Latest news with #communism
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
JFK Files: How Cuba's War Of Words Flooded The Americas
Join authors Dennis McCuistion and Dory Wiley for an explosive panel discussion at The Dallas Express' 'Who Killed JFK?' event on June 9, 2025. , , or today! The CIA feared that Cuba's true revolutionary export wasn't fighters—it was a playbook for turning a country's own resources against itself. Newly declassified intelligence files from the 1960s, released by President Donald Trump in March 2025 as part of the broader 'JFK Files' disclosure, detail extensive efforts by Fidel Castro's Cuba to spread communism across Latin America—not through mass invasions or military might, but by subverting nations from within. One such document from then-CIA Director John A. McCone to then-Senator John Stennis (D-MS) is marked 'Secret' and appears to be from the spring of 1963. The document outlines the CIA's assessment of Cuba's subversive strategy as a potent mix of ideological indoctrination, sabotage training, and psychological warfare. According to the report, Cuba offered revolutionaries from across Latin America a chillingly precise deal: 'Come to Cuba; we will pay your way, we will train you…in guerrilla warfare, in sabotage and in terrorism.' Though the Cubans generally avoided supplying weapons or personnel, they promised political support, training materials, demolition guides, secret communication techniques, and, in some cases, funding. The strategy focused on training guerrillas to be self-sufficient and to weaponize their surroundings. Pocket-sized manuals, such as '150 Questions on Guerrilla Warfare' by Spanish Civil War veteran Alberto Bayo, circulated widely. They instructed revolutionaries on how to craft explosives from household items and steal arms from government forces. CIA agents found versions of these texts adapted for countries like Peru, Colombia, and Brazil. In the early 1960s, the CIA leadership believed between 1,000 and 1,500 individuals from almost every Latin American country (except Uruguay) reportedly traveled to Cuba for ideological or guerrilla training. The Cuban government tried to obscure the movement, issuing visas on separate slips to avoid passport stamps and even providing falsified passports. American intelligence used agents within communist parties and foreign customs authorities to track and estimate the scale of this traffic, the director told the senator. The report highlights Cuba's two-pronged media campaign into the United States as an early extension of this subversive agenda. 'Radio Free Dixie,' hosted by North Carolina-born Robert F. Williams, was broadcast in English to Black Americans in the South, while 'The Friendly Voice of Cuba' reached a wider Southern audience. These programs, the CIA noted, could be heard clearly in Florida and across much of the Deep South and represented a subtle yet strategic psychological campaign aimed at undermining American unity. Castro's ambition, the report asserts, was to make Cuba the blueprint for the Latin American revolution. He famously stated in 1960 that he aimed to 'convert the Cordillera of the Andes into the Sierra Maestra of the American continent.' The Sierra Maestra was the mountain refuge from which Castro launched his successful revolution against Batista. 'Socialism,' he argued, could not afford to wait for democratic change—it had to be won by force. And yet, Cuban communism was not as militant as it might seem. The CIA noted that Castro often trod a careful line between the Soviet Union and Communist China. 'Castro's heart is in Peiping but his stomach is in Moscow,' one section reads, referencing the ideological tug-of-war between Chinese revolutionary zeal and Soviet pragmatism. While China promoted all-out militancy, the Soviets favored subversion through legal means. Castro attempted to serve both masters—adopting Chinese revolutionary theory but relying on Soviet material aid. Despite this ideological balancing act, the CIA classified the Cubans and Venezuelans as the only Communist parties in Latin America 'totally committed to terror and revolution.' Other parties, while ideologically aligned, preferred subversion, propaganda, and infiltration to outright violence—at least initially. Several revolutions swept through South America during the decades following Cuba's turn to communism, some succeeding and others collapsing. In Nicaragua, the Sandinistas ultimately overthrew the Somoza regime in 1979 with tactics reminiscent of the Cuban model. In Chile, Salvador Allende's Marxist government came to power democratically in 1970 but was overthrown in a military coup three years later. Guerrilla movements plagued Colombia, Peru, Argentina, and Bolivia, with groups like the FARC and the Shining Path drawing from the ideological and tactical lineage traced back to Cuba's training camps and printed materials. Even where communist revolutions never took root—such as in Brazil, Ecuador, or Paraguay—leftist guerrilla groups launched campaigns of sabotage and terror, often mimicking Cuban tactics. Many of these movements were ultimately suppressed, but not before spreading fear and destabilization. Perhaps the most telling metric of Cuba's nonviolent infiltration was its printed word. 'It may be worth noting,' the CIA director wrote, 'that the postal and customs authorities in Panama are destroying on average 12 tons a month of Cuban propaganda.' Another 10 tons were reportedly confiscated monthly in Costa Rica. These materials, in the form of books, pamphlets, and ideological tracts, were seen as weapons of war. Despite accepting Soviet missiles and troops during the Cuban Missile Crisis—20,000 Soviet personnel were reportedly stationed in Cuba, according to one document—the island's long-term strategy was quieter and more insidious. The CIA concluded that Cuba's effort to spread communism through nonviolent means was far more effective than the Cuban effort to spread communism through violent means.
Bloomberg
5 days ago
- General
- Bloomberg
Now with Colorful Blocks, Tirana's Pyramid Represents a Changing Albania
CityLab Design A monument to Albania's former dictator, remade as a tourist-friendly community center, points to the western design influences reshaping the capital city. The top of the Piramida, as residents of Tirana call it, is a great place to see the skyline of Albania's capital. The soaring, communist-era ode to longtime dictator Enver Hoxha, who ruled the country for more than 40 years after World War II, offers clear views across downtown. From there, you can see the boxy silhouettes of the modernist apartment blocks built under his rule. Today those apartment buildings are overshadowed by stylized high-rises — and the monument itself has a new sheen, too.
Irish Times
23-05-2025
- Politics
- Irish Times
‘This is the end game': India corners Maoist rebels after decades-long struggle
Indian communist rebel Nambala Keshava Rao was one of the country's most wanted men, but few images of him are publicly available. A photograph from his college days, before he went underground in the 1970s to join what is known as the Naxalite movement, shows an intense, bearded young man in a striped shirt. This week, Indian authorities released a new image, showing the 69-year-old Rao, with grey stubble, lying on a forest floor and apparently dead. The revolutionary's death marked a moment of triumph for Indian prime minister Narendra Modi's government, which has prioritised national security and only this month fought a short but sharp military conflict with neighbouring Pakistan . READ MORE The Naxalite insurgency, one of the world's longest running, has claimed the lives of thousands of security personnel, rebels and civilians across central, southern and eastern India over more than five decades. But analysts said it was now entering its endgame, and Modi's government has vowed to wipe it out in less than a year. Amit Shah, the home affairs minister and Modi's top deputy, announced on Wednesday that paramilitary police had killed 27 rebels, including Rao, who he described as the 'topmost' leader of the Communist Party of India (Maoist), a leading Naxalite armed group. 'What you are seeing is the pincer movement closing in on the surviving top leadership,' Ajai Sahni, a counter-terrorism expert, said. 'This is the end game for the Maoists – and as far as the movement is concerned, it can be declared a failure.' At its peak in 2008-2009, Naxalite rebels were active in 223 districts in 20 Indian states, Sahni said. Now, they have been cornered by authorities into scattered pockets in just five states. Rao and the other insurgents were killed in what police called an 'encounter' in the remote Abujhmarh forest, a tract of hilly woods and scrubland mostly in the southern part of India's central Chhattisgarh state that is one of the Naxalites' last redoubts. Similar 'encounters', mostly in secluded areas, have resulted in the deaths of dozens of rebels, but human rights defenders have questioned whether authorities could have tried to capture more of them alive. The theatre of fighting has centred mostly on India's tribal belt, where some of the country's poorest indigenous groups have been caught in the middle. 'For every claim that the police makes which it calls an 'encounter', it could very well be a fake encounter or a partial truth,' says Bela Bhatia, a human rights lawyer and writer based in Chhattisgarh's Bastar division, near the forest where Rao was killed. 'There is kind of a police raj [rule] in these parts.' [ Many Indian police officers in favour of shooting serious offenders, says report ] Naxalism emerged in the heyday of Maoist-inspired movements in 1967, taking its name from the village of Naxalbari, in West Bengal, where communists revolutionaries launched a violent peasant uprising against landlords. Its first leaders were readers of Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedong and Che Guevara, with aspirations of global revolution and an agenda of overthrowing the state. According to a biography shared by Indian intelligence officials this week, Rao was born in a village in southern Andhra Pradesh and became involved in leftist politics through the communist-affiliated Radical Students Union. The movement was crushed, but resurfaced in other rural rebellions, mainly among agricultural workers demanding land redistribution. In the 1990s, rebels fled an expanding security crackdown into the tribal belt, whose rugged terrain and thick forests were easier to defend in guerrilla warfare than the flat plains. The region has been a rich source of resources, including timber and more recently minerals, with a mining boom taking off in the years after India opened its economy to the world from 1991. Adani Group and Jindal Steel are among the companies with coal, iron ore and other operations in Chhattisgarh. 'Businesses needed access to land, and these areas became militarised,' says Alpa Shah, an Oxford anthropologist and author of a book about the Naxalites, who lived in the tribal belt for several years in the late 1990s and early 2000s. 'Hundreds of thousands of troops were sent in to clear the land.' The state launched a counter-insurgency to root out the Maoists in Chhattisgarh in 2005, but alleged human-rights abuses alienated communities and India's supreme court declared the operations illegal six years later. According to Indian intelligence, Rao received guerrilla warfare and explosives training from former members of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the Sri Lanka -based militant group blamed for the 1991 assassination of former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi. He rose to become military head of the CPI (Maoist), then in 2018 the group's general secretary. Indian authorities said he masterminded several attacks, including a 2019 ambush in Gadchiroli, Maharashtra, in which 15 police were killed. But forest clearing and technological advances – including the use of drones and security cameras – have allowed security forces to push further into the rebels' territory. Last year Modi's government announced that by March 2026 India would wipe out Naxalism. The home ministry launched Operation Kagar, a major crackdown that analysts said had sapped the militants' recruitment and morale. Sahni, the counterinsurgency expert, said the movement was in its 'terminal stage'. But Oxford's Shah cautioned against writing the group off as a spent force 'We have heard this claim many times by Indian leaders that this is the last battle, we have got rid of this movement. 'We have also seen that when it seems nothing is going on, a new movement in the name of Naxalbari is born again.' − The Financial Times
Times
16-05-2025
- Politics
- Times
Highgate Cemetery — London's place to be seen dead in
Even the most ardent communists have selfish needs. An indication of the priorities of those who take the Northern line to Archway and walk 20 minutes uphill to visit Highgate Cemetery can be seen in the order of information on a sign at the entrance. 'Toilets, right. Marx, straight on.' They put Karl Marx in the far-left corner, naturally, of the eastern side of the 36-acre cemetery, his remains moved by the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1954 from the modest grave on a side path where they were interred in 1883, to a more prominent spot under a vast bronze bust upon a marble plinth. Nothing's too good for the champion of the workers. He now rests for eternity opposite the grave of
Yahoo
11-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The fall of Saigon
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. The capture of Saigon – the capital of America's ally South Vietnam – by communist North Vietnamese forces on 30 April 1975, marked the end of the Vietnam War. The war had been fought between the two halves of the former French colony since 1955. The US had been deeply involved since 1965; almost three million Americans, mostly young conscripts, had fought against North Vietnam, which was backed by Russia and China, and the Viet Cong, the communist guerillas in the south. The US had spent billions of dollars – and 58,220 of its own soldiers' lives – to block the emergence of another communist regime in Asia. Vietnamese losses were vastly larger: about two million civilians and perhaps 1.3 million soldiers were killed on both sides during the conflict. But the departure of the last helicopters from the rooftop of the US embassy in Saigon has gone down in history as a symbol of American hubris and defeat. America's direct military involvement had ended in 1973, with the signing of the Paris Peace Accords. Washington knew that the peace wouldn't hold and the North was likely to win the war, but wanted, in the words of national security adviser Henry Kissinger, a "decent interval" between the US departure and the South's defeat. So the US continued to give financial and military aid. But involvement in Vietnam was by that time extremely unpopular in the US, and President Nixon's political career was soon to be ended by the Watergate scandal. By late summer 1974, Nixon had resigned, and Congress had cut military and economic aid to South Vietnam by 30%. The South Vietnamese government, led by President Nguyen Van Thieu, was corrupt and inefficient; it was struggling with runaway inflation, unemployment and rising rates of desertion from the army, as well as a heroin addiction epidemic. The North duly pressed home its advantage. In March 1975, it launched what was expected to be a two-year offensive to conquer South Vietnam. In the event, the South Vietnamese army soon crumbled. After capturing the central highlands, the North Vietnamese took Hue, about halfway between Saigon and the northern capital, Hanoi, and then Da Nang, the South's second-largest city, sparking a refugee exodus. Its forces pushed on to Saigon, a city largely untouched by the war until then. Realising the imminent danger, President Thieu resigned on 21 April, delivering a furious televised speech in which he accused Washington of having "sold" its ally to the communists. He fled to Taiwan, taking 15 tonnes of luggage, and later lived for a time in Surrey. President Ford, who had succeeded Nixon, had pleaded with Congress to release additional military aid, to no avail. On 23 April, Ford delivered a speech in New Orleans, in which he declared that America's involvement in Vietnam was now "finished". Four days later, Saigon was encircled by 100,000 North Vietnamese troops and Viet Cong. By now, America had evacuated some of its citizens from Saigon; but about 6,000 remained, along with large numbers of South Vietnamese closely associated with the US, to whom Ford said it owed a "profound moral obligation". On the morning of 29 April 1975, US forces launched "Operation Frequent Wind" to extract them. The code for the operation's launch was the declaration on US Armed Forces Radio that "the temperature in Saigon is 105 degrees and rising", followed by the playing of the song "White Christmas". On 28 April, North Vietnamese artillery had shut down Tan Son Nhut Air Base, from which 50,493 people had been evacuated. The only option available, therefore, was to use US military helicopters to ferry evacuees from the embassy in Saigon to 26 US navy vessels stationed about a 30-minute flight away in the South China Sea. A crowd of some 10,000 Vietnamese gathered outside the embassy, desperate for a flight out; some 2,500 more would-be evacuees were in the embassy compound. Marines guarded the embassy, lifting US citizens and a lucky few Vietnamese over the walls. As flights began taking off, the scenes were chaotic. Keyes Beech, an American war reporter, described being caught in the "seething mass" of bodies outside the embassy, "fighting for our lives, scratching, clawing, pushing ever closer to the wall". The military collapse had been rapid; by the morning of 29 April, North Vietnamese tanks were rolling through Saigon. And the US ambassador to Vietnam, Graham Martin, had deludedly believed that South Vietnam would cut a deal with Hanoi, so had ignored advice to expedite the evacuation. In light of this, Operation Frequent Wind was a remarkable feat: in less than 24 hours, the US evacuated more than 7,000 people, including more than 5,500 South Vietnamese. Some pilots flew for 19 hours straight. South Vietnamese helicopters carrying refugees joined US aircraft on the US navy carriers; about 45 military helicopters were reportedly pushed overboard to clear space for new arrivals. The last helicopter out of Saigon, just before 8am on 30 April, evacuated the Marine guards. Thousands of South Vietnamese – intelligence officers, special police – were left behind at the embassy. Although surprisingly few were executed, more than 200,000 South Vietnamese spent between three and 18 years in labour and re-education camps. Many more fled the country. By 30 April, Saigon, soon to be renamed Ho Chi Minh City, was under full North Vietnamese control. By the end of 1975, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos were all under communist rule – which in Vietnam has endured to this day. In the 20 years that followed the fall of Saigon, about 800,000 Vietnamese refugees safely fled the communist regime, in one of the largest mass exoduses in modern history. Escaping over land was extremely difficult: Vietnam is bordered only by Cambodia (where the Khmer Rouge had taken control), China and Laos (both allies of Vietnam). So most refugees fled in small boats over the South China Sea – becoming known as the "boat people". Many made their way to Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Hong Kong; some reached Japan, or even Australia. Journeys were fraught with risk: boats were often unseaworthy and sank, or ran out of food and water; many were raided by pirates, mainly from Thailand, who raped women and killed those on board. It is estimated that 200,000 to 400,000 Vietnamese died at sea. In 1979, the UN declared a "grave crisis", and urged countries to take in refugees. Some 402,000 were eventually settled in the US; Australia and Canada also welcomed substantial numbers; about 19,000 came to the UK. Despite US public opinion initially being opposed to accepting refugees from Vietnam, 2.3 million people of Vietnamese extraction were living in the US by 2023.
