Anger, Anti-Americanism, and the Break in U.S.-Cuban Relations Downloaded from Q: Mr
Diplomatic History Advance Access published September 26, 2016 william m. leogrande Anger, Anti-Americanism, and the Break in U.S.-Cuban Relations Downloaded from Q: Mr. President, do you want to comment on the behavior of Fidel Castro? What do you suppose, sir, is eating him? The President: I have no idea of discussing possible motivation of a man, what he is really doing, and certainly I am not qualified to go into such abstruse and difficult subjects as that. I do feel this: here is a country that you would http://dh.oxfordjournals.org/ believe, on the basis of our history, would be one of our real friends. The whole history—first of our intervention in 1898, our making and helping set up Cuban independence, the second time we had to go in and did the same thing to make sure that they were on a sound basis, the trade concessions we have made and the very close relationships that have existed most of the time with them— would seem to make it a puzzling matter to figure out just exactly why the Cubans and the Cuban Government would be so unhappy when, after all, their at University of Hong Kong Libraries on October 1, 2016 principal market is right here, their best market. You would think they would want good relationships. I don’t know exactly what the difficulty is. —President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Press Conference, October 28, 1959 In the breakdown of relations between the United States and Cuba in the months following Fidel Castro’s revolutionary triumph, anger was a critically important factor in the decisions taken in both Washington and Havana.
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