Phenomenon of resistance to US hegemony in the western hemisphere that began with the victory of guerrilla forces led by Fidel Castro over the dictator Battista on 1 January 1959 and was affirmed in April 1961 with the defeat of a CIA-directed invasion of Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs. US Pres Kennedy subsequently ordered an undeclared war that included several attempts to assassinate Castro. Conspiracy theories about his own 1963 assassination assume either that the Cuban dictator retaliated in kind, or that the Cuban exiles betrayed at the Bay of Pigs sought revenge.
Expeditions to spread the revolution started in 1959 and ended with the 1968 death of Guevara in Bolivia. An alternative strategy, more successful because Soviet-approved, was to support autochthonous rebellions against pro-US regimes. Successive US presidents used up considerable political capital in putting out these fires, including the invasions of the Dominican Republic (1965) and Grenada (1983), the destabilization of the Allende regime in Chile (1973), and the Iran-Contra affair in the 1980s.
Cuban encouragement was significant in all Latin American rural and urban guerrilla outbreaks of the 1960s and 1970s, but the principal outcome was the extermination of an entire generation of young revolutionaries by military regimes. The main appeal of the Cuban Revolution was always nationalist, and consequently it also lost attractiveness as evidence of Soviet domination grew. This was shown most clearly when Cuban regular troops acted as (highly successful) Soviet surrogates in the Angolan and Ethiopian civil wars in the 1970s. Finally, the worldwide failure of socialism to provide answers to modern problems gradually stripped away the ideological gloss on what was clearly a dictatorship.
Latterly, Cuba played a significant role in promoting the cocaine trade, seeking as always to expose the ‘contradictions’ in US society, while generating independent revenues. But the extent of Cuba's economic dependency became apparent after the implosion of the Soviet empire beginning in 1989, and although Castro remains the last of the great Latin American caudillos and a burr under the saddle, his ability to wage war on US interests is now negligible. Nonetheless, with a large, wealthy, and vocal Cuban exile community, the USA maintains an economic embargo of the island, and the bankrupt, stagnant reality of the revolution is still able to present itself credibly as being preferable to the pre-1959 political gangsterism that is the only alternative on offer from 90 miles (145 km) across the Straits of Florida.
— Hugh Bicheno
