Thanks for your efforts. Seems Fidel has been a bad boy. For the sake of argument, and assuming Fidel is not a complete idiot, what possible rationale could he have used for firing spit balls at the U.S.? I mean, we're not France after all, so it's not like we were/are holding white flags behind our backs just waiting to unfurl 'em at the first opportunity. Maybe the old communist was expecting some force multipliers from somewhere???
He is not a complete idiot (in terms of his sense of self-preservation and political pragmatism, anyway), but he is desperate and vengeful: he has been expecting the CIA to kill him for many years, so he has nothing to lose, and if he is going to die anyway he would rather take someone with him. Beyond this psychological motivator, he does seem to have a strategic rationale, though. Prior to the Cuban Missile Crisis, I think his rationale was part of a Soviet strategy of seeing how far they could push Kennedy (as they were also doing in Berlin and Laos at the same time) before he would either back down or escalate to full-scale war. Once they had determined where that line was (they got Kennedy to pull NATO Jupiter missiles out of Turkey, without Fidel ever actually fulfilling his part of the deal by submitting to UN weapons inspections), Fidel knew how far he could push things and get away with it, so since then he has waged war within those boundaries. One of his objectives is to export the Cuban Revolution throughout Latin America, so he has been doing that with support from his allies, counting on the gamble that as long as this is done covertly the US cannot garner the international support to intervene directly and can only oppose him covertly in turn, and as long as the battle stays on the level of guerrilla warfare he can hold his own against us. Another of his objectives is to stir up domestic dissent in the US, which was his purpose in supporting several of the domestic terrorist groups mentioned--Panthers, Weather Underground, FALN--since if the US is divided at home it cannot act as decisively abroad (the strategy used against us in Vietnam and since then). He again seems to figure he can get away with this as long as it is done covertly enough that the American and European public does not become aware enough of his sponsorship to shift world opinion against him; and he knows he can count on our media to see to it that this does not happen.