Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Castro-directed overt and covert operations

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The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or on a Votes for Undeletion nomination). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result of the debate was Delete Ryan Norton T | @ | C 23:58, 18 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Castro-directed overt and covert operations

This doesn't feel right as an article. Not sure I can verbalize it more than that, but it's.... it's not the content, it's the idea of facet of the subject having an article. DS 20:16, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

Feelings are usually not enough to work with, unless of course one is in love. The article on the History of Cuba does not cover this important point, and it should not be missed.


Web sites from inside Cuba, tell of small towns in Eastern Cuba which have lost a good number of their men to these Castro promoted adventures. It is common knowledge that Castro started doing these kind of things before he was a rebel working some say for the communists, and others from the CIA to distabilize democratic elections in Colombia in 1948. About that time he also was part of the far more worthy cause the Cayo Confites effort of the "Caribbean Legion" to over throw the Dictator of the Dominican Republic Rafael Trujillo.


Soon after victory in Cuba Castro disposed of the remnants of Camilo Cienfuegos forces by sending them on a doomed mission to the Dominican Republic (as he would do later with the "Che" in Bolivia). Castro trained, armed and sent expeditions to almost every country in Latin America, with possible but not certain exception of Mexico.


Castro supported and still supports the Basque Separatists of ETA, the Polisario front in North Africa, he even sent tanks to Golan Heights (whether these tanks saw action is a matter of some Israel 's discuss). He provided refuge to certain IRA members, some who turned up later showing the Colombian FARC rebels how to make better bombs. He supported supplied and armed rebels in most of Central America.

I have heard Castro supplied so many arms to the Salvadoran Faribundo Marti group that they would leave untrained but magnificently armed rebels, on the side of volcanoes to be slaughtered by helicopters of Salvadoran Army. He sent at least one expedition to Venezuela, which caused much bloodshed. and the list goes on.


Of course all know of Castro's support of the North Vietnamese, and the Cuban "interrogators" of US POW. My favorite account of those times is a standard press report of a Cuban vessel supplying weapons to the Sri Lankan Tamil rebels. Castro was most busy. Much of this info comes from the KGB files which are now to some extent in the public domain.


Thus if somebody has a feeling that this is not so, then that person has much to learn. If a Castro simpathizer objects ask him about the "internationalistas," they are their heroes why be ashamed of them. Let him/her tell his/her side of the story......


I have no objection to any label you may wish to place on the site, but one would think that placing such a label indicates a lack of ability to rebut argument. (El Jigüe, 10/7/2005)


  • Delete. Someone tried to do a sort of okay thing here, listing these "operations" separately rather than trying to jam them all into the paragraph towards the end of Cuba#Brief History, where this page is referenced. But the effort to properly "jam them in there" (more cleanly, of course, and with some verification) needs to be taken, or perhaps to add them to Fidel Castro (where the Angola operation, at least, is already mentioned), because these operations certainly aren't worth their own separate article yet. I suggest copying the text here onto Talk:Cuba and Talk:Fidel Castro, and letting it filter onto those pages as editors see fit. Steve Summit (talk) 21:38, 7 October 2005 (UTC)
  • At the moment the article is a list of assertions, and is woefully under-referenced. There is one web link (that I can't get to work at the moment). The article needs tens of references. For example the sentence "In Vietnam Cuban engineers help build the Ho Chi Min trail, and Cuban intelligence harshly interrogated US prisoners" requires at least 2 references, one for the Ho Chi Minh trail section, one for the interrogation claim; I'd prefer more.
Nowhere in the article is the covert or overt nature of each operation identified. I can imagine that the overt operations could be verified. The covert operations would inevitably present verifiability problems that are orders of magnitude greater. In the absence of verification (i.e. at least one reference for each claim) delete. Sliggy 22:00, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

Humbug! All you guys want is to find and excuse to delete because this reality offends you. Apparently you only read the news you like. I will put in the references, even though I am sure you will say that they are insufficient, wrong, or in the wrong format. However, when you do that remember this identifies your call name as that of a marxist radical. And provides more evidence that Wikipedia is merely a source that rewrites history to its own far leftwing agenda. (El Jigüe, 10/7/2005)

G. that article does not mention the Polisario front, Ethiopia, the Congo, Bolivia, the Chile intervention when he had a Cuban bodyguard Patricio de la Guardia kill Allende to make him a martyr, the old and new Venezuelan adventures, the support for the Macheteros in Puerto Rico,for the Montoneros, the disastrous landing in the Dominican Republic, the material and manpower support to North Vietnam, and who knows what else. Appears that the above acts are not consistent, with the conclusions reached in Foreign relations of Cuba ; and thus one is tempted to consider that the proposed deletion of this section is merely to facilitate a single view of Castro's action that differs from objective reality. Therefore the proposed deletion is quite clearly a violation of Wikipedia guidelines (El Jigüe, 10/7/2005 ).


I have added a historical introduction to the article, including Spy vs Spy. (El Jigüe, 10/7/2005 ).

  • Comment Overly verbose, and somewhat disjointed, but those aren't reasons for deleting an article, but for cleaning it up. Also I agree that the atricle title isn't ideal. I suggest merging the overt activities to Foreign relations of Cuba and moving the covert activities to History of Cuban espionage which would be in keeping with the naming pattern of some of the articles in Category:Espionage. Caerwine 04:37, 9 October 2005 (UTC)


Cleaned up a bit and added more detail, there is an amazing amount of the stuff (El Jigüe, 10/9/2005)

  • Since you also decided to triplicate the article by adding identical versions under History of Cuban espionage and Brief history of Cuban espionage and related extraterritorial activity, I'll change my vote to a simple delete. Caerwine 22:28, 11 October 2005 (UTC)
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in an undeletion request). No further edits should be made to this page.