History of the USA : cold war, Cuba crisis

The Cold War was the strategic, economic and ideological struggle between the global superpowers of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the United States of America, supported by their respective and emerging alliance partners.

The Cold War is usually considered to have occurred approximately from the end of the strained alliance between the U.S. and the Soviet Union during World War II until the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991.

The struggle was widely called the Cold War because it did not involve direct armed conflict between the contestants (by contrast, a so-called "hot" war). The Cold War was instead waged by means of diplomatic maneuvering, economic pressure, selective aid, intimidation, propaganda, assassination, low-intensity military operations and full-scale proxy wars.

In the 1970s, the Cold War gave way to détente and a more complicated pattern of international relations in which the world was no longer split into two clearly opposed blocs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_War

Cuba crisis :

In 1953, Fidel Castro attacked the Moncada barracks, and was exiled to Mexico. He returned to Cuba on November 1956 with 82 fighters trained by Alberto Bayo (a former colonel in the Spanish Republican Army), and with the help of popular discontent managed to overthrow Batista. Batista fled the country on 1 January 1959. Castro established a Soviet-leaning one party Communist state, the first in the Western Hemisphere, although Castro did not officially reveal his Marxist-Leninist leanings until 1961.

According to Antonio Núñez Jiménez at the time when Batista was deposed, 75% of Cuba's prime farm land was owned by foreign individuals or foreign (mostly U.S.) companies. Cuba’s main crop was sugar, for the American and to a lesser extent English market. Most of Cuba's sugar was exported to the United States because Cuba was given a large quota, which was paid above world prices in part to help domestic US industry. After the revolution, Che Guevara, industrial minister at the time, negotiated with the USSR for the export of Cuban sugar after the US decreased its imports of sugar from Cuba. [7] The new revolutionary government adopted successive "land reforms" and eventually confiscated almost all private property. At first, Castro was reluctant to discuss his plans for the future, but eventually he declared himself a communist, and with the backing of Che Guevara, explained that he was trying to build socialism in Cuba, focusing on free health care and education for all, and began close political and economic relations with the Soviet Union and to a lesser extent with China. The USSR long after the Missile Crisis had bases in Cuba (e.g. at Bejucal and Bahia Honda), and the Chinese government still maintains a large electronic surveillance presence especially at a base in Havana Province.

Since Castro came to power, the United States has since progressively enacted legislation intended to isolate Cuba economically via the U.S. embargo and other measures, such as prosecuting US citizens who vacation in Cuba. For more on these issues see the Economy section below

The Bay of Pigs invasion of April 1961 by U.S. backed Cuban expatriates failed because U.S. president John F. Kennedy left the invaders stranded for fear of getting officially involved. The expected urban revolt collapsed when it became clear Brigade 2506 had been abandoned to its fate; and because the Soviet Union warned Castro, who ordered numerous executions and preemptive mass arrests of those thought likely to support a counter-revolution. [8],(Priestland, 2003). Church schools were confiscated, clergy were arrested, [9] and expelled en masse. In the rural central provinces the War Against the Bandits (circa 1959-1965) was suppressed by massed Castro militia, many executions and internal deportations of rebel supporters.

The Cuban Missile Crisis started with the Soviet Union installing nuclear missiles in Cuba in 1962. In response, the United States put up a blockade in international waters. This is generally believed to be the closest the world has come to a nuclear war. The Soviet Union backed down, agreeing to remove the missiles in exchange for United States promises to remove similar nuclear missiles in Turkey and to never invade Cuba again.

see:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuba#History

USA and communism in the 1950s:

A witch-hunt was traditionally a search for witches or evidence of witchcraft, which could lead to a witchcraft trial involving the accused person. Today such events are recognised as a type of moral panic. Witchhunts still occur in the modern era, in the sense that ignorant or uneducated people, isolated peoples, or people living a traditional lifestyle may persecute people that they believe are witches. The term is now widely used in a modern sense to refer to any search for a perceived or hidden enemy, with the same connotations of hysteria, prejudice and injustice that accompanied historical witchhunts.

The term gained further currency in the 1950s with Arthur Miller's play, The Crucible. This was ostensibly about the Salem witch trials but was intended to criticize the hearings of United States Senator Joseph McCarthy as well as the general atmosphere of paranoia and persecution that accompanied them. Other anti-communist hearings in the 1950s were under the aegis of the House Un-American Activities Committee, or HUAC. Although revelations of the Soviet archives in the 1990s showed that some of those who were pursued were indeed communists (HUAC uncovered very few genuine Communist infiltrators), the practice of McCarthyism left many innocent victims in its wake. Thus the "witch hunts" of the time were compromised by wild accusations and disregard for civil liberties and civil discourse.