Bay of Pigs: ‘It was a calamity: Kennedy had been totally misinformed by American Intelligence.’ The Sixties: The World on the Brink, 2014
1898 President McKinley orders US troops to invade Cuba; 1905 President Theodore Roosevelt orders the invasion of Honduras; 1912 President Taft orders the invasion of Nicaragua; 1914-1918 President Wilson invades Haiti, Cuba and Panama; 1924-26 President Coolidge invades Nicaragua and Honduras; 1954 Eisenhower approves the overthrow of the elected government of Guatemala; 1961 Kennedy approves the CIA invasion of Cuba; 1965 Johnson invades the Dominican Republic; 1973 Nixon approves the overthrow of the elected government of Chile; 1981 President Reagan approves the CIA secret war against Nicaragua; 1983 President Reagan orders the invasion of Granada. John Pilger, Nicaragua – A Nation’s Right to Survive, ITV 1983
Cuba’s achievements in healthcare and education are widely respected. However, by not bowing to the greatest power on earth, the Cuban revolution has paid a high price. A forty-five-year economic war. John Pilger, The War on Democracy, 2007
Good evening, my fellow citizens. This government has promised, has maintained the closest surveillance, of the Soviet military build-up on the island of Cuba. Within the past week unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island. The purpose of these bases can be none other than to provide a nuclear strike capability against the Western hemisphere. John F Kennedy, 7 p.m. 22nd October
President Khrushchev told President Kennedy yesterday that he would withdraw offensive weapons from Cuba if the United States withdrew its rockets from Turkey. John F Kennedy, reading letter to EXCON meeting
It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union. John F Kennedy
To halt this offensive build-up, a strict quarantine on all offensive military equipment under shipment to Cuba is being initiated. All ships of any kind bound for Cuba from whatever nation and port will, if found to contain cargoes of offensive weapons, be turned back. This quarantine will be extended, if needed, to other types of cargo and carriers. We are not at this time, however, denying the necessities of life as the Soviets attempted to do in their Berlin blockade of 1948. John F Kennedy
I trust that in the interests of both the Cuban people and the Soviet technicians at the sites, the hazards to all concerned of continuing the threat will be recognised. John F Kennedy
I thought if there was a war, an invasion of Cuba, there would be nuclear war. And that would result in the disappearance of millions and millions of people. Jose Ramon Fernandez, vice president Cuban council of ministers
Fidel Castro’s Cuba: a communist island in a sea of American power. It was his one small foothold in the western hemisphere. But Cuba was an ally that could be lost at any moment. Defcon 2: Cuban Missile Crisis, Discovery 2002
We must establish a New World Order based on justice, on equity and on peace. Fidel Castro, United Nations 1979
I am Fidel Castro and we have come to liberate Cuba. Fidel Castro
United States’ leaders should think that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe. Fidel Castro 7th September 1963, attributed
Warfare is a means and not an end. Warfare is a tool of revolutionaries. The important thing is the revolution. The important thing is the revolutionary cause, revolutionary ideas, revolutionary objectives, revolutionary sentiments, revolutionary virtues! Fidel Castro
This country ... abounds in that Cuba is a heaven in the spiritual sense of the word, and we prefer to die in heaven than serve in hell. Fidel Castro
Castro couldn’t even go to the bathroom unless the Soviet Union put a nickel in the toilet. Richard Nixon
I think that I’ve tried many times to get Cuba in my writings. Especially Havana, which was once a great and fascinating city. Guillermo Cabrera Infante
March 13th 1962: Lyman Lemnitzer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, prepares a document for Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara named Operation Northwoods. The document proposed staging terrorist operations in and around Guantanamo Bay to provide a pretext for military intervention in Cuba. The plans included starting rumours about Cuba using clandestine radio, landing friendly Cubans inside the base to stage attacks, starting riots at the main gate, blowing up ammunition inside the base, starting fires, sabotaging aircraft and ships on the base, bombing the base with mortar shells, sinking a ship outside the entrance, staging funerals for mock victims, staging a terror campaign in Miami Florida and Washington DC, and finally, destroying a drone aircraft over Cuban waters. Project Illuminati
As the Kennedy brothers appeared to suddenly go soft on Cuba Lemnitzer could see his opportunity to invade .. Attempts to provoke the Cuban public to revolt seemed dead ... Lemnitzer and the other chiefs knew there was only one option left that would ensure war. They would have to trick the American public and world opinion. James Bamford, Body of Secrets
Cuba ‘plane bomber’ was CIA agent: Declassified US government documents show that a man suspected of involvement in the bombing of a Cuban passenger plane worked for the CIA. BBC news online article 11th May 2005
Washington DC – On the 40th anniversary of the assassination of John F Kennedy and the eve of the broadcast of a new documentary film on Kennedy and Castro, the National Security Archive today posted an audio tape of the President and his national security advisor, McGeorge Bundy, discussing the possibility of a secret meeting in Havana with Castro. The tape, dated only seventeen days before Kennedy was shot in Dallas, records a briefing from Bundy on Castro’s invitation to a US official at the United Nations, William Attwood, to come to Havana for secret talks on improving relations with Washington. The tape captures President Kennedy's approval if official US involvement could be plausibly denied. Kennedy & Castro: The Secret History, TVPG 2003
In the early 1960s the federal government needed an excuse, a pretext, to invade Cuba. Seldom do we see examples as sterling as the Northwoods document where the federal government put the plan to paper ... The federal government proposed blowing up airliners full of Americans ... President Kennedy was not amused. Alex Jones, 9/11 The Road to Tyranny, 2002
US Military Drafted Plans to Terrorise US Cities to Provoke War With Cuba. ABC News 1st May 2001
Of all the defeats in the Cold War the capture of Cuba by the communists is the most unacceptable. Major General Edwin A Walker, US National Indignation Society
The CIA’s actions in Cuba were designed to spark a popular revolution against Fidel who had come to power via a revolution himself – a revolution against American power in Cuba. Secrets of the CIA, 2006
The intention was to create such war hysteria that a legitimisation and justification for intervention in Cuba would emerge out of it. Kennedy refused that back then. He did not carry it out. But nevertheless all his chiefs of staff from Army, Air Force, Marines and Navy were in total agreement that it should be done. Andreas von Bulow, former German minister of research & education
He had led a revolution that overthrew a hated dictator. And on January 6th 1959, the day of his triumphant march into Havana, he embodied the hopes of an entire nation. Fidel Castro, PBS 2013
He survived a US backed invasion, countless assassination plots, an economic embargo, even the collapse of his benefactor the Soviet Union. ibid.
The CIA trained an army of exiles in Guatemala for an invasion of Cuba. ibid.
Sierra Maestra Mountains, Cuba 1958: Charismatic leader Fidel Castro leads guerrilla fighters on a mission to take the island nation by storm ... A revolution turns into a war. Edge of War: Castro’s Revolution, History 2013
One night in late 1955 Castro is introduced to a fiercely intelligent physician by the name of Ernesto Che Guevara. ibid.
Castro loses over 75% of his men before his invasion has a chance to begin. ibid.
The duplicate would be substituted for the actual civil aircraft ... The drone aircraft meanwhile will ... fly the filed flight plan. Operation Northwoods document 13th March 1962
When in 1955 Guevara meet Castro for the first time he feels at last that he can put his idealism into action. Castro is still determined to invade Cuba and depose president Batista. But all he has is a handful of men. Infamous Assassinations: Che Guevara
2nd January 1959 Havana, Cuba: The revolutionary armies arrive in Havana, as Batista knowing his situation is hopeless flees to safety in the Dominican Republic. But he doesn’t go empty-handed having looted a three-hundred million dollar fortune from the Cuban Treasury. ibid.
January 3rd 1961 Washington DC: The US officially breaks off all diplomatic relations with Cuba. ‘There is a limit to what the United States’ self-respect can endure. That limit has now been reached’. ibid.