Fidel Castro

*Born in Mayari, Cuba in 1926.
*He graduated from the University of Havana with a law degree.
*Castro assembled a small force and attacked the Moncada Army Barracks in the Santiago de Cuba.
*He was captured and sentenced to fifteen years in prison and when released, he exiled in Mexico where he began to train a group of revolutionaries.
*In 1956, He invaded Cuba and finally in 1959, Batista fled the country.
*The relations with the U.S. were declined shortly after he took the power.
*President Kennedy authorized an attempt to overthrow the Cuban dictator and it failed.
*When Khrushchev offered to place nuclear missiles in Cuba, he agreed.
*Castro had little effect on the outcome of the crisis and felt betrayed by the U.S.S.R. The crisis solved few of Cuba´s problems and left the country to deal with the U.S. alone.
*He has worked to improve education, housing and health and Cuba has suffered from a troubled economy.

John F. Kennedy

*Born in Massachussetts in 1917.
*He joined the U.S. Navy
*He was anti-communist
*In 1952, he won a seat in the Senate.
*He became the U.S. President
*When he heard about the Cuban Missiles, he felt betrayed.
*With the help of the EX-COMM, Kennedy got out of the crisis.
*He was assassinated in 1963 in Texas.

Allende/Pinochet/Nixon

*Allende is elected as the President of Chile and is the world´s first Marxist leader of a nation.
*Richard Nixon wanted to disestablish Allende.
*Nixon helped Pinochet.
*Military units stationed throughout Chile led by Augusto Pinochet. All the phone lines were cut.
*Valparaíso was taken in stages.
*When the President Allende heard the news, he immediately removed himself to La Moneda.
*The President made a radio announcement that left the people frozen and by mid-morning, the Palace was surrounded by tanks.*At 1:30, Patricio Guijón made the announcement: The president had committed suicide.

Reagan/Sandinistas/Contras

*Ronald Reagan, President of the U.S. became implacably opposed to the Sandinista government.
*In El Salvador, guerrilla fighters from the Faribundo Marti Liberation Front became involved in a bitter conflict with the Salvadoran army and a civil war erupted in Guatemala.
*Reagan increased military aid to the beleaguered governments. And at the same time he began to engineer an overthrow of the Sardinistas.
*Reagan allocated funds to the contras and to the CIA for the purpose of destabilising the Sandinista regime.
*The Reagan government illegally transferred to the contras the proceeds of clandestine sales of military equipment supplied to Iran.*Journalists exposed what was going on and at first sight, it would seem that Reagan´s policies failed because the Sandinistas were not overthrown militarily but indirectly Reagan achieved his goal, to stop socialism spreading to the rest of Central America.

Ho ChI Minh/Domino Theory

*Ho Chi Minh was born in Nguyen Sinh Cung in Central Vietnam on May 19, 1890
*He studied at the Lycee Quoc-Hoc school
*In 1912 he moved to Grance where he became active in socialist politics. He visited United States during the WWI.
*In 1920 he became a founding member of the French Communist Party.
*He became famous because of his petition to the Versailles Peace Conference demanding Vietnam´s Independence.
*He went to Moscow and met Lenin, then to China to work in the Soviet mission with Chiang Kai-Shek´s government.
*He returned to Vietnam and founded the Viet Minh, the League for Independence of Vietnam.
*While he was in Europe, he recruited the Vietnamese exile community.
*He served as a guerilla training instructor in Central China.
*In May 1940, most Vietnam was under Japanese control and he made out a meeting to form the League for the Independence of Vietnam, he spent a lot of time searching for allies and support for the war that was about to come.
*In 1945, Viet Minh´s forces launched an insurrection to seize power throughout Vietnam.
*Democratic Republic of Vietnam was created with Ho Chi Minh as president.
*He tried to search a settlement with France and he managed to reduce the distrust of rival nationalist leaders and reached agreement on a coalition cabinet.
*In 1946, the alliance between the Viet Minh and the nationalists broke down and in December war broke out.
*The war ended in 1954 with the Vietnamese victory, he made France sign another agreement and Vietnam divided in two: the communist north and the noncommunist south.
*He died on September 3, 1969.

More info at: http://www.wilsoncenter.org/coldwarfiles/index.cfm?fuseaction=people.details&thisunit=0&peopleid=12

Osama Bin Laden

*He was born in 1957 in Saudi Arabia
*He studied management and economics at King Abdul Aziz Univesity.
*In 1979, there was a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan where he supported the Afghan resistance and U.S. supported Afghans too.
*After the Soviet withdrawal, bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia and founded an organization to help veterans of the Afghan war.
*Because of the Iraqui invasion of Kuwait, American troops were allowed to station in Saudi Arabia.
*He was expelled form Saudi Arabia in 1991 and went to Sudan.
*He was responsible for attempting to bomb U.S. troops in Yemen and attacking them in Somalia. He returned to Afghanistan.
*In 1998, he called for all American and Jews to be killed and again, was responsible for bombings at the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tarzania.
*His organization is called al-Qaeda and has approximately 3,000 followers.
*He attacked the World Trade Center on U.S. in September 11th, 2001.
*He has warned that “America will not live in peace”.

More Information at: http://www.infoplease.com/spot/osamabinladen.html