From late 1959: Exile/CIA ops, underground resistance (8 ottob 1959 anni – 16 ottob 1962 anni)

Descrizione:

The US had equipped, trained and infiltrated local anti-Castro Cuban forces, and at one point the Cuba spy units made up the largest US espionage operation in a Communist country anywhere in the world; but neither these units nor the CIA had the scale to meet Kennedy's wish for autonomous, "blown-cover-proof" operations, and most raids were hit-and-run maritime landings from staging areas outside Cuba in the Florida Keys or the Bahamas.

Both the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations insisted on "plausible deniability" for US-planned anti-Castro exile actions, to avoid the risks of escalation with the USSR, substantiating anti-American propaganda, and other forms of political embarrassment. Kennedy preferred covert activities be carried out by infiltrated espionage and special ops units from within Cuba.

Thus at the outset of the covert war, the requirements for success were already at odds with political and foreign policy reality which mandated limited war and minimization of political risk to the US.

Later the exile landing operations came to be viewed as ineffective or counter-productive "pinpricks" to be brought back into CIA direct management, or discontinued. US Customs and Coast Guard began intercepting these maritime sorties.

Exile activity began to shift to domestic targets: bombings on Cuban political, diplomatic and cultural arts targets, and Soviet entities in the US. Bombings and assassinations were planned, funded and carried out in New Jersey, NYC, Washington DC and Miami by exile groups like Omega 7 in the 1980s.

Omega 7 leader Eduardo Arocena was arrested and imprisoned for a long term before his 2014 release on humanitarian health grounds. Exile militants meanwhile viewed these prosecutions of domestic political attacks as a betrayal by the US and viewed them as explicit support of Castro by the United States.

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