When Fidel Castro decided to nationalize private businesses operating in Cuba, he angered their well-connected owners in the USA. The contacts of United Fruit Company included longest-serving CIA director Allen Dulles, who used to defend the company’s interests, working as a lawyer for law firm Sullivan & Cromwell.
It was Dulles who would be humiliated after the failed attempt to oust Castro during the Bay of Pigs affair. Kennedy, who caused the coup to fail by refusing to provide military air support, fired Dulles afterward, and vowed to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces.
President Kennedy not only thwarted U.S. financial elite attempts to secure massive economic gains from their Cuban colony, he also angered the one man whose allies included the head of the CIA’s assassination unit, William Harvey.
The true story of the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy thus became a story of aggressive U.S. elites opposing a more diplomatic President representing the nation’s broader interests of peace and prosperity. It is a story of collective popular restraint vis-à-vis aristocratic urges of conquest.
