Castro Rise The Power Essay Research Paper

Castro Rise The Power Essay, Research Paper

Castro Rise The Power

Dr. Fidel Castro Ruz became involved with political protests as a young

student. After Batista s coup in 1952, he went to court and tried to have

the Batista dictatorship declared illegal. However, his attempt to

peacefully bring down the Batista government did not work, and so in 1953,

Castro turned toward violent means. On July 26, 1953, Castro led a group of

men to attack the Moncada military fortress. However, his little rebellion

was immediately crushed by the Batista army. In fact, the Roman Catholic

archbishop of Santiago had to make the government promise that the rebels

would live, if they would stop fighting and come down from the mountains.

Sure enough, the government kept its promise and Fidel Castro and his

followers were sentenced to three years of imprisonment. Batista, in order

to gain some popular support, released them after a few months.

Castro s rebellion failed, it sparked hopes of revolution everywhere in

Cuba. After a few years of exile in Mexico, Castro and a small band of about

eighty-five men returned to Cuba in December of 1956. Many of the men

perished during the initial landing, but a small group including Fidel

Castro and an Argentinian Marxist Ernesto “Che” Guevara, survived and went

into the mountains. During the next two years, Castro and Guevara fought the

Batista army continuously in small guerrilla wars. They called themselves

the Twenty-sixth of July Movement, after the earlier unsuccessful raid on

the Moncada barracks. Their group gained in numbers and popularity among

Cubans as the desire for political change in Cuba increased. Castro promised

sweeping changes including free elections, non-corrupt government, land,

improved educational systems, jobs and health care for all. Castro became

sort of like a Robin Hood for Cuba and many flocked to his banner. The final

blow to the Batista regime came when the United States withdrew its support

as Batista was falling from power. Seeing that a full scale war against him

was inevitable, Batista fled the country with his family and close friends

to the Dominican Republic. On January 8, 1959, the revolutionary forces

marched into Havana unopposed.

Tension between Cuba and the United States

Tension between Cuba and the United States increased dramatically after the

Castro takeover. The main reason was that Castro and Guevara were leading

Cuba toward communism. As a part of the sweeping reforms that Castro had

promise, he took all estates larger than one thousand acres and nationalized

it, meaning that it was made the property of the government. Most of the

seized land, including over 2 1/4 million acres owned by U.S. investors,

were made into large state-owned farms. The lost of sugar mills, banks,

hotels, utility companies, etc. totaled about $2 billion. By then, it became

clear that Castro was leading Cuba toward communism instead of his promise

toward democracy. This conclusion was further bolstered when the USSR signed

their first trade agreement with Cuba in February of 1960. Finally, in

January of 1961, only two years after the fall of Batista, the United States

severed diplomatic relations with Cuba and imposed an unilateral trade

embargo against the island country.

Even before the United States broke relations with Cuba, there had already

been plans made against the Castro regime. The U.S. supported Operation

Pluto, the secret name of an invasion on Cuba, in hopes of overthrowing

Fidel Castro. The Bay of Pigs Incident, as it was later known as, began on

April 15, 1961 with air raids on Cuba. Two days later, 1,500 U.S. trained

Cuban exiles landed on Cuba with weapons supplied by the United States. At

the time, the U.S. government was convinced that the Cuban people would join

the invading forces once they land and that the Castro army would disband.

However, this assumption was fatally wrong. The landing party were defeated

with forty-eight hours. About 120 people died and more than 1,200 captured.

The U.S. government had to pay $50 million in food and medical supplies to

ransom them.

The tension between Cuba and the U.S. grew to a climax during the Cuban

Missile Crisis of 1962. After the Bay of Pigs Invasion, Castro openly

admitted that he was committed to communism. “I am a Marxist-Leninist and

will be a Marxist-Leninist until the day I die,” he declared. In the summer

of 1962, U.S. spy planes saw that Cuba was receiving large amounts of

military equilpment from the Soviet Union. Photographs revealed that the

Soviets were building missile installations within Cuba. The U.S. felt

threatened because the missiles had a range of 1,000 miles and they were

capable of carrying nuclear warheads. With a nuclear threat only 90 miles

off the coast of Florida, President John F. Kennedy war

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