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• History
• Politics and Government
• 03 / 08 / 2019

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The Cuban government has accused the United States of alleged military intervention in Venezuela under the pretext of humanitarian aid promoted by the interim president of that country Juan Guaidó, who was prevented by the forces related to the dictator Nicolás Maduro.

From Havana, they insist on repeating US military interventions over and over again. in the world, but obviate those of the Cuban troops that occurred as recently as in 1959, just when the dictator Fidel Castro Ruz came to power on the island and tried to export his guerrilla war in the region.

In that year, Cuba supported two military interventions, one to Panama and the other to the Dominican Republic.

April 1959: Failed intervention in Panama

Some 97 men left Mayarí on April 19, 1959 from Puerto Surgidero in Batabanó to Panama, where they disembarked on April 24 at Playa Colorada, San Blas.

But, the eagerness to reedit the Cuban example in Panama was paralyzed by the National Guard of that country immediately because it was aware of such actions.

The Panamanian government estimated that the damages of the invasion were more than three hundred thousand dollars in direct costs and in indirect damages in several million dollars, since trade and industry were paralyzed for several days, notes the newspaper La Estrella de Panamá.

The Cuban government paid for the return of the island's invaders on a plane belonging to the airline COPA landed at the Ciudad Libertad military airport in Havana.

June 1959: Failed intervention in the Dominican Republic

From December of 1958 Dominican exiles arrived at the Island, where they received military training in Pinar del Río to try to overthrow the dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo.

In June 1959 they left in two groups to that country, but immediately the Army of Trujillo ended with more than 100 Dominican exiles who tried to end their regime supported by Castro.

Only five men survived, two of them Cubans who were later repatriated to Cuba. In the Dominican Republic the invasion is known as the expeditions of the Immortal Race, as reported by the newspaper Hoy Digital.

1963: War of the Sands, Algeria

Cuba sided with Algeria in a territorial dispute with Morocco and sent "686 men, a battalion of 22 tanks, artillery and mortar groups and a battery of anti-tank guns," says BBC Mundo.

On October 10, 1963, a merchant ship departed from the port of Havana to Algeria, followed by two special flights of Cubana de Aviación and another ship, adds this British media. The Cuban military followed the first international medical mission, one of the main sources of income currently for the coffers of the Cuban regime.

Although the Cuban troops did not fight in the so-called War of the Sands, the Castro military remained in Algeria a few months after the Algerian President Ahmed Ben Bella and King Hassan II of Morocco signed a ceasefire agreement on the 31st. October 1963

The US administration of John F. Kennedy influenced the agreement between Algeria and Morocco because it feared a new escalation of the Cold War with the former Soviet Union (USSR) in that area of Africa.

Cuba left in 1963 all the armament in that country, but the influence of Castro in Algeria came from 1961 when it sent part of the American armament used in Bay of Pigs to the army of liberation of that country.

1964-1965: Crisis of the Congo

After the death of Patrice Lumumba in 1961, Cuba supported the liberation movements both in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and in the rest of Africa with one of its main commanders, Ernesto Che Guevara.

The country was fragmented into three regions and Guevara supported one of them from April to November 1965 with shallow war actions that did not contribute to the stability of that African nation, which finally was in the hands of the dictator Joseph Mobutu.

Some 120 guerrillas commanded by Che entered the DRC through Tanzania and settled in the coastal city of Kigoma, from where they participated in operations at the request of Lieutenant Laurent Kabila.

However, the Cuban military was demoralized after some defeats that even cost the lives of four of them.

"All the Congolese leaders were in full retreat, the peasants had become increasingly hostile," Guevara wrote after that immersion in the Congo crisis, says international analyst David Seddon in Pambazuka News, translated into Spanish by the portal Rebelion .

1967: Machurucuto incident, Venezuela

In May of 1967 a small group of Cuban and Venezuelan fighters tried to invade Venezuela with about 10,000 dollars and 10,000 bolivars each.

The men disembarked by Machurucuto, in Miranda state, where some were discovered by the Guard and the Venezuelan National Army, while others joined the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR).

However, a year later the Cuban agents decided to return to the island when they saw that in Venezuela they were not able to achieve the change that Castro wanted through that guerrilla.

Among them were the commanders Raúl Menéndez Tomassevich and Ulises Rosales del Toro, who years later rose to the rank of general and were decorated as "heroes of Cuba," says BBC Mundo.

1973-1974: Yom Kippur War

Under the pretext of internationalism, the Cuban government sent in 1973 to more than 800 fighters, as Colonel Vicente Díaz García acknowledged and the second chief of the Political Direction of the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR) in an interview with the state newspaper Granma in 1998

However, some specialists estimate that the participation of the island in the so-called Yom Kippur War, which had its peak in October 1973 between Israel and the Arab forces of Egypt and Syria, amounts to more than 1,000 and even up to 4,000 Cuban soldiers.

The Cuban forces supported with combat pilots and a battalion of tankers to Syria in their dispute with Israel to recover the region of the Golan Heights and Egypt, for the Sinai Peninsula.

"We were in the desert, in a stage of very intense cold, even snow, and a summer with excessive heat, there was a shortage of water and a different diet, circumscribed to the possibilities of a country at war," said the colonel. Díaz to Granma.

Although the ceasefire occurred on October 25, 1973 with the Israeli victory for US support, the Cubans continued alongside the Syrians until February 1975.

1975-1991: Operation Carlota, in Angola

"Our intelligence services are so bad, so inept, that we learned that the Cubans were going to Angola when they were there," the former US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, said in 1975 in November 1975. .

The president of Angola, Agostinho Neto, allowed the entry of Cuban forces into his country after independence from Portugal and fear that South Africa would try to invade that nation, which still maintains very close ties with the Havana regime.

The Cuban military went from training the young Angolans to actively participating against the South African troops that tried to reach the Angolan capital, Luanda.

According to the Cuban Institute for Freedom of Expression and Press, 377,033 Cuban soldiers participated in the so-called Operation Carlota and more than 50,000 civilian aid workers.

From 1976 Castro agreed with Neto to the weekly withdrawal of 200 Cuban troops, but the final blow to put an end to South Africa's attempt to extend apartheid to Angola was the Cuito Cuanavale battle in 1988.

1977-1988: War of the Ogaden and Civil War of Ethiopia

The conflict between Ethiopia and Somalia in the desert territory of Ogaden, almost 300,000 square kilometers, forced the USSR and Cuba to position themselves before two dictators of "Marxist ideas", the Ethiopian Mengistu Haile Mariam and the Somali Mohamed Siad Barre.

From Havana, they sent more than 17,000 Cuban soldiers with Colonel Arnaldo Ochoa to the front to support the Ethiopian regime. The victory of this general against the Somalis was not enough for the Castro regime to spare his life in Cause 1 and to shoot him to clean up suspicions of drug trafficking in 1989.

"The war that is currently taking place in Eritrea is not between Eritrean guerrillas and the Ethiopian Army, but between the Soviets and Cubans and us," said Nassib Kurdi, representative of the Popular Front of Eritrea, in 1978, according to the Spanish newspaper El País.

Despite the support of the Cubans, Eritrea declared its independence from Ethiopia in 1993 and the dictator defended by Castro, Mengistu Haile Mariam was condemned in 2008 for the genocide of thousands of people.

1979-1990: Sandinista Revolution, Nicaragua

In Nicaragua, the cold war between the US and the former USSR had its particular battle with dictatorships in that Central American country and the support of the Soviets and Cubans to the Sandinista National Liberation Front.

In July 1979, the FSLN succeeded in overthrowing Anastasio Somoza Debayle and established a Junta de Gobierno de Reconstrucción Nacional, which was supported by the Cuban government and the USSR with an economic cooperation pact in 1982, due to the economic blockade imposed by Ronald Reagan. year before.

Reagan's incursion into the situation in Nicaragua with the financing of guerrilla groups with money obtained from the sale of arms to Iran between 1985 and 1986, was questioned by the United States Congress, but there was not enough evidence to carry out a impeachment.

In this period one of the figures still in power in Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega, one of the members of the so-called Troika of Tyranny, according to John Bolton, the National Security Adviser to President Donald Trump.

According to specialists, the Havana regime controls the security and military intelligence services that have kept Ortega in power since 2007, despite the fact that since last year it faces strong opposition in the streets.

1999-present: Chavismo in Venezuela

With the arrival of Hugo Chávez to the presidency of Venezuela in 1999, Fidel Castro finally saw the light at the end of the tunnel of a long Special Period that Cuba suffered after the fall of the USSR in the nineties.

Chavez, who had attempted a coup d'état in 1992, came to power through the polls, but little by little his mandate led to a model similar to what Cuba suffered since 1959 and that many specialists agree, was directly influenced by the Cuban regime.

The so-called socialism of the 21st century, named after Chávez himself, almost followed Castro's footsteps in Cuba with the subtle difference that Venezuela had almost unlimited resources due to oil and distributed its benefits throughout most of Latin America.

From Havana they secured the privileged position in the business portfolio of Chavez and later in the dictator Nicolás Maduro, whom according to the US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, keeps in power Cuban security agents.

Cuba could not repeat the failures of the expeditions in 1963 and 1967 when Castro tried to establish a friendly government with the island, but was prevented by the Venezuelan government by destroying the Cuban artillery established in the Venezuelan islands.

Castro had been supported by President Rómulo Betancourt with arms while in the Sierra Maestra, but after a visit in 1959 to Caracas, Rómulo made it clear that if he wanted oil, he would have to pay and call for free elections, as reported by the Spanish newspaper ABC.

Currently, Maduro is supported by the Venezuelan Armed Forces and the Bolivarian National Guard (GNB), which according to former Venezuelan general Hugo Carvajal is controlled by Cuban intelligence.

Even the interim president, Juan Guaidó, has repeatedly asked Cuba to withdraw its forces from Venezuela.

"If there is an interference in Venezuela, it is Cuba over Venezuela, where they handle part of the intelligence and counterintelligence apparatus, especially dedicated to terrorizing the military mainly so that they do not openly pronounce themselves," he said.