminent nuclear war. The calamity he craved in Oct. 1962 will erupt, he predicted, when the Israelis and their ‘Yankee vassals’, provoke Iran in the straits of Hormuz.
Castro, the same man who co-sponsored the 1975 UN resolution equating Zionism with Racism, says, “The Israeli tail wags the Yankee dog.” Those Yankees are certainly powerful, Castro explained, but also a bit naïve and submissive. The main instigators are those crafty Israelis. "The control that Israel has over the United States is enormous," he proclaimed.
Fidel Castro has excellent reason to have fond memories of imminent nuclear war. “Of course I knew the missiles were nuclear- armed,” responded Fidel Castro to Robert McNamara during a meeting in 1992. “That’s precisely WHY I urged Khrushchev to launch them. And of course Cuba would have been utterly destroyed in the exchange.”
"If the missiles had remained, we would have fired them against the very heart of the U.S., including New York. The victory of socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims.” (Che Guevara, November 1962.)
“My dream is to drop three Atomic Bombs on New York City (Raul –not Fidel—Castro, Nov. 1960.)
“We should deliver a nuclear first strike,” read the telegram from Castro to Khrushchev on Oct. 28 1962.
“What!” Khrushchev gasped, as recalled by his son Sergei. “Is he (Fidel Castro) proposing that we start a nuclear war? That we launch missiles from Cuba?”
“Apparently.”
“Yesterday the Cubans shot down a plane (U-2 with) without (Soviet) permission. Today they’re preparing a nuclear attack.”
“But that is insane!...Remove them (our missiles) as soon as possible! Before it’s too late. Before something terrible happens!” instructed the Soviet premier.
The Castro brothers and Che Guevara’s genocidal lusts played a major part in prompting Khrushchev to get those missiles out of Cuba!
“We ended up getting exactly what we'd wanted all along
," Nikita Khrushchev later wrote in his memoirs, "security for Fidel Castro’s regime and American missiles removed from Turkey. Until today the U.S. has complied with her promise not to interfere with Castro and not to allow anyone else to interfere with Castro. After Kennedy's death, his successor Lyndon Johnson assured us that he would keep the promise not to invade Cuba.""Kennedy pulled defeat out of the jaws of victory,” Nixon wrote about the Bay of Pigs and Missile Crisis. “Then (he) gave the Soviets squatters rights in our backyard."
In his memoirs, Khrushchev further twisted the knife and snickered yet again: "it would have been ridiculous for us to go to war over Cuba--for a country 12,000 miles away. For us, war was unthinkable.
The Crisis “resolution” gave Castro a new status, protection assured by the two most powerful countries on earth.
The Missile crisis “solution” also pulled the rug out from under Cuba's freedom fighters. Raul Castro himself admitted that at the time of the Missile Crisis his troops and their Soviet advisors were up against 179 different "bands of bandits" as he labeled the thousands of Cuban anti-Communist rebels then battling virtually alone in Cuba's countryside, with small arms shipments from their compatriots in south Florida as their only lifeline.
The deal with the Soviets cut this lifeline. The Cuban freedom-fighters based in South Florida were suddenly rounded up for "violating U.S. Neutrality laws." The Coast Guard in Florida got 12 new boats and seven new planes to make sure Castro and his Soviet patrons remained virtually unmolested as they consolidated Stalinism 90 miles from U.S. shores. Think about it: here's the U.S. Coast Guard and Border patrol working 'round the clock arresting Hispanics in the U.S. who are desperate to return to their native country.
President Bush used to give speeches about how it was America’s duty to help the spread of democracy. It is a shame he overlooked our neighbor just a little south of Key West. As for Castro’s prediction of nuclear war, he also predicted Cuba would be shining example of progress and prosperity under his brand of socialism. He has now had five decades and we still have not seen any success.
2 comments:
Gary
It wasn't until I saw the Robert McNamara documentary "Fog of War" that I really grasped how close the world came to nuclear war during the missile crisis. For me, it also made understand how important it was that no other country in Latin America be allowed go communist.
As for Cuba, I suppose at the time of the crisis itself Kennedy did the right thing even if the Soviets got more out of it than the US.
For me, the real blame for Cuba lies with whoever is responsible for allowing Castro to come to power and for those who failed to remove him in the early days of the regime. I'm not sure if the blame falls more with Eisenhower or JFK.
As for the decades following the missile crisis. For stability sakes non intervention in Cuba was probably wise even if it was hard to stumoch. Today Cuba does not really threaten US security. Communism will eventually fall in Cuba. I think it's best to just let it happen naturally.
Incidentally, isn't it amazing how Castro manages to blame the worlds problems on Israel.
Ted,
Cuba has always been a blind spot for me. In my early days I worked closely some some people who had been involved in the Cuban operation and there was a lot of deep anger, directed at everyone involved. So much that it could easily be why I have not spent much time on it these days.
You are right. Castro should never have been allowed to come in or stay in power. But he did.
You are also right that unless things change the best course is to watch and let the whole thing play itself out as it will inevitably do.
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