The speech was by Sir Winston Churchill, the British premier then. For some obscure reason, apparently the West had expected the USSR to abandon her socialist philosophy to dance to the tune of the West. How naive! A year earlier the United Nations had been formed by design of the allied powers as a centre to harmornise the actions of nations and settle disputes by peaceful methods. World War II had been too costly in human life and in economic terms. Sir Winston’s speech thus portended a new type of war to be fought between former allies - the Cold War - a war hopefully without firearms, yet with potential to degenerate into full scale war. The Americans under President Franklin Rooseveldt were a different lot from American generations of administration that followed the Rooseveldt administration. After a period of self-imposed isolation, Americans had received a rude awakening from a sneaking Pearl Harbour attack by the Japanese and had reluctantly been forced to declare war against the Axis Powers – Nazi Germany and Japan; from the reading of documents of the history of World War II, Rooseveldt had genuinely hoped for enduring peace and sincerely believed he could do business with Stalin! One wonders whether he would have embraced the war taunts uttered by the warmonger Sir Winston, to lead the cold war that ensued after his death. The post-Rooseveldt US even went further on their hot-and-cold war mission to manipulate the UN to fight a hot war in Korea and a division of Korea into the South and the North creating a permanent flashpoint in Asia.
After the humiliation of the French at Dien Bien Phu by the Vietcong the US believed she could take over the French colonial mandate in the region to impose regime change willy-nilly in her own image. Throwing everything she had: men, money, bombs including napalm bombs, the US eventually left Vietnam with tail between the legs defeated and booed by progressive Americans and the world! While the US fought her not-so cold wars in faraway Asia, trouble was brewing up in her own backyard. Cuba is a small island 150 kilometres off the coast of Florida State.
