Why didn't Castro try to retake Guantanamo Bay from America?

0:00 The entire island of Cuba famously does not belong to the Cuban government.

0:04 You see, this small part here, the southern part of Guantanamo Bay,

0:07 has been home to an American naval base since 1903.

0:10 And as you'll likely know, there have been points during that time where

0:12 the Cuban and US governments really didn't get along.

0:15 And throughout the premiership of Fidel Castro,

0:17 when these relations were at their lowest point,

0:19 he wasn't able to retake Guantanamo Bay for himself and his country.

0:22 Which raises the obvious question, why not?

0:24 Why didn't Castro and communist Cuba try to take

0:26 Guantanamo Bay and make the island whole once more?

0:29 So, to learn how Cuba ended up in this position,

0:31 we've got to go back to the 19th century.

0:33 Not you, not this time.

0:35 In the closing years of which, the Cubans revolted against Spanish rule.

0:38 Like most revolutionaries before them, the Cubans imagined that they would get

0:41 to keep all of their territory upon independence.

0:43 But, fun fact, no.

0:44 Their war against the Spanish soon caught the attention of the US of A.

0:48 And after a main sinking, calls to remove Spain's last imperial

0:50 territories from the Western Hemisphere grew rapidly.

0:53 Now, many Americans wanted Spain out of Cuba,

0:55 but that didn't necessarily mean that they wanted Cuba to be free.

0:58 And so to preempt this, the less

0:59 expansionist members of Congress passed the teller amendment,

1:02 which as part of the act given President McKinley the right to intervene

1:04 in Cuba made it clear that the United States was not allowed to keep it.

1:08 Now the government being forbidden from annexing Cuba is not

1:10 the same as being forbidden from annexing any of it.

1:12 And during the SpanishAmerican War,

1:14 the US found that Guantanamo Bay was well suited as a naval base,

1:17 mostly because it gave much quicker access to the rest of the Caribbean,

1:20 which was useful for keeping an eye on any European ambitions there.

1:23 And so after the Spanish were defeated,

1:25 Cuba was occupied by the United States which agreed

1:27 to leave once the new independent government was up and running.

1:30 Now this independence came at a price

1:32 because the Americans had just passed the Plat

1:34 amendment meant to override the teller amendment

1:36 and Washington not only wanted the naval

1:38 base as well as this island but also the perpetual right to intervene

1:41 in Cuba should it do anything that threatened

1:43 American interest there or in the region.

1:45 This was begrudgingly agreed by the Cubans

1:47 in 1901 because what real choice did they have?

1:49 And two years later, the US built themselves a naval base in the bay,

1:51 which they would lease for a small annual sum.

1:53 This led the Americans to by and large ignore their claim on this island,

1:56 and eventually it was just sort of agreed that it was now Cuba's.

1:59 Over the next decades,

2:00 the US routinely intervened against any destabilizing forces

2:02 in Cuba and steadily began to economically dominate the island.

2:06 This continued until the early years of the Cold

2:07 War during the fractured rule of President Fhensio Batista.

2:10 Batista had a great relationship with the United States in that he

2:13 was happy to sell Cuba to it in return for Washington

2:16 propping him up and maintaining the base at Guantanamo Bay meant

2:18 that the US and its help were never too far away for him.

2:21 Over time he became much more tyrannical and so resistance to him notably

2:24 by students with communist sympathies increased massively

2:27 and soon resistance turned into open rebellion.

2:29 To combat this Batista strengthened the military

2:31 which promptly tried to overthrow him but failed.

2:34 He then opted for the triedand-true response of purging

2:36 the army which did keep it loyal to him

2:38 but it did mean that the inexperienced people now

2:40 running it weren't as capable of dealing with the rebels.

2:42 Said rebels were by and large a mish mash

2:44 of different groups with varying objectives barring the ousting of Batista.

2:47 That is however the largest and most effective group was

2:49 the July 26th movement led by a certain Fidel Castro.

2:52 By 1958 said rebels were in control of these parts

2:55 of Cuba and after Batista rigged the end

2:56 of the year election the US stopped providing him with weapons

2:59 which of course made things much easier for the rebels.

3:02 And within a couple of months, Batista had fled.

3:03 The revolutionaries were in charge of the major

3:05 cities and the Cuban revolution was over.

3:07 Mostly kind of.

3:09 Well, not really.

3:10 You see, the coalition of rebels were now in charge.

3:12 And whilst they could put their differences aside,

3:14 fighting against a common enemy when it became clear though

3:16 that not everyone could get what they wanted, tensions rose.

3:18 Castro was in charge of the most guys with guns.

3:20 And so he got to choose the new interim

3:22 president before telling said president to make him prime minister.

3:25 He announced that there would be elections.

3:26 But don't worry, he banned all opposing political parties, too,

3:29 so that he on behalf of the people could take

3:31 all of that troublesome and tiring thinking out of the process.

3:33 He would soon change his mind and ban elections altogether.

3:35 But long story short, Cuba was now Castros,

3:38 barring the shortlived rebellion by his former associates.

3:40 Now, it won't surprise you to learn that Castro and his fellow

3:42 co-revolutionaries didn't believe that America's ownership

3:44 of part of Guantanamo Bay was legitimate,

3:46 and they argued that it was an agreement between the USA and a dead government,

3:50 and thus was void, meaning that it would

3:51 be nice if the US Navy just simply left.

3:53 Now running a country after overthrowing its government means

3:56 that some things are naturally going to get overlooked.

3:58 And one thing that the new communist government did

4:00 was to cash the American check for the Guantanamo lease.

4:02 Now Castro claimed that this was an oversight.

4:05 But the Americans quickly claimed that by accepting the money the new

4:07 rulers of Cuba had legitimized the lease and so therefore no back seis.

4:11 Obviously that's not really how things work because it's not like Eisenhower

4:14 or any of his successors would have handed Guantanamo Bay over anyway.

4:17 And in the decades following this, the Havana government

4:19 was sure to never cash another one of those checks.

4:21 And it maintained that the United States had absolutely

4:23 no rights to the base or anything else on Cuba,

4:25 which is why the government nationalized basically everything

4:27 and their former American owners got nothing in return.

4:30 So Castro obviously wanted the Guantanamo territory back under Cuban control.

4:33 But he wasn't a dummy.

4:35 Whilst the US garrison there was small enough that he

4:37 would have been able to capture it fairly quickly,

4:38 it's not like the US would have just simply accepted

4:40 that its soldiers had been killed in its territory attacked.

4:43 In fact, not only did Castro and his government

4:44 refuse to consider attacking the US base there directly,

4:47 but during the first years of their rule,

4:48 they were terrified of the Americans invading Cuba to remove them,

4:51 which was a fair concern because that's what they wanted to do.

4:54 Now, I know what you're thinking.

4:55 This is because of the US's right to intervene in Cuba,

4:57 part of its constitution if America's interests were ever threatened.

5:00 But actually, it wasn't because Franklin D.

5:02 Roosevelt had given up that right in the 1930s to improve relations with Cuba.

5:06 He still kept the base, though.

5:07 That was just useful.

5:09 Their fear actually came from the fact that the United States was a hegemonic

5:12 superpower and could do whatever it wanted

5:14 in the region with very little push back.

5:16 In response to Castro's takeover,

5:17 President Eisenhower embargoed the country and began

5:20 preparing for an invasion of Cuba.

5:21 Not by the US military, though.

5:23 Castro was seen as far too popular with the Cuban people,

5:25 and the worry in America was that casualties would be far too high.

5:28 Instead, this invasion would be undertaken

5:30 by exiled Cubans who opposed the new government.

5:32 Eisenhower left office before this plan could be enacted, but John F.

5:35 Kennedy, his successor, went ahead with the operation.

5:38 This invasion would take place here at the Bay of Pigs and it did not go well.

5:41 Castro quickly won and as a result

5:43 his relationship with the USSR improved greatly because they

5:46 believed that if Cuba were to be uncommunistified

5:48 then it would make them look weak internationally.

5:50 As a result the two intensified their military alliance and the Soviet

5:53 Union stationed nuclear weapons there and thus Cuban missile crisis.

5:56 During this the US base on Guantanamo took a new importance for both sides.

6:00 The Americans evacuated civilians from the base and massively

6:02 reinforced the garrison there to deter any offensives from Cuba.

6:05 This wasn't going to be a problem, though,

6:07 because the Soviets there had just opted to point a nuclear missile at it,

6:10 meaning that it would have been

6:11 vaporized 15 seconds after everything went wrong.

6:14 Now, Castro saw this crisis as an opportunity for him to regain Guantanamo.

6:17 When the three nations began to negotiate over how they could all not die,

6:20 Castro listed his demands, which he hoped that the US would agree

6:23 to in return for the nukes going back home.

6:25 These demands were that one, the US would end the economic embargo.

6:28 Two, it would stop trying to off Castro and overthrow his government.

6:30 Three, the USA would respect Cuba's sovereign waters.

6:33 Four, the same but for Cuba's airspace.

6:35 and five, it would of course return Guantanamo Bay.

6:37 JFK didn't want to do any of this and so he did something clever.

6:40 He claimed to the USSR that this disagreement

6:42 was solely between superpowers and that Castro

6:45 shouldn't be allowed to torpedo negotiations

6:46 that were so important and Nikita Krushchov,

6:48 the Soviet premier, agreed because Castro was kind of hard to work with.

6:52 And by ignoring Cuba's demands,

6:53 he had a better chance of getting what he wanted.

6:55 This obviously wasn't what Castro had hoped for.

6:57 But after the crisis was over,

6:58 the Soviet Union promised to keep some troops in Cuba.

7:01 Because at least that way, if the US invaded again,

7:03 then the Soviets would be forced to get involved.

7:05 But outside of that, the Cubans didn't really get much from the crisis.

7:08 And the US, not even for a second, ever considered handing over its naval base.

7:11 And after this, the Cubans weren't really able

7:13 to do much about the Americans on their island.

7:15 They wanted it gone, and the Americans didn't want to leave.

7:18 And given the massive disparity in power between the two,

7:20 the only way they were going to get

7:21 the Americans out was via a diplomatic agreement.

7:23 But there was nothing Castro could give them

7:25 that would make such a trade worth it.

7:26 And thus, Cuba had to resort to diplomatic nagging.

7:29 And it was shocking to learn that this didn't work.

7:31 And the United States remains there until this day.

7:34 I hope you enjoyed this episode

7:35 with a special thanks to my patrons James Bizinette, Sky Chappelle, Carttoska,

7:39 YN Hockey, Anthony Beckett, Marvin Cassau, Winston Kwood, Gustav Swan,

7:43 Captain Sydog, Andy McGee, Alex Schwin, Copper Tone, Robert C.

7:46 Perkins, Ma Ahmed, AF, Firefly, Spencer Lightfoot, Castle Bravo, Rod D.

7:50 Martin.

7:51 Respectable Level of Chaos Spinning Three Plates, Arthur Hosie Jr.,

7:54 Udwan Wang, Shawen, Kimmoon Yun, the McWer, Michael Halbert,

7:58 the Jim Stannon, Kitro, The Flying Deutseland, Starry Knights, Bonnie Bounds,

8:02 Jim Sternberg, Remco, Hoisman, Betcobot, Lord Beak, and Charles I.