The Complete Military History of France

Some good points to consider, sir. But I still believe that if the Cubans had had a stronger culture, Castro never would have been able to conquer them. I really think culture is more important than anything else.

Noticed one prominent name absent from the list-- Charles Martel, who lead a mostly French army which stopped the Islamic invaders at Tours, 732 a.d., one of the pivotal battles of world history. The Islamists were so soundly defeated, Europe didn't hear from them again for nearly half a millenium.

Hi Thorondir,

I really do not know what you mean by culture. Plenty of great cultures around the world have had tyrants. Look at the Chinese. Look at the Germans. Look at the French when they allowed to be taken over by Hitler. Look at the Italians. All these are great cultures but they had a tyrant ruling them. Any great culture can be taken over by tyrants if one is not careful. That is why we must always be vigilant to protect our freedoms in this great country. In Cuba Batista came to power by a coup and held power for 8 years. The reason Castro took power was because many Cubans thought that it was Castro who was going to end the dictatorship of Batista after 8 years. So many rallied to Castro side. Wanting to bring an end to the 8 year dictatorship. He even promised full elections in a year after he took power. It was only after he took power and took steps to secure his power that he betrayed many of the people who fought for him and announced that he was a communist. And that he would start communism in Cuba. Many of his own friends who fought for Castro were even executed after they rose up in opposition to Castro's communism. An example of this was a great uncle of mine. But he was able to escape before being executed. Today he is very old and constantly writing letters to the editors attacking communists and defending the US. ;-)

Btw, please read this other great article:
http://www.canf.org/News/030129newsa.htm

Btw, I do not believe that it is culture. Because anyone can have many different types of cultures and traditions and still have freedom and democracy. Therefore instead of using culture I will use the word "values" instead. I believe Cubans have the values to succeed because they have proven it in this great country when given the freedom to do so. They also proved it before Castro came to power.

Take care,
David

Agreed. Plus:

4. Don't bathe or use deodorant.

LMAO!

In Cuba Batista came to power by a coup and held power for 8 years. The reason Castro took power was because many Cubans thought that it was Castro who was going to end the dictatorship of Batista after 8 years. So many rallied to Castro side. It was more than 8 years and in two different eras.

Batista, was a two bit thug that started his career as a Cuban Army Sergeant stenographer in the 1930’s. During the Depression, the Cuban Government decided to scale back military spending. After all, Cuba, as an island nation without external enemies, had little use for a standing Army. The Sergeants, fearing a loss of their jobs, staged a military coup since labeled “The Sergeant’s Revolt”.

A Cuban population armed to the teeth would have been helpful at that time. However, Cuban had become a nation of shopkeepers at the time much as America is becoming with the Second Amendment becoming Politically Incorrect nowadays.

When the Sergeants of the Cuban Army revolted, Batista was chosen as their leader merely because he was a good public speaker. He assumed power, while spouting anti-American rhetoric, simply because the Army sergeants had the guns.

After several years, for whatever personal reasons, Batista stepped down. Cuba then adopted the progressive Constitution of 1940.

In 1953, when a national election did not go the way Batista wanted, Batista again staged a coup simply through force of arms.

The second time around, the Cuban people had had enough and took up arms.

All segments of Cuban society fought against Batista. Castro was only one of those elements, leading the 26 of July Movement in Oriente Province, Cuba’s largest province. Castro’s stated goal was to restore the Constitution of 1940. He lying through his teeth.

Once Batista was gone, Castro began a westward march towards Havana. As he came to each province, he convinced the local democratic Comandates that had fought against Batista to lay down their arms and go back to their civilian pursuits. “Armas para que?”, “What do you needs your guns for now?” was his slogan at the time.

Again, not a good idea.

After he disarmed the democratic groups that fought against Batista, liquidated any opposition inside and outside the 26 of July Movement and set himself up as the next thug.

“Meet the new Boss. Worse than the old Boss.”

One of my uncles fought in the 26 of July Movement with Castro against Batista. When he saw that Castro betrayed the Constitution of 1940 and was, in fact, merely a Communist dictator, he fought against Castro at the Bay of Pigs along with another one of my uncles. After his release as a Bay of Pigs P.O.W., he joined the U.S. Army and served two combat tours as a Green Beret. Each tour ended with a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart.

At the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy had a chance to deal with Castro but he got cold feet and withheld the U.S. air support the original invasion plan specifically called for. Imagine how D-Day would have turned out if the German Luftwaffe had been allowed total air superiority over the Normandy beachead to sink the invasion supply ships with total impunity.

Where Kennedy’s nerve failed, the USSR nerve did not. It moved in with full military support of Castro right in America’s backyard. Now, Castro was under the protection of the USSR’s nuclear umbrella. This then brought about the Cuban Missile Crisis. The U.S., as part of the deal worked out after the Missile Crisis, guaranteed Castro’s safety from invasion either by U.S. forces or from Cuban exile forces in the U.S.

With Cuba invulnerable, my uncle then fought Communism, as I noted before, where America said he could fight it.

As for the younger generation, I retired as a U.S. Naval Officer. My brother is a veteran of the 10th Mountain Division. My sister is also a U.S. Army veteran. Between the four of us, we have 45 years of Reserve and active military duty, not fighting for Cuba, but defending the United States. For my generation, Cuba is our heritage and history but we are Americans now.

…………………..Continued on next post.

Interesting. Thanks.

In regards to Cuban “culture and history”, I believe the comments on this thread have more to do with a personal flame war for past grievances between Luis and Thorondir (an individual I don’t know anything about) than anything else but I feel they must be addressed.

The small Indian populations on the Caribbean islands of Cuba, Jaimaica, Puerto Rico and Hispaniola did not survive the introduction of European diseases. Mexican Indians were numerous enough to survive them. Europeans were numerous enough to survive New World diseases. The Caribbean Indians were simply wiped off the face of the Earth.

Since present day Cubans were not dropped off a Martian space ship, their forefathers had to come from somewhere. The “somewheres” is Spain for the whites and Africa for the slaves just as “African-Americans” have their forefathers in Africa and the American Founding Fathers had their forefathers in England.

To claim that Cubans have no cultural background such as Notre Dame in Paris is analogous to claiming that the Americans of 1776 had no cultural link to anything in England.

Our forefathers did not come from Mars. Our forefathers came from Spain. Whether it is Galicia or Asturias or Catalonia or Castilla or Andalusia, just about every Cuban family can tell you where, exactly in Spain, each branch of the family came from. Some branches of the family came over to the New World in the 1500’s long before the Pilgrims were ever born and some came in the late 1800’s. The history of our Spanish forefathers is our History.

In regards to Spain’s History, civilization reached it before it did much of Europe.

Spain was originally settled by barbarian Iberians in the south, Celts in the north and Celt-Iberians in the center. When Rome was a small town on the Tiber, Greeks had colonized southern Spain.

Then came the Carthaginians. The Carthaginians had a way of war that utilized Carthaginians commanders and mercenary or colonial troops. Hannibal’s military command was in southern Spain. When Hannibal crossed the Alps in the Second Punic Wars, he crossed it with Spanish troops. When Hannibal inflicted three crushing defeats on Rome, including the Battle of Cannae that is still studied to this day as an example of total military defeat of an enemy, Hannibal used Spanish troops. Rome also had her Spanish allies and they won their victories in Spain under Scipio Africanus.

After the Second Punic War ended in 202 BC, southern and central Spain became civilized as a Roman province 300 years before Britain did. During the time of Augustus, the Celts of Asturias and Galicia were the last Celts to fall to Roman arms on the European continent. The Celts in France fell to Rome under Caesar.

By the time of the birth of Christ, when Britons were still savages, southern and central Spain had been part of Roman civilization for 200 years. Our Hispano-Roman forefathers produced the aqueduct at Segovia, an engineering marvel that still survives after 2000 years having been built without cement or mortar. The Roman poet Lucan was a Spaniard.

By the First Century AD, the savage Britons were conquered by Rome and one of the four Roman Legions to carry out the conquest and civilized the savage Briton tribes was the Roman Legion IX HISPANIA

As time passed, Spanish born Emperors ruled the Roman world. Among them were Emperors Trajan and Hadrian, two of Rome’s “Good Emperors” and, in the later Roman Empire, Theodisius the Great.

Then came about the fall of the Roman Empire also brought about by some of our late arriving forefathers, the Germanic Visigoths. After sacking Rome, the Visigoths settled in Spain except for the region of Galicia and Asturias (my paternal region) that remained as obstreperous as ever.

After a few hundred years, the Visigothic warrior kingdom became a little soft and the Islamic hoards descended upon Spain conquering everything except Galicia and Asturias.

Thus began the first European Crusade with continuous warfare against Islam that lasted until 1492 when the last Moor was expelled from Spain. In the meantime, great architecture flourished in Spain as it did in the rest of Europe. In my paternal neck of the woods, it was the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela that was a pilgrimage destination that had more pilgrimage than Canterbury.

After the last Moor was expelled, the Spanish Crown decided to finance a crazy Italian named Christopher Columbus and gave him Spanish ships and Spanish crews. In his first voyage in 1492, Columbus did not discover what is now the United States. In 1492, Columbus discovered Cuba.

The rest of our Spanish forefathers, after 700 years of continuous warfare with the Islamic Moors, then went to the New World seeking new @ss to kick.

As I noted before, the native Cuban Indians did not survive the encounter with Europe.

In the Eastern part of the United States, the Indians did not fare much better. Either through death by warfare or disease or through “ethnic cleansing”, such as befell the Cherokee, Eastern American Indians did not survive to form any significant part of the Eastern American Seaboard population.

Our Spanish forefathers then sailed from Cuba, landed in Mexico and then conquered the entire Aztec Empire with 650 men. That’s quite a feat of @ss-kicking IMHO.

Of course, some of our Spanish forefathers did not come to the New World until later centuries. During the 1500’s, the Spanish armies of our forefathers dominated Europe under Charles V.

At the Battle of Lepanto, the navy of our Spanish forefathers defeated the might of the Islamic sea-power in the Mediterranean. Even Protestant England celebrated this victory with the ringing of church bells.

During the American Revolution, our Spanish forefathers helped the new American nation.

During Napoleonic times, after the French Revolution had degenerated from a struggle for freedom to a sectarian bloodbath to a nationalistic orgy of conquest, Napoleon tried to conquer Spain as he had the rest Europe. Our New World Spanish forefathers and our later to be Cuban forefathers stopped Napoleon’s dreams in their tracks. The New World colonies remained loyal to Spain and kept the New World revenue flowing into the Spanish coffers. Our Old World Cuban forefathers whose children had not yet sailed to Cuba made Spain what Napoleon Bonaparte called his “Spanish bleeding ulcer”. The defeat of France and Napoleon started with our Spanish forefathers.

As time passed, the colonies became dissatisfied with the Old World and wanted independence. From 1868-1878, Cuba fought it’s first war with Spain. Unlike the United States, Cuba had no outside help in that war and lost it. My great-great-grandfather was a signatory of the first Cuban Declaration of Independence and lost his life in that war. The Cuban rebels, however, did force Spain to abolish slavery in Cuba. That was something that was not accomplished in the United States without a loss of over 618,000 American deaths during the Civil War.

After the Little War and the last 1895-1898 War Cuba was able to gain it’s independence against a European power just as America was able to gain independence from Britain with the help of France and Spain.

During the 20th Century, Cuba was so economically successful that it had a large amount of European immigration to it’s shores.

And who came to Cuba?

A while back, I lurked on a Galician web site, Galicia being the Old Spanish country of my immediate paternal Cuban side of the family.

Here, in the Galician language (Yes, Spain, like Britain, has different laguages that have survived) is what that Galician traveling through Mexico said about our forefathers than ventured into the New World:

O que nunca admitiran ee o potencial humano que eles sacaron con todo esto. As xoias, o mellorcinno da nosa xente foi a que se foi oo Novo Mundo. Esa era a xente que tinna ansias, que tinna interese e espiritu por gannar novas cousas. E eso foi a nosa perda e a gannancia dos americanos. Galicia non estaria tan mal como esta se non fose polos milleiros e milleiros de galegos perdidos pola emigracion. Quen emigraba? Emigraban os mellores. Os que tinnan iniciativa, os que querian cambia-las cousas, os que non se resignaban co que tinnan. E claro, tamen se lle dou unha lingua, unha cultura e unha relixion.

Translation: What they (the Mexicans) will never admit is the human potential that they gained. The gems, the very best of our people were the ones who left for the New World. Those were the people with a yearning, with an interest and spirit to seek out new things. That was our loss and the gain of the Americas. Galicia would not be in such a sorry state now if it were not for the thousands upon thousands of Galician it lost to the migration. Who immigrated? The best immigrated. Those who had initiative. Those who wanted to change things. Those who did not resign themselves settle for what they already had .

The Spaniards who came to Cuba and were our forefathers were not just any Spaniards. They were the Spaniards who kicked @ss and took names.

So, what was is the military history of Cuba's forefathers?

It varies with the brach of the familiy:

The defeat of Rome during the Roman republic, the defeat of Carthage, the conquest of Britain, the conquest of the Spanish Roman Emperors, the sack of Rome by the Visigoths, the defeat of the Islamics Moors during the Reconquista, the Conquest of the Aztec Empire, the domination of Europe during the Reign of Charles V, the defeat of Islamic Mediterranean seapower at the Battle of Lepanto, the defeat of Napoleon in Spain, the Cuban wars of Independence. The Vietnam and Cold War after coming to America.

The 80% vote for George W. Bush in Florida which is the reason that George W. Bush and not Al Gore is President of the United States today.

Now about our common European faults:

Our treatment of the Indigenous people and our history of slavery.

In those two areas, nobody, not the Cubans nor the Americans have any reason to be proud about.

Yes, European diseases helped wipe out the Caribbean Indians but out forfathers helped the process along. In the United States, it was a calculated process of ethnic cleansing. Even the civilized Cherokees were summarily evicted from their ancestral lands.

In regards to slavery, both of our ancestral lands suffered.

Slavery was the low hanging fruit on the tree. It kept the American South and Cuba too enamored too easy agriculture when our sights should have been set elsewhere.

That is not to say that the same mistakes were not made elsewhere.

Look at Haiti.

That French version of slavery in the New World ended up with a complete massacre of the French white population.

In Cuba and America, it ended up with a sullen and embittered segment of the population. In Cuba, however, there was never the Jim crow segregation that seemed very strange to me when I came to the U.S. as a 6 year old boy in 1960.

However, the black resentment was their in both countries. In Cuba, that population gave it’s support to Fidel Castro. However, it did the blacks no good at all. The Cuban Communist Party is essentially lily-white and living in a feudal land with Cuban serfs, both black and white.

In American cities, that same embittered population has turned the inner cities into war zones. You can walk through European cities in complete safety. You cannot do that in America’s cities thanks to the heritage of slavery.

And what about Mexico?

In Mexico, the Spanish did not exterminate or ethnically cleanse the native Indian population as was the case in Cuba and in most of the United States. So, ethnically and culturally, Mexico is an Indian country.

So, someone wants to complain about the Mexicans?

Have American Indians fared any better? No. Those that were not killed or ethnically cleansed are very few in number and many are living in poverty in reservations. And Cuban Indians? Sorry. They became extinct in the 1500’s.

Now, what about Cuban culture after we Cubans came to the U.S.?

As David pointed out, Cuba did very well before Communism. As I pointed out, Europeans came to Cuba for economic opportunity.

When we came to the U.S., Cubans kicked economic butt. David documented that.

When I came to the U.S. as a child of 6 years of age with my six first cousins in 1960, our parents came to the U.S. with nothing but the clothes in their suitcases. Now, in 2003, all seven of us first cousins are self-made millionaires that own our own businesses.

Both sides of my wife’s family have been in America for over 100 years and not a single member of their family has ever approached that level of success. Few native born Americans that I know have reached that level of success.

As someone in this thread said, “the proof is in the results”.

It's not the genes. It's the culture.

Interesting. Thanks.

Thanks for the thanks.

I just posted my second part dealing with our culture. I won't deny that I wrote it being being influenced (read P.O.'ed) by your remarks towards Luis.

However, as I said in the beginning, I believe your remarks had more to do with a personal flame war between you and Luis than a slur against Cubans in general.

Whatever past history you two have is between you two.

I defended the honor of our Cuban and Spanish forefathers.

Best regards,
Polybius

Wow, great info. I only skimmed through it because I have no time now. I have to go to bed. Will read it tomorrow. But it looks great.

Don't worry about Thorondir. I have communicated with Thorondir privately over his remarks. As you said, it is just the result of a personal flame war between him and Luis. Thorondir just got pissed over something Luis said and Thorondir just went overboard. He told me he would stop attacking Cubans. And I thanked him for it.

Wow, great info. I only skimmed through it because I have no time now. I have to go to bed. Will read it tomorrow. But it looks great. Don't worry about Thorondir. I have communicated with Thorondir privately over his remarks. As you said, it is just the result of a personal flame war between him and Luis. Thorondir just got pissed over something Luis said and Thorondir just went overboard. He told me he would stop attacking Cubans. And I thanked him for it.

Good to hear that oil has been poured over the turbulent waters.

Here is another bit of our cultural heritage: A Roman denarius issued by the Spanish born Emperor Hadrian honoring his home province of Hispania, circa 134 A.D.

Well..ok,perhaps not garbage..the scandinavian in me got the best of me...as you point out, it was a humorous "Vent on the French" thread. Nothing personal... Pax!

Admitted,Vikings did tend to absorb into the surrounding culture pretty quickly once they obtained land and power (and local women) . The vikings up north in Yorkshire were not well prepared at Stamford bridge and "one eye" beat "hard rider" before a nine day march south to Hastings. The Norman's feigned cavalry retreat at Hastings -a tactic reeking of viking guile--suckered the dying Harold's shield wall to break ranks and pursue, only to be turned on and defeated. French in name, Ok; but I would still assert the normans were viking/scandinavian by birth and inclination.

Hadrian is the emperor who built the wall to protect the Roman Empire from the only people the Romans could never conquer.

French to Send Surrender Advisors to Iraq

02/10/2003 - William Grim

Paris - In a stunning reversal of policy, French President Jacques Chirac announced today that the French government will be supporting the War on Terror after all. Five hundred soldiers from the elite L'Abandonnement du Field d'Honneur Battalion (French Surrender Battalion) of the Legion Etrangere (Foreign Legion) are in the process of shipping out to Iraq where they will assist the elite Iraqi Republican Guards in their inevitable surrender to the overwhelming might of the American Armed Forces.

"Eet eez important to be haughty and insufferable when surrendering," said General Philippe de Peepee, the Commanding Officer of the Surrender Battalion, who has personally surrendered in over 200 battles going back to Dien Bien Phu in 1954. "We French are zee world masters at surrendering, n'est-ce pas, not like you arrogant Americans. Ha, I spit on your filthy American victories."

President Chirac also announced that his government will be sending 3000 advisors from the elite Force du Collaborateur Francaise (French Collaboration Force) to assist the Iraqis in collaborating with the Americans while pretending to be part of a non-existent resistance movement.

If Normans were not French by 1066, then American citizens are still English subjects in 2003. They could not speak any Norse language. And they were christians.William was their fifth duke.
One third of the troops of William were Normans, one third Bretons from Brittany, one third French from other provinces, mainly Picardie, Anjou, Ile de France. They were given land in England. The dukes of Brittany became earls of Richmond for centuries. The English language was created by mixing old english and norman french.
The Norman ships started from Normandy, stopped a long time in Picardy before crossing.

You'll like this one...ENJOY!