Fidel Castro was the Revolutionary leader of Cuba from 1959 to 2006. He was the first Communist leader in the Western Hemisphere. His political philosophy was all his own and that scared and confused many of the players in the International System at the time. The Untied Sates, the closest world power to Cuba and the leader of the fight against Communism, could not figure Castro out calling him “highly neurotic and unstable a personality as to be vulnerable to certain kinds of psychological pressure.” Castro was a multifaceted leader who bucked the system and created an air of mystery around him so thick that his closest allies could not see the true Castro.
Before the Revolution, Fidel was a student. He studied law at the University of Havana starting in 1945. Before university, Castro was not politically active. As his studies continued, Castro became disillusioned with the state of Cuba under its imperialistic relationship with the United States. In 1947, Castro joined a military force whose main objective was to overthrow Rafael Trujillo, the US backed president of the Dominican Republic. The Cuban government foiled this planned invasion, but it was one of the first indications that Castro was a born Revolutionary. As Castro aged, his anti-imperialistic nature developed as well. In 1948, Castro joined a student trip to Bogotá, Columbia to organize a Latin American Student Congress when the leader of the political opposition in Columbia was assassinated. Castro had, reportedly tried to turn the riots that followed the assassination into a revolution, but he wasn’t able to drum up support in Bogotá. According to the CIA in declassified documents, Fidel may have used guerilla warfare as his main tactic because of this incident. Not being able to create a cohesive force out of the outraged crowds may have led his thinking to start with those who lived outside of the cities in his revolution.
During his school years, Castro became a member of the Partido Ortodoxo, a left-leaning Cuban political party whose main tenants were derived from Cuban thinkers like Jose Marti. In 1952, Fidel ran for Cuba’s House of Representatives with support of Ortodoxo members who stemmed from Cuba’s poorest districts. As Castro was campaigning in 1952 Fulgencio Batista overthrew Cuba’s government in a military coup. He promptly cancelled the elections slated to occur later that year. Batista was backed by the United States. Castro, like many of those in Cuba’s left, thought that this was illegal and unconstitutional. He brought several legal petitions against the new government and no of which amounted to anything. Legally, Fidel had no options. Fidel’s inner revolutionary took control from this point onward. He started to plan an attack on one of Cuba’s largest barracks, the Moncada Barracks, located near his hometown in Santiago de Cuba. This operation was planned over the course of a year, from 1952-1953, and involved about 170 militants who would be assaulting the barracks, including Fidel. On July 26, 1953, Castro’s assault was a complete disaster. The alarm in the barracks was raised before Castro’s men even got inside of the barracks. Most of the men were captured soon after the start of the assault, with a small number escaping, only to be captured within the next few days.
During his time in jail, awaiting his trial, Castro wrote one of his most famous speeches, “History Will Absolve Me.” He gave this speech over 4 hours in the courtroom. Castro outlined many of his grievances with the Batista government and Cuba’s current state. Most of these grievances were things that affected the everyday people like education concerns; Cuba’s literacy rate was abysmal. One of these was the fact that many of the poorest Cuban’s did not have the money to buy shoes, which led to them contracting Hookworm, a parasitic worn that burrows into the body through the foot. This aspect of Castro’s four hour speech in his, and the other militants, defense shows how Castro fights for the people of Cuba and not just for himself or his political aspirations. Fidel, his brother Raul, and many of the other fighters were found guilty and sent to prison. After 2 years, in an effort to quell some political unrest, Batista agreed to free the Castros. From prison, Fidel and his brother set sail to Mexico where they gathered support and supplies. In 1957, Castro and his band of revolutionaries invaded Cuba.
Fidel Castro was the ringleader of the Cuban Revolution. He had devised intricate plans on how to overthrow Batista, but needed the manpower for it. Batista was vicious and ruled in a matter to benefit himself and the American corporations that funded his reign. His subjects were of the working class and were slaves, in all but in name, to the arable land Cuba possessed. Castro saw how many of the working class men were treated and promised them a better life once Batista was ousted from office and the land, which over 70% of it was owned by American businessmen, to be divided amongst those who worked it. Fidel Castro and his brother, Raúl, recruited hundreds of desperate Havana working class men and armed them. After hearing about the armed insurgencies in Cuba, the United States ended the sale of rifles and other guns to Batista’s troops, giving Castro and his army some leverage in the fight. Batista’s forces faltered and Castro’s entered Havana on January 1, 1959 and installed a provisional government, which Castro would eventually run as Prime Minister.
In the United States, Castro was seen as the hero of the Cuban people when he arrived in 1959 for a visit with members of the American government. On this visit, Castro met with Vice President Richard Nixon, not President Eisenhower. Fidel saw this as an insult, but did not act as such while still in America. Nixon wrote about his talk with Castro. He wrote of Castro’s loyalty to his people, but he questioned much of Castro’s actions. One topic that Nixon pushed for was a sure answer on democratic elections in Cuba. Castro’s answer to Nixon’s prodding on elections, and to many other topics, was that “…he justified his departure from democratic principles on the ground that he was following the will of the people.” Nixon, and many other US officials that meet with Fidel offered economic aid to Cuba. This may have been out of sheer altruism, but it was not something that Castro could except on the grounds that he was trying to break the hegemonic relationship between the US and Cuba.
As time elapsed, John F. Kennedy was sworn in as President and he inherited a plan to remove Castro and the communist threat from Cuba. What would later be called the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the CIA had completed a plan to overthrow the Castro regime with a group of trained Cuban exiles and other mercenaries. This plan was based on a similar operation that the CIA ran in Guatemala in 1954. It worked in 1954, but in Cuba in 1961, the invasion was a total failure. The 1000 or so invaders were captured or killed almost instantly. This completely soured the relationship between the US and Cuba. Things only got worse leading into 1962 as Castro and Khrushchev became close. In December of 1961, Castro declared that, “I am a Marxist-Leninist and I shall be one until the end of my life.” As the Cuban-Soviet relationship started to blossom, Kennedy and NATO placed nuclear missiles in Turkey as a defense measure against Soviet aggression. Khrushchev wanted his own missiles near the US border and Cuba is only 90 miles of the coast of the United States. Khrushchev now had a plan to turn his new found ally into a missile base. Castro was now put in between a rock and a hard place with the US, who had just recently backed a failed invasion of Cuba, and the Soviet Union, who was starting to become Castro’s economic lifeline. As Nixon said, Castro was a man who believed “… he was following the will of the people.” In an effort to make an assurance that the US would never invade Cuba again, Castro agreed to allow Soviet nuclear missiles to be stationed in Cuba.
This decision forever changed how Castro was seen by the world. The Cuban Missile Crisis was one of the closest times that the world came to Nuclear War. When the Americans discovered the missiles, plans to invade Cuba were immediately drawn up. Kennedy’s level-headedness kept some of the more hawkish advisors in check. His plan was one of negotiation. As Kennedy addressed the country on the existence of the missile sites in Cuba, he called for a “quarantine” of Cuba. His wording was very important here as a blockade would be an act of war, and that was the outcome that Kennedy, and the world, most feared. This quarantine was announced on October 22 and it was effective by October 24, when the Soviet ships carrying nuclear warheads were set to arrive. Luckily the ships turned tail back to Russia. On October 26, Castro wrote Khrushchev a letter verbalizing his fear of a US invasion of Cuba within the next 48-72 hours. Castro also urged Khrushchev that, if the US launched a full invasion of Cuba, he should drop a nuclear bomb on Cuba. This would make a martyr of Castro and his people for the Global Communist Revolution, but it would also severely cripple the United State’s military.
This plea cannot be taken lightly. Castro, who had not publically announced his belief in the Marxist-Leninist doctrine until less than a year before his letter to Khrushchev, was willing to sacrifice himself and his people for the communist cause of fighting imperialism. Asking for a nuclear death in the face of an invasion by Castro’s most hated enemy, the imperialistic Americans who ravaged his beloved country, and many of his Latin American neighbors for well over 100 years, seems like an act to show his commitment to communism, but it could also be the way that Castro saw to take revenge on America for their historical wrongdoings.
Castro’s hatred of imperialism manifested while Fidel was at the University of Havana. His disdain for the exploitation of Cuba by foreigners, like American businesses, was present long before Castro’s communism. In his speech, History Will Absolve Me, Castro talks about how half his country’s fertile land is owned by foreigners. His argument, and the reason for the land expropriation that resulted from his Agrarian Reform, was that Cubans are barely getting by, but the foreigners, mainly American fruit companies, were taking in much of the profit that should go to Cubans. Castro fights the US of Cuban’s to regain what they had exploited from them by the United States more than the Global Communist Revolution.
While Castro was ready to be martyred, Khrushchev thought that Castro was hotheaded and rash, especially during this crucial time in the negotiations. On October 27, Khrushchev had offered Kennedy to remove the missiles from Cuba in exchange for the US and its allies to never invade Cuba. This was what Castro had wanted in the first place, but Khrushchev was worried about Castro’s overzealousness. A man does not ask to be irradiated unless he is serious about his convictions. While the crisis was settled with limited bloodshed, one American pilot was shot down for invading Cuba airspace, Castro’s safety was guaranteed.
The world’s perception of Castro changed after the missile crisis. Many people who believed that Castro was a hero of the Cuban people and a true revolutionary looking to change Cuba for the better, now saw him as a communist puppet, even if this was not the truth. Castro may have been a man of the Cuban people, but he was also a man of revolution. As previously mentioned, Castro had tried to spark revolutions more than once. He succeeded in Cuba where he failed in Columbia and the Dominican Republic. Castro, and his right hand man Che Guevara, had always planned to export the Cuban Revolution to other countries. Castro was a man of armed conflict and he wished to spread revolution around the world in the same way he did created armed conflict in Cuba, violently. At this time, the Soviet Union had a policy of peaceful coexistence. Khrushchev’s lack of resolve when it came to armed struggle, and Castro’s convictions to fight until the end, led to a strained relationship between the Soviets and Cuba.
Castro’s need to make Cuba a player on the world’s stage is something that shaped how he presented himself and how others saw him. Cuba’s legacy of subservience to Spain, then to the United States, molded Castro into trying to create a spot in the world for Cuba. Fidel’s goal was for Cuba to become a pole in an ever-polarized world. As the Soviet Union was a collection of Russia and her satellite states, Castro wanted to be at the center of a Latin American Communist Union. By exporting his revolution to other countries that have been exploited by the Western colonialist, Castro hoped to achieve his goal.
Unfortunately for Castro, his movements in other Latin American countries all failed. Castro and his government tried to help spark revolutions in many of the countries in Latin America. Whether it was exporting arms, training, or even troops, Cuba tried to help the people, mostly in right leaning US backed countries, continue the Cuban Revolution throughout Latin America. Although he used tactics that had worked in Cuba, Castro’s men could not create the same kind of outrage in the people that was needed for revolution. A foreign military spouting Marxist-Leninist talking points to people in the countryside who most likely could not even read is not how revolution is born. Revolution is not something that can be started by those on the outside, but they must be created by the people who wish to revolt against their leader. Che Guevara was one of Castro’s biggest influences on armed struggle. Che personally led some of these forces trying to spark revolution, unsuccessfully.
Obviously, Cuba trying to spark leftist revolutions throughout Latin America was not something that the US could let stand. The American intelligence community had tried to assassinate Fidel Castro around 600 times. Castro was America’s boogeyman. To end the Missile Crisis in 1962 President Kennedy promised that the United States would not invade Cuba unprovoked. That being said, invasion plans for Cuba never stopped being made. Operation
Mongoose was one of many different strategies that the United States used to try and fabricate a reason to invade Cuba.
Operation Mongoose was a plan, drawn up by the Joint Chiefs of Staff before the Missile Crisis to create a situation where the United States could, justifiably, invade Cuba. The plan involved many different options like a staged attack of Cuban troops on Guantanamo Bay. One idea was to create a terror campaign against Cuban refugees and frame the Cuban government. “We could sink a whole boatload of Cubans enroute to Florida (real or simulated).” The United States’ upper echelon in the military was willing to create a false flag operations, or even go so far as to murder dozens of Cubans seeking asylum, just to justify an invasion. Now this plan was finished well before the Missile Crisis, but it was in response to the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion. At this time, the United States seemed to truly fear the power of Castro’s revolution, or at least what it stood for. Communism was America’s biggest threat, in their eyes, and their policy of intervention and invasion of other sovereign states exemplifies this fear.
Now, to be fair, the United States had reason to fear Cuba because of their relationship with the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was a nuclear power and America’s enemy. The Soviets had already tried to make Cuba a launch pad for their nuclear missiles. Fidel’s zealousness in his anti-imperial beliefs made him dangerous. His life’s mission seemed to be to fight imperialism at every turn starting with his participation in the failed invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1947. Castro would do anything to he could to strike a blow at imperialists. Although Khrushchev was against the idea, Castro had urged him to strike first if the Americans were to invade Cuba.
Castro’s anti-imperialism stemmed from his time in the University of Havana and from the Partido Ortodoxo. The Partido Ortodoxo was the political party that Castro joined while he was at the University. The Ortodoxo party was a leftist populist party. The party’s platform was one of reform including, anti-corruption, agrarian reform, and many other leftist ideas, that Fidel would one day would realize. A major part of the Ortodoxo platform, which Castro took to heart, was anti-imperialism. Castro was politically naive when he entered the University of Havana. His involvement in the Ortodoxo party shaped his political beliefs to a great extent, considering he didn’t have a stance to begin with.
Another one of Castro’s influences was Jose Marti. Marti was a Cuban thinker and revolutionary during the first Cuba Revolution in 1895. Although Marti was killed in the first battle of the Revolution, his writings leading up to the revolution concerned Cuba’s independence from Spain, an imperialist power, and Cuba’s national identity after their independence. Marti also focused on race relations in Cuba, advocating to abolish “race’ identification. This was a major break from Spanish society in their colonies as they classified everyone by their skin color and their ancestry. Castro most likely compared himself to Marti. He seemed to believe that he was the continuation of Marti’s legacy. During his rule, Castro quelled many of the racial inequalities with his economic and agrarian reforms. He also strived to put Cuba on the map as a player in world politics. The most important tenet of Marti’s thinking that Castro embodied was his anti-imperialistic beliefs.
Both Marti and Castro believed that imperialism is one of the main issues as to why the people of Cuba were so impoverished. Spain and the United States, respectively, were exploiting Cuba for her resources and her labor while hoarding all of the profits. In Marti’s time, Spain’s economic system of mercantilism kept all of Cuba’s profits from their resource production, mainly sugar production, with the peninsulars, the upper class of Spaniards who lived in Cuba, and with the Spanish government. The Cuban people were under their rule and many were enslaved up until 1886, 9 years before Marti’s revolution. Castro’s Cuba pre-revolution was quite similar. The sugar businesses, some of the only industry in Cuba, were owned by foreigners or by the corrupt government officials. The workers were given pennies on the dollar for their labor and their raw sugar compared to what was taken in at the top. This concentration of wealth at the top left Cubans poor and starving. The work done by the everyday Cubans should be compensated fairly. Both Marti and Castro believed in the value of labor and fought to create a Cuba that also fairly valued the workers.
Castro’s political beliefs may have stemmed from Marti and his time in the Ortodoxo party, but the main aspect of Castro’s politics was anti-imperialism. Most of Castro’s actions stem from his fight against imperialism and his intent to create a Cuba that was not exploited, but flourished as a sovereign nation. Breaking from the United States economically and expropriation foreign land, as well as other agrarian reforms, allowed the workers to have agency over their labor. By seizing the means of production from foreign companies and giving them to the people they should see a rise in the amount of money that they make and in the quality of living throughout Cuba.
Castro’s revolution was a fight against imperialism, not just Batista. After his power had been secured at home, exporting the revolution was Castro’s plan. His political dream was to create a Latin Revolution against imperialism. This may have failed, but his interventions in Africa, mainly the Angolan Civil War, succeeded where his efforts in Latin America did not. Cuba’s military aid in support of the MPLA, a leftist movement in the fight to control Angola after Portugal granted them independence. The intervention was in response to the news that South Africa had sent their troops into Angola to fight against the MPLA. South Africa was controlled by the Apartheid system, a social system based on race, at this point in time. Castro was a firm believer in racial equality, which may have helped him decide to intervene. Another reason may have been the fact that South Africa was backed by the United States at this time. Many of the poor, black, South Africans were in a very similar situation to Cubans before the revolution. Not only was this a fight to further the leftist cause in Africa, but also it was a fight against racism and imperialism. Nelson Mandela, Nobel Peace Prize winner and President of South Africa, saw Fidel Castro as, “a source of inspiration to all freedom-loving people." Castro became a hero to many Africans because of his fight against Apartheid and imperialism in Africa.
Cuba became a household name under Fidel Castro. His actions impacted the world. Although his dream of becoming a world power did not succeed, his role in world politics during the 60’s and 70’s shaped the Cold War and Latin America irreparably. His fight against imperialism led Cuba down a path of isolation and constant danger. The people of Cuba suffered for Castro’s goals, but people all over the world benefited from Fidel’s fight.