Baby Elian
Lyrics: Nicky Wire
Music: James Dean Bradfield and Sean Moore
Quotes: --
Bay Of Pigs

1. The Bay of Pigs (span.: Bahía de Cochinos) is a beach on the southern coast of Cuba.

2. The Bay of Pigs Invasion was an U.S.-backed attempt to overthrow the government of the Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. On April 17, 1961 about 1300 anti-revolutionary Cuban exiles, armed with weapons supplied by the United States, landed at the Bay of Pigs intending to cross the island and storm the capital Havana. The exile force, however, was terribly defeated by Castro's army. The failure of the invasion was a serious debacle for the young Kennedy administration. The President was only three months in duty when he approved the plan.
Manics reference:
'THE BAY OF PIGS OR BABY ELIAN' (Baby Elian lyrics)

More information:
The Bay of Pigs Invasion
Cuba

(Republic of Cuba, capital Havanna, population 11 mio.)
History from 1956 onwards and US-Cuban relations:
Fidel Castro Ruz, a tall, bearded attorney in his thirties who had been in exile in Mexico, landed in Cuba on Christmas Day 1956 with a band of 12 fellow revolutionaries, evaded Batista's soldiers, and set up headquarters in the jungled hills of the Sierra Maestra range. By 1958 his force had grown to about 2,000 guerrillas, for the most part young and middle-class. Castro's brother Raul, and Ernesto (Ché) Guevara, an Argentine physician, were his top lieutenants. Businessmen and landowners who opposed the Batista regime gave financial support to the rebels. The United States, meanwhile, cut off arms shipments to Batista's army. The beginning of the end for Batista came when the rebels routed 3,000 government troops and captured Santa Clara, capital of Las Villas province 150 miles from Havana, and a trainload of Batista reinforcements refused to get out of their railroad cars. On New Year's Day 1959, Batista flew to exile in the Dominican Republic and Castro took over the government. Crowds cheered the revolutionaries on their seven-day march to the capital.
The United States initially welcomed what looked like the prospect for a democratic Cuba, but a rude awakening came within a few months when Castro established military tribunals for political opponents, jailed hundreds, and began to veer leftward. Castro disavowed Cuba's 1952 military pact with the U.S. He confiscated U.S. investments in banks and industries and seized large U.S. landholdings, turning them first into collective farms and then into Soviet-type state farms. The United States broke relations with Cuba on Jan. 3, 1961. Castro forged an alliance with the Soviet Union.
From the ranks of the Cuban exiles who had fled to the U.S., the CIA recruited and trained an expeditionary force, numbering less than 2,000 men, to invade Cuba, with the expectation that the invasion would spark an uprising of the Cuban populace against Castro. Planned under the Eisenhower administration, President John F. Kennedy gave the go-ahead for the invasion in early 1961, but rejected a CIA proposal for U.S. planes to provide air support. The landing at the Bay of Pigs on April 17, 1961, was a fiasco. Not only did the invaders fail to receive any support from the populace, but Castro's tanks and artillery made short work of the small force.
A Soviet attempt to change the global power balance by installing medium-range missiles in Cuba-capable of striking targets in the United States with nuclear warheads-provoked a crisis between the superpowers in 1962 that had the potential of touching off World War III. Denouncing the Soviets for "deliberate deception," President Kennedy on Oct. 22 announced that the U.S. Navy would enforce a "quarantine" of shipping to Cuba and search Soviet-bloc ships to prevent the missiles themselves from reaching the island. After six days of tough public statements on both sides and secret diplomacy, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev on Oct. 28 ordered the missile sites dismantled and shipped back to the Soviet Union, in return for a U.S. pledge not to attack Cuba. A Soviet satellite in the 1960s and 1970s, Cuba helped spread the Communist revolution in the Western hemisphere. The U.S. established limited diplomatic ties with Cuba on Sept. 1, 1977. Emigration increased dramatically after April 1, 1980, when Castro, irritated by the granting of asylum to would-be refugees by the Peruvian embassy in Havana, removed guards and allowed 10,000 Cubans to swarm into the embassy grounds.
As an airlift began taking the refugees to Costa Rica, Castro opened the port of Mariel to a "freedom flotilla" of ships and yachts from the United States, many of them owned or chartered by Cuban-Americans to bring out relatives. It wasn't until after the refugees had reached the United States that it was discovered that the regime had opened prisons and mental hospitals to permit criminals, homosexuals, and others unwanted by the Cuban government to join the refugees.
For most of President Ronald Reagan's first term, U.S.-Cuban relations were frozen. But late in 1984, an agreement was reached between the two countries. Cuba would take back more than 2,700 Cubans who had come to the United States in the Mariel exodus but were not eligible to stay in the country under U.S. immigration law because of criminal or psychiatric disqualification. Castro canceled the agreement when the U.S. began the Radio Marti broadcasts in May 1985 to bring a non-Communist viewpoint to the Cuban people. With the collapse of communism in eastern Europe, Cuba's foreign trade plummeted as did aid from Russia, producing the worst economic crisis in the island's history. The government moved slightly toward a mixed economy in 1993 by permitting limited private enterprise in a number of trades and services and allowing Cubans to possess convertible currencies. In March 1996, the U.S. passed the Helms-Burton Act, which further extended the U.S. trade embargo on Cuba by penalizing non-U.S. companies doing business with Cuba. Reaction to the measure was widespread international condemnation that included the U.S.'s North American neighbors, Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean nations. Christmas was declared an official holiday in Cuba in 1997, for the first time since the revolution, in preparation for Pope John Paul II's historic visit to Cuba in Jan. 1998. By Castro's allowing the pope's visit, he raised hopes that the gesture signaled a new openness, easing of restrictions, and increased religious freedom for Cubans.
In mid-1999, the U.S. sent negotiators to Havana to begin talks on better communication between the U.S. and Cuba regarding drug shipments in the Caribbean, despite protests from some Cuban-Americans. The U.S. government stated that the action was not part of an effort to normalize relations with Cuba.
Manics reference:
'CUBA, MEXICO CAN'T CAUTERIZE OUR DISCIPLINE' (Ifwhiteamericatoldthetruthforonedayit'sworldwouldfallapart lyrics)
'WENT TO CUBA TO MEET CASTRO' (Let Robeson Sing lyrics)
'BUT CUBAN BOXERS STILL WIN' (Baby Elian lyrics)
In 2001 the Manics were the first Western rockband who played a gig in Havana, the capital of Cuba.

More information:
Cuba Net
Cuban Adjustment Act

The Cuban Adjustment Act (CAA), was signed by U.S. President Johnson on November 2, 1966. It applies to any native or citizen of Cuba who arrived - legally or illegally - in U.S. territory from January 1, 1959 on and has resided there for at least two years (later shortened to one year). Those people can be given the admission for permanent residence in the United States. As Cuban citizens are only allowed to emigrate from Cuba legally, if they can show an immigrant visa to any foreign country, and the United States attach high requirements to the granting of visas, the Act promotes illegal departure from Cuba.
Manics reference:
'A CUBAN ADJUSTMENT ACT' (Baby Elian lyrics)

More information:
The Cuban Adjustment Act
Elian

A young Cuban boy found clinging to an inner tube off the Florida coast in Nov. 1999, became the subject of an international dispute between the U.S. and Cuba. The boy's American relatives and the U.S. Cuban community demanded that the six-year-old refugee remain in Miami rather than be returned to his father in Cuba, arguing that American democracy would benefit the boy more than life in Castro's Cuba. A dramatic raid by armed federal agents on April 22 ended the standoff, and the boy was reunited with his father. The influential Cuban-American community lost a good deal of public sympathy by pitting political ideology against familial bonds. For Castro it was a publicity bonanza, emphasizing the intransigence of the official U.S. policy toward Cuba, which has imposed a 38-year-old trade embargo and other cold war-era sanctions.
Manics reference:
Baby Elian lyrics

More information:
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Miami

second largest city of Florida, USA(1999 est. pop. 369 253)
Manics reference:
'YOU CANNOT BUY A NATION'
'NOT EVEN MIAMI MOB' (Baby Elian lyrics)

More information:
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Operation Peter Pan

Peter Pan: Hero of the play Peter Pan, written by Sir James M. Barrie in 1904. The play is about a boy who never grew up.

Operation Peter Pan: The so-called Operation Pedro (Peter) Pan was a reaction to the Cuban revolution in 1959, which brought Fidel Castro to power. Between 1960 and 1962 over 14,000 Cuban children were brought to the United States by Catholic organizations funded by the U.S. State Department. Their parents were meant to follow them within a month. But months became years and some of the kids never even saw their families again. The operation ended in October 1962 when the Cuban Missile Crisis terminated all flights out of Cuba. Today it is still discussed controversially whether this was a political operation encouraged by U.S. propaganda or just a humanitarian act.
Manics reference:
'OPERATION PETER PAN'
'AMERICA THE DEVIL'S PLAYGROUND' (Baby Elian lyrics)

More information:
Operation Pedro Pan (Official Site)
Read the play
Promised Land

1. Heaven.
2. Canaan, the land promised by God to Abraham and his descendants. Gen. 12:7.
3. (often l.c.) a place or situation believed to hold ultimate happiness.
Manics reference:
'KIDNAPPED TO THE PROMISED LAND' (Baby Elian lyrics)

More information:
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Shining Path

Span. Sendero Luminoso, Peruvian Communist guerrilla force, officially the Communist party of Peru. Founded in 1970 by Abimael Guzmán Reynoso as an orthodox Marxist-Leninist offshoot of the Peruvian Communist party, the Shining Path turned to terrorism in 1980. By the mid-1980s it had several thousand guerrillas, largely in rural Peru. The group began urban terrorism in the late 1980s. In 1992 President Fujimori instituted martial law, and the subsequent capture and life sentence of Guzmán and the jailing of most the organization's central committee has greatly diminished guerrilla raids, except in a very few areas. In 15 years of fighting more than 25,000 people, most of them civilians, died.
Manics reference:
'WE FOLLOW A SHINING PATH' (Baby Elian lyrics)

More information:
Terrorism Research Center
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