Cold War

On July 26, 1953, a group of approximately one hundred poorly armed guerrillas attacked the Moncada Barracks. Many of them were killed in the battles after the attack. The survivors, among them Fidel Castro Ruz and his brother Raul Castro, were captured shortly afterwards. In a highly political trial, they were sentenced to long prison terms. Castro was sentenced 15 years in the presidio modelo located on Isla de Pinos.

In 1955, due to pressure from civil leaders, the general opposition, and the Jesuits who had helped educate Fidel Castro, and perhaps because he had known the Castro brothers in their youth, Batista freed all political prisoners, including the Moncada attackers. The Castro brothers went into exile in Mexico, where they gathered more exiled Cubans to fight in the Cuban revolution for the overthrow of Batista. During that period, Castro also met the Argentine doctor Ernesto "Che" Guevara, who joined their forces. They were trained by Alberto Bayo, a former military leader of the failed "loyalists" in the Spanish Civil War.

The group training in Mexico under the leadership of Fidel Castro left for Cuba in November 1956, in a small yacht named, "Granma." They hoped their landing in Eastern Cuba would coincide with planned uprisings in the cities and a general strike, coordinated by the llano wing of the 26th of July Movement. It was their intention to launch an armed offensive and swiftly topple the Batista government.

The Granma was delayed en route to Cuba, arriving late and at a location further east than was planned. This dashed any hopes for a coordinated attack with the llano wing of the movement. After arriving and exiting the ship, the band of rebels began to make their way into the Sierra Maestra mountains, a range in Southeastern Cuba. Shortly after their trek began, they were attacked by men from the army. Most of the Granma participants were killed in this attack, but a small number, between one and two dozen, escaped. The survivors were separated from one another, and alone or in small groups, wandered through the mountains, looking for other survivors. Eventually, this small group of persons, would find one another with the help of peasant sympathizers. This small group of people, which included Fidel Castro, Ernesto Che Guevara, Camilo Cienfuegos, and Raul Castro would form the core leadership of the guerrilla army.

From 1956 through the middle of 1958, Castro with the aid of the Frank Pais and Ramos Latour, Huber Matos, and many others, staged successful attacks on small Batista garrisons in the Sierra Maestra mountains. Batista forces tried bloody repression to retain control and the cities in Cuba remained under Batista's control until the end. Che Guevara and Ra�l Castro helped consolidate political control in the mountains through executions of Batista Loyalists and potential rivals to Castro. The irregular poorly armed escopeteros harassed the Batista forces through the foot hills and the plains of Oriente Province; in addition these much maligned forces provided Castro's main forces with moderate military support, intelligence, and protected supply lines. Thus Castro achieved military control of these mountains.

During this time, Castro's forces were quite small, at times less than 200 men, while the Cuban army and police force numbered between 30,000 and 40,000 in strength (Bockman, Chapter 2). Yet nearly every time the army fought against the revolutionaries, they were the ones who retreated from the fight. The Cuban military was remarkably ineffective. A growing problem for the Batista forces was an arms embargo imposed on the Cuban government by the United States government on March 14, 1958. The Cuban air force rapidly lost its power as planes could not be repaired without spare parts from the U.S.

Batista forces finally responded with an attack on the mountains called Operation Verano (the rebels called it "la Ofensiva"). Some 12,000 soldiers (more than half new, untrained recruits) attacked into the mountains. In a series of small scale fights, the Cuban army was defeated by Castro's determined fighters. In one battle (the Battle of La Plata) which lasted from July 11 till July 21, Castro's forces defeated an entire battalion, capturing 240 men, while losing just 3 of their own. The tide nearly turned on July 29 when Castro's small army (some 300 men) was nearly destroyed at the Battle of Las Mercedes. The Cuban army under General Cantillo lured Castro's forces into a trap. After two days of fighting, Castro's forces lost 70 men, nearly one third of his men. With his forces pinned down by superior numbers, Castro asked for, and was granted, a temporary cease-fire (August 1st). Over the next seven days, while fruitless negotiations took place, Castro's forces gradually escaped from the trap. By August 8th, Castro's entire army had escaped back into the mountains. Operation Verano had been a failure for the Batista government.

August 1958 to Victory

On August 21 1958, after the defeat of the Batista "ofensiva", Castro's forces began their offensive. There were four fronts in the "Oriente" province (now divided into Santiago de Cuba, Granma, Guant�namo and Holgu�n) directed by Fidel Castro, Ra�l Castro and Juan Almeida. Descending from the mountains, with weapons captured during the ofensiva and smuggled in by plane, Castro's forces won a series of victories. The major Castro victory at Guisa, and the succeeding capture of several towns (Maffo, Contramaestre, Central Oriente, etc.) consolidated victory on the Cauto plains.

Meanwhile, three columns under the command of Che Guevara, Camilo Cienfuegos and Jaime Vega proceeded westward toward the provincial capital of Santa Clara. Jaime Vega's column was ambushed and destroyed. The surviving two columns reached the central provinces, where they joined efforts with several other resistance groups not under the command of Castro. Cienfuegos won a key victory in the Battle of Yaguajay on December 30, 1958 (earning him the nickname "The Hero of Yaguajay"). The next day (the 31st), in a scene of great confusion, the city of Santa Clara was captured by the combined forces of Che Guevara, Cienfuegos, and William Alexander Morgan. News of these defeats caused Batista to panic. He fled Cuba for the Dominican Republic just hours later on January 1, 1959.

Castro learned of Batista's flight in the morning and he immediately started negotiations to take over Santiago de Cuba. On January 2nd, the military commander in the city, Colonel Rubido, ordered his soldiers not to fight and Castro's forces took over the city. The forces of Guevara and Cienfuegos entered Havana at about the same time. They had met no opposition on their journey from Santa Clara to Cuba's capital. Castro himself arrived in Havana on January 6th after a long victory march. Officially, the leader of Cuba was the new President Urrutia, in reality, Castro was in control.

The United States only got openly involved with two countries in Latin America, Nicaragua and Cuba. There are other countries that the United States got involved with, but that comes later. :) In Cuba, the United States was trying to prevent the Soviets from storing nuclear missiles on missile platforms in Cuba (only 100 miles away from Florida). Having missiles in Cuba was undesirable, because the Soviets could launch missiles to hit any city in the United States. In Nicaragua, the United States acted under the Truman Doctrine to repress the Soviet-backed Sandinista; who were fighting the Somoza family over the assassination of Augusto Cesar Sandino. We backed the Somoza family, led by Anastasio Somoza Garcia, a dictator.

It's important to remember that in this period of American foreign policy, we would support ANY and ALL countries trying to resist Communism, this extended to dictators that claimed to be Anticommunists to secure American support; supporting these dictators would soil our reputation and create the image of evil Americans in countries that we claim to have supported.

Going back to the Latin American issue, the Sandinists were victorious after Jimmy Carter stopped supporting the Somoza family in 1978-9. Even after they started creating an independent government, we chose to prevent them from creating the government they had fought 43 years to create. In addition, we refused to help rebuild Nicaragua and we left the Somoza family's debt of 1.6 billion with the Sandinists.

After all of that, the United States supported the anti-Sandinist regime, the Contras. The Contras were a group of anti-communist paramilitary partisans, whose desire was to overthrow the Sandinists and re-establish a dictatorship similar to the Somoza's. This Contra organization was strong in countries like Nicaragua (obviously), Honduras, and Belize.

At the end of World War II in 1945, Germany was separated into four occupation zones, administered by the Russians, British, French and Americans respectively. It was intended that Germany would eventually be reunified as a separate country. However due to the onset of the Cold War, Russia decided to create East Germany as a separate country under communist control, rather than give up control and let it become democratic/capitalist as it likely would have. The other three zones were reunited as the democratic country of West Germany.

He targeted and attacked various people. - nova net

Involvement in both is wrongly credited to the administration of President John Kennedy. President Eisenhower had put the wheels in motion for both incidents. The planning for the Bay of Pigs Invasion was entirely set up, recruited, trained and financed and placed into motion by Eisenhower and was inherited by Kennedy. The US Advisors, Assistance Command (MACV) and Air America program to support the French recolinization of Vietnam had been in place when Kennedy was elected, Americans had died in action before that date. The connection between the two conflicts was their creators.

Everytime one of their nuclear subs sank we had to help them recover lives, etc.; though they often politely declined our offer thru fear that we might see some of their military secrets...which was a fairly valid point.

Joseph Stalin was not the head of state during WW2, Mikhail Kalinin was. Stalin was at the forefront of soviet politics due to the fact that Kalinin kept a low profile and was submissive, and you could say, Stalins puppet.

However, Stalin was NOT the head of state during WW2...

Most people feel that the pros of the fall of the Berlin Wall far outweighed the cons. The main thing was that people from East and West Berlin, formerly a single city, were once again allowed to travel freely throughout all of Berlin. East Germans were no longer forced to remain in the East or risk being shot. One of the cons that hurt a lot of people in the short term was that in East Germany the government had previously controlled the economy, so that even though the people were poor, everybody had jobs. Once the wall came down the unemployment rate skyrocketed, and many people were unhappy for some time, until normal market conditions eventually corrected the imbalance.

Population cannot be accurately determined in North Korea, however since there are reports of people dying of starvation, i would think that South Korea has a larger population.

Mikhail Gorbachev is usually credited with helping to end the cold war.

World War I

Four republics peacefully gained independence

The Berlin Wall was 167.8 km (104.875 mi) long

The Cold War was a driving force behind international events such as the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the Korean Conflict, the Vietnam War, and the space shuttle program. It also played a role in McCarthyism, and films about a dystopian future with a totalitarian government were popular.

the soviets shot down an American spy plane

by having a minuets silence when neccecery and on war annerversrys by wearing a poppy on rememberence sunday by visiting our local memorials

Nicaragua was seen as a battlefield in the Cold War. There's some history to consider:

In 1912, the US invaded and occupied Nicaragua, and left in 1933 as part of FDR's "Good Neighbor Policy", where he vowed to stop messing with other countries in Central America (which had been happening a lot in the early 1900's). The Somoza family stepped in and took control in 1936, forming a family dynasty of corrupt, brutal dictators (FDR once referred to the first Somoza dictator as "our son of a bitch", because while he was a terrible dictator, he was also a non-communist and aligned with the US).

In the 1960's, a group calling itself the Sandinistas (named after a Robin Hood-like folk hero named Sandino who fought against the US occupation) formed in opposition to the Somozas. In 1972, there was a huge earthquake but the Somoza government and military stole most of the money and supplies sent by other countries to assist. The Sandinistas grew more powerful and began attacking the government; the government responded with censorship, violence and torture, which caused powerful countries like the US to stop supporting it. By 1979, the last Somoza dictator was forced to flee (and he was assassinated a year later).

The Sandinistas (who were leftist/socialist) tried to form a new government with right-leaning business leaders, but the attempt failed and the Sandinistas took control on their own. They instituted many socialist reforms and became very popular, but ex-Somoza supporters, soldiers who served in Somoza's military and other Nicaraguans who happened to oppose the Sandinista regime began forming guerrilla groups which became known as "Contras" ("Contra" means "Against" in Spanish) and a long, bloody civil war began.

When Ronald Reagan became president of the US in 1981, one of the first things he did was began giving support to these Contras. He assumed that the Sandinistas, under their leader Daniel Ortega, were planning on turning their country into a Cuba-style Communist state (the Sandinistas did in fact have some ties to Castro), and Reagan did not want to let it happen. He ended all aid to the Ortega government and began giving weapons and CIA support to the Contras, who were based in Nicaragua's neighboring countries like Honduras. Like the Somozas, the Contras were brutal and committed numerous atrocities, but Reagan considered them "our guys" because they opposed Ortega.

Then the US Congress passed a law called the Boland Amendment, which significantly cut funding for the Contras. However, Reagan's government found another way to continue supporting them. The Reagan administration began secretly selling weapons to Iran (even though Iran was considered an enemy to the US), and used the money to continue funding the Contras. Eventually this "Iran-Contra affair" was revealed to the public- several high ranking Reagan officials were fired and indicted, but President George H.W. Bush pardoned most of them so they never went to trial. Additionally, it was revealed that the CIA and Contras had participated in narcotics smuggling, including that the rapid rise of crack cocaine use in the US in the mid 1980's was linked to the groups.

After the Iran-Contra Affair, the US government was only allowed to provide non-military assistance to the Contras, which it did. American money poured to political parties opposing Ortega and the Sandinistas, and the US government announced that if Ortega won the 1990 election, they would continue funding the Contras, thereby continuing the war. In the 1990 elections, a coalition of mostly right-leaning parties led by Violeta Chamorro won, ending Ortega's tenure. The Contras disbanded, the war ended, and Chamorro wisely kept in place some of Ortega's reforms while rolling back others, trying to strike a balance to keep the war from restarting. The US ended its embargo on Nicaragua and began sending aid to rebuild the wartorn country.

Interestingly, Ortega would remain in politics, and became president of Nicaragua again in 2006. The US did not renew the support for the Contras at that time.

Alain Remy, the French consul general in Jerusalem, said the Palestinians have received $3 billion in foreign aid in 2008. This was stated in an AP article dated 12/23/2008.

Remy said $1.8 billion went to the Palestinian Authority, $700 million to specific projects, and $500 million to humanitarian aid.

J. Robert Oppenheimer allowed for the fact that such a bomb existed as far back as May 10th, 1945. Remember that the Manhattan Project was undertaken using the utmost secrecy. The atomic bomb was first exploded at the top secret base of Alamogordo, NM on July 16th, 1945. The bomb was first used in warfare at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan in August 1945. .

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yes my friend the rich people Americans feed people like me lies to say it bad. I live in America i hate every second of it, people like that guy go by what they here it a good strong government it just rich captilist say it bad.

The media ended up having a tremendous effect on the Vietnam War. This was the first war in history that people were able to follow on television. The stories on the nightly news fueled resistance to the draft and the war as a whole, leading to large protests to end US involvement.

The end of WW2 left these two countries as the only superpowers. The United States saw the Soviet Union as a revolutionary communist expansionist threat. The Soviet Union saw the United States as a counterrevolutionary imperialist threat.