THUS BEGAN THE “honeymoon phase” of the revolution. At the start of 1959 Havana was an open city, and everyone with a sense of adventure wanted to be there. A traveler could fly from New York or Miami on a bargain Cubana Air charter, then take a room in one of the Art Deco hotels at massively discounted rates. From the moment they left the airport in a shark-finned taxi, visitors would be swept up in the popular fervor. Volunteers were raising money in the streets for the new government, famous Cuban musicians gave free concerts, and armed militia roamed the plazas singing patriotic anthems. (Someone came up with the catchy “With Fidel, with Fidel, always with Fidel,” sung to the tune of Jingle Bells, which became a popular hit at rallies.) The revolutionary-chic address of choice was the Havana Hilton, soon renamed La Habana Libre, where Fidel and Celia had taken up residence in the penthouse, a sumptuously furnished suite with wraparound views of the city. Dozens of guerrillas took lesser rooms, often baffling maids by continuing to sleep on the floor. Che’s parents flew in from Buenos Aires and stayed at the Hilton before heading off on a tour of their son’s battle sites. The obsessive secrecy of the guerrilla days was a thing of the past: Fidel could be seen prowling the hotel at night to get a chocolate milkshake from the snack bar. Camilo took to turning up in the early hours at the Tropicana nightclub, where he had once worked in the kitchen, to dine on shrimp and chat up sequined showgirls.
There was a tentative return to normalcy. After waiters staged a protest march, the casinos were reopened under tight restrictions. (“We are not only disposed to deport the gangsters,” Fidel remarked of those with US Mafia connections, “but to shoot them.” The brothels stayed closed, however, and Superman was forced to find other employment.) Visitors could sit alongside barbudos on city buses, which they rode for free, since they had no money. The politics of beards continued, with the length now measuring political commitment: men with three-day growths might be angrily ordered to remove their M-26-7 armbands by the more hirsute. A Cuban cartoon showed a clean-shaven man jumping on a bus and refusing to pay: “I’m undercover,” he explains.
Ever at the center of the action, Errol Flynn also took a room at the Hilton with the bubbly Beverly Aadland to work on a documentary about the revolution, A Cuban Story, and his feature film, Cuban Rebel Girls. The renowned Hollywood screenwriter Budd Schulberg, who had won the Academy Award for On the Waterfront in 1954, spotted Fidel and Flynn in the lobby walking “arm in arm,” he told an interviewer in 2005. He knew Flynn from California. “So I went up to the room with them—Errol served up a tall vodka—and got to talk to Castro. The whole world wanted to talk to him.” When he suggested that the story of the Castro brothers might make a good film, Raúl joked that he wanted Brando and Sinatra for the parts. On a less glamorous note, Flynn had to be rescued after he set fire to the mattress in his hotel room, having passed out with a lit cigarette. He was also briefly arrested by the tourist police for being in possession of narcotics, but managed to find a prescription.
Some 350 international journalists shuffled through the hotel in early 1959, including the roustabout American from CBS TV, Robert Taber. Intoxicated by the rebel victory, Taber signed up as a columnist for the Movement’s new official newspaper Revolución and became a familiar figure on Havana streets, where locals greeted him as “El Comandante” because he wore a Colt .45 strapped to his hip.
Romantic dreams were now fulfilled. Che and Aleida went arm in arm on sightseeing strolls around the capital, joking that they were worse than provincial yokels when they got lost in colonial back streets or became confused by traffic lights. Like the other guerrilla women, Aleida recalled the strangeness of shedding her fatigues for the traditional Cuban feminine look, with flower-patterned frocks and ornate hairstyles. Their relationship still moved at a glacial pace by modern standards. On January 12, Che asked Aleida as his “secretary” to read a letter to his wife, Hilda. He was asking for a divorce so he could marry a Cuban woman he had met during the war. Aleida asked who the woman was. “He looked at me with surprise and said it was me . . . I wondered why he hadn’t ever mentioned this.” Che’s next smooth move came when they took a trip together to a beach resort and he held her hand in the back of the car. “I felt my heart would jump out of my chest,” Aleida wrote, and she realized she really was in love. “Not long after that, on a memorable January night, Che came into my room in La Cabaña and we consummated an already strong relationship.” Che joked with her that this was “the day the fortress was taken.” She said it “‘surrendered’ without resistance.”
The first celebrity marriage was between Raúl and Vilma, the lovebirds who used to neck in foxholes, less than four weeks after Batista fled. It was a happy mix of Santiago high society and guerrilla celebrities, Old Cuba and New: she wore a meringue-white wedding dress and carried a bridal bouquet, while Raúl kept his rebel uniform with .45 on a holster and his hair tied back in a ponytail. The reception was held at the fashionable Rancho Club, founded by the Bacardi rum magnate (and Fidel fan) Pepín Bosch, the tables groaning with flowers and forty crates of champagne. Life magazine covered the wedding under the headline “Raúl Castro Is Captured,” a joking reference to his habit of kidnapping US citizens only half a year earlier.
On a more risqué note, Fidel moved a new lover into the Havana Hilton: Marita Lorenz, a nineteen-year-old German-American woman he had met on a visiting cruise ship. Celia was busy setting up an apartment nearby on Calle Once (Eleventh Street), which would become the nerve center of government, where he would work every day. “Celia didn’t resent me,” Lorenz later recounted to a Vanity Fair journalist. “She was happier to have only one girl than to have him flying around.” Marita herself soon found she also had to be tolerant of Fidel’s flings. “Every day letters came in from women all over the world, offering to do anything to meet him.”
THE FIRST DISCORDANT notes in this happy pageant came as the executions of Batista’s henchmen gained pace. Only four days after Fidel’s victory speech, on January 12, Raúl made good on his promise to avenge the mothers of Santiago when more than seventy detested SIM officers were gunned down before an open trench. (Reports filtered out describing the disorganized scene, where only half of the condemned men got blindfolds and one broke for the nearby woods but was dragged back. A lieutenant charged with fifty-three murders received a four-hour reprieve when a Cuban TV crew requested the firing squad wait for better light.) In Havana, executions were conducted in La Cabaña under Che’s orders, including members of the CIA-funded death squad BRAC (Bureau for the Repression of Communist Activities). There was not a whiff of sympathy for the victims from Cubans, but international observers, especially in the United States, expressed outrage; one US congressman denounced the executions as a “bloodbath.”
Cubans were just as offended by the criticism. The US government had remained silent during the long years of Batista’s brutality, so the indignation seemed like rank hypocrisy. The charges against 1,000 or so officers were a fraction of the reprisals against Nazi collaborators in France, Cubans pointed out. On January 21 a million people joined a Havana rally in support of the trials, waving banners such as “Women Support the Execution of Murderers!”; “Let the Firing Squads Continue!”; and “We Want No Foreign Interference!” Fidel vowed to bring justice, although it did not calm matters that he was overheard saying: “If the Americans do not like what is happening, let them send in the Marines! Then there will be 200,000 dead gringos.”
Fidel was making a rare PR blunder. When the first public trial was held the next day, it was a mockery. Three of Batista’s vilest offenders were brought in handcuffs to the Sports City stadium, where a crowd of 18,000 greeted them with jeers of “Kill them!” and “To the wall!” Speaking before the tribunal, one defendant, Jesús José Blanco, compared the blood-crazed proceedings to the Roman Colosseum, but his words were drowned out by shouts as witnesses stepped forward to recount his grisly crimes. Women broke down in tears. A twelve-year-old boy pointed an accusing finger. Two prisoners were nearly seized by the angry throng as they left. The foreign press reveled in comparisons to the howling Parisian mob at the guillotine. Time reported that it all revealed “the Latin capacity for brooding revenge and blood purges.”
From then on, trials were removed to the relative seclusion of La Cabaña fortress. In an ironic twist, given the outcry from the US, the shooting squads were overseen by an American. Herman Marks, the sadistic ex-con from Milwaukee whom Che had dismissed from his column the October before, had come back out of the woodwork in Havana to offer his distinctive talents. For a period “Captain Marks” became one of the most notorious yanquis in Cuba, profiled in Time as Fidel’s “Chief Executioner” and nicknamed by unlucky inmates El Carnicero, “the Butcher.” He was known for emptying his revolver clip into a victim’s face during the coup de grâce so relatives could not recognize the corpse. He claimed to be respected by Cubans for doing a difficult but necessary job, and would be given the best tables at the Riviera and Plaza when he went out to dine.
Marks’s presence even attracted a morbid tourism, with Americans surreptitiously asking him if they could attend an execution. The young writer George Plimpton met him in the Floridita bar while drinking with fellow literati, the playwright Tennessee Williams and English critic Kenneth Tynan. When Marks offered to bring them along that night, Plimpton and Williams guiltily accepted, while Tynan, stammering badly, promised to turn up and denounce the proceedings as immoral. Later that day Hemingway encouraged Plimpton to go, since “it was important that a writer get around to see just about anything, especially the excesses of human behavior, as long as he could keep his emotional reactions in check.” Whatever the loss for literature, the macabre rendezvous fell through when the execution was delayed.
The English writer Norman Lewis also met Marks, who told him that most of the condemned men liked to give the order to fire themselves. The American said he took pride in his work. “As a technician—that’s how I see myself—I hate to see a bungled job,” he said. “Sleep well? I sure do.” Lewis learned that Marks had cuff links made from the firing squad’s spent rifle shells and gave them as presents to friends.
Perhaps the most humane account comes from Errol Flynn. In an unpublished typescript “How to Die” he wrote: “I have witnessed many gruesome sights in my life, but none more so than a human being facing the firing squad. I don’t care how much he deserves it, it made me vomit—and I couldn’t have given a damn when I saw the expressions of faint amusement on the faces watching the hero of a thousand screen battles, Flynn, so white and [about to] heave his brave guts up. Brave? Guts? I puked—close to the feet of a guard, spilling on the end of his hardworn boot, and there was a faint amusement in the faint flicker of the smile he had.”
Friends said that Flynn would return from these ceremonies looking gray and swearing to cut down his drinking: “I’m down to two bottles of vodka a day.”
IN OTHER REGARDS, Fidel remained a picture of moderation, promising that democratic elections would be held within eighteen months, denouncing communism, flaunting his religious medals, and in general assuring the world that Cuba was on track for a Caribbean version of Roosevelt’s New Deal. Segregation rules were done away with in bastions of privilege such as the Havana Country Club. Cuban business leaders were so supportive that they agreed to pay taxes in advance. Esso and Texaco even advertised in Revolución.
The American infatuation with Fidel as folk hero reached such a pitch that the revered newsman Ed Murrow agreed to interview him relaxing in silk pajamas in his Hilton penthouse. In a bizarre celebrity puff piece for the CBS series Person to Person, Fidel looks like a grown-up surprised on a sleepover as Murrow banters about the most crucial subject for US audiences: When does he intend to shave? “My beard means many things to my country,” Fidel explained, glancing at the collection of armed barbudos, whom the producer asked to stand off-camera. “When we have fulfilled our promise of new government, I will cut my beard.” Soon after, “Fidel Junior” is introduced with an adorable puppy and asked about his public school spell in Queens. “Were you as good-looking as your son when you were his age?” Murrow inquires flirtatiously of Fidel.
IN MID-APRIL, FIDEL accepted an invitation from the American Society of Newspaper Editors to speak in Washington, DC, which turned into a triumphant tour of the northeastern United States. He set off “full of hope,” wrote his press secretary Teresa Casuso (the Cuban novelist who had hidden weapons for him in Mexico and returned to join the revolution), and was welcomed as the second coming of Simon Bolívar, with the largest crowds that any foreign leader had ever attracted. To cash in on his popularity, a toy company made 100,000 fake beards and forage caps marked “El Libertador” to be sold alongside Davy Crockett coonskin hats. Fidel had hired a Manhattan PR agent, Bernard Relling, who advised him to cut the guerrillas’ hair and have them wear suits; the Cuban team should be university-educated and English-speaking. Fidel ignored the suggestions. He knew the power of their shaggy-haired image at a time when almost all American men stuck to a clean-cut look straight out of My Three Sons; in the 1950s, anyone who dressed otherwise risked alienating themselves from the establishment at best, at worst (in the more redneck parts of the South) receiving a hiding from police and spending a night in the cells.
Fidel was mobbed as he went for photo ops at the Lincoln Memorial in DC and an excursion to Mount Vernon. He spoke to legions of admiring students at Harvard and Princeton, who knocked down police barricades and rushed him. (Casuso found them “seemingly crazed.”) But the biggest frenzy occurred in New York City. When his train pulled into Penn Station, a crowd of 20,000 gave him a “tumultuous welcome”; it took twenty-four minutes just to cross the avenue to his hotel, most of the time carried on the shoulders of his admirers. He met Mayor Robert F. Wagner in City Hall, took in the view from the Empire State Building, and visited the Bronx Zoo, where he charmed reporters by hopping the fence and sticking his hand in the tiger cage. While eating a hot dog, he declared the zoo “the best thing in New York.” (Carlos Franqui had tried to get Fidel to visit the Museum of Modern Art instead but failed.) On his last evening he gave a speech in Spanish to an estimated 40,000 people at the Central Park band shell, and was presented with the symbolic keys to the city.
To the horror of the NYPD, which fielded the largest security detail in its history, Fidel repeatedly insisted on pushing past his bodyguards to shake hands. (“He has to greet his public,” Celia explained.) On one Manhattan drive, Casuso was terrified that their car might be overturned by crowds trying to get closer to their hero. Another night Fidel left his hotel without warning and ended up at a Chinese restaurant, chatting with students. “I don’t know if I’m interested in the Revolution,” one New York woman told Cuban reporters, “but Fidel Castro is the biggest thing to happen to North American women since Rudolph Valentino.”
On the surface, the visit was a smashing success. Newspapers embraced Fidel as representing Americans’ better selves. He came “out of another century,” the New York Times fluttered, “the century of Sam Adams and Patrick Henry and Tom Paine and Thomas Jefferson,” and “stirred memories, long dimmed, of a revolutionary past.” But behind all the grinning faces was a less happy story. President Eisenhower was miffed that the Cubans had defied diplomatic protocol and visited without an official invitation, and had even suggested that Fidel be denied a visa. Instead he made sure he was away on a golf trip when Fidel was in DC; the Second World War hero was not going to sit down with an upstart guerrilla. (He had become Prime Minister in February and remained head of the armed forces, making President Urrutia a virtual figurehead.) Fidel was forced to settle for a meeting with Vice President Nixon. The two men disliked each other on sight. “That son-of-a-bitch Nixon,” Castro reportedly said. “He treated me badly and he is going to pay for it.” Fidel had instructed his Cuban negotiators not to beg for US aid, and nobody offered it.
Fidel’s deepest wish had been to commune directly with the American public, just as he did with Cubans. Calling his visit “Operation Truth,” he appeared to be genuinely certain that, if only the political situation on the island was properly explained, Americans would be won over to the revolutionary cause. One night he did a jig in his hotel room, singing: “They are beginning to understand us better!”
In fact, Americans were not really listening.
THE AMERICAN PUBLIC’S mood swing was apparent during Fidel’s next visit to New York a little over a year later, in late September 1960, when he was a delegate at the United Nations. Teresa Casuso describes a gloomy car ride along the same Manhattan streets where they had been mobbed the year before: “Instead of the acclamation of thousands of people crowding the sidewalks, and the joyful faces of the automobile’s occupants, there were now only whistles and angry shouts as we crossed the city, and the sad silence of the passengers. I know what Fidel must have been suffering at seeing himself so utterly rejected.” This time, Fidel was mocked by the Daily News as “El Beardo.” Editorials ran with titles like “Spoiled Brat with a Gun,” which quoted Senator Barry Goldwater saying that the “knight in shining armor” had turned out to be “a bum without a shave.” The once-raffish Cubans were now wild-haired, unwashed degenerates: “Girls, girls, girls have marched into the Cubans’ suites,” tut-tutted the News. “There have been blondes, brunettes, redheads and—a detective said—many known prostitutes. Along with the girls have gone booze, booze, booze . . . Fidel himself had a visitor from 2 a.m. to 3:30 a.m. yesterday—an attractive bosomy blonde.” Instead of kids running around with toy Fidel beards, some Long Island residents burned him in effigy.
When the manager at the upscale Shelburne Hotel in midtown demanded a $10,000 cash security deposit from the Cubans, alleging that they were killing and cooking chickens in their rooms, Fidel packed his bags and marched his entire menagerie of seventy to the United Nations Secretariat, the sleek Modernist skyscraper that looms like a tombstone over the East River. There he explained to mild-mannered Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld that the Cubans would prefer to sleep in Central Park if need be, since they were “mountain people” and happy to be en plein air, than suffer such insults. Suddenly, they all hopped into cars at midnight for Harlem, the “capital of black America,” where the thirteen-story Hotel Theresa on 125th Street had offered to put them up.
It was a deft stroke on the eve of the civil rights movement. In 1960, Harlem was a “city within the city,” an isolated African-American enclave in uptown Manhattan that was culturally rich but economically depressed, its once-splendid streets of brownstones in decay, plagued by crime and drugs. Unlike the Jazz Age 1920s and ’30s, when nightspots like the Stork Club and Apollo were world-famous, only the most bohemian white New Yorkers were seen there after dark. No world leader had ever stayed in Harlem.
Fidel’s gesture of solidarity did not come out of nowhere. He had long encouraged African-Americans to come to Cuba to see the revolution for themselves, and even celebrated New Year’s Eve 1959 in Havana with black civic leaders from across the US with the boxer Joe Louis at his side. On his first night in Harlem, Malcolm X arrived and was photographed embracing Fidel in the hotel lobby. Every day, huge crowds of well-wishers from the Harlem community gathered in the streets. Two thousand rallied from the Nation of Islam. Photo ops included Fidel’s staff eating at a Chock full o’ Nuts and Juan Almeida, his Afro-Cuban military chief, bantering with waitresses in a diner. The puckish Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev also made the pilgrimage uptown to pay homage, and was photographed almost enveloped in a bear hug by the towering Fidel.
Fidel now stole headlines every day. When Eisenhower held a luncheon for Latin American leaders without inviting him, the Cubans hosted a rival meal at the Theresa with the black hotel staff. As Fidel sat down to steaks and beer alongside a bellboy, he declared himself most at home among “the poor and humble people of Harlem.” The group Fair Play for Cuba, which had been founded by Robert Taber and Richard Gibson, the first African-American reporter for CBS, then hosted a soiree that was the precise opposite of the UN’s stiff black-tie affairs. In an early example of “radical chic,” the gathering attracted a mixed-race group of leftist politicians, civil rights activists, and bohemians like poet Allen Ginsberg and photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson.
It was the perfect backdrop for Fidel’s speech at the United Nations on September 26, denouncing US imperialism. Clocking in at four hours and twenty-six minutes, it is still the longest address ever given to the body. When the Cubans were ready to go home, they found the US had impounded their planes. Khrushchev lent them a Soviet one.
WHAT HAD GONE wrong in between the two Manhattan visits? In retrospect, the American public’s feverish joy during Fidel’s 1959 tour turned out to be puppy love; the infatuation was superficial. White middle-class Americans did not want a genuine revolutionary. They expected Fidel to turn into a clean-shaven, well-behaved supporter and, above all, someone who could be controlled. When he went home to Cuba and enacted his first land reform bill in May, with genuinely radical changes that threatened the enormous American-owned sugar plantations, the affection evaporated. From then on, at every sign of Cuban independence, the US reacted like a jilted lover. As Herbert L. Matthews observed, Americans had been romanticizing Fidel as a hero who was going to “save” Cuba but let their wildly unequal economic relationship proceed as usual: “In reality, Americans were welcoming a figure who did not exist, expected what could not and would not happen, and then blamed Fidel Castro for their own blindness and ignorance.”
By early 1960, a tit-for-tat standoff was in full swing as Congress stopped Cuban sugar imports and Fidel and Che (who had been elevated to oversee the economy) began nationalizing American assets. Behind closed doors, Washington quickly gave up on peaceful coexistence. In March, six months before Fidel’s Harlem visit, Eisenhower had already approved a secret plan to get rid of him either by assassination or invasion. The argument over whether Cuba was pushed or jumped towards the Eastern Bloc may never be fully settled, but British Intelligence was already warning the US that its punitive actions were forcing Fidel into ever more radical positions and ensuring the island would be “lost.” The CIA began to destabilize Cuba by supporting anti-Castro rebels in the mountains. Bombs went off in the cities. The largest department store in Havana was torched; a French freighter in Havana Harbor exploded with massive loss of life. Fidel clamped down on dissent at home, and wealthy Cubans who had supported him began to flee. The country was becoming dour and humorless. Color began fading from Havana like bleached coral.
When the CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion occurred just after midnight on April 17, 1961, the Cuban population was already armed with Soviet-made weapons. Some 1,500 soldiers of fortune, mostly Cuban exiles, landed on the south coast; within three days 115 had been killed and the rest surrendered. It was a resounding defeat. Soon afterward Che sent a message to the White House through intermediaries, thanking JFK for organizing the botched invasion attempt, which had galvanized the Cuban population behind the new regime’s most extreme measures. “Before the invasion, the revolution was shaky,” he wrote. “Now, it is stronger than ever.” On May Day 1961, Fidel declared that Cuba was officially a socialist country in the Soviet camp.
The “honeymoon period” was not just over; it was such a distant memory that the two countries would forget that it had ever occurred. The long, acrimonious divorce had begun.
COULD THINGS HAVE gone otherwise? We will never know what Fidel was really thinking in the heady early days of 1959—and it is hard to imagine that he would have given up power once he had it, given the megalomaniacal tendencies he was already showing. But the course of the revolution was far from fixed when he first swept into Havana. Many around Fidel observed that he had no concrete plan for government. As Celia admitted, the barbudos were surprised to find that they had been handed such complete control of Cuba; M-26-7 had always thought it would share power. Overnight, they were running the country much as they had run the guerrilla war: by making things up as they went along.
Few observers at the time dreamed that Cuba would turn into the Soviet Union’s tropical satellite. Almost none of the men who landed in the Granma regarded themselves as Communists—including Fidel. Every CIA investigator had agreed that he had no real interest in socialist ideas; at heart he was a left-of-center nationalist whose burning desire was for Cuba to gain genuine independence. And yet, an air of inevitability hangs over the confrontations that unfolded. In 1959, American businesses owned almost every economic asset in the country, including the best land, the oil and telephone companies, power stations, and train lines. Fidel knew that Cuba would always be under US domination until the stranglehold was broken. By 1960, Fidel could see that a confrontation with the US was coming and began to seek out a new patron. The Soviet Union was eagerly waiting in the wings to buy Cuba’s sugar and offer economic aid. With its Sputniks soaring across the sky and industrial strength apparently surging ahead, the USSR was then regarded a viable alternative to the capitalist West. Soon Fidel and Che were requesting Soviet military assistance to fend off the coming invasion.
It may be idle to speculate, but a more flexible attitude from the United States in 1959—and an attempt to understand what independence really meant to Cubans—might have taken advantage of the enormous reserves of goodwill that remained between the two countries. Instead, Washington insisted on its right to control the island. We will never know where a more creative approach might have led—if, for example, the US had offered a generous loan and aid package to Cuba, as it did with almost every other new Latin American government. The result could hardly have been worse for America’s larger diplomatic goals than the hostile policy begun by Eisenhower and followed by JFK, leading the world to the brink of nuclear holocaust in the Missile Crisis of October 1962.
Another what-if proposition is more certain: history would surely have been different if Washington had not backed Batista throughout the 1950s. Cubans could never understand why the United States would abandon its noblest founding ideals to support a dictator who terrorized his own people. If the US had taken a more principled stand after his 1952 coup—if it had withdrawn military aid immediately, pushed for democratic elections, and criticized the regime’s most flagrant abuses—it’s quite possible that Batista would have stepped aside and change would have come to Cuba through peaceful means. There would have been no need for Fidel to start a revolution in the first place. It’s a dismal pattern that has been repeated over and over again in the decades since Batista fled, with the United States propping up a string of appalling dictators in Iran, Vietnam, Chile, and Panama, to name a few. The tragedy is that it has almost always led to disastrous results. By betraying its own principles, the United States has also managed to defeat its most basic strategic goals.