Even before Fidel Castro’s rise to power, the United States had been worried about the spread of communist ideas and leaders. While they had aided the Soviet Union in World War II, there was not a strong sense of “camaraderie” between the two powers by 1959. Robert Buzzanco’s article, titled “Many Deeds of War: American Power and Decline in the 1960s”, describes the decade in which the United States waged war, both physically and economically, against communist or socialist countries such as Cuba and Vietnam. While the fight has continued well beyond that time period, the 1960s specifically are remarked upon for American anti-communism being as intense as it was. John F. Kennedy believed it to be in the United States’ best interests to keep southern Vietnam from “turning communist”, and so troops were sent, as well as tanks, advisors, and the infamous chemical Agent Orange. While Cuba did not receive chemical agents similar to Agent Orange on its land, fighting involving Americans still took place there. They were cut off from trade with the Americans, in a frustrated attempt by the United States to stop Fidel Castro from preventing American profit in Cuba. The multiple attempts on Castro’s life also contributed to the lessening of their power, as obviously, none succeeded.
Robert Buzzanco’s “Many Deeds of War: American Power and Decline in the 1960s” describes the fates of other communist countries besides Cuba while being under the watchful eye of the American empire. Buzzanco, himself, is a professor who specializes in Vietnamese history and American foreign policy. However, it is not necessary to know the countries’ full backstories for this project, just how the United States exposed their own weaknesses there. In Vietnam, they underestimated the strength in guerilla fighters, and so were forced to retreat, despite their supposed military might. As for the Soviet Union, it indeed no longer exists, but the United States spent a significant amount of time trying to outdo them in many advances, such as the infamous Space Race, and failed multiple times. Both of these failures would only serve to inhibit the United States’ demonstrations of power towards Cuba’s Fidel Castro. Castro was a believer in what Buzzanco calls a “hybrid of market”, or an economy involving both capitalist and statist ideas. In other words, capitalist ideas such as markets for clothing, toys, and other items still exist, but the large industries involving things like oil, gas, and minerals were state-owned. The United States, a society which prides itself on being solely capitalist and with little government involvement in the economy, did not appreciate Castro’s attempts to distance himself from the American way of doing things, particularly when it swept their companies into being owned by the Cuban government instead of remaining their own separate entities.
As stated before, the United States had its eye on Cuban communism even before Fidel Castro took office. What caused the break in relations to occur? The article “Anger, Anti-Americanism, and the Break in U.S.-Cuban Relations” seeks to explore that. LeoGrande has a long history of being involved with government intelligence, having served on the Democratic Caucus Task Force on Central America (House of Representatives), as well as being a specialist in both Latin American politics and U.S. foreign policy towards Latin America. He argues that, despite its attempts to make it appear otherwise, the United States was beginning to lose its grip on global power, with its break with Cuba being a factor. There were indeed many reasons for the fracturing of U.S.-Cuba relations, but perhaps one of the biggest reasons was that of the nationalizing of property, something Buzzanco’s piece heavily featured. The United States had many pieces of land in Cuba, pertaining particularly to the sugar cane industry; Castro said that the United States’ “corporations owned the best sugar cane land in Cuba”. Castro nationalized most American land in Cuba, giving little thought to what would happen to American investors. A loss of the majority of their land in Cuba was an infuriating blow to several United States companies, with Castro’s refusal to reimburse them adding insult to injury. The final straw for the two sides, LeoGrande says, is often speculated to have culminated in the approval from president Dwight Eisenhower to begin planning for the Bay of Pigs invasion, another event previously mentioned in this essay. It was a clear act of aggression on the American side, causing Cuba to drop its civility.
Relations between the United States government and Fidel Castro dealt with primarily American issues, so one would think that they sent solely their own spies and Cuban exiles to do work in Cuba. According to Dun Munton’s “Our men in Havana: Canadian foreign intelligence operations in Castro’s Cuba”, this was not the case. Munton currently works in the Department of International Studies in the University of British Columbia, and has published many works over the past few decades detailing what has gone on behind the doors of the Canadian foreign intelligence scene. He says that Canadians and English nationals were also involved in the United States’ spy work, meaning they backed and agreed with the United States’ anti-communist sentiments. Canadian spies would take orders from the American government and then go from there, as well as speaking with English authorities. Canada began providing information on Cuba to the United States in 1961, with “’a remarkably free exchange of intelligence material most of the time.’” It made sense that the United States would recruit other western allies for their own ends. However, despite the information flowing in from multiple countries, the United States was not able to stop Castro’s popularity from growing, nor “wipe out” communist ideologies. Munton also argues that Canadian officials’ lessened hostility to Cuba in relation to their American counterparts made many Americans, particularly the right, view Canada as communist sympathizers. Canadians were not limiting their trade and other economic issues with Cuba, and believed that “the regime in Cuba and its tenure in power was a matter for Cubans to decide”. This also connects back to Buzzanco’s argument, in that the United States’ power and influence was not enough to coerce the Canadians into halting economic relations with Cuba entirely, nor feel the need to impose western ideals there.
Buzzanco, LeoGrande, and Munton all agree that the United States, as well as the western world in general, disapproved of communism and Fidel Castro’s rise to power. Originally, they did not believe he would be a threat, viewing him as another leftist whose ideas would likely fail. However, as he began enacting his policies that actually affected the American economy, such as company nationalization, the United States grew angry and retaliated. They used foreign intelligence and recruited help from other western countries such as England and Canada to spy on Fidel Castro and other communists in Cuba. However, with all their motivation against stopping communism, aid from allies, and previous experience of going against other communist countries such as the Soviet Union and Vietnam, they still failed to stop the Castro regime’s popularity and only made him seem more sympathetic. This past has lead to the tensions one can see between Cuba and the United States today, and why anti-communist sentiment runs so deep in American society.