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Why did the US fail to prevent the spread of communism to Cuba?
There is the argument that the US did prevent the spread of communism to Cuba, but through American policy and paranoia they pushed a nationalist leader, with no intention of communism or even socialism into the opening arms of a Communist government.
In 1889, the USA first became involved in Cuba; by helping to overthrow their ‘old world colonial masters’, Spain. Cuba then became all but an American colony, even with an amendment in its constitution stating that the US government had the right to intervene in Cuban affairs; this was though to be repealed in 1934. Batista came to direct power in 1933, yet he was a puppet of his American masters, his regime got more and more despised within Cuba. Castro was to first raise the revolutionary standard in Havana on January 8 1959, a week after Batista had fled the country.
1960 saw the visit of Premier Mikoyan to Cuba, Castro signed a trade agreement with him in order that he could start to improve the economy, to do this e had to nationalise over a billion dollars worth of American industry. Eisenhower enforced an economic blockade upon Cuba as a reprisal; this however had dire consequences, as the USSR agreed to purchase all of the sugar export. When the US then refused to sell petroleum products to Cuba, the USSR again stepped in to aid Cuba, despite the major strain that would be placed upon Soviet shipping. It can be said that the consequence is that Cuba became a Communist state.
There are two views of history that concern the cold war: they are the Traditionalist and Revisionist views. These two schools of thought evolved at different times and current thinking would suggest that there deserves to be a compromise between the two, central to this debate is the foreign policy of the two ‘warring’ states.
The Traditionalist view endorses the official view of the United States Government’s position of who started the cold war: that it was the US who had to resist a series of aggressive and expansionist moves by the USSR. However, the ‘revisionists’ of the world are more critical and cynical about the use of American foreign policy; arguing that the US had ‘acted in an aggressive and unreasonable manner after the Second World War, provoking a Soviet counter-response.
The Marxist view of history must not be forgotten: that communism will spread through out the world at an ever expanding rate. In this view there would have been nothing that the US could do nothing to prevent the spread of communism to Cuba.
It is now the general consensus that ‘the Cold War was the result of mutual misunderstandings and of unavoidable clashes between Soviet and American foreign interests’. The question remains though, why did Khrushchev place his ‘dog’ in ‘Uncle Sam’s backyard’. It can be [next page]