Bytes: WE DIDN’T START THE FIRE

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Continuing a look at the events and people in Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start the Fire.

Each two lines represent a year.

Little Rock, Pasternak, Mickey Mantle, Kerouac

Sputnik, Chou En-Lai, "Bridge on the River Kwai"

Lebanon, Charles de Gaulle, California baseball

Starkweather homicide, children of thalidomide

Buddy Holly, "Ben Hur", space monkey, Mafia

Hula hoops, Castro, Edsel is a no-go

U-2, Syngman Rhee, payola and Kennedy

Chubby Checker, "Psycho", Belgians in the Congo

1959: Castro

Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz (1926 – 2016) was a Cuban revolutionary and politician who was the leader of Cuba from 1959 to 2008, serving as the prime minister of Cuba from 1959 to 1976 and president from 1976 to 2008.

Ideologically a Marxist–Leninist and Cuban nationalist, he also served as the first secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba from 1965 until 2011.

Under his administration, Cuba became a one-party communist state; industry and business were nationalized, and socialist reforms were implemented throughout society

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Born in Cuba, the son of a wealthy Spanish farmer, Castro adopted leftist and anti-imperialist ideas while studying law at the University of Havana. After participating in rebellions against right-wing governments in the Dominican Republic and Colombia, he planned the overthrow of Cuban president Fulgencio Batista, launching a failed attack in 1953. After a year's imprisonment, Castro travelled to Mexico where he formed a revolutionary group, the 26th of July Movement, named for the date of the failed attack, with his brother, Raúl Castro, and Ernesto "Che" Guevara. Returning to Cuba, Castro took a key role in the Cuban Revolution by leading the Movement in a guerrilla war against Batista's forces from the Sierra Maestra.

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Relevance to 1959:

Believing support for the revolution was waning, Batista called for a major military offensive against the rebels in the Sierra Maestra mountains in the summer of 1958. Instead, the rebels swiftly turned back the offensive, forcing the army to withdraw. With international media giving favourable press coverage to the revolutionaries, the United States began to withdraw support for Batista’s government, which it had previously backed due to the dictator’s anti-communist stance.

By the end of 1958, the guerrilla revolutionaries in Castro’s 26th of July Movement had gained the upper hand in Cuba. On January 1, 1959, with rebel forces bearing down on Havana, Batista fled Cuba for the Dominican Republic; he later proceeded to Portugal, where he would remain in exile until his death in 1973.

Castro arrived in Havana on January 9 to take charge of a new provisional government, quickly consolidating control and rounding up Batista’s supporters, many of whom were tried and executed by revolutionary courts. Though Castro had called for elections during the revolution, he postponed them indefinitely once he came to power.

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Cuba and the US:

The United States was one of the first countries to recognise Castro’s government in Cuba, but relations between the two countries quickly deteriorated as Castro implemented a communist regime and forged close ties with the Soviet Union, the U.S. enemy in the Cold War. The United States broke off diplomatic relations with Cuba in early 1961, and the next few years were marked by escalating tensions.

These included the Bay of Pigs invasion (April 1961) and the Cuban missile crisis (October 1962).

The Bay of Pigs Invasion in 1961 was a failed attack launched by the CIA during the Kennedy administration to push Cuban leader Fidel Castro from power. Since 1959, officials at the U.S. State Department and the CIA had attempted to remove Castro. Finally, on April 17, 1961, the CIA launched what its leaders believed would be the definitive strike: a full-scale invasion of Cuba by 1,400 American-trained Cubans who had fled their homes when Castro took over. However, the invasion was doomed from the start. The invaders were badly outnumbered by Castro’s troops, and they surrendered after less than 24 hours of fighting.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, leaders of the U.S. and the Soviet Union engaged in a tense, 13-day political and military standoff in October 1962 over the installation of nuclear-armed Soviet missiles on Cuba, just 90 miles from U.S. shores. In a TV address on October 22, 1962, President John F. Kennedy (1917-63) notified Americans about the presence of the missiles, explained his decision to enact a naval blockade around Cuba and made it clear the U.S. was prepared to use military force if necessary to neutralise this perceived threat to national security. Following this news, many people feared the world was on the brink of nuclear war. However, disaster was avoided when the U.S. agreed to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s (1894-1971) offer to remove the Cuban missiles in exchange for the U.S. promising not to invade Cuba. Kennedy also secretly agreed to remove U.S. missiles from Turkey.

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Rule:

Adopting a Marxist–Leninist model of development, Castro converted Cuba into a one-party, socialist state under Communist Party rule, the first in the Western Hemisphere.

Policies introducing central economic planning and expanding healthcare and education were accompanied by state control of the press and the suppression of internal dissent.

Abroad, Castro supported anti-imperialist revolutionary groups, backing the establishment of Marxist governments in Chile, Nicaragua, and Grenada, as well as sending troops to aid allies in the Yom Kippur, Ogaden, and Angolan Civil War.

These actions, coupled with Castro's leadership of the Non-Aligned Movement from 1979 to 1983 and Cuban medical internationalism, increased Cuba's profile on the world stage.

Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Castro led Cuba through the economic downturn of the "Special Period", embracing environmentalist and anti-globalization ideas. In the 2000s, Castro forged alliances in the Latin American "pink tide"—namely with Hugo Chávez's Venezuela—and formed the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas. In 2006, Castro transferred his responsibilities to Vice President Raúl Castro, who was elected to the presidency by the National Assembly in 2008.

The longest-serving non-royal head of state in the 20th and 21st centuries, Castro polarized world opinion. His supporters view him as a champion of socialism and anti-imperialism whose revolutionary government advanced economic and social justice while securing Cuba's independence from American hegemony. His critics view him as a dictator whose administration oversaw human rights abuses, the exodus of many Cubans, and the impoverishment of the country's economy.

Despite a long-running U.S. trade embargo, widespread economic hardship, a mass exodus of hundreds of thousands of Cubans and multiple efforts to implement regime change, Fidel Castro remained in power until 2008, when he formally resigned after handing off power to his brother.

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