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This chapter examines the efforts of the Carter administration to normalize relations with Cuba, noting that no president before or since has made as determined an effort to normalize U.S.-Cuban relations. Carter’s personal belief in civil relations with friend and foe alike, Cuba’s reduced support for Latin American revolutions, and détente between the superpowers all led Carter toward normalization. But despite this clear presidential directive, the road to better relations was neither straight nor smooth. From the outset, senior U.S. officials were of two minds about the value of improving relations with Havana. And for Fidel Castro, improving relations with Washington was just one of several competing foreign policy objectives.

This chapter describes how the Kennedy administration secretly explored the alternative of accommodation in dealing with Cuba, despite the administration’s otherwise infamously aggressive actions against the country. Given that more aggressive options proved unequal to the task of ousting Castro, and the missile crisis dramatically demonstrated the dangers of hostility, the more civil option of trying to domesticate him through dialogue gained adherents—including the president himself. Amid economic destabilization, covert operations, and assassination plots, the Kennedy administration secretly but actively began to pursue what classified National Security Council (NSC) and CIA records referred to as “the rapprochement track” with Cuba.

Highlighting the mass rally called La Gran Concentración Campesina, the chapter examines the impact of rallies during the first months of the Cuban Revolution. It explores the huge mobilization of cross-class support for Fidel Castro's call for the execution of Fulgencio Batista's war criminals, as well as the Agrarian Reform in 1959 by analyzing the role of the media and the increasing centrality of mass rallies as instruments for asserting national sovereignty.

In this chapter, Louis A. Pérez Jr. proposes a unique answer to the question of why the U.S. sanctions against Cuba, which have outlived their historical time and outlasted their political purpose, remain. Pérez locates the sources of sanctions within the larger context of the narratives by which Americans fashioned the terms of self-representation. This chapter examines the realms of policy where the premise of the propriety of the U.S. purpose assumed the appearance of normal and universal, where the prerogative of power often passed for the pursuit of beneficence. It argues that the U.S. response to Cuba was very much conditioned by its deepening antipathy toward Fidel Castro, and that policies that Washington perceived as inimical to U.S. interests and contrary to its professed values came to be associated entirely with the person of the Cuban leader.

This chapter analyzes US-Cuban relations under the Eisenhower administration. The discussions include US-Cuban relations prior to the revolution; Ambassador Philip W. Bonsal's efforts to build a constructive relationship with Cuba's new revolutionary government; Fidel Castro's visit to the US in 1959; and events leading to the disintegration of US-Cuban relations.

This chapter argues that Castro's image as a selfless, Christ-like redeemer with similarly altruistic followers owed its origins as much to the actions of the clandestinos who withstood the brunt of the violence and constructed Fidel's messianic portrayal for Cubans and for the outside world as it did to the political strategies of the guerrillas themselves in the Sierra Maestra. Unknown but central to the guerrillas' importance was the way that they, like the clandestinos, sought to “humanize” war and violence by inviting citizens to see their actions as defensive efforts to reunite a Cuba that Batista—not the insurrectionists—had divided.

The U.S. Embassy stated in January 1959: “Fidel Castro clearly established himself as the dominant military and political figure in the revolution.” As U.S. government officials are pondering what Fidel Castro would do next, normal hegemonic assumptions guided their observations. U.S. dignitaries observed Castro being restless, headstrong, opportunistic, and motivated by an “undeviating urge for fame and political power.” Embassy diplomat Daniel Braddock stated: “Castro has taken Cuba by storm.”

Washington became convinced that Fidel Castro threatened U.S. security and its economic plans as well as core values that he had to be stripped down to the government of Cuba. The regime's execution of bastianos, postponement of elections, calls for revolution in the whole of Latin America widened the gap between Havana and Washington. Castro stated: “What do Americans know about... a tyrant's atrocities except in the novels and movies?” When Castro visited the United States in April 1959 under the sponsorship of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Eisenhower deliberately ignored him by leaving to play golf.

During his early years Fidel Castro had no ties with Cuba's Communist Party, however, the communists had encountered Castro's challenge to Batista. However, the CIA, FBI, and other U.S. agencies continued to search for traces of communism during the insurrection. Officials focused on possible law violations, such as The Munitions Control Act, The Voorhis Act, and the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Fulgencio Batista led the Sergeants' Revolt that helped bring the reformist Ramon Grau San Martin government to power. Fidel Castro, with young companeros, attacked the Moncada Army Barracks in Santiago de Cuba. Castro got a folk-hero status among Cubans for this but was branded as “a ruthless opportunist” by Americans.

This essay argues that the United States and the Soviet Union endeavored to thwart attempts by Cuba to become a prominent international actor from the mid-1960s through the early 1970s. They did so because of their mutual fear of dramatic changes in world affairs that were beyond their control and because each feared that what they saw as the adventurism of Cuban foreign policy might impair the prospects of détente. In the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis, officials in Moscow and Washington vowed to improve relations in order to avert another possible nuclear showdown. In short, the Soviet Union and the United States tacitly joined forces in the name of détente to contain Cuban efforts to play an influential global role.

This chapter analyzes US-Cuban relations under the Kennedy administration. Amid economic destabilization, covert operations, and assassination plots, the Kennedy administration secretly but actively began to pursue what classified National Security Council (NSC) and CIA records referred to as “the rapprochement track” with Cuba. To a policy built upon “overt and covert nastiness,” as one top secret White House memorandum characterized US operations, Kennedy's aides cautiously added “the sweet approach”—the possibility of “quietly enticing Castro over to us”.

This chapter discusses the most serious effort to normalize relations between the United States and Cuba since Washington broke ties with Havana in January 1961. In 1974, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger opened communications with Fidel Castro, anxious to discuss bilateral issues and to do so discreetly, through intermediaries. Kissinger’s message set in motion a protracted effort to achieve an “opening” to Cuba comparable to the opening to China—an effort to extend the Nixon-Kissinger strategy of détente with the Soviet Union to its Communist ally in the Caribbean. Over the next eighteen months, emissaries traveled back and forth between Washington and Havana, and Kissinger’s deputies quietly met with Cuban officials in airport lounges, New York hotels, and private homes to discuss the issues that divided the United States and Cuba.

This chapter begins with Batista’s March 11, 1952, coup, followed by a discussion of the violent and repressive character of the new regime. It also traces the development of the struggle to oust Batista including the emergence of several political and armed organizations, most saliently Castro’s 26th of July Movement. It examines the Moncada attack, the Granma landing, and subsequent guerrilla war that defeated Batista’s forces.

This chapter looks at how Fidel Castro's personal domination of the Cuban Communist Party (CCP) by the 1960s represented a clear break with the standard Soviet model of Leninist leadership. In contrast, it should be understood in terms of two factors. The first was Castro's agility as a guerrilla fighter in the 1950s and thereafter as Cuba's leader in tapping into nearly a century of popular frustration and anger at the failure of established organizations, and especially political parties, to meet the country's interests. The second factor was the successful propagation of a cult of “Fidel.” For this achievement, Castro owed much to his confederates and adulators.

Jimmy Carter, alone among all the presidents since the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, decided to make the normalization of relations with Cuba an objective of U.S. foreign policy. The story of Carter's policy is therefore of special importance in trying to understand why the two governments failed at that moment and how they might succeed in the future. The interests of the two governments at that time were not compatible: the United States chose not to normalize relations in the face of increased Cuban-Soviet military activities in Africa, and Fidel Castro viewed his international role as more important than normalizing relations. Tragically, with the end of the cold war, U.S. policy became even more hostile, as the Cuban American lobby replaced the cold war as the main reason for maintaining the status quo.

This chapter looks at how José Antonio Echeverría, president of the Federación de Estudiantes Universitarios (Federation of University Students, FEU), prepared the public to back the violent overthrow of the regime that he and his FEU allies were secretly plotting by appealing to Cubans with the claim that an armed challenge to Batista's power could only renew and refresh the national collective union. Castro and his supporters took this argument several steps further, couching their own movement's already proven commitment to violence in discursive histrionics of “making love, not war” in defense of la patria. In adopting the prose and pose of reluctant revolutionaries who loved rather than hated, Echeverría, Castro, and their respective movements attempted to undercut the very claims Batista had made all along, since the very day of his coup.

This chapter consists of two transcribed recordings that Mills made detailing his experiences and conversations with Fidel Castro. These are important not only because they offer a firsthand account of Mills’s conference with the Prime Minister, but because they also reveal Mills’s impressions of Castro and the revolution he was leading. Mills, who did not speak Spanish, spent three and a half 18-hour days traveling and conversing with Castro and Juan Arcocha, who served as his translator. On at least one occasion Mills took meticulous notes of such a conversation, but did not record it; later that day he made an audio recording of those notes as he dictated them onto the recorder. In this chapter is another recording that Mills made of interactions Castro had with military men on the Isle of Pines.

Fidel Castro explicitly rooted the grand narrative of redemption in the teachings of Jesus Christ and the rituals of Catholic Christianity amid a context of national crisis. This chapter focuses on Fidel's appeals to Christian-inspired notions of justice and the citizens' response to them. It explores the citizens' interpretations of fidelismo and how fidelismo became the collective cultural religion of a society governed by an ideologically Marxist state.

This chapter describes how, after the Bay of Pigs surrendered, most eyes—even those of the methodical Robert McNamara—remained fixed on Cuba. The defense secretary returned to the Pentagon after the April 20 cabinet meeting and ordered the Joint Chiefs to develop a plan for the military overthrow of the Cuban government. Two weeks later, he was handed a sobering answer from an interagency committee chaired by Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Nitze: overthrowing Fidel Castro would be too expensive. An invasion would involve many civilian casualties and imperil the U.S. position of leadership in the Free World. Almost everyone who cooled down a bit before offering advice said the same thing. However, something had to be done. Both the State Department and the CIA were especially concerned that the continued existence of Cuba's revolutionary government would destroy the new administration's reformist policy toward the rest of Latin America.