Fidel Castro How One Man With A Cigar Dominated American Foreign Poli

Fidel Castro: How One Man With A Cigar Dominated American Foreign Policy In 1959, a rebel, Fidel Castro, overthrew the reign of Fulgencia Batista in Cuba; a small island 90 miles off the Florida coast. There have been many coups and changes of government in the world since then. Few if any have had the effect on Americans and American foreign policy as this one. In 1952, Sergeant Fulgencia Batista staged a successful bloodless coup in Cuba . Batista never really had any cooperation and rarely garnered much support. His reign was marked by continual dissension. After waiting to see if Batista would be seriously opposed, Washington recognized his government. Batista had already broken ties with the Soviet Union and became an ally to the U.S. throughout the cold war. He was continually friendly and helpful to American business interest. But he failed to bring democracy to Cuba or secure the broad popular support that might have legitimized his rape of the 1940 Constitution. As the people of Cuba grew increasingly dissatisfied with his gangster style politics, the tiny rebellions that had sprouted began to grow. Meanwhile the U.S. government was aware of and shared the distaste for a regime increasingly nauseating to most public opinion. It became clear that Batista regime was an odious type of government. It killed its own citizens, it stifled dissent. (1) At this time Fidel Castro appeared as leader of the growing rebellion. Educated in America he was a proponent of the Marxist-Leninist philosophy. He conducted a brilliant guerilla campaign from the hills of Cuba against Batista. On January 1959, he prevailed and overthrew the Batista government. Castro promised to restore democracy in Cuba, a feat Batista had failed to accomplish. This promise was looked upon benevolently but watchfully by Washington. Castro was believed to be too much in the hands of the people to stretch the rules of politics very far. The U.S. government supported Castro's coup. It professed to not know about Castro's Communist leanings. Perhaps this was due to the ramifications of Senator Joe McCarty's discredited anti-Communist diatribes. It seemed as if the reciprocal economic interests of the U.S. and Cuba would exert a stabilizing effect on Cuban politics. Cuba had been economically bound to find a market for its #1 crop, sugar. The U.S. had been buying it at prices much higher than market price. For this it received a guaranteed flow of sugar. (2) Early on however developments clouded the hope for peaceful relations. According to American Ambassador to Cuba, Phillip Bonsal, "From the very beginning of his rule Castro and his sycophants bitterly and sweepingly attacked the relations of the United States government with Batista and his regime".(3) He accused us of supplying arms to Batista to help overthrow Castro's revolution and of harboring war criminals for a resurgence effort against him. For the most part these were not true: the U.S. put a trade embargo on Batista in 1957 stopping the U.S. shipment of arms to Cuba. (4) However, his last accusation seems to have been prescient. With the advent of Castro the history of U.S.- Cuban relations was subjected to a revision of an intensity and cynicism which left earlier efforts in the shade. This downfall took two roads in the eyes of Washington: Castro's incessant campaign of slander against the U.S. and Castro's wholesale nationalization of American properties. These actions and the U.S. reaction to them set the stage for what was to become the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the end of U.S.- Cuban relations. Castro promised the Cuban people that he would bring land reform to Cuba. When he took power, the bulk of the nations wealth and land was in the hands of a small minority. The huge plots of land were to be taken from the monopolistic owners and distributed evenly among the people. Compensation was to be paid to the former owners. According to Phillip Bonsal, " Nothing Castro said, nothing stated in the agrarian reform statute Castro signed in 1958, and nothing in the law that was promulgated in the Official Gazzette of June 3, 1959, warranted the belief that in two years a wholesale conversion of Cuban agricultural land to state ownership would take place".(5) Such a notion then would have been inconsistent with many of the Castro pronouncements, including the theory of a peasant revolution and the pledges to the landless throughout the nation. Today most of the people who expected to become independent farmers or members of cooperatives in the operation of which they