In early January 1959, U.S. television host Ed Sullivan traveled to Cuba to interview a victorious Fidel Castro. Mainstream newspapers and periodicals had depicted Castro and his followers as a band of communist thugs. Sullivan wanted to see for himself. “Freedom is everybody’s business,” he told his New York studio audience. Sullivan caught up with Castro in the town of Matanzas at two o’clock on the morning of January 11, three days after Castro led his triumphant army into Havana.1
Nestled in a thicket of gun-toting soldiers, the dapper variety show host put five questions to a soft-spoken, deferential, and clearly exhausted Castro: Are you Catholic? Weren’t you once a baseball player? How many people did Batista torture? How do you plan to put a permanent end to dictatorship in Cuba? Finally, what do you think of Americans? Castro, speaking very passable English, answered dutifully: yes, yes, many thousands, institutional reform, and I have “great sympathy” for the people of the United States, who through “hard work” built a nation, which, comprised of “all the people of the world,” “belongs to all the people of the world,” serving as a refuge “to those who could not live in their own country.” Gratifying answers all.
But in truth, Sullivan seemed less concerned with what Castro had to say than in putting his own spin on developments in Cuba. Castro’s army was not a band of “communeests,” Sullivan told the folks at home, but a “wonderful group of revolutionary youngsters who wanted to make corrections”—and who even “carry bibles.” He sought to assure Castro that, notwithstanding the negative press coverage, “the people of the United States have great admiration for you and your men”; after all, Castro was in “the real American tradition of a George Washington, of any man who started off with a small body and fought against a great nation and won.” Americans “like you,” Sullivan insisted, “and we want you to like us.”
The interview ended with Castro insisting that the feelings were mutual and promising to work on his English. Sullivan’s studio audience was delighted. Amid thunderous applause, Sullivan signed off by observing that Castro was “a fine young man, and a very smart young man. With the help of God and our prayers, and with the help of the American government, he will come up with the sort of democracy down there that America should have.”
In fact, despite the United States’s recognizing the revolutionary government on January 7, there was little sympathy between Castro and an Eisenhower administration that had only recently tried to prevent his rise to power. News out of Cuba the first week of the new year did not help any. “When you have a revolution, you kill your enemies,” CIA director Allen Dulles told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in late January 1959. Dulles, who knew a thing or two about taking care of enemies, was in the unusual position of trying to ease U.S. senators’ concerns about reports of summary executions carried out by the revolutionary government. In Law No. 1 of the Sierra Maestra, announced the previous February, Castro had warned that government soldiers, police, and paramilitary who committed atrocities during the war would face the death penalty upon the event of a rebel victory. He and his lieutenants believed that delivery on this promise was all that stood between an orderly transition and the mayhem that attended the fall of Machado. Even as Castro addressed the crowd in Parque Céspedes on New Year’s Day, his soldiers were at work excavating mass graves, exposing government torture chambers, and rounding up alleged perpetrators. The irrefutable evidence of Batista’s crimes only increased public demands for vengeance.2
As Castro headed off toward Havana, he left behind his brother Raúl to do the dirty work. During the first week in Santiago, Raúl Castro and his men carried out over one hundred executions. Within ten days, courts-martial presided over by rebel officers had been instituted across the country. There remained cause for concern about the rigor and fairness of the ensuing tribunals. In one notorious episode broadcast on U.S. television, some seventy alleged perpetrators were tried in Santiago’s Palace of Justice, where the Moncada trial took place. Comprised primarily of Rolando Masferrer’s private army, the accused were found guilty, transported to a nearby field, and shot in pairs by the side of a trench. In a still more notorious incident, Castro responded to mounting disquiet among the public and press corps by holding the trial of reviled Army Colonel Jesús Sosa Blanco at the seventeen-thousand-capacity Sports Palace on the outskirts of Havana. If the world wants transparency, we’ll give it to them, Castro threatened, waving away comparisons of the proceedings to a Roman Circus. By the end of January, the list of executed is said to have reached two hundred; by the end of March, the number had climbed to around five hundred.
Not everybody tried was found guilty, nor were all the guilty put to death. The Chicago Tribune’s Jules Dubois was probably right that Castro could have avoided the criticism by doing what other revolutionaries and liberated countries had done since time immemorial, namely, “mow down a thousand suspected torturers, killers and informers” without making a public spectacle of it. Alarm over the kangaroo courts poured in from all quarters, including Latin America and Europe. Predictably, Castro tolerated U.S. criticisms the least, asking where the North Americans had been all this time when Batista was terrorizing Cuba.3
The outcry over the executions was only the first in a series of disagreements between the new revolutionary government and U.S. officials over the course of the year. Sabotage and terrorist attacks against the revolutionary regime began almost immediately, just as Castro had anticipated. In February 1959, Castro replaced José Miró Cardona as prime minister (Castro was making all the decisions anyway, Miró Cardona concluded, so there was no point in pretending otherwise). In March, Castro nationalized the Cuban Telephone Company (ITT), reducing phone rates by 50 percent. In April, while on a trip to Washington, D.C., Castro alarmed U.S. officials by never bringing up the subject of U.S. aid, as if he had another source of economic assistance in mind.
Castro’s trip to the United States in April 1959 was the brainchild of journalist Herbert Matthews and was intended to counteract the negative press that the fledgling revolution continued to earn. The trip included meetings with State Department officials, a few congressional committees, and Vice President Nixon, though not, notably, President Eisenhower, who fled Washington, D.C., just before Castro arrived so as to avoid a face-to-face meeting with a leader thought to be conspiring with communists.
In spring 1959, the Cuban economy was in free fall and the revolutionary government in desperate need of economic assistance. Castro refused to kowtow to U.S. officials and bankers, hoping that by taking his message directly to the U.S. people they could prevail on their representatives to provide the coveted loans. On day three of his tour, Castro visited Mount Vernon, Arlington National Cemetery (where he laid a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier), and the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials. He was visibly moved by his encounter with Jefferson, reciting in broken English the words descending the memorial’s southeast wall: I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions. But laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. . . . We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.
Administration officials greeted Castro with skepticism. Nixon found him “slavishly subservient” to public opinion. Nixon also described Castro as “naive” on communism and utterly lacking in “the most elementary economic principles.” Secretary of State Christian Herter described him as “a most interesting individual, very much like a child in many ways, quite immature regarding problems of government, and puzzled and confused by some of the practical difficulties now facing him.” Meanwhile, Florida senator George Smathers thought him devious and evasive. “There is serious trouble brewing in the Caribbean area,” Smathers warned, “centered in Cuba.”4
Others found their meetings with Castro encouraging. “I feel reassured about a number of matters I’ve been concerned about,” said Louisiana senator Russell Long. “I was neutral and suspicious before, but today I was very favorably impressed,” added Pennsylvania representative James G. Fulton. “I think we should help him.” Even Nixon conceded that Castro possessed “those indefinable qualities which make him a leader of men. Whatever we may think of him,” Nixon concluded, “he is going to be a great factor in the development of Cuba and very possibly in Latin American affairs generally.”5
The American public ate him up. Fifteen hundred greeted him at the airport in Washington. Twenty thousand people showed up at New York’s Penn Station and forty thousand flocked to Central Park to hear him speak in Spanish on the problem of hemispheric development. And it wasn’t just youth who rallied to him, though university students swarmed him at Princeton and briefly at Columbia, while 8,700 squeezed in to see him at Harvard’s Soldiers Field. The Harvard visit, where Castro was hosted by dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences McGeorge Bundy, who would soon head John Kennedy’s National Security Council and try to overthrow Castro, provided the comic highlight of the U.S visit, when Castro was understood to have said that he made this journey to the United States in order to appeal to the Jews. The young audience scratched its head. Appeal to the Jews? Castro’s translator, Teresa Casuso, noticed the confusion. A brief conversation ensued, followed by a broad smile on Castro’s face. To the JOUTHS! Castro emphasized, to the YOUTHS!, pronouncing the English word “youth” in classic Latin style.6
As Castro departed for Canada at the end of the month, The New York Times provided a postmortem. How had Castro fared? He had given reassuring answers to questions about supporting the United States over the Soviet Union, democracy over communism, and he confirmed a commitment to free enterprise. But it was the people-to-people contact that caught the paper’s attention. “The reception Premier Castro received here was so friendly that he will surely return feeling better about the United States than when he arrived. By the same token it seems obvious that Americans feel better about Fidel Castro than they did before.” One could only hope for good and long-lasting results. “This first visit was of great importance,” the Times remarked. “It must not be the last.”7
Nearly two years later, one month before the Bay of Pigs invasion, President John F. Kennedy introduced the Alliance for Progress, a Marshall Plan for Latin America. Designed to undercut support for communist Cuba, the Alliance for Progress promised economic assistance to nations willing to undertake significant social and political reform. Criticized by some for its idealism and overreach, the program won the praise of many, stoking Kennedy’s reputation as a visionary while auguring a new chapter in hemispheric relations.
Largely missed in all the fuss was the fact that Castro himself had anticipated the Alliance for Progress by two years. Before returning to Cuba from his U.S. tour, he flew to Buenos Aires to attend a conference of the economic ministers of the Organization of American States. Widespread underemployment and a lack of private property deprived Cubans and Latin Americans in general of the power to participate in the marketplace, he explained. With no markets, there could be no profit making, no surplus, no investment—in short, no economic development. The solution was to stimulate purchasing power by redistributing land, diversifying agriculture, and establishing new industries. All of which took commitment, to be sure, but above all money—something the countries of Latin America simply did not have.
Castro estimated the cost of ushering Latin America into the modern age at “thirty billion dollars” to be paid out over a period of ten years. There was only one country in the world that could conceivably come up with that kind of money in 1959: the United States. Turning to the U.S. delegation, Castro emphasized that Latin America was not looking for a handout (“We don’t ask for donations of capital, we don’t want gifts of money”). What the region needed was loans, which the beneficiaries would repay “with interest.” The United States had as much to gain from such a program as its southern neighbors, Castro argued. Greater purchasing power throughout Latin America would mean a larger market for U.S. goods, along with new opportunities for investment. By creating “internal markets in each country, we can create a common market among all.” But markets and economic development were only the means to a higher end: fulfillment of the “democratic aspiration and the most cherished dreams and hopes of this Hemisphere.”8
Castro’s plea for help went unanswered, compelling him to turn to the Soviet Union for economic assistance, and leaving President Kennedy to take up the plan two years later at the exclusion of Cuba. Meanwhile, tensions between the two countries continued to escalate. In mid-May 1959, Castro introduced the Agrarian Reform Law, which limited farmholdings to under a thousand acres, directly threatening U.S. sugar producers on the island, some of whom owned 400,000-plus-acre estates. In February 1960, he signed a trade agreement with the Soviet Union, by which the Soviets agreed to purchase five million tons of Cuban sugar over five years, while providing Castro with $100 million of credit and crude oil—an agreement calculated to displease North American refineries on the island. The following March, Castro accused the United States of blowing up a French freighter (La Coubre) packed with small arms in Havana Harbor. All of which prompted President Eisenhower to declare that Castro “is going wild and harming the whole American structure.”9
It took until just after the Bay of Pigs fiasco of April 1961 for Castro to fully tie Cuba’s fate to the Soviet Union, which in a speech the following December he characterized as a “natural” alliance (“there is no half way between socialism and imperialism,” he thundered; “anyone maintaining a third position is, in fact, helping imperialism”).10 If Cuba’s alliance with the Soviet Union troubled U.S. officials, it unsettled Castro, too. However much Cuba needed money and protection, it was never his intention to trade dependence on one imperial juggernaut for dependence on another, and Castro soon learned that condescension and a lack of reciprocity were not the province of Americans alone.
In summer 1962, the Soviet Union thought to give the United States a taste of its own medicine by increasing Soviet influence in the region and installing intermediate-range nuclear missiles on the U.S. doorstep. The crisis was diffused only when Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev agreed to remove the missiles in exchange for the United States secretly withdrawing its Jupiter missiles from Italy and Turkey. To people around the world, this was a satisfying resolution to a cataclysmic threat. To Castro, by contrast, Khrushchev’s readiness to negotiate with Kennedy without seeking Cuban input was evidence of imperialism not so different from that which Cuba had come to expect from the United States. Castro was livid, Khrushchev bemused. “We believe the aggressor has suffered a defeat,” Khrushchev wrote Castro. “It was preparing to attack Cuba, but we have stopped that, and forced [the aggressor] to acknowledge before the world that it will not do so in the current stage. We judge this to be a great victory.”11 What more did Cuba want?
In 1978 Max Lesnik, Castro’s old friend from Ortodoxo days and one of the few Cuban exiles respected on both sides of the Florida Straits, returned home for the first time since departing just after the triumph of the Revolution. Why had Lesnik left Cuba? Castro wanted to know. Because he didn’t like the communists or the Soviet alliance, Lesnik replied. Well, Castro continued, if Lesnik had been in his place, what would he have done? Would he have turned to the Soviet Union to help save Cuba’s sovereignty? In retrospect, Lesnik believes that Castro had no choice. “Fidel was entirely correct . . . and I was wrong. If we had done what I wanted, that is to say, keep Cuba from forming an alliance with the USSR, the Revolution would have been wiped out by Washington.”12
It seems fitting to leave the final word on Castro to his idol and fellow countryman, José Martí. Attending the dedication of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor on October 28, 1886, Martí testified to the agony of living in the grip of an oppressive political regime (at that time, colonial Spain). Overwhelmed by the pomp and circumstance among French and U.S. officials and journalists, Martí withdrew from the crowd to address Lady Liberty in private. “For him who enjoys thee not, Liberty, it is difficult to speak of thee,” Martí confessed. “His anger is as great as that of a wild beast forced to bend his knee before his tamer. He knows the depths of hell while glancing up toward the man who lives arrogantly in the sun. He bites the air as a hyena bites the bars of his cage. Spirit writhes within his body as though it were poisoned.”13
Despite a comfortable upbringing and privileged education, Castro grew up seeing the world from deep within that cage. He was a rarity in that he wanted for others the privileges that he enjoyed. It was never his intent to destroy the liberal institutions that undergirded those privileges. He had long insisted that national sovereignty, civil liberty, and social justice were compatible, so long as people were willing to settle for their fair share, a principle he applied simultaneously to individuals and nations, to Cubans and foreign nationals. When fairness toward Cuba collided with U.S. interests and Cold War realities, the imagined alignment between sovereignty, liberty, and justice disintegrated and Castro responded like a caged animal. With sovereignty in danger, liberty would have to take a backseat. But surely not for long. Either the Revolution would be smashed, or Cuba’s self-determination acknowledged. Or so everyone imagined.