The true story of the dispute between Cuba and the United States.

By: Pedro Corzo - 23/03/2026

Guest columnist.
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The allies and spokespeople of Castroism, like worthy disciples of Joseph Goebbels, resort to every possible half-truth to identify the Cuban nation with Castro's totalitarianism, while trying to present the Island as an innocent victim of the great powers, particularly the United States.

Relations between Cuba and the United States, like any other, have sometimes been marked by opposing positions based on the interests of each state, but the Cuban people, for the most part, have professed sympathies to the northern power, so much so that there has been no shortage of supporters of annexation, nor have there been any absence of staunch enemies of what the American Union represents.

Of course, more than one US government has tried to turn Cuba into a protectorate, as happened with the imposition of the Platt Amendment in 1902. But more than one Cuban political leader has also enjoyed involving third-party nations in the island's domestic conflicts, as Don Tomas Estrada Palma did in 1906 when he sought US intervention ordered by Theodore Roosevelt, or when Fidel Castro, eager for power in 1962, transformed our country into the Soviet aircraft carrier in the Caribbean and a Kremlin spy base.

It goes without saying that differences have not been lacking between the governments of Cuba and the United States, but these disagreements never ended the friendship, except when Fidel Castro took power through violence, imposing his frustrations and hatreds until he destroyed the Republic and made Washington his number one enemy.

We must remember that Fidel Castro, from the Las Mercedes camp in the Sierra Maestra mountains, on June 5, 1958, six months before the triumph of the insurrection, wrote to his closest collaborator at the time, Celia Sánchez, “Seeing the rockets they fired at Mario’s house, I swore to myself that the Americans are going to pay dearly for what they are doing. When this war is over, a much longer and greater war will begin for me: the war I am going to wage against them,” adding that this would be their true destiny.

No one with even a modicum of knowledge can deny that relations between the two countries have been very difficult and on more than one occasion on the verge of open conflict, such as when the United States organized the Brigade 2506 expedition to Cuba in 1961 or when Fidel Castro subverted the political order throughout the American hemisphere for decades, supporting guerrilla groups and terrorist factions, as well as supporting alleged revolutionaries involved in introducing narcotics into US territory.

The Castro regime has never been a peaceful dove in its relations with the United States, as its allies and spokespeople would have us believe. Before Washington ordered the first action against Castroism, Havana, under the rule of the Castro brothers, organized four armed expeditions against four Caribbean countries, including Panama, which is of great importance to the White House because it is home to the canal.

In just over a year, the Castro regime confiscated most of the American assets on the island without financial compensation and opened the doors to the defunct Soviet Union, while strengthening its alliance with the Popular Socialist Party, Kremlin puppets in Havana, and in less than three years, deployed nuclear-capable missiles and asked Nikita Khrushchev to launch rockets at New York.

To say that Washington accepted Castroism from the very beginning would be a blatant lie, as would claiming that the actions of Fidel and Raul Castro were sovereign acts, when in reality their actions were inspired by a visceral hatred of the northern power. Hence, they developed an intense indoctrination campaign within the Cuban people against the United States, similar to the one Adolf Hitler used against the Jews.

Hitler was clearly more successful in his efforts to incite hatred than Fidel Castro. Currently, a significant number of Cubans feel a deep devotion to this country, which leads many of us to worry that the resounding failure of totalitarianism will drive the majority of the island's population to try to fall like ripe apples into the American gardens—a long-held dream of a sector of this country's political class. If this happens, the Castros will be to blame.

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