In Boston, Milan Lucic, Matt Hunwick, Andrew Ference and Blake Wheeler chipped in to help provide equipment to the Cambridge Youth Hockey Association. In Philadelphia, Jeff Carter and Mike Richards surprised the Ed Snider Youth Hockey Foundation by delivering more than 50 full sets of gear.

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The Strategic Arms Limitation Talks refers to two rounds of bilateral talks and corresponding international treaties involving the United States and the Soviet Union-the Cold War superpowers—on the issue of armament control. There were two rounds of talks and agreements: SALT I and SALT II. A subsequent treaty was START.

Negotiations started in Helsinki, Finland, in 1969 and focused on limiting the two countries’ stocks of nuclear weapons. These treaties have led to START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty). START I (a 1991 agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union) and START II (a 1993 agreement between the United States and Russia) placed specific caps on each side’s number of nuclear weapons.

By 1961, hundreds of thousands of Cubans had left for the United States. The 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion (La Batalla de Girón) was an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the Cuban government by a U.S.-trained force of Cuban exiles with U.S. military support. The plan was launched in April 1961, less than three months after John F. Kennedy became the U.S. President. The Cuban armed forces, trained and equipped by Eastern Bloc nations, defeated the exiles in three days. The bad Cuban-American relations were exacerbated the following year by the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the Kennedy administration demanded the immediate withdrawal of Soviet missiles placed in Cuba, which was a response to U.S. nuclear missiles in Turkey and the Middle East. The Soviets and Americans soon agreed on the removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba and American missiles secretly from Turkey and the Middle East within a few months. Kennedy also agreed not to invade Cuba in the future. Cuban exiles captured during the Bay of Pigs Invasion were exchanged for a shipment of supplies from America. By 1963, Cuba was moving towards a full-fledged Communist system modeled on the USSR. The U.S. imposed a complete diplomatic and commercial embargo on Cuba and began Operation Mongoose.

In 1965, Castro merged his revolutionary organizations with the Communist Party, of which he became First Secretary, and Blas Roca became Second Secretary. Roca was succeeded by Raúl Castro, who, as Defense Minister and Fidel’s closest confidant, became and has remained the second most powerful figure in Cuba. Raúl’s position was strengthened by the departure of Che Guevara to launch unsuccessful insurrectionss in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and then Bolivia, where he was killed in 1967.

During the 1970s, Castro dispatched tens of thousands troops in support of Soviet-supported wars in Africa, particularly the MPLA in Angola and Mengistu Haile Mariam in Ethiopia. The standard of living in 1970s was “extremely spartan” and discontent was rife. Fidel Castro admitted the failures of economic policies in a 1970 speech. By the mid-1970s, Castro started economic reforms.

Cuba was expelled from the Organization of American States (OAS) in 1962 in support of the U.S. embargo, but in 1975 the OAS lifted all sanctions against Cuba and both Mexico and Canada broke ranks with the US by developing closer relations with Cuba. On 3 June 2009 the OAS adopted a contentious resolution to end the 47-year exclusion of Cuba, but the U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton walked out in protest as the resolution was being drafted. Cuban leaders have repeatedly announced they are not interested in rejoining the OAS.

As of 2002, some 1.2 million persons of Cuban background (about 10% of the current population of Cuba) reside in the U.S., Many of them left the island for the U.S., often by sea in small boats and fragile rafts. On 6 April 1980, 10,000 Cubans stormed the Peruvian embassy in Havana seeking political asylum. The following day, the Cuban government granted permission for the emigration of Cubans seeking refuge in the Peruvian embassy. On 16 April, 500 Cubans left the Peruvian Embassy for Costa Rica. On 21 April, many of those Cubans started arriving in Miami via private boats and were halted by the U.S. State Department, but the emigration continued, because Castro allowed anyone who desired to leave the country to do so through the port of Mariel. Over 125,000 Cubans emigrated to the U.S. before the flow of vessels ended on 15 June.

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