 When revolution came to Cuba, I was pleased to see that democracy was coming to that island. I thought that Castro was a real, genuine, colorful, popular national hero, a savior of his nation. Unless we were reactionaries, we would have no right to think that Castro could not fulfill his goal. The victory of Fidel Castro was the victory of all of us Latin Americans, proud, nationalistic, and lovers of freedom. January 1, 1959. Pente Cece de Julio, the 26th of July movement led by Fidel Castro, had turned out the tyrant Batista. To the Cuban people and to the admiring world, there could be no better way to start the new year. A correspondent remembers those heady days, Aristides Molion of Venezuela's Últimas Noticias. 23 days after Castro's victory, we received him in Caracas. He had just triumphed over a dictatorship, and therefore we welcomed his revolution. Castro was an impassioned man, but a civil war is no joke. We had hopes that he would allow the Cuban people to decide on their own future, to take their place in the sun, and to adapt their institutions to their desires. The revolutionary leader now took to the public square in Nevada to tell the people what victory meant. There would soon be general elections. There would be a free press, beholden to no one. There would be land for the peasants. This revolution, Fidel Castro told the people standing in the sun of the Prado, is as native as the Cuban palms. But first there was further bloodletting to be done. The world had mixed emotions about such violent retribution. His convicted torturers and collaborators fell with a maximum of publicity and a minimum of due process of law. It was the seventh month in power of the Cuban Revolution. While the people waited for the first free general election in 20 years, as Fidel had promised, political orientation was carried out under the orders of Che Guevara, an Argentine with a Botticelli angel's face and a scholar of Marx. From obscurity came Cuban communist leader Blas Roca, claiming that communists had fought as hard as anyone else in the revolution. It was a fiction curiously tolerated by Castro. On the night of July 13th, Provisional President Manuel Urutia, a liberal judge who had denounced Batista and had been forced into exile for his pains, went on national television. There he warned that communism is not concerned with the welfare of the people, that it constitutes a danger for the Cuban Revolution. Among those who listened and watched was the man who had brought President Urutia back from exile. Four days later, he took to the television channels to accuse Urutia of treason. Urutia resigned and was put under virtual house arrest. Later he once again sought political refuge. Signor Fidelli of the Socialist Party of Italy recalls the time. It was the degeneration of the revolutionary movement. No elections were held. There was no democratic debate inside the revolutionary movement itself. The ideas of dissenters were not discussed since those who expressed opinions in disagreement with the majority were persecuted. As happened in the case of Huberto Matos, who was sentenced to 20 years. It was the 10th month of the Cuban Revolution. Leo Sauvage of Le Figaro, Paris, observed that it was stillborn. To serve truth, one must serve freedom. These are the two recommendations that Albert Camus in his speech in Sweden made to the writer and they can also be applied to the journalists. Journalists who wish to examine the situation in Cuba. Four years after the revolution have to begin by acknowledging three undeniable facts that underlie everything that happened later. The first was the arrest in October of 1959 of Commander Huberto Matos who was one of the first of Castro's colleagues and who was arrested in his general headquarters in Camagüey. He was arrested for one reason. Because he wrote a letter to Castro in which he expressed his disagreement with the communizing position, it wasn't as yet a communist one but a communizing position of the government. He took no stand, he made no action, he made no rebellion. He merely wrote a letter to a friend who was also a chief. He was arrested and despite Castro's request for a death sentence he was sentenced to 20 years in jail. Now I believe that it is this fact that Camus that he is still alive would have borne in mind when he prepared those two principles, the refusal to deny what one knows and resistance to oppression. In early 1960, the serious communication problem that existed between the United States and Cuba grew worse. US Ambassador Philip Bonsal, who had come to Cuba with support and greetings for the revolution, was rebuffed. What would amount to $350 million worth of land and property was expropriated without compensation. United States offers to reconcile differences went ignored. From his suite high up in the Havana Hilton Hotel where he would often seek his own tormented counsel, Castro now made his choice. On February 4th, 1960, the Havana airport resounded to the excitement and confusion attendant to great occasions of state. The arriving celebrity, Anastas Mikoyan, first deputy premier of the Soviet Union. In the month that followed, Cuba and Russia signed economic and trade agreements. Henceforth, Cuban sugar would sweeten the cups of Russian tea drinkers. $100 million worth of credit would be extended. Soon after, Che Guevara, the new honorary citizen of Cuba and Fidel's brother Raul went to communist Eastern Europe. Toasts were offered. So were arms. In this 1960 Havana May Day Parade, the arms are checked. Soon, they will be Soviet. From the Kremlin, Nikita Khrushchev pledged that the Soviet Union is raising its voice and extending a helpful hand to the people of Cuba. In the case of necessity, he threatened, Soviet artillery men can support the Cuban people with rocket fire. Meeting in San Jose, Costa Rica, the foreign ministers of the American Republic declared that such extra-continental intervention, as they termed it, endangers the security of this hemisphere. In response, Raul Roa, Castro's foreign minister, walked out. In Havana, in a rambling monologue for which he is now famous, Fidel Castro attacked the Organization of American States and denied that the Soviet Union or communist China had interventionist intentions. Moreover, said Castro, Cuba would establish relations with the Chinese People's Republic. As Castro speaks, no amount of bluster can disguise the people's unrest. To make certain it will not spread, people's brigades are rapidly formed. Children are encouraged to inform against their parents, anyone protesting or criticizing is a counter-revolutionary and as such, can be sentenced to the war. Brazilian journalist Luis Wesnitzer revisited Cuba during this time. I returned to Cuba in March of 1960 and things had still not been clearly defined and many people still believed in Fidel Castro. But I must say that I found a series of promises that had been made had not been fulfilled. Fidel was leading the country via television and speeches made all over the city and with his police. Many persons had been held in prison for four or five days without being interrogated. Thousands of political adversaries had been shot and this massacre lost Fidel many sympathizers in Latin America. The great landowners who had lost their land had found that the land had not been given to the peasants. The land had been nationalized and the peasants instead of serving, the landowner now were serving the state itself. Something that was even more distant and more abstract than the landowner. Fidel had nationalized the great enterprises which was fine. But through a work law he had also done away with private property and small business however humble it might be. The state had the right to intervene and nationalize a shop if the employees were not satisfied with what they were being paid or the treatment they were receiving. The middle classes that had raised Fidel to power were now deceived by him. In an interview that Fidel gave me at that time one night in the Brazilian Embassy he told me that socialism as far as he saw it was the best way for Latin America but he wanted a more strict type than that that existed so far. All the answers he gave me that night were of Marxist inspiration. He did not belong to the Soviet bloc but he had become a self-taught Marxist. In schools the textbooks had been substituted by Marxist textbooks. Trade unions had no more autonomy and they had become organs of the body along Soviet lines. One day a very well-known journalist of Cuban television a very close friend of Fidel's told me that I had been misled that not only did Fidel dislike the Communist but very few days later Fidel would throw them all out of the country yet a couple of days ago this correspondent had to leave Cuba for Mexico. The next time Fidel Castro came to New York after a triumphant first visit in April 1959 it was not as a conquering hero. Soon diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba would be severed all together. The newsman who once had been impressed Hans Steinitz of Berlin's De Morgan Post now took another look. I obtained a clearer and when I look back even a more accurate picture of Castro when he returned to New York for the General Assembly of the General Assembly in the fall of 1960 it was that General Assembly when a great number of heads of states and governments were there Khrushchev, Macmillan, Tito, Nehru and many others and Castro of course had to be there himself. It was a memorable theater performance which he gave a performance with very low and vulgar taste quite obviously cynically and well planned and certainly centrally directed. There was some scandal in the hotel which Castro chose first and he then declared that from now on he would live in a tent in Central Park and then he went to a hotel in the colored quarter and Khrushchev visited him and embraced and everything that would be cheap and vulgar was to be seen until the time when Castro went to the roster of the United Nations and for five full hours with his shirt color open spoke for five hours to the General Assembly. At the occasion of this General Assembly I believe that any illusions one might have had about Castro would have to disappear. He who would say perhaps there's only an alliance with the Communists or is a tool of the Communists or on the contrary he was trying to use the Communists for his own ends had to recognize that he had been completely wrong. It was clear that there was a cynical plan for an alliance with the Eastern Bloc and little by little it came so far that at the occasion of votes in the UN a Cuba voted with the East. Another journalist, Pulitzer Prize winner Herb Locke saw it in pen and ink this way. During the third year in power of the Cuban Revolution Cuba's economy was in serious trouble. Unskilled farm labor, students and clerks were commandeered to gather crops through government mismanagement and lack of incentive for peasants to work state owned land the sugar crop began to grow sparse. By 1962 Cubans would be speaking of the harvest of the bitter sugar. Everywhere there were food cues in rationing. There was hunger for political freedom as well and soon tens of thousands of Cubans became known as refugees. We took the power, which were our systems free place to every body, free ideas, free religion belief and all those rights, those human rights that we could establish in the most... No oratorical harangue could dispel what their faces told of the real Cuba as they went into exile. Where once Castro had promised a new life for the Cuban people he now chose instead to restock his arsenal. In 1962 he boasted of having 350 medium and heavy tanks 300,000 machine guns, rifles and pistols more than 100 jet fighters all at a cost that would be enough to feed, clothe and shelter every newly born Cuban baby for the rest of its life. What manner of man is this former revolutionary? What works within the mind of a man who in April 1959 said I am not communism. I am not agree with communism. And just two years later insisted I am a Marxist, Leninist and will be until the last day of my life. What kind of conscience does this man own? A man who once told the Cuban peasants the man who works the land must own it those who have no land must have some and then three years later told these same people why should we give land to the peasant? soon he'd want more and more and then he'd become a large landowner a man of many faces surely these are questions which will intrigue the historian and the analyst for years to come Aristides Mollion again At this moment now not as quickly as some but not as slowly as others we have realized that Castro is not following the right path he had not called for elections in Cuba he rather consulted the people in the open plaza in order to support or reject his policies and to reject his policies naturally implied a certain number of risks We of Latin America have long experience with dictatorships and we know full well that when the people is consulted in the open plaza it is because there is a dictatorship and we know also that a dictatorship always brings about the jailing of the better groups the suppression of public freedoms from that moment on we could no longer support the Castro regime In October 1962 the world was not only disillusioned with the Cuban Revolution but outraged with the discovery of at least 10 Soviet missile bases in Cuba aerial reconnaissance photos revealed their location and their menace armed with one megaton warheads the missiles could reach and conceivably destroy Washington or Lima, Peru Now your leaders are no longer Cuban leaders inspired by Cuban ideals they are puppets and agents of an international conspiracy which has turned Cuba against your friends and neighbors in the Americas and turned it into the first Latin American country to become a target for nuclear war we know that your lives and land are being used as pawns by those who deny your freedom The President of the United States announced the nation's intentions among the decisions and insistence upon immediate dismantling and withdrawal of the missiles a quarantine on all offensive military equipment and continued increased surveillance of the military buildup Hemisphere support was swift the organization of American states by a vote of 20 to nothing approved the resolution some nations offering active military assistance Surveillance did continue in the air as planes may pass as to photograph missile installations despite Cuban anti-aircraft and on the sea as US Navy Task Force 136 steamed to a fateful rendezvous with Russian ships and Cuba-bound ships entering the quarantine area would be commanded to heave to be searched one week later Premier Khrushchev who had never once consulted Castro issued a new order calling for the return of the weapons to Russia then like a penitent burglar who's been caught in the act he wrote to President Kennedy after all both you and I understand what kind of weapons they are editorial cartoonists around the world express their scorn but even though the missiles left and even though the world allowed itself its first sigh of relief in days the fact is this 6 million Cubans remain imprisoned on their island and more than 250,000 are without a country each vowed that their displacement was only temporary that they'd return to create a free Cuba the news arriving from Cuba is very encouraging to us the workers have not gone over to communism the peasants have not gone over to communism the students have not gone over to communism the regime exists today because of two reasons because of the apparatus of betrayal and espionage and because of the military apparatus set up and handled by the Muscovites the world awaits the next act of history with millions of people in Cuba and throughout the world directly affected by the next turn of Castro's ambition the world now awaits with anxiety and with contempt this is their verdict the deputy prime minister of Thailand, Prince Wang the subversive attempt to bring Cuba under communism has been done torturously in the manner of a snake it is only right that the United States has taken out the snake's fangs but as Shakespeare said the snake is scotched but not killed Castro is more dangerous than a snake we see that revolution in Cuba is rather moving in opposite direction if later it joined the communist bloc it turned matters worse but even had it not done so from that moment on it had no longer our support Tamargo, Cuban correspondent without any doubt at the end of four years Fidel Castro having delivered his revolution to Russia has converted the republic into this concentration camp as everyone who is in Cuba can see and it's a kind of depressing factor to me because we in our country too believe in democratic principles Dorrego from Buenos Aires I deplore that six million Cubans have been swindled by a revolution which promised them freedom and democracy and gave them death and slavery Silva from Rio de Janeiro we also regret that Cuban workers have not been granted their rights and we regret that there is no freedom of press in that country we believe that freedom of press is fundamental as we consider the press to be the lung through which we breathe Amanda in from Hong Kong the Cuban revolution was at first a local political revolution but later it was utilized as a total one by the communists in their attack against the free world whether in Asia or Africa the communists have been taking advantages of contradictions within a country to stir up trouble to further their aggressive designs a Cantonese refugee from communist China for the purpose of seizing power the communist revolutionaries found it to their advantage to be on the side of the people at the beginning but once victory was secured they did not hesitate to turn their guns on the people from our own bitter experience people on the Chinese mainland have come to realize that the fate in store for the Cubans cannot be any different from what has befallen the Chinese people a Cuban correspondent this is a living example which should be studied carefully by all Latin American countries because of the lesson which can be derived from it 100 years ago the great Cuban liberator Jose Martí wrote among the dreams of man there is one that is most beautiful to overcome the darkness perhaps one day Cuba will overcome the darkness and truly no freedom and peace