In 1952 a twenty-six-year-old Cuban lawyer, Fidel Castro, began openly to criticize the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. A little over a year later, on July 26, Castro and 160 idealistic insurgents he had recruited and trained attacked the Moncada army post in Santiago de Cuba. They were defeated, and Castro was captured, tried, and sentenced to twelve years in prison. Freed two years later in a general amnesty, Castro went to Mexico where he organized the Twenty-sixth of July Movement which dedicated itself to overthrowing Batista.

In December of 1956 he landed on the southwestern coast of Cuba’s Orient province with a force of eighty-one rebels. Again they were repulsed, and all but twelve were captured or killed. The twelve, including Fidel Castro, his brother Raul, and Ernesto "Che" Guevara, fled into the Sierra Maestra Mountains, where despite severe hardships, they gathered a new following. They organized, armed, and launched an increasingly effective guerrilla campaign that toppled the Batista regime on January 1, 1959. 1

Widely hailed as a heroic fighter for democracy and a liberator of an oppressed people, Castro became the darling of the U.S. press and television, and, as a result, a popular figure with the American public, although the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was suspicious of him from the earliest days of his revolution, Castro effectively, and in an amazingly short time, purged the Cuban bureaucracy of Batista supporters and dismantled the old army structure and replaced it with his own military forces under the command of his brother Raul. He also instituted sweeping reforms that provided equal opportunities for education and medical care to the poor and restructured the old elitist social order for the benefit of the lower classes. Meanwhile, the Cuban upper class began to flee the island.

As Castro began instituting a totalitarian regime along the lines of a police state, U.S. enthusiasm began to cool. When he began dispossessing the landowning, oligarchic class and collectivizing agriculture, U.S. enthusiasm grew cold. And when he began nationalizing both native and foreign industry, harping continuously on the ills of "Yankee Imperialism", and exporting his brand of revolution to other areas. The United States’ attitude became frigid. After Castro expropriated all U.S. business interest in Cuba, Washington, in January 1961, broke diplomatic relations with Havana. 2

What irritated, and perhaps alarmed, the U.S. government the most was Castro’s shift toward the Soviet Union. From the beginning Castro had consistently denied any Communist links or any intention of adopting a Soviet model for Cuba. During his April 1959 trip to the United States, he had stated categorically that he was not a Communist and did not agree with the Communist system. Then why did Fidel Castro turn toward the Soviet Union? 3  The answer lies in his foreign-policy objectives. He had not fought his revolution just to implement domestic considerations. His ultimate goal was the "Liberation" of Latin America, a goal symbolized in his slogan: "The Andes will become the Sierra Maestra of South America". 4