Fidel Castro: Revolutionary and/or Tyrant

                                

                                                              1926 - 2016

       With the death of Fidel Castro Friday night and our shift in focus from the Eisenhower administration to that of John F. Kennedy, it seems appropriate that we look at the rise to power of Castro and why he, almost sixty years later, still has politicians worldwide fiercely debating his place in history.

         On New Years Day 1959, Cuban Dictator Fulgencio Batista was forced to flee the country from Havana airport, following Castro’s successful guerilla war in the island nation. Batista had ruled the country since 1952, and had actually imprisoned Castro in 1953, but released him in an effort to appear less like a dictator. The released Castro travelled to Cuba with a handful of allies, included his brother Raul Castro and the revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara. What happened next is nothing short of incredible – travelling through rough seas for over 1,200 miles on a decrepit yacht called the Granma, Castro and eighty fellow revolutionaries invaded Cuba on 2 December 1956. Hiding in the mountains, Castro began to lead a guerilla campaign against the Batista government, and this campaign was able to connect with the Cuban people.

            Castro’s transition to power in 1959 was anything but smooth. Early supporters who had hoped he would end the dictatorship of Batista and bring democracy to Cuba, were dismayed as he began to align himself to the Soviet Union, going so far as to describe himself as a Marxist-Leninist in a speech around this time. In response to demands that the US withdraw all but eighteen members from their embassy in Havana, Eisenhower ordered that the US embassy close; it wouldn’t reopen until 2015. An embargo from the US soon followed, forcing Cuba to rely heavily on the Soviet Union to buy their sugar and otherwise prop it up economically.

            The embargo would prove to be the least of Cuba’s worries from the United States. On April 17, 1961, three months into the presidency of John F. Kennedy, a counterrevolutionary army of over 1,400 exiled Cubans, armed and funded by the CIA, attempted an invasion of Cuba, by way of creating a beach head at the Bay of Pigs. Castro was prepared for this, and slaughtered the soldiers as they landed. The counterrevolutionaries were not given the required air nor naval power, and had failed to take the Cubans by surprised. The invasion was a spectacular failure, and a complete surrender was offered after only three days.

            From the Bay of Pigs invasion onwards, Castro would have firm evidence to show that the United States could not be trusted. The ninety miles between Florida and Cuba became a sea of distrust and suspicion. Increasingly paranoid, Castro requested ballistic missiles from Nikita Khrushchev, the leader of the Soviet Union, to deter future aggression from the United States. President Kennedy was not about to let missiles to be held so close to the US border, so he sent naval ships down to blockade the incoming Soviet ships. For thirteen days the heads of both the United States and the Soviet Union scrambled for a diplomatic solution – in the end, the Soviets turned around and went home, and the United States agreed to pull its Jupiter missiles out of Turkey.

            This successful aversion of conflict by the Kennedy administration kept the Cubans from becoming an existential threat. Castro stayed on as dictator for the next forty-four years, but we have now reached the end of the history of what we are concerned with in our class. Fidel Castro, the leader of a Caribbean nation of eleven million people, certainly punched above his weight. No leader besides Queen Elizabeth II held onto power longer in the western world. He jailed and executed rivals, he suppressed free speech, and he continually agitated the United States. He also improved the country’s access to quality healthcare, brought about racial integration, and was to a degree successful in managing an economy without any aid or trade from the United States. His legacy will remain hotly debated by historians for years to come

John F. Kennedy Inaugural Address

As we begin our transition from the 1950's into the 1960's with the election of President John F. Kennedy, it is important to familiarize ourselves with the rhetoric at that time. Therefore, I want you to watch this video and to come to class prepared to reflect on the ideas espoused in it.

Three Songs

Assignment:
Listen to these songs by Phil Ochs and Bob Dylan. Read the lyrics along with them. How do these songs reinforce the culture of the 1960s? What are they referring to, specifically - such as when Ochs says "I hate Joe Enlai, I hope he dies"? Draw examples directly from the lyrics. Find one other song from the 1960s that fits these themes. Two paragraphs, due Wednesday.

Student Blog: Constitutionality and Brown v. Board

In 1954, the United States Supreme Court declared that “separate, but equal” was no longer constitutional in the United States, overturning Plessy v. Ferguson, and idealistically forcing an equal society for the first time in U.S. history. The problem? That’s not quite what the decision said.

           Let’s begin with the background—what lawyers refer to as “the facts of the case.” Thirteen parents of Topeka, Kansas, public school students filed a class action to force the district to reverse its policy of racial segregation. The plaintiffs lost in the district court because, even though the court found that segregation in public education had a detrimental effect on African-American children, the schools were substantially equal with respect to buildings, transportation, curricula, and education. By the time the case went to the Supreme Court, it had been consolidated with five other cases representative of five other states, all of which were sponsored by the NAACP. Fun fact: the lead attorney on this case was Thurgood Marshall.

         Things went differently in the Supreme Court. First, the Court didn’t decide the case in its first hearing. It asked for a second argument a year after to focus specifically on the issues raised by the Equal Protection Clause. Second, before that subsequent hearing, one of the very conservative justices died—to be replaced by Earl Warren, the architect of the single most liberal Supreme Court in this nation’s history. Thus, in a sixteen page per curiam decision (per curiam being fancy Latin for a unanimous court), the Court struck down racial segregation. The holding was quite literally that segregated black and white schools of equal quality were still harmful to black students, and therefore had to be unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause.

                                                          The Warren Court

          But that is where this gets really interesting. Two points: first, the Supreme Court relied on social science for the first time in making this decision. The Court pointed to psychology and other social science studies about the effect of segregation of the African-American psyche. This was an unprecedented step. To that date, the Supreme Court had based its decision in legal precedent and statutory interpretation. To go beyond that, one might argue, was more akin to creating legislation, rather than judging the law. And as we all know, the power to legislate rests only with Congress. Second, and most importantly, the Supreme Court did not automatically end segregation. Contrary to popular belief, Brown told the states to change “with all deliberate speed.” What does all deliberate speed mean?” No one really knows.

           In the end, it took a second decision for the Court to delegate orders that desegregation occur. And it’s taken repeated litigation efforts to get the Court to not only reaffirm its commitment to what has become affirmative action, but also to make communities respect the mandate. The Supreme Court has had to repeatedly decide cases about how schools should be run; how they should treat their students; how busing routes should be driven; and more. This may seem like what the Supreme Court is supposed to do, but let’s remember the contours of the actual decision: was Brown meant to go that far? Or should Congress have stepped in and done the actual governing? Should the individual state communities have created their school standards? Should the Court have reviewed them on appeal, rather than created the guidelines that individual communities then had to wrestle with?

        All these answers depend on your view of the Court’s role in our constitutional structure. But at the end of the day, only the right to equality exists in the Constitution. Separate but equal is unconstitutional. And so, perhaps, is a Court that legislates from the bench.

By Laura Ferguson

The Korean War: Police Action

The Korean Demilitarized Zone

            Roughly halfway down the Korean peninsula lies the Demilitarized Zone, an armored border stretching roughly two hundred and fifty miles from the east coast to the west coast and about two and a half miles wide throughout. This border divides the peninsula into The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, or North Korea, from the Republic of Korea, or South Korea. This border, which runs on the 38^th latitudinal parallel, holds in place a shaky cease-fire that was signed in 1953 following the end of the Korean War. How and why was Korea divided? To understand that we must turn the clocks back to the late 1940s, and trace the origins and the fallout of the Korean War.

            Towards the end of the Second World War the Soviet Union joined her allies in the war against Japan. Soviet troops made their way halfway down the Korean peninsula before the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki signalled the end of the war, and thereafter Korea was occupied and controlled by a joint Soviet and American Military Government. This commission failed to make progress on creating an independent Korea, and elections held in 1948 attempting to set up a new sovereign state were met with boycotts and violence from the Korean communists. The results of these elections set up a government located in the Southern city of Seoul, while the Soviets set up a communist government based out of Pyongyang soon thereafter, led by a man named Kim Il-Sung.  This was followed by the United States and Soviet Union pulling out of the Korean peninsula by 1949, and allowing these two new states to develop on their own. Both sides, however, began planning for future reunification - peacefully or otherwise.

            In 1950 Kim Il-Sung, backed politically and economically by the Soviet Union and militarily by the newly formed Communist Chinese state, invaded South Korea, believing that the people would welcome him as a liberator. As Russia was boycotting United Nations meetings and the Communist Chinese weren’t yet internationally recognized, the Security Council voted unanimously to have member states support South Korea militarily that June. However, by September the Communists had overrun almost the entirety of South Korea; something drastic was needed. On September 15, the United Nations began the battle of Inchon, an amphibious invasion under the command of General Douglas MacArthur that provided a clear victory and a strategic reversal. Within the next two months MacArthur’s forces would push their way northwards, soon making their way passed the 38^th parallel and eventually to within miles of the Chinese border. This was met with a major invasion by the Chinese, which pushed the fighting back to the 38^th parallel, where the fighting was localized for the remainder of the war.

            These quick troop movements up and down the peninsula before settling into a longer stalemate at the 38^th parallel were incredibly deadly. The majority of the war’s casualties fell in this period, which included some 2.5 million between both sides. Halfway through 1951 both countries accepted that they had reached a stalemate, and little territory was exchanged as fighting continued. General MacArthur argued that the allies should extend the war into China, which was rebuked by the US government as many feared this would lead to another world war. He sent cables to members of the House of Representatives defending his position, and in response President Harry Truman demanded his resignation. Over the next two years, the two Koreas sought to create a peace deal, but no resolution could be found that both sides could find agreeable. During these two years of protracted negotiation Dwight Eisenhower was elected US President. He had campaigned on ending the Korean War, and immediately set out to do so. In 1953 an agreement was reached, not in the form of a treaty, but rather a cease-fire; to this day, the two Koreas technically remain at war.

            Discussion questions, write a paragraph for one:

In many Anglophonic nations, the Korean War is referred to as the “Forgotten War” – why might this be the case?

Was the United Nations right to act on a vote that would put the members at war with the Soviet Union and China when neither was represented in the vote? Why or why not?

President Truman famously referred to the war as "Police Action" - why might he choose to use this phrase to describe such a brutal war that had broad international support?