Cuba–U.S. Cooperation in the Defense and Security Fields: Where Are We? Where Might We Be Able to Go?

In 1959-60, the revolutionary government broke entirely the 60-year dependent relationship that the Cuban military had had with the armed forces of the United States. The Cuban Army and Rural Guard had been set up by the United States directly in the several years of military occupation that the country repeatedly endured between 1898 and the 1930s, until the Roosevelt government dropped the Platt Amendment limiting Cuba’s independence at the beginning of the period known as the Good Neighbor Policy (1934-54).1