Dwight Eisenhower rode in a limousine with US flags flying on the fenders and golf clubs in the trunk. Richard Nixon had an enameled American flag pin on the lapel of what appeared to be an off-the-rack suit. Fidel Castro Ruz was a rumpled revolutionary with a wardrobe of fatigue uniforms and paratrooper boots.

Four months after his revolution had militarily succeeded, Castro was invited to Washington, DC, by the American Society of Newspaper Editors for a lecture tour of the Washington vicinity. The editors knew a good story when they saw one. Fidel Castro was the Robin Hood of the hills, who had sped out of the hills on New Year's Day 1959 and assumed control of the Cuban government by taking over the baroque Presidential Palace in Havana. It was clear from his rapport with the people that he was the world man of the hour.

The Eisenhower White House recoiled at the idea of giving such a cultural disaster a full reception. They were in a quandary as to how they could trivialize Castro's visit. Eisenhower, in his last term as president, opted for a golfing trip to North Carolina, where no one could count his mulligans. The task of playing host to Castro defaulted to Vice President Nixon, who saw it as an opportunity to enhance his reputation as the scourge of all things left-leaning. Early in his career, the vice president had acquired a political handle as a Red-baiter.

The White House staff dug up information on Castro that revealed his call for agrarian reform at the start of his revolution. I suspect that they probably didn't include the fact that Castro saw this as a way of relieving the abject poverty of rural Cuba. The chimera of agrarian reform set off a conservative backlash that was based on the faulty premise that land would be confiscated in the Chinese example, but Fidel was referring only to surplus acreage.

Nevertheless, the White House staff placed Castro on its communist-sympathizer list. If they had bothered to check, they would have found that the Cuban leader was actually a member of the Cuban Ortodoxo Party, which was in no way affiliated with any radical group.

Before boarding his flight to Washington, Castro paid an impromptu visit to Carlos Prío, a former president of Cuba. Prío was a member of a rival mainstream party, the Autenticos, but he willingly offered advice on how Fidel should comport himself with the American officials he would be dealing with.

The meeting with Nixon was designed as an insult to Castro. Instead of receiving the prime minister in the White House, Nixon steered the Cuban leader to one of the offices in the Senate Office Building. The door was shut to the press. According to Fidel, Nixon waved around what he said was an FBI report indicating he had communist leanings. Castro knew immediately that Nixon was out to sabotage him. The meeting, toxic in content, went on for three hours.

In the breast pocket of his fatigues jacket, Castro had a proposal to form a strategic alliance with the United States in which Cuba would come to the aid of the United States in the event of hostilities with the Soviet Union. It was his feeling in the current state of world affairs that third-world countries should select one of the two superpowers and align with them. But he never got to run his proposal by government officials because of Nixon's hostile behavior. He was, in short, humiliated.

When I interviewed ex-president Prío in retirement, he confirmed that Castro did have such a proposal but kept it in his pocket when Nixon's behavior became more than obnoxious.

That night at the Cuban Embassy, Fidel was heard to curse Nixon's treatment of him. Since he had no promises from Nixon to provide aid for the poor in Cuba, Fidel was caught in a vise. When he left the meeting with Nixon, he had the feeling that the Eisenhower administration was already planning to overthrow him. At the same time, he had to return empty-handed to Havana and face his brother Raul and Che Guevara, who were putting the heat on him to obtain aid from the United States. This lack of support gave the pair considerable leverage to pursue a more stringent agenda. Fidel underwent an epiphany that led him down the path to socialism.

It is not difficult to conceive what might have happened had Fidel not been spurned by Ike and Dick. There would have been no need for the self-crippling Bay of Pigs and no missile crisis because Cuba would not have become communist.

The darker side of United States policy toward Cuba is that it became obvious that assassination had developed into an instrument of American foreign policy. Even before Castro had won the revolution, the dictator of the Dominican Republic, Rafael Trujillo, paid an American naval reservist named Alan Nye a hundred thousand dollars to go into the hills and kill Fidel.1 He was fortunately intercepted by a patrol. A later CIA attempt to assassinate Castro took place when he visited the United Nations the year after the Nixon debacle. In that scheme, the CIA tried to involve the New York Police Department in poisoning the Cuban at a reception. The NYPD responded that they were there to protect Castro, not to kill him.²

The fabric of a society rests on the moral compunctions of its people. The attitude of the majority of Americans seems to be to pass the responsibility on to government officials. It is perhaps revealing of organizations like the CIA that have no compunctions in using the most horrendous of crimes, like narcotic trafficking, and criminals, like the Mob, to further their agenda. What this creates can be an evil worse than the one they are trying to eliminate. The Mob has never failed to exact a prize for cooperating in an operation, and it never will.

It is impossible to scan the criminal horizon today and not realize so much of it was proliferated in the heyday of the Mob in the open city of Havana. The fact that Fidel Castro shut down the gambling casinos was reason enough for Meyer Lansky, the “chairman of the board” of organized crime, to issue a bounty of one million dollars for Castro's demise.³

In the light of assassination as a political tool, there has always been speculation that the assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963, was planned and executed right out of the covert CIA base at Point Mary in the Everglades. When asked by his son about who fired the rifles at the Kennedy assassination, John V. Martino, who frequented the Point Mary complex, responded, “They were just a couple of Cubans, it doesn't matter.”4

Finally, there has come to light a defector operation at the highest level in the Cuban government. The components that came together to produce the JFK/Almeida coup plan comprise some of the best and worst attributes of the American intelligence services and their tendency to use the most corrupt elements in highly sensitive cases. This situation, as described by Lamar Waldron in Watergate: The Hidden History, employed risky personnel, namely E. Howard Hunt (of later Watergate infamy), in two of the most sensitive aspects of the highly secret plan involving Almeida and his family.

As a famous folk song claims, the roads of Cuba never run straight. In the case of the CIA secret war against Castro, the roads of Cuba led to a dead end. The agency set up a secret city on the South Campus of the University of Miami from which it directed the second invasion of Cuba and its various attendant assassination plots. The station included dummy front companies created for gathering supplies and managing personnel for the invasion like Zenith Technical Enterprises and Ace Cartography Incorporated. It was a huge operation with a budget of well over $500 million, employing six hundred to seven hundred American personnel.⁵ Yet it ground to a halt with the assassination of JFK. Lyndon Johnson considered the operation “Bobby's thing” and ordered it shut down so that the intelligence services could move on to Vietnam. Today it is a latter-day Stonehenge, a reminder of the extraordinary resources the US government can expend in the pursuit of futility.