American companies controlled 80 to 100
percent of Cuba's utilities, mines, cattle ranches and oil
refineries, 40 percent of the sugar industry and 50 percent of the
public railways.
The [imposed] Platt Amendment permitted
intervention in Cuba.
[JG: The American government planted
that seed of anti-Yankee hatred in the island. They got what they
richly deserved on January 1st. 1959, when
Cuba finally became free.]
... Fidel Castro
moved to set up a nationwide system of education, [health care],
housing, and of land distribution to landless peasants. The
government confiscated over a million acres of land from three
American companies, including the United Fruit Company.
When Cuba signed a
trade agreement with the Soviet Union, American-owned companies in
Cuba refused to refine crude oil that came from the Soviet Union,
Castro nationalized these companies.
[In 1961] the
whole Bay of Pigs affair was accompanied by hypocrisy and lying. The
invasion was a violation of the Charter of the Organization of
American States which reads: “No state or group of states has
the right to intervene, directly or indirectly, for any reason
whatever, in the internal or external affairs of any other state.”
Source: “ A People's History of
the United States: 1492 to Present”
By Howard Zinn
Paperback, Harper Perennial Modern
Classics, New York, 2005
Originally published in 1980 as a
hardback.
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