The Foreign Service Journal, May 2013

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MAY 2013 47 ment. Reporting, especially Herbert Matthew’s New York Times dispatches from the Sierra Maestra, portrayed a young, daring and educated guerrilla leader who would usher in a new era of enlightened governance for an island nation plagued by corrup- tion, repression and U.S. meddling. The ease with which Castro’s motley band brought about the collapse of the Batista govern- ment offered confirmation. So when Castro planned a visit to the United States as a guest of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, I was pleased, in a fit of undergraduate audacity, to invite him to visit Prince- ton on behalf of the American Whig-Cliosophic Society and its subsidiary International Relations Club, of which I happened to be president. He accepted, but ultimately gained more official sponsorship for this visit to campus. My notes from his remarks record him seeking a middle way between communism and capitalism, one that neither “sacri- fices freedom” nor fails to meet “the needs of the people.” He advised us “not to worry about communism in Cuba [because] when our goals are won, communism will be dead.” Castro must have said something similar in his three-hour meeting with Vice President Richard Nixon, because Nixon commented that Castro was “either incredibly naïve about com- munism or under communist discipline.” In Fidel: A Critical Portrait, one of the more important books about Fidel Castro, Tad Szulc wrote that on this trip Castro “had engaged in decep- tion [and] that Fidel had initiated secret coalition talks with the old communists at least three months before his American trip.” Nixon’s phrasing reflected the prevalent view in Washing- ton: world events should be seen in the context of an existential struggle with the Soviet Union. Events in Cuba moved rapidly to concentrate the Eisenhower administration’s mind. By the time Ike ceded the presidency to John Kennedy, Castro’s show trials of his opponents, his expropriations and Nikita Khrushchev’s embrace of the Cuban Revolution had convinced Washington to side against Fidel. President Kennedy rapidly executed Eisenhower’s plan to support an invasion by Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs. That effort was a well-known fiasco, and undoubtedly helped persuade Castro that he would be more secure with Soviet missiles posi- tioned in Cuba. Taking up my appointment as a Foreign Service officer in September 1963, I would soon become engaged with initiatives the Kennedy administration undertook to counter Soviet influence and the threat of Castro-style revolutions in the Americas, which risked moving the region out of the U.S. orbit and into the Soviet camp. For Latin Americans, Castro’s insurgent model offered Collage–Caryn Smith; Castro–Keystone/Hulton Archive/ Getty Images; Whale/Background–iStockphoto.com