Cuban Missile Crisis and The Invasion of Pig Beach
by: Cody Crockett
Introduction The Cuban Missile Crisis and the invasion at the Bay of Pigs are two significant events in the history of the relationship between the United States and Cuba and how it affects the relationship in today's age. The Bay of Pigs invasion was an unsuccessful attempt by the CIA to overthrow the Cuban government in April 1961. While the Cuban Missile Crisis occurred in October 1962, when the world was brought to the brink of nuclear war due to the Soviet Union's placement of nuclear missiles in Cuba. These two events are intertwined, as the Bay of Pigs invasion played a crucial role in the Soviet Union's decision to place nuclear missiles on the island, leading
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Kennedy in 1997 of meetings with his top advisers, the Executive Committee of the National Security Council the "ExComm". Sheldon M. Stern, a historian who evaluated the ExComm tapes, has written a book using irrefutable evidence to debunk the mythic version of the Cuban missile crisis. Stern concludes that Kennedy and his administration were substantially responsible for the crisis and had misled the American people about the military imbalance between the superpowers and their campaign of threats, assassination plots, and sabotage to overthrow the Cuban government. (Schwarz, 2) During the 1960 presidential election, Kennedy falsely claimed that there was a "missile gap" and attacked Richard Nixon for allowing the USSR to surpass the US in missile technology. However, the US had a significant nuclear advantage over the USSR at the time of the Cuban missile crisis. Despite this, Kennedy ordered the deployment of Jupiter nuclear missiles in Italy and Turkey, which were vulnerable to attack and encouraged a preemptive strike by the USSR. The USSR suspected that the US viewed a nuclear first strike as an option, and archives reveal that the Kennedy administration had considered this during the Berlin crisis in 1961 (Schwarz, …show more content…
The new Cuban government confiscated American-owned private property and tried to incite Communist revolutions in other Latin American countries. Castro accused the US of undermining his government, leading Congress to pass legislation in June 1960 enabling President Eisenhower to take retaliatory measures, including cutting off sugar purchases from Cuba and imposing an embargo on all exports except for food and medicine. In January 1961, just before President John F. Kennedy's inauguration, Eisenhower broke diplomatic ties with Cuba. (Schaff,