These Soviet-made missiles above are set up outside the 18th-century fort of La Cabana. Like the fort itself, the missiles served only as a deterrent and were never used.
In Cuba, the relics of the Cold War are physical, but in the US they're mostly mental now. An interesting example is the old-fashioned attitudes within the Bush administration that resulted in the strange but true saga of John Bolton's fabricated Fidel quote.
"Iran and Cuba, in cooperation with each other, can bring America to its knees. The U.S. regime is very weak, and we are witnessing this weakness from close up."
The quote above was attributed to Fidel Castro by U.S. Undersecretary for Arms Control and International Security John R. Bolton, in a speech to the Heritage Foundation on May 6, 2002. He claimed that Fidel had said this during a visit to Tehran in 2001. Since Bolton's comments came a few months after President Bush had labeled Iran as part of an "axis of evil," and shortly after the State Department announced that they believed Cuba was manufacturing biological weapons and selling them to Iran, this quote received much attention around the world.
The quote is pure fabrication, a lie told to the American people to keep them frightened and supportive of popularity-building military adventurism. Publications around the world immediately denounced this propaganda, including many whose reporters where standing right there when Fidel gave his speech in Tehran. Former President Jimmy Carter publicly asked for proof of the biological-weapons claim, but none has ever been provided to him, the American public, or any U.S. ally.
Three weeks after Bolton's comments, the State Department released their "Overview of State Sponsored Terrorism," which included Cuba. Loud objections came from around the world again, since no evidence has ever been presented to support this view of Cuba.
A week after that, on June 5, 2002, Senator Christopher Dodd led a hearing of the Western Hemisphere Subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Senator Dodd asked John Bolton to attend and explain the Bush administration's claims regarding Cuba, but Colin Powell stepped in and said that Bolton was not the best person to answer their questions and instead sent Carl Ford, an assistant Secretary of State. The committee expressed their displeasure to Ford, ex-President Jimmy Carter made public statements about the fact that the current administration's Cuba policies didn't seem to be founded on quality intelligence, and this scandal quietly died like so many others.
The only thing accomplished by Mr. Bolton's reckless and dishonest statement is that millions of frightened and confused Americans added Cuba to their huge list of things to be frightened and confused about. In this sense, it was similar to the infamous incubator-baby scandal, a wholly fabricated story of Iraqi soldiers ripping infants from incubators that was used to drum up support for military action against Iraq before the first Gulf War. This type of propaganda is very effective, because the initial sensationalistic story usually makes front-page news, but the subsequent denials and retractions don't.