Noam Chomsky Quotes

The consequence of the Bay of Pigs failure wasn't an acceptance of Castro and his control of Cuba but, rather, a renewed determination to bring him down by stealth.

History will absolve me.

Everyone knows now that it was Nixon who wanted me liquidated. For a long time, the Americans dreamed of doing to me what they failed to do against Fidel Castro during the Bay of Pigs incident.

Was Castro sincere when, during his guerrilla war, he swore that he was not a Communist? If so, when did he change, and why? Looking back, does he believe he might have chosen a better course?

The Bay of Pigs was an operation the United States endorsed. That was a preventive operation. We were afraid that Castro was going to subvert the hemisphere.

The Bay of Pigs is one of America's most infamous Cold War blunders, and it has been studied, debated, and dramatized endlessly ever since.

Che came in 1963, shortly after I had come to power.

Few living figures could contribute as much as Castro to our understanding of the second half of the 20th century.

Despite the President's orders that no American forces be used, the first two people who landed in the Bay of Pigs [in 1961] were Americans. The CIA sent them in.

Ten Presidents have tried to do something about Cuba and the statis is quo.

A great many people simply do not at this moment see that Cuba presents so grave and compelling a threat to our national security as to justify a course of action which much of the world will interpret as calculated aggression against a small nation.

If the CIA did find out what we were doing this would have trickled down to the lower echelon of activists, and Cuban exiles, and the more gung-ho CIA people who had been involved since the Bay of Pigs….I can understand why they would have reacted so violently. This was the end of their dreams of returning to Cuba, and they might have been impelled to take violent action. Such as assassinating the President.

Cuba has become a symbol of courageous resistance to attack. Since 1959, Cuba has been under attack from the hemispheric superpower.

The U.S.S.R. had absolutely nothing to do with the triumph of the Cuban Revolution.

The Cuban Revolutionary Government has been generous and very considerate to me and my family. I lived in Santa Clara for a few months because I wanted to work in the countryside and get to know the country better.

I realized that I had traveled to Havana during what now seems like the childhood of the Cuban Revolution, if you think that Fidel has now been in power for 44 extremely long years. I started looking at the revolution as history, and not as part of the daily news.

Particularly during the late 1960s, a large number of American skyjackers earnestly believed that Fidel Castro's Cuba was an egalitarian, post-racial utopia.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, decisions made by President John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev could have plunged both countries into thermonuclear war.

Fidel is really a special case. He's a personality of history.

From the moment he took office in January of 1961, Kennedy had been eager to settle the Cuban problem without overt military action by the United States.

The CIA's official history of the Bay of Pigs operation is filled with dramatic and harrowing details that not only lay bare the strategic, logistical, and political problems that doomed the invasion, but also how the still-green President John F. Kennedy scrambled to keep the U.S. from entering into a full conflict with Cuba.

If you're setting a game during the Cuban Missile Crisis, look through a library. find out what people were wearing, what other issues were in the news, how houses were furnished, what cars were being driven. Especially include things which now seem foreign.

I always felt that the Cubans were being pushed into the Soviet Bloc by American policy.

Thorough consideration should be given to the elimination of Fidel Castro

Between 1945 and 2005 the United States has attempted to overthrow more than 40 foreign governments, and to crush more than 30 populist-nationalist movements…