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This isn’t how it went down. Castro was open to working with the US and worked with Cuban liberal reformers initially, but he was pushed into the Soviet camp by US policy. Raul was a communist, but it’s not really clear when Fidel was fully won over to communism. If the US had been more willing to work with him, he might never have taken a communist line.
He made two ardent communists, Raul and Che, his de facto second and third in command way before it was clear to the US that he was a communist, and while the guerrilla war was still dangerous enough that he could have died at any moment. This would be comically incompetent if he was some kind of liberal reformist.
Raul and Che likely would have been willing to limit their ambitions to liberal reformism if it meant that they could accomplish the goals of the revolution while allowing Cuba to maintain a good relationship with the US.
I mean 67 out of the 82 he landed with were killed within 3 days. That plays havoc with the chain of command. Che was only meant to be the doctor for the party and had to step up.
Regardless you’re also forgetting Camilo Cienfuegos who was the official second in command of Fidel’s faction. His politics were pretty opaque, presumably some sort of leftist but how radical unclear. He died in a plane crash towards the end of the revolution.
Definitely Fidel was kind of a Maoist in the streets (how he fought a protracted peoples war from the countryside through a dialectical relationship with the peasantry’s needs) and a social democrat in the sheets (basically just wanted self determination for Cuba as a liberal democracy with welfare programs).
is being a social democrat in the sheets when you pretend to be pleasing your partner but actually you do the bare minimum just to prevent the eruption of a violent orgasm
Yeah Castro was forced by the US to be more friendly with the Soviet bloc due to trade (US embargo preceded the revolution being explicitly communist) and military threats and actions (if the US constantly threatens to attack you, the USSR might counterbalance). The revolution did have a substantial communist contingent in the cities and in leadership, so this was a natural consequence.
One of the first things done by the revolutionary government was to strike a deal for sugar exports, as the country, like many colonized countries, had a massively unbalanced economy that catered to colonist interests - at the time, cash crops, mobbed up casinos and sex trade, and limitations on industry. They originally made this offer to the US, but the US, as always, went as extreme as it could do pressure the newly sovereign government and refused and made threats. They then made basically the same deal with the USSR.
wow til tropico was a documentary
“Hey hot lady, go kill Castro!”
“Okay”
later
“So is Castro dead?”
“Yeah about that…”
Too bad the CIA tortured Che Guevara to death. Cowards.
