Really,?? Cuba was a threat to the US?? I don thank sooo.... Castro was a problem for the Mafia because he seized there gambling casinos and whore houses, which were very lucrative enterprises . And when he booted the Mafia out of Cuba they lost a base for smuggling drugs into the US....
Castro also hit HL Hunt pretty hard by seizing the refineries ( Sugar and OIL ) and Hunt was not a happy camper.
Excerpt from a 1991 interview of Georgie Anne Geyer on C-Span:
https://web.archive.org/web/20111011174333/http://booknotes.org/Watch/17009-1/Georgie+Anne+Geyer.aspxLAMB: You have a rundown of the number of Cuban soldiers that were in these different countries -- 57,000 troops in Angola; 5,000 to 7,000 in Ethiopia, hundreds and thousands from South Yemen to Libya, Nicaragua, Mozambique, Syria, Equatorial Guinea -- it goes on and on. Why Cubans all over the world?
GEYER: Well, Brian, that's what's so extraordinary about Castro. I don't mean extraordinary in a desirable way, but as a power study, Fidel Castro took this little island with basically no economy except sugar -- he's destroyed that -- and he created power out of this powerlessness and power on a world stage. Those were the figures in those countries at the height of his guerrilla power, his imperialist power, if you will. When he went into Angola in 1974, he moved thousands of troops across the Atlantic. For the first time in history, troops were going across the Atlantic not from the United States but from this little island in the Caribbean. He's an incredible military man, but he can't do anything else. Everything in Cuba is so militarized. It's not communist, it's not collectivist, it's not Marxist. It is pure Third World military. If you admire military power and the mind that goes behind that, then Fidel Castro is a very interesting man.
LAMB: Where are there Cuban troops today? Anywhere?
GEYER: They're basically all coming home. The 57,000 or 58,000 troops that were in Angola are mostly home now, and that's his big problem. The other countries are also clearing out. His big problem, Brian is these 57,000 or 58,000 Cubans come home from Angola, and there is no economy to absorb them. There are no jobs. Two years ago he executed the hero of Angola, Gen. Arnoldo Ochoa -- this very excellent military officer, a quintessentially honorable man, handsome long-beaked nose, had served in Ethiopia, Angola, Nicaragua. Very loyal to Fidel, but you see, Arnoldo Ochoa did something terrible. He became a competitor to Fidel, and he never, ever allows anyone to become a competitor. He moves them out, he kills them, puts them in prison, puts them under house arrest -- whatever is the appropriate thing. The only appropriate thing in Fidel's mind for Arnoldo Ochoa was to be executed. If you see those films of that trial of Ochoa which was now two years ago this spring, it's just chilling because you could see the men -- there were four of them that were executed together -- in this Moscow-type of trial from the '30s. They looked down, they wouldn't look up. Some of them just broke down on the stands. You could see how false the whole thing was. It's a very chilling, surreal kind of place.