The Cold War

Fidel Castro

(born August 13, 1926, near Birán, Cuba—died November 25, 2016, Cuba), political leader of Cuba (1959-2008) who transformed his country into the first communist state in the Western Hemisphere. Castro became a symbol of communist revolution in Latin America. He held the title of premier until 1976 and then began a long tenure as president of the Council of State and the Council of Ministers.

satellite states

A Satellite State is a political term that refers to a country or nation that was formally independent, but is now politically and economically influenced by another country. The term is often used to reference the Soviet Empire, Soviet Satellite States, or Eastern Bloc.A Satellite State is a political term that refers to a country or nation that was formally independent, but is now politically and economically influenced by another country. The term is often used to reference the Soviet Empire, Soviet Satellite States, or Eastern Bloc.

bay of pigs

April 17, 1961), abortive invasion of Cuba at the Bahía de Cochinos (Bay of Pigs), or Playa Girón (Girón Beach) to Cubans, on the southwestern coast by some 1,500 Cuban exiles opposed to Fidel Castro. The invasion was financed and directed by the U.S. government.

MAD-mutually Assured destruction

Mutual assured destruction or mutually assured destruction (MAD) is a doctrine of military strategy and national security policy in which a full-scale use of nuclear weapons by two or more opposing sides would cause the complete annihilation of both the attacker and the defender

Warsaw pact

The Soviet Union and seven of its European satellites sign a treaty establishing the Warsaw Pact, a mutual defense organization that put the Soviets in command of the armed forces of the member states. The Warsaw Pact, so named because the treaty was signed in Warsaw, included the Soviet Union, Albania, Poland, Romania, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria as members. The treaty called on the member states to come to the defense of any member attacked by an outside force and it set up a unified military command under Marshal Ivan S. Konev of the Soviet Union. The introduction to the treaty establishing the Warsaw Pact indicated the reason for its existence. This revolved around "Western Germany, which is being remilitarized, and her inclusion in the North Atlantic bloc, which increases the danger of a new war and creates a threat to the national security of peace-loving states." This passage referred to the decision by the United States and the other members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) on May 9, 1955 to make West Germany a member of NATO and allow that nation to remilitarize. The Soviets obviously saw this as a direct threat and responded with the Warsaw Pact.

domino theory

also called Domino Effect, theory in U.S. foreign policy after World War IIstating that the "fall" of a noncommunist state to communism would precipitate the fall of noncommunist governments in neighbouring states. The theory was first proposed by President Harry S. Truman to justify sending military aid to Greece and Turkey in the 1940s, but it became popular in the 1950s when President Dwight D. Eisenhower applied it to Southeast Asia, especially South Vietnam. The domino theory was one of the main arguments used in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations during the 1960s to justify increasing American military involvement in the Vietnam War.

berlin wall

barrier that surrounded West Berlin and prevented access to it from East Berlin and adjacent areas of East Germany during the period from 1961 to 1989. In the years between 1949 and 1961, about 2.5 million East Germans had fled from East to West Germany, including steadily rising numbers of skilled workers, professionals, and intellectuals. Their loss threatened to destroy the economic viability of the East German state. In response, East Germany built a barrier to close off East Germans' access to West Berlin and hence West Germany.

korean war

conflict between the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea) and the Republic of Korea (South Korea) in which at least 2.5 million persons lost their lives. The war reached international proportions in June 1950 when North Korea, supplied and advised by the Soviet Union, invaded the South. The United Nations, with the United States as the principal participant, joined the war on the side of the South Koreans, and the People's Republic of China came to North Korea's aid.

marshall plan

formally European Recovery Program, (April 1948-December 1951), U.S.-sponsored program designed to rehabilitate the economies of 17 western and southern European countries in order to create stable conditions in which democratic institutions could survive.

berlin blockade-berlin airlift

international crisis that arose from an attempt by the Soviet Union, in 1948-49, to force the Western Allied powers (the United States, the United Kingdom, and France) to abandon their post-World War II jurisdictions in West Berlin. In March 1948 the Allied powers decided to unite their different occupation zones of Germany into a single economic unit. In protest, the Soviet representative withdrew from the Allied Control Council. Coincident with the introduction of a new deutsche mark in West Berlin (as throughout West Germany), which the Soviets regarded as a violation of agreements with the Allies, the Soviet occupation forces in eastern Germany began a blockade of all rail, road, and water communications between Berlin and the West. On June 24 the Soviets announced that the four-power administration of Berlin had ceased and that the Allies no longer had any rights there. On June 26 the United States and Britain began to supply the city with food and other vital supplies by air. They also organized a similar "airlift" in the opposite direction of West Berlin's greatly reduced industrial exports. By mid-July the Soviet army of occupation in East Germany had increased to 40 divisions, against 8 in the Allied sectors. By the end of July three groups of U.S. strategic bombers had been sent as reinforcements to Britain. Tension remained high, but war did not break out.

NATO

military alliance established by the North Atlantic Treaty (also called the Washington Treaty) of April 4, 1949, which sought to create a counterweight to Sovietarmies stationed in central and eastern Europe after World War II.

truman doctrine

pronouncement by U.S. Pres. Harry S. Truman on March 12, 1947, declaring immediate economic and military aid to the governments of Greece, threatened by Communist insurrection, and Turkey, under pressure from Soviet expansion in the Mediterranean area. As the United States and the Soviet Union struggled to reach a balance of power during the Cold War that followed World War II, Great Britain announced that it could no longer afford to aid those Mediterranean countries, which the West feared were in danger of falling under Soviet influence. The U.S. Congress responded to a message from Truman by promptly appropriating $400,000,000 for this purpose.

containment

strategic foreign policy pursued by the United States in the late 1940s and the early 1950s in order to check the expansionist policy of the Soviet Union. In an anonymous article in the July 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs, George F. Kennan, diplomat and U.S. State Department adviser on Soviet affairs, suggested a "long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies" in the hope that the regime would mellow or collapse. The Truman Doctrine of 1947, with its guarantee of immediate economic and military aid to Greece and Turkey, was an initial application of the policy of containment.

brezhnev doctrine

the doctrine expounded by Leonid Brezhnev in November 1968 affirming the right of the Soviet Union to intervene in the affairs of Communist countries to strengthen Communism.

iron curtain

the political, military, and ideological barrier erected by the Soviet Union after World War II to seal off itself and its dependent eastern and central European allies from open contact with the West and other noncommunist areas. The term Iron Curtain had been in occasional and varied use as a metaphor since the 19th century, but it came to prominence only after it was used by the former British prime minister Winston Churchill in a speech at Fulton, Missouri, U.S., on March 5, 1946, when he said of the communist states, "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent."

cuban revolution

the rule of Batista, direct or indirect from 1933-1944 was succeeded by two inefficient corrupt but nominally indirect from 1933 to 1944 was succeeded by two inefficient corrupt but nominally democratic governments. Batista returned as head of state in March 1952 his administration becoming so tyrannical that in 1957 the US Government cut off supplies of arms to Cuba, and encouraged the resistance movement of Fidel Castro. The success of Castro in January 1959 was, however, followed by rapid deterioration in Cuban-American relations caused partly by Cuba's political flirtation with China and the USSR and partly by Castro's nationalization of industrial enterprises and a series of agrarian reforms which placed large plantations under state control.