When Castro turned to Moscow for economic and military support, the Russians were at first suspicious. But Castro, who was master only of a small Caribbean island, played his hand well.
"Sure, Cuba's only a little island, but it's 90 miles off the Florida coast, a very important strategic position for the Soviets and a very dangerous position for the United States," said Mircea Munteanu, a Cold War scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington.
The Kremlin wasn't looking to stir things up in the early 1960s, but "they were dragged into it by Castro," said Munteanu. "The Russians were not necessarily looking for trouble, but the Cubans were saying, `If you don't want to help us, the Chinese will.'"
When it became clear that Castro was joining the Soviet orbit - and soliciting Soviet military support - the U.S. response "was pretty close to hysterical," Cohen said.
According to investigations led by Sen. Frank Church in 1975, the CIA launched at least eight plots between 1960 and 1965 to assassinate Castro.
Working through reputed mobsters Johnny Rosselli, Salvatore Giancana and Santos Trafficante, the CIA struck out on each attempt. These included the use of poison cigars, dusting Castro's shoes during a U.N. visit with a chemical that would cause his beard to fall out, sending a sniper with a high-powered rifle to Havana and contaminating Castro's diving gear with tuberculosis germs.
The CIA also schemed to rig an exotic seashell with explosives and place it on the sea floor where Castro was fond of diving, an idea that proved impractical, according to the 1975 report of the Senate investigations committee.
Undaunted, Castro launched an unprecedented series of foreign interventions in the 1970s and 1980s with major Soviet economic and military support.
Pressing the "people's revolution" agenda across the Third World, Castro dispatched Cuban tank battalions to Ethiopia and tens of thousands of troops, along with squadrons of doctors and teachers, to Angola and across Latin America.
In the mid-1980s, with the Reagan White House warning of major Soviet and Cuban inroads into Central America, Cuban support for Nicaragua's revolutionary Sandinista government prompted a series of U.S. missteps, including an ill-fated CIA effort to mine Nicaraguan harbors and the scheme to sell weapons to Iran to raise money for the anti-Sandinista insurgents known as the contras.
Although Castro is often portrayed as a major Cold War problem for the United States, diplomatic archives opened up after the collapse of the Soviet Union suggest that he was as much of a headache for Moscow.
"Castro ended up being more of a revolutionary than anyone in Moscow," said Cohen. "He really knew how to push buttons."
At no point was that more true than in 1962, when a U.S. spy plane photographed the construction of launch sites for Russian missiles in Cuba. The United States protested and imposed a naval quarantine on Cuba to prevent Soviet ships from carrying the missiles to Cuba.
Eventually, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev backed down, and the Russian ships turned back.
david.wood@baltsun.com
