Eight months before Oct. 16, 1962—the day U.S. President
John F. Kennedy was informed of the presence of Soviet
nuclear missiles in Cuba, just 90 miles from Florida—the
U.S. had already imposed a unilateral trade embargo on the
regime of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. That’s largely
because Fidel, who ruled Cuba from 1959 until handing the
presidency to his younger brother Raúl in 2006, had aligned
his Caribbean nation with the Soviet Union. Now, by letting
the Soviets use bases in Cuba to position ballistic missiles
that could strike deep into the U.S.—and by urging Soviet
leader Nikita Khrushchev, according to Khrushchev’s account,
to fire those missiles when Kennedy ordered a naval blockade
of the island during the 13-day U.S.-Soviet standoff—Fidel
had further stoked Washington’s wrath.
(PHOTOS: Remembering the Cuban Missile Crisis: 50 Years from
the Brink of Armageddon)
| michael kors purses |
The crisis ended peacefully when the Soviets removed the
missiles in exchange for a pledge to eventually remove U.S.
missiles from Turkey. But a few months later, on top of the
trade embargo, Kennedy ordered a ban on all U.S. travel to
Cuba. Meanwhile, Fidel tightened restrictions on Cubans’
ability to leave the island. The embargo and the U.S. travel
ban, incredibly, are still in effect—and so is the Cuban
regime’s policy of using those measures as a scapegoat for
the impoverished island’s economic blunders and as an excuse
for the repression of political rights. “For 50 years,”
says Tomás Bilbao, executive director of the Cuba Study Group
in Washington, D.C., which advocates an end to the embargo as
well as democratic reform in Cuba, “both sides have
continually taken measures that prevent the free flow of
people, to the detriment of Cuban civil society. Now both
sides are finally starting to take steps to facilitate it.”
