Cuba has long been considered a major security threat to the United States because of its Communist-led government under Fidel Castro. Castro came to power after leading a coup in 1959. Relations between Cuba and the United States have passed through several different levels since that time, but for most of the period, the U.S. has treated Cuba as a region to be shunned and has refused to normalize relations or to allow trade with Cuba. Events such as the shooting down of some anti-Castro group airplanes caused even more tension and efforts to force other countries to conform to U.S. policy as well, with mixed results. The greatest point of tension in this history was not with Cuba itself but with the Soviet Union over the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. The Communist government in Cuba has claimed success in reforming agrarian policies and in achieving a fairer and more equal society, but in fact there is considerable evidence that the government has failed, that the economy is a shambles, and that the people are worse off today than they were before the coup in 1959.
The end of World War II led to the beginning of a different kind of war, the Cold War, an enduring ideological battle between the democratic West and the Soviet bloc. The United States emerged from the war as the strongest power in the world, and the Soviet Union intended to challenge that strength. There were signs of tension between the U.S. and the Soviet Union before the end of the war. The tensions increased after the war. There is disagreement on the precise beginning of the Cold War, but the Cold War is seen as deriving from the historic background of Soviet-American relations and from the specific events of 1945 through 1948. In fact, the alliance between the Soviets and Americans during the war was an aberration from the norm since the Russian Revolution. American hostility toward the Soviet Union began with American animosity toward communism. Am...