The American Foreign Policy towards Cuba between 1959 and 1963: Causes, Manifestations and Consequences

This bachelor thesis focuses on the American foreign policy towards Cuba in the period between the Cuban Revolution and the death of the U.S. President John F. Kennedy in 1963. It aims to answer the question why did the United States choose an aggressive policy towards the new Cuban regime, what were the results of their strategy, whether a more accommodating attitude would have potentially represented a better solution, and whether considering the circumstances the U.S. could have adopted such an attitude. It analyzes individual events and aspects of this period, led by the Bay of Pigs invasion, in order to find out how much influence did the United States have on Fidel Castro's turn to Communism and the Soviet Union, and whether they were partly responsible for triggering the Cuban missile crisis. The author comes to the conclusion that the American foreign policy towards Cuba between 1959 and 1963 was ill-chosen, because it was not only unable to obtain its main goal of overthrowing Fidel Castro, but also forced the Cuban regime to radicalise and closely cooperate with the Soviet Union. At the same time, she argues that the enforcement and implementation of a more accommodating policy, which probably would have in the end benefited both countries, represented a very difficult task for the U.S...