With relevance to Cuba

With relevance to Cuba, I've always found some of the past U.S. policy difficult to comprehend, or perhaps hypocritical. Why? We went to fight the North Koreans (communism) before Castro was ever in power. Castro said he was Marxist–Leninist (communist), and so was his government. Afterwards, we went to fight communism in Vietnam for years. Both Korea and Vietnam are thousands of miles from the U.S. on the other side of the Pacific, yet Cuba is only 90 miles from the United States, practically next door. Mind boggling!

Of course, I heard Richard Nixon once say many years after he was out of office that maybe those missiles were still down there. Nixon had intelligence briefings, so why would he say something like that since he would have known for a fact if it was true or false. Mind boggling!