This was where it had started; and ought to have ended.

Cuba...

Initially, it was estimated that over 90 percent of the population of the main island - over six million men, women, and children - had died on the day of the war. In fact, although the western provinces of Cuba were devastated and the capital Havana utterly wrecked, some two million people had probably survived the US Air Force retaliatory strike, mainly because great care had been taken to avoid the US enclave at Guantanamo Bay, situated near its southeastern extremity from being inundated with radioactive fallout.

Fatefully, in early 1963, the decision had been made - in great secrecy - to contract the problem of ensuring a second Castro-like regime could never again arise to the CIA and its exiled Cuban surrogates. Thereafter, distracted by other more pressing matters, the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations had tried their level best to forget all about "that goddamned island"!

However, that was then, and much blood and treasure later, the still secret, dirty war for the eastern province of Oriente - known as Santiago de Cuba before 1905 - has sucked in 30,000 US infantrymen and marines to prop up Central Intelligence’s brigade of as many as 20,000 former mobsters, Batista-loyalists, and soldiers of fortune.

It is 1969. The casualties are mounting, and the new man in the Oval Office, working through his in-tray has got to the file marked "Cuba: Options for Consideration".

There is a great deal of unfinished business for the newly inaugurated 39th president of the United States, and "Cuba: Options for Consideration" file has briefly found its way to the top of his to-do list!