“FOR THE THING WE SHOULD NEVER DO IN DEALING WITH REVOLUTIONARY COUNTRIES…IS TO PUSH THEM BEHIND AN IRON CURTAIN RAISED BY OURSELVES. ON THE CONTRARY, EVEN WHEN THEY HAVE BEEN SEDUCED AND SUBVERTED AND ARE DRAWN ACROSS THE LINE, THE RIGHT THING TO DO IS TO KEEP THE WAY OPEN FOR THEIR RETURN.”1

—WALTER LIPPMANN, JULY 1959

There are opinions pro and con as to whether Castro was a communist before his revolutionary victory. Jim Noel, the CIA station chief in Havana, traveled to the Sierra Maestra range, where the revolutionary was based, to see for himself. His take was that Castro was not a communist.² Representative Charles Porter, who spent quality time with Castro in Washington, was convinced he wasn't in the shadow of Karl Marx.³ The evidence stacks up that when Castro left Washington for home, he was not a believer in communism. This is convincingly illustrated by his vehement reaction to Nixon's charge that his administration was riddled with Communists.

Nixon could beat the air over the chimera of communism, but there was nothing to stick it to. The general public in Cuba regarded Castro as a heroic figure who was nothing more than a headstrong nationalist. CIA director Allen Dulles, who was already tuned in to a program to force him into the Soviet orbit to justify an intervention, previewed the potential for deploying punitive politics by drastically reducing Cuba's sugar allotment if he didn't toe the line. The one thing Castro was not was a communist. He told a Social Democrat in his delegation, Norberto Fuentes, that he was not a communist because “communism was the dictatorship of a single class and meant hatred and class struggle.”4 Castro still harbored resentment for the Communist Party of Cuba because it had falsely labeled his effort at the Moncada Barracks a “putsch.” For his part, Castro maintained back at the embassy that he was nothing more than a staunch Cuban nationalist who belonged to the Ortodoxo Party, which was mainstream and majority. It had been his shibboleth on the Hill, as the University of Havana was called, and it was his position now. It was a saying on the Hill that a communist is someone who can't think for himself. At the University of Havana, Fidel's political gyro tilted slightly to the left.

It is worthy of note that Castro had invited two of Cuba's most powerful executives, Jose “Pepin” Bosch and Daniel Bacardi of the rum distilling empire, to join his entourage in Washington. On his blog, Macrohistory and World Report, Frank Smitha put it nicely, “He appeared to be a free enterprise nationalist but in search of remaking Cuban society.”⁵ In other words, Castro was a Social Democrat.

Castro left the United States telling the Cuban Embassy staff that he was going to continue to pursue a modus vivendi with the White House. Actually he felt embittered by the double standards Nixon had laid down. He arrived at the seat of American power full of promise to forge a Cold War alliance only to find it would have been futile as well as humiliating to even raise the point. In his biography Castro: A Political Biography, New York Times correspondent Herbert Matthews, who interviewed Castro extensively in the mountains in 1957, writes, “from his Havana University days Fidel would never take orders from anybody. In fact, he would rarely take advice.”⁶

If this “lone wolf” characterization had been noted in the beginning by his Cuban middle-class enemies and by Americans in the State Department, there would have been less naïve zeal in picturing Fidel Castro as becoming a satellite of the Soviet Union.

Castro's dreadful experience with the vice president apparently caused a political vertigo that swept him to the left. On the return trip to Cuba, by way of Canada and Argentina, attending an economic conference in Buenos Aires, he was still fuming over his humiliation at Nixon's hands. He vented his feelings to Norberto Fuentes, “They [Ike and Nixon] don't know me. They don't know what I want or what I'm going to do. From now on it will always be that way.”7 By the time he landed at Camp Columbia, it was as if he had undergone an epiphany. Castro realized that he would not be able to work out an accommodation with the White House. The fact that he came away empty-handed from his brutalizing meeting with Nixon meant that he had lost his leverage with his brother Raul and with Che, who were advocating that the Ortodoxo Party convert to socialism. Fidel would not be able to stand alone against the party. As the wheels of his Bristol Britannia touched down at Camp Columbia, the smiling, handshaking celebrity was gone.

Eisenhower badly wanted Castro's demise before he left office at the end of 1960.⁸ This contradicted his general foreign policy of containment. Nixon's contrite Checkers speech, in which he used his dog as emotional prop, hadn't as yet swayed the squeaky-clean general in Nixon's favor, and the suspense was killing Nixon. On the other hand, Eisenhower had to make a choice between turning thumbs down on Nixon's presidential bid or keeping him to direct the overthrow of the Castro regime. Ike finally chose the latter, endorsing his vice president for the Republican Party nomination. But he also appointed him White House Action Officer for the Cuba Project, as the effort to deconstruct the Castro regime was called. Ike had been impressed by Nixon's consuming anti-communism, his tendency to let expediency trump ethics, and, yes, his recklessness. A scary example of the latter had occurred in 1952 and could have cost both Nixon and Eisenhower their jobs. Nixon and his slush-fund manager, Dana Smith, were carousing in the Sans Souci Casino. The report of the incident has it that Smith gambled away a large amount of money, which could only have come from the political contribution funds he was managing.⁹ Nixon was often seen drinking and gambling at the Havana casinos, but this was the first time such a huge sum was involved. And this was ten days before the presidential election. If the true story had hit the papers, the outcome of the election would have been different. And it would have been true that reporters wouldn't have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore.

So Eisenhower's conscious decision to in effect hand the 1960 election for president to the corruption-tainted Nixon was a roll of the dice based on practicality—his perceived potential to overthrow the Castro regime before Ike left office in January 1960—that trumped moral concerns. Eisenhower's old soldier pride had won the day for Nixon. But he lost the day when John F. Kennedy edged him out for president. The irony was that Nixon was muzzled on the Cuba Project for security reasons. On the other hand, Kennedy's camp was the beneficiary of several credible reports on an impending thrust against Cuba. It was an open invitation for Kennedy to spread his wings.