{"id":300765,"date":"2024-04-25T18:29:17","date_gmt":"2024-04-25T22:29:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/oncubanews.com\/en\/?p=300765"},"modified":"2024-04-26T19:07:11","modified_gmt":"2024-04-26T23:07:11","slug":"in-a-forest-of-prejudices-fidel-and-the-americans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oncubanews.com\/en\/opinion\/columns\/in-plain-words\/in-a-forest-of-prejudices-fidel-and-the-americans\/","title":{"rendered":"In a forest of prejudices: Fidel and the Americans"},"content":{"rendered":"

It is difficult for me to speak here in the middle of a forest of prejudices. I can speak here about a real revolution that is taking place near your country. Our revolution was made without hate of class. There was never a division from one class to another. Our revolution is a revolution for social justice, for the poor people, and of course, too, for the middle class<\/span><\/i>.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is Fidel Castro, 65 years ago, speaking in English to students at Princeton University. The Revolution has triumphed 109 days ago, and he has been in the United States for five, where he has arrived as a guest of the Newspaper Publishers Association. Although on a \u201cprivate\u201d visit, he has spoken repeatedly in front of that big press, on high-rating television programs, and has even met with the Secretary of State, with senators and representatives of the Congress\u2019 foreign committees, and with Vice President Nixon himself. The photo of him waving to the crowd in Washington is on the front page everywhere. He is not yet 33 years old.<\/span><\/p>\n

Before leaving Havana, Ambassador Bonsal made all kinds of recommendations on how to make the most of the trip. The diplomat, for whom Cuban politics is a crossword puzzle, believes that the trip will be a round trip, and it annoys him that the journalists have taken the lead over the Eisenhower administration. He knows, by the way, that the general president was reluctant to invite him, waiting for Fidel and Cuba to toe the line. Instead, the guerrillas have slipped through the half-open door of the press, since closing it would have been embarrassing (Eisenhower discreetly asked if they couldn\u2019t \u201cdeny him a visa\u201d).<\/span><\/p>\n

The plan is dizzying, of course, like everything back then, but not so improvised. The government\u2019s economic team, made up of top professionals, has prepared to talk with their counterparts in the North. The National Bank has sent a memo to the other side proposing an agenda on cooperation and financial assistance. And the Foreign Ministry (the foreign minister is not yet Roa, who was serving as ambassador to the OAS) has even hired a well-known U.S. public relations company to advise the visit.<\/span><\/p>\n

For some notable historians, this was the best opportunity to have avoided the breaking of relations and the spiral of conflict that surrounded it. I\u2019m not saying no. Reviewing it retrospectively is like going back over the history of what could have been, a path of lost opportunities, options, and gestures that were just that. However, it allows us to appreciate how many negative reactions, vested interests, prejudices, underestimations, arrogance, the young revolution and its top leader had already aroused in the toxic climate of the Cold War.<\/span><\/p>\n

In fact, if you look carefully at everything that was happening in that political theater, with the benefit of time and declassified papers, the chronicle of a death foretold was already underway, the collision course between the United States and the Revolution. This was true despite the fact that that expedition was hopeful for many, including Fidel himself.<\/span><\/p>\n

The first act of the Revolution in power had been to install the revolutionary courts, to prosecute the dictatorship\u2019s criminals. The popularity of those processes at home contrasted with the commotion they raised abroad. Instead of taking justice into their own hands, as 25 years earlier, when Machado fell, this time the trials applied the law as punishment for the repression. In January 1959, the independent Cuban press spoke of 20,000 deaths. Beyond the number of victims, the 81 months of Batista\u2019s regime represented a much greater cumulative effect: that of a historical hangover in which impunity had prevailed, from the time of Weyler until the last dictatorship. In the Cuba of 1959, there were living witnesses to all these pending cases. This time they were going to be judged.<\/span><\/p>\n

Paradoxically, the first point of friction between the United States and the young Revolution had been neither the agrarian reform nor the nationalizations, but rather the punishment of human rights violators and its extreme transparency, which reached the point of letting in the Cuban and foreign press to the executions. Although its outward image turned out to be counterproductive. Let\u2019s say, the sequence of the execution of Colonel Cornelio Rojas, police chief of Santa Clara, guilty of countless murders and torture that terrorized the city, presented a defenseless old man, dressed in civilian clothes, whose hat flew through the air under the impact of the bullets. With that bad image circulating around the world, what would be the surprise of the Christian Science Monitor\u2019s envoys when they heard Cubans on the street who, instead of protesting the expeditious action of the courts, asked them: \u201cDid you already see how exemplary Cuban justice is?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

It is not surprising that, when those newspaper editors, fascinated with the exotic image of Fidel and the bearded men, took the initiative to see him up close, they offered him the golden opportunity, above any other economic or diplomatic interest, to convey to the people in the United States, live and direct, their version of what was happening in Cuba. That was the priority. Thus, no more asking for help or financing, he told his perplexed economists, this is going to be a visit of goodwill, to tell our truth. And so the delegation of 40 Cubans left, on April 15, 1959.<\/span><\/p>\n

Fidel Castro in three acts<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n