Bay Of Pigs Invasion

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Introduction

When it comes to the Bay of Pigs invasion, there is one underlining reason why it occurred. That is because the U.S. did not want Fidel Castro in power in Cuba. But why? That is the basis of my paper. I plan on explaining why the U.S. government wanted Fidel Castro out of power. I plan to do this by using two levels of analysis. Through state and global analysis, you will understand why the Bay of Pigs invasion occurred.

State Level Analysis

The state level analysis deals with three distinctions. The governmental institution, the state actors, and the state processes. The state governmental institution would be what the state’s political agenda is. The United States’ political agenda for the Bay of Pigs was theoretically simple. It was to get Castro out of power, but as you can see, it wasn’t so easy because Castro remains the leader of Cuba today. The U.S. wanted Castro out of Cuba for several reasons. One was because Castro came to power in a rebellion against Fulgencio Batista, whom the United States had a good relationship with. Also soon after obtaining power, Castro began to abuse the power by becoming very hostile with both the Cuban people and the United States. Castro nationalized all businesses in the country which deprived a lot of U.S. based multinationals of a very profitable cash flow. “Castro seized American oil refineries sugar mills, and electric utilities.” (Wiener) Last but not least, Castro began to welcome communism and develop strong ties with the USSR. This upset the United States because we did not want a communist country so close to United States soil. We felt at the time that communism was an idea that could spread quickly. The United States also felt uneasy about it because the USSR was the only other country in the world, besides the U.S., with nuclear weapons. We did not want the USSR to take advantage of the opportunity to obtain a closer strategic position to the United States. The state actors refer to who was actually involved. In this case it was the United States and Cuba. Cuba is a small island off the coast of Florida. The United States was not the only country that was upset when Castro took over.

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