English

Psywar on Cuba: The Declassified History of U.S. Anti-Castro Propaganda

INTRODUCTION Of all the weapons unleashed against Cuba by the United States, perhaps the least understood is psychological warfare — or “psywar” for short. Though psywar campaigns have become a mainstay of international conflict, they often go overlooked in news reports and historical works. The documents compiled in this book will help redress this shortcoming, at least in the case of Cuba. Almost four decades of records are on display here, and they will reveal a great deal to readers who have a basic awareness of the unique and sometimes misleading jargon used by psywar experts and practitioners. To begin with, what, exactly, constitutes psychological warfare? The U.S. military, which now prefers the term psychological operations (or PSYOP), offers this definition in a recent publication by the Joint Chiefs of Staff: “Planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of foreign governments, organizations, groups, or individuals.” This is an appropriately broad definition, inclusive enough to apply to most of the anti-Castro propaganda programs conducted by t

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