LGBT rights in Cuba visibility and gender transgressions themselves constituted a central part of the problem identified by the revolution. Even during the severest period of enforcement, Marvin Leiner reminds us, private homosexual expression was never the main target. Rather, "... the major concern, as it had always been, was with the public display of homosexuality." Many of the progressive LGBT persons who remained in Cuba became involved in counter-revolutionary activities, independently or through encouragement of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and were jailed. The 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, commando attacks from Florida bases, and internal CIA-sponsored subversion created in Cuba an increased
CIA activities in Iraq Castro as well as his trips throughout the Soviet Union, the Eastern Bloc, and China. In 1991, former high-ranking U.S. diplomat Hermann Eilts told journalist Elaine Sciolino that Mahdawi had been the target. By 1961, the CIA had cultivated at least one high-level informant within the Iraqi wing of the Ba'ath Party, enabling it to monitor the Party's activities. A CIA cable reveals that the Ba'ath Party "first approached Arif about a coup in April 1962." In mid-1962, alarmed by Qasim's threats to invade Kuwait and his government's expropriation of 99.5% of the British- and American-owned Iraq Petroleum Company's (IPC)