For János

CONTENTS

Title Page
Dedication
Prologue

1 The Stage Is Set

2 Into the Belly of the Beast
3 Monday 19 September
4 Tuesday 20 September
5 Wednesday 21 September
6 Thursday 22 September
7 Friday 23 September
8 Saturday 24 September
9 Sunday 25 September
10 Monday 26 September
11 Tuesday 27 September
12 Wednesday 28 September
13 ‘¡Viva la Revolución!’

Acknowledgements
Select Bibliography
Index
About the Author
By the Same Author
Copyright
 PROLOGUE

The voice of our leader will be heard in every corner of the UN hall and in every corner
of the world … More than the voice of Cuba, Fidel will be the valiant voice of all the
oppressed …
CUBAN RADIO, 15 SEPTEMBER 1960

It was, to say the least, idiosyncratic behaviour for a prime minister. But,
for Fidel Castro – a man who liked to hold cabinet meetings at midnight,
and who had a habit of turning up at hotel kitchens unannounced in the
hopes of rustling up a quick meal – it was entirely in character. One
afternoon in early September 1960, the leader of Cuba’s revolutionary
government was strolling along Calle Doce y Veintitrés, one of the
chicest parts of Havana, famous for its art galleries, cinemas and cafes,
while snacking on some spicy Creole oysters. It was a pastime that he
had enjoyed many times while a student in the late 1940s. Suddenly, the
Cuban prime minister made a beeline for a shoeshine boy, who was well
known as the best source of gossip in the capital. ‘What do you say I go
up to New York,’ Fidel asked, smiling, ‘and speak at the UN?’
‘Caballo,’* replied the boy, enthusiastically, ‘get on up there and put it to
those damn Yankees.’1
Soon, all of Havana was buzzing with speculation that Fidel would be
attending the Fifteenth Session of the UN General Assembly. Due to
open on 20 September, the gathering would afford Fidel the chance to
defend the Cuban Revolution on the world stage, and from inside the
very heart of the United States at a time of deepening acrimony between
the two countries. His presence in New York, then, would be guaranteed
to make waves. Early on the morning of Tuesday 6 September, America’s
‘man in Havana’, Philip W. Bonsal, cabled the Secretary of State to
report on the growing rumours that Fidel was planning to attend the UN.
Bonsal, a fifty-seven-year-old Yale alumnus and career diplomat, who
had been in post for eighteen months, judged that the Cuban leader’s
attendance ‘appears probable’.2 Then, on the evening of Saturday 10
September, came another tantalizing hint. During a television newscast,
Mario Kuchilan – editor of Prensa Libre (Free Press) – teased viewers by
confessing that he knew of a head of government who was planning to
attend the General Assembly, before going on to explain that ‘for the
moment I cannot divulge this news’. Three days later, a statement from
the presidential palace made it official: Fidel Castro was going to New
York.3

Notes
1. Carlos Franqui, Family Portrait with Fidel: A Memoir (New York: Random House,
1984), 82.
2. Bonsal to Secretary of State, 6 September 1960, 320/9-660, College Park; Department of
State, For the Press, no. 49, 21 January 1959, Nomination of Philip Wilson Bonsal to be
Ambassador to Cuba’, in DDE Office Files, Part 2, Reel 5, Cuba (2), RIAS.
3. ‘Castro Plans U.N. Trip, Reports in Havana Say’, New York Times, 12 September 1960,
3; R. Hart Phillips, ‘Castro to Attend Assembly Session’, NYT, 14 September 1960, 1.

* During the early years of the revolution Fidel was known as El Caballo, ‘The Horse’ –
which was the pictorial representation of the number one in the lottery. The origin of the
nickname is ascribed to the popular Cuban entertainer Beny Moré, who is said to have
exclaimed, ‘Here comes the Horse,’ after hearing Castro pass by one night – see Richard
Gott, Cuba: A New History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 175.
 1

THE STAGE IS SET

Cuba certainly is going to remain hot …

LIVINGSTON T. MERCHANT, US UNDER SECRETARY OF STATE FOR POLITICAL AFFAIRS, 8
APRIL 1960

The opportunity [for] antagonistic foreign leaders to come right on our doorstep and
abuse us is one of the evils that goes with being host to the U.N.
SENATOR GORDON ALLOTT – REPUBLICAN, COLORADO, 9 SEPTEMBER 1960

Fidel Castro – champion of the oppressed, scourge of colonialism, critic

of racial segregation, and beatnik revolutionary – had certainly picked his
moment to face down the ‘Yankee imperialists’ in their own backyard. In
the autumn of 1960, the US government was beset by a series of
deepening crises. On the domestic front, Washington was confronted
with intensifying demands from African Americans for equal rights, as a
new generation of students launched a wave of direct-action protests that
rocked the South and exposed President Eisenhower’s gradualist
approach to the race problem as hopelessly out of touch. Meanwhile, on
the international stage, America’s leaders were scrambling frantically to
counter a newly belligerent Soviet Union, which saw, in the rapid (and
often chaotic) end of European empire, the chance to steal a march on her
Cold War rivals.
For Fidel, the opportunity to add to America’s discomfort was far too
good to pass up. During his stay in New York, which lasted from 18 to 28
September, the Cuban leader would receive a rapturous reception from
the city’s black community, hold court with a succession of political,
intellectual and cultural luminaries – including Malcolm X, Nikita
Khrushchev, Gamal Abdel Nasser, C. Wright Mills and Allen Ginsberg –
and promote the politics of anti-imperialism, racial equality and leftist
revolution with a fervour and an audacity that was to make him an icon
of the 1960s counterculture, and his country a centre of the global anti-
imperialist movement. Fidel’s sojourn in New York helped to place the
Global South – including his own Latin America – at the very centre of
the Cold War, while his new-found and very public closeness with
Khrushchev, whom he met for the first time there, all but guaranteed a
decisive and fateful rupture in US–Cuban relations. Meanwhile, his
valorizing of black freedom fighters, celebration of ‘Third World’
revolutionaries and association with ‘radical chic’ offered an early
glimpse of the cultural politics – the fêting of Black Power activists, open
support for the Viet Cong and an instinctive condemnation of American
‘empire’ – that would soon become de rigueur for a generation of young
leftists across the United States and Western Europe. Although no one
knew it at the time, then, this brief trip proved to be both a turning point
in the history of the Cold War and a foundational moment in the creation
of what we think of as ‘the Sixties’.

The opening session of the Fifteenth General Assembly brought together

an unprecedented galaxy of international statesmen, the like of which the
United Nations – and its predecessor, the League of Nations – had
seldom seen. Among the ten heads of state, thirteen prime ministers and
seventy or more foreign ministers and other senior government ministers
in attendance were some of the biggest global political stars of all:
Dwight David Eisenhower, the thirty-fourth president of the United
States and a Second World War hero; Nikita Khrushchev, the pugnacious
leader of the world’s other superpower, the Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics; the prime ministers of Great Britain, Canada and Australia;
and major players from the Global South, including Jawaharlal Nehru
(India), Sukarno (Indonesia), Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana) and Gamal
Abdel Nasser (United Arab Republic).1
Rising out of the ashes of the Second World War, the United Nations
symbolized the post-war hopes for a new international order. In the
words of its founding charter, the organization’s purpose was to ‘save
succeeding generations from the scourge of war’, to affirm and protect
fundamental human rights, and to advance the cause of social and
economic progress.2 Formally established in San Francisco on 24
October 1945, the UN was rooted in a universal appeal to freedom,
equality and rights. At the same time, though, the decision to grant
permanent membership of the Security Council – and the accompanying
veto power – to the USA, Britain, France and the USSR (along with
China) preserved the influence of the traditional Western powers. The
advent of the Cold War in 1947–8 rendered the Security Council – the
only body with the power to authorize the use of force – more or less
impotent when it came to the major issues of war and peace. And with
the Security Council stymied, the General Assembly, in which every
nation had an equal voice, came to take centre stage.3
Founded by its ‘great power architects’ as an ‘institution tolerant of
empire’ (otherwise Britain and France, who had no intention of giving up
their colonies without a fight, would never have supported it), the United
Nations, according to the historian Mark Mazower, ‘turned astonishingly
quickly into a key forum for anti-colonialism’.4 An early sign of this had
come in 1946 when, under the leadership of Jawaharlal Nehru, India –
one of only four founding members that were not independent at the time
of admission – had protested the second-class treatment afforded to
Indians living and working in South Africa. The government in Pretoria
was, Nehru argued, in breach of its Charter obligations.5 In the course of
the following decade, the European powers – economically ravaged by
the Second World War, overstretched militarily, and under intense and
growing pressure from indigenous nationalist movements – saw their
empires collapse on a scale, and at a pace, that had been scarcely
imaginable in 1945. Among those joining India in the UN were Pakistan
(1947), Burma (1948), Indonesia (1950), Cambodia, Ceylon, Laos
(1955), Morocco, Sudan, Tunisia (1956), Ghana and Malaya (1957) and
Guinea (1958). Then, in 1960, the so-called Year of Africa, sixteen of the
seventeen new nations admitted to the United Nations were newly
independent African states.* The original founding membership of fifty-
one, of which Cuba was one, had virtually doubled in just fifteen years,
and the so-called Afro-Asian bloc now made up forty-six out of ninety-
nine votes.6
Although the General Assembly lacked teeth and a two-thirds
majority was needed to pass resolutions dealing with peace, security and
other major issues, it came to serve as a major forum for debate and the
shaping, and reshaping, of international opinion. As Mazower puts it,
‘even though the UN had been established by the great powers, Third
World nationalists took its universalism at face value, exploited its
mechanisms, and fostered international public opposition to continued
colonial rule.’7 They also – as the historian Adom Getachew has
highlighted – worked tirelessly to promote the idea of ‘self-determination
as a human right’, refashioning it ‘as a prerequisite to other human rights’
and insisting that it required an ‘immediate end to colonial rule’. This
stood in stark contrast to the position held by the UN’s founders, who
subordinated the right to self-determination ‘to the larger aim of securing
“peaceful and friendly relations among nations”’ (the concept did not
appear at all in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights).8 A mere
fifteen years after its founding, anticolonial nationalists had successfully
captured the UN and transformed the General Assembly into a platform
for the international politics of decolonization. 9

As well as taking place at a key moment in the history of decolonization,

the Fifteenth Session of the General Assembly was also opening against a
wider backdrop of international tension. Despite a brief thaw in the Cold
War, which had seen Khrushchev meet with Eisenhower at Camp David,
Maryland, in September 1959, hopes for a meaningful rapprochement
had quickly soured. In the bitter aftermath of the U-2 incident, in which
an American spy plane had been shot down over Russia on 1 May 1960,
Khrushchev lashed out at the perfidy of the United States. Storming out
of disarmament talks in Paris later that month, the Soviet leader retaliated
by ratcheting up the tension over Berlin. Deep in communist East
Germany, the divided city – which, fifteen years after the end of the
Second World War, remained occupied by Britain, France, the United
States and the Soviet Union – was viewed by Khrushchev as a ‘fishbone
in his throat’. The exodus of thousands of East Germans – many of them
young and well educated – to the West via Berlin constituted an
existential threat to the German Democratic Republic. Travelling back
from Paris, Khrushchev had stopped off in East Berlin where, before an
audience of 10,000 communists, he had denounced Eisenhower’s
‘treachery’ and, not for the first time, threatened to sign a separate peace
treaty with the GDR – a move that would bring an end to Western rights
of occupation in the city. On 7 September, Allen Dulles, the CIA director,
told President Eisenhower’s National Security Council that Khrushchev
appeared to be ‘deliberately stirring up the Berlin situation in order to
have it at boiling point’ by the opening of the General Assembly.10 The
West German government of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, meanwhile,
fretted that Khrushchev’s impending appearance at the UN General
Assembly ‘might be the beginning of new and more dramatic moves by
the Soviets’.11
While diplomats were keeping a nervous eye on Berlin, an even
greater crisis was underway in the Congo. Occupying a vast swathe of
central Africa, the Belgian Congo boasted huge mineral wealth, notably
in copper, tin, cobalt, uranium and diamonds. The personal possession of
King Leopold II from 1885, the territory had been organized as a formal
colony of Belgium in 1908. The colonial masters brutalized,
impoverished and exploited its people, and left its infrastructure
criminally underdeveloped. On the eve of its independence on 30 June
1960, the Congo had no real road system, no locally born doctors, high
school teachers or military officers, and only sixteen university graduates
in a population of more than twelve million. In pre-independence
elections, held in May, the Mouvement National Congolais emerged as
the biggest party, and its leader, Patrice Lumumba – a former postal
clerk, and left-wing nationalist – became prime minister. The Belgians,
who, to put it mildly, had little time for Lumumba, were further incensed
when, in an independence-day speech delivered before an audience that
included Baudouin, King of the Belgians, he excoriated the ‘injustice,
oppression, and exploitation’ of the former colonial regime and
celebrated the ‘end to the humiliating bondage which was imposed upon
us by force’. ‘We shall show the world’, Lumumba declared, ‘what the
black man can do when working in liberty, and we shall make the Congo
the pride of Africa.’12
It was not to be. Almost immediately, the country began to fragment;
in July, with the active encouragement of Belgian mining interests and
government officials, the mineral-rich province of Katanga, headed by
staunch anti-communist and one-time accountant Moïse Tshombe,
attempted to secede.13 As the country slipped into chaos, and Belgium
sent in troops to protect its citizens, in violation of the Congo’s newly
established sovereignty, Lumumba appealed to the United Nations for
help. On 13 July, the Security Council voted to send thousands of
peacekeepers to oversee a Belgian withdrawal and ensure the country’s
stability. But, dismayed that the UN forces would not be immediately
sent into Katanga (the UN had little appetite for placing its troops in the
middle of a civil war), Lumumba turned to Moscow for assistance.14
During the early years of the Cold War, Stalin had viewed non-
communist movements for national liberation in Africa and Asia as ‘class
enemies’.15 His successor, though, took a very different approach.
Khrushchev was, in fact, keen to build anti-imperialist alliances across
the rapidly decolonizing Third World, and argued that the Soviet Union
offered the newly independent nations a clear alternative to the capitalist
West’s model of economic modernization; one that was free from the
stain of colonial exploitation. ‘Today,’ Khrushchev explained, the former
colonies ‘need not go begging for up-to-date equipment to their former
oppressors. They can get it in the socialist countries, without assuming
any political or military commitments.’16 Confident that the future
belonged to socialism, Khrushchev declared: ‘Let us verify in practice
whose system is better. We say to the leaders of the capitalist states: Let
us compete without war.’17 Alongside long-term credit, technical
assistance, trade agreements, scientific cooperation and arms came a
charm offensive: in the autumn of 1955, for instance, Khrushchev spent
almost two months in Asia, travelling thousands of miles, visiting
cultural and historic sites, and greeting crowds that turned out in their
hundreds of thousands.18 During his decade in power, the Soviet Union
sponsored some 6,000 projects across the Third World, often at enormous
expense.19 High-profile recipients of largesse from Moscow and her
Eastern bloc allies during the 1950s and 1960s included India, Ghana,
Egypt, Cuba – and, briefly, the Congo.
In early August 1960, Khrushchev promised Lumumba the ‘friendly
and disinterested help of the Soviet government’. Arms – including
weapons, ammunition and IL-14 transport planes – as well as
humanitarian aid, soon followed. US officials were now convinced that
the Congolese prime minister was ‘a Castro or worse’. Fearing the
prospect of a ‘second Cuba’, Washington began covertly to seek
Lumumba’s removal: the CIA hatched an assassination plot, and the
Eisenhower administration encouraged the Congolese military to take
over. On 14 September, with the opening of the UN General Assembly
now just days away, Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, a Lumumba confidant and
newly appointed army chief of staff, staged what was, for now at least, a
bloodless coup. Lumumba, holed up in his official residence, was now
reliant on UN troops to prevent his arrest.20

While these extraordinary international dramas were unfolding, the UN’s

host country, the United States, was itself on the cusp of seismic political
and social change.
Back on 1 February, a bold new front in the struggle for African
American civil rights had opened up, when four students at North
Carolina’s Agricultural and Technical College, in Greensboro, had sat at
a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter and demanded service. One of
the idiosyncrasies of the South’s entrenched system of white supremacy –
known colloquially as ‘Jim Crow’ – was that, while African Americans
could shop in the store, they could not eat at the store’s lunch counter.
After being refused service, the young men remained seated for an hour –
politely rebuffing requests to leave – until the store closed. The
experience was personally, as well as politically, transformative; one of
the four, nineteen-year-old Franklin McCain, explained:
… if it’s possible to know what it means to have your soul cleansed – I felt pretty clean at
that time. I probably felt better on that day than I’ve ever felt in my life … a lot of feelings
of guilt or what-have-you suddenly left me, and I felt as though I had gained my manhood,
so to speak.

The following morning, McCain and his three friends were joined by
more than a dozen others. Within a month, more than thirty towns had
been affected by sit-ins; by the end of April, some 50,000 students had
taken part in protests across more than seventy southern towns and cities,
with 2,000 arrested.21 There were sympathy boycotts, too, in northern
cities, and even overseas. In Cuba, where a common history of struggle
against slavery, racism and oppression, as well as shared connections
across the Caribbean diaspora, had long served to foster deep and
meaningful connections between black Cubans and African Americans,
students picketed the American-owned Woolworth store in downtown
Havana. Their placards read: ‘Woolworth Denies Democratic Rights to
Black People’.†22
The African American students’ audacious challenge to segregation
grabbed headlines, and was sustained by local organizations that included
chapters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP; founded in 1909, it was America’s largest and oldest
civil rights organization) and the Baptist church. Aided by continued
media interest, the emerging movement also benefited from the
uncompromising stance of their opponents. The contrast was unmissable
between the well-dressed, polite and disciplined nonviolent activists, on
the one hand, and the implacable defenders of Jim Crow, who often
resorted to intimidation, taunts and violence (students were splattered
with eggs and coffee, had cigarette butts stuffed down their collars, and
some were beaten up), on the other.23 An editorial in the conservative
News Leader, written during the height of the sit-in protests in Richmond,
Virginia, noted that:
Here were the colored students, in coats, white shirts, ties, and one of them was reading
Goethe and one was taking notes from a biology text. And here, on the sidewalk outside,
was a gang of white boys come to heckle, a ragtail rabble, slack-jawed, black-jacketed,
grinning fit to kill, and some of them, God save the mark, were waving the proud and
honored flag of the Southern States in the last war fought by gentlemen. Eheu! It gives one
pause.24

Capturing, with perfect moral clarity, the iniquities of racial

segregation and the righteousness of the crusade that was now being
waged against it, the sit-ins launched a new era of mass protests that
would, within just a few years, transform the face of the Jim Crow South.
Meanwhile, the first stirrings of the wider student revolt that would
dominate the 1960s were being felt in San Francisco. There, during the
second week of May, college students from across the Bay Area gathered
at City Hall to protest hearings that were being convened by the House
Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) – the congressional
body that had played a leading role in the 1950s ‘red scare’ by
investigating the communist infiltration (both real and imagined) of
labour unions, the teaching profession, civil rights organizations and the
Hollywood film industry, ruining numerous lives in the process.
On Friday 13 May, faced with hundreds of peaceful protesters singing
‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ and ‘We Shall Not Be Moved’, the police
turned firehoses on the demonstrators, blasting them down the building’s
imposing marble staircase, and dragging others away. The attempt to
crush the protest was, though, wholly counterproductive: 5,000 people
turned out to denounce HUAC the following day, and in a subsequent
court hearing all the charges were dismissed, with the judge describing
the protesters as ‘clean-cut American students’. Operation Abolition, a
propaganda film that portrayed the demonstrations as the work of highly
trained communist agents, also backfired, inspiring many thousands of
young people to enrol at the University of California-Berkeley, which
quickly found itself at the centre of the 1960s student movement.25
If racial and social tumult was not enough, the United States was also
in the midst of a gripping political contest. With President Dwight
Eisenhower just about to turn seventy and in his final year of office, the
forty-seven-year-old Republican Richard Nixon was battling John F.
Kennedy, his forty-three-year-old Democratic rival for the presidency. In
this close-fought race, one thing was certain: power would shortly pass to
a new generation of leaders, the first to be born in the twentieth century.
As vice president for eight years, Nixon was the candidate of experience;
a figure who had been at the very heart of the Eisenhower administration
(after Ike suffered a massive heart attack in September 1955, Nixon had
effectively served as ‘acting president’ for several weeks, presiding over
regular meetings of both the cabinet and the National Security
Council).26 Pointing with pride to what he characterized as the ‘best
eight-year record of any Administration’ in American history, Nixon
promised to build on this ‘great record’ in order to forge ‘a better
America’ and to realize the dreams of millions of people, in the United
States and throughout the world, ‘for a fuller, freer, richer life than men
have ever known in the history of mankind’.27
Meanwhile, the senator from Massachusetts who, like Nixon, had
enjoyed a meteoric political rise, sought to harness the spirit of a new era
to propel his bid for the White House. Decrying the Republicans as the
‘party of the past’, and a vote for Nixon as a ‘vote for the status quo’,
Kennedy proclaimed that ‘we stand today on the edge of a New Frontier
– the frontier of the 1960s – a frontier of unknown opportunities and
perils – a frontier of unfulfilled hopes and threats’. Calling on his fellow
Americans to rise to the challenge posed by ‘uncharted areas of science
and space, unsolved problems of peace and war, unconquered pockets of
ignorance and prejudice, unanswered questions of poverty and surplus’,
he declared that ‘the times demand new invention, innovation,
imagination, decision’.28

In some respects, Fidel Castro and John F. Kennedy were not dissimilar.
Fidel, like Kennedy, was born into privilege: the Castro family home was
a rambling, plantation-style mansion that sat on a 25,000-acre sugar cane
farm in Oriente province. Like Kennedy, he grew up in the shadow of a
domineering patriarch – his father, Ángel Castro y Argiz, a self-made
immigrant from Galicia, northwest Spain, was famously stern.29 And,
like Kennedy, Fidel was a devout patriot with a gift for oratory, who
would come to personify the idealism of a new generation.
Kennedy’s rise to power was gilded. In 1940 he graduated cum laude
from Harvard, where he had majored in government and international
relations. After wartime service in the US navy, where he saw action in
the Pacific and was decorated for heroism, he was elected to the House of
Representatives in the mid-term elections of 1946; elevation to the
Senate came just six years later. In 1957, he won the Pulitzer Prize for
biography for his – largely ghost-written – book, Profiles in Courage.
Fidel’s path to the top, though, would be quite different.
Fidel, the only pupil in his elementary school class who owned shoes,
later claimed that his passion for social justice had been forged during his
childhood. Mayarí, the region where he grew up, was dominated by the
all-powerful, American-owned fruit and sugar companies, such as United
Fruit and Cuban-American Sugar. And with these companies came stark
inequalities of wealth and opportunity. Cuban cane cutters – including the
fathers of Fidel’s childhood friends – lived in squalid shacks, earning just
a dollar a day, sometimes less, during the four months of the sugar
harvest and eking out a hand-to-mouth existence during the so-called
dead time. Meanwhile, the companies’ American employees and their
families enjoyed a sumptuous lifestyle, in gated communities that
boasted luxury stores, swimming pools and access to private beach
resorts.30
Fidel, whose rebelliousness, stubbornness, lack of discipline, and
recklessness had earned him the nickname ‘El Loco’ (the crazy one),
enrolled at the University of Havana in the autumn of 1945 to study law.
He later set up a legal practice with two of his classmates, in a slightly
shabby neighbourhood, to defend the rights of the poor. His first love,
though, had always been politics: aged just thirteen, he had attempted to
organize a strike among the workers on his father’s own sugar plantation
and, at university, he had immersed himself in the cut-and-thrust of
student politics. A keen debater, Fidel had overcome an early fear of
public speaking, and his great hero and role model was José Martí. Born
in January 1853 in Havana, this poet, philosopher, journalist and
revolutionary spent most of the 1880s and early 1890s in exile in New
York, where he developed a powerful critique of American imperialism
and corporate capitalism. ‡ Then, in April 1895, Martí returned to his
native Cuba to help lead the nationalist uprising. His death at the hands
of the Spanish, on 19 May, during the Battle of Boca de Dos Rios, made
him a martyr.31
Like Martí, Fidel was committed to eliminating the vested interests,
the inequality and the corruption that marred his homeland. During late
1951 through early 1952, he had been preparing to run for Cuba’s
National Assembly, as a member of the left-wing Partido Ortodoxo. But
then, on 10 March 1952, Fulgencio Batista, Cuba’s leader from 1934 to
1944, returned to power in a coup, and immediately suspended the
constitution and cancelled the elections. Whereas Batista’s first period of
rule had been relatively progressive, his new government soon descended
into a corrupt and brutal dictatorship. With the democratic route closed
off, Fidel turned to the politics of revolution. On 26 July 1953, he led an
assault on the Moncada Barracks, in Santiago in the south of the country,
in a doomed attempt to spark a popular uprising. While many of his
fellow rebels were killed, or subsequently hunted down, Fidel was
captured alive and, three years into a fifteen-year jail term, was granted
an amnesty. He headed to exile in Mexico with a promise to return ‘with
the beheaded tyranny at one’s feet’.
Fidel was as good as his word. In November 1956 he arrived back in
Cuba aboard the Granma, a rickety leisure yacht that had been purchased
from an ex-pat American dentist. After a disastrous landing, and the
death or capture of most of the eighty or so rebels, Fidel, his younger
brother Raúl, the young Argentine doctor Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara and a
dozen other survivors regrouped in the Sierra Maestra mountains. It was
from here that Fidel and his 26 July Movement launched a remarkable
military campaign that culminated in the Maximum Leader’s triumphant
march into Havana on 8 January 1959. Batista had fled into exile nine
days earlier.32
Having stunned the world by overthrowing El Hombre (‘the Man’)
and then establishing a genuinely revolutionary government right on
America’s doorstep, it did not take very long for Fidel to turn his
attention to the international arena. In the spring of 1959, he travelled
across the Americas – visiting Canada, the United States, Brazil,
Uruguay and Argentina – in an attempt to win public and political
support for his revolution, and to champion the cause of Latin American
solidarity. On 22 April, after touring the UN Building in New York and
conferring for thirty minutes with Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld,
Fidel told waiting reporters that Cuba – hitherto a rock-solid ally of
Washington – would now be pursuing a more independent course at the
United Nations. He also declared that, while it might provide a helpful
example to his sister republics in the hemisphere, the Cuban Revolution
was ‘not for export’. In São Paulo, a few weeks later, Fidel proclaimed
that ‘our aspirations are the same as those of all Latin America’ and, at an
economic conference in Buenos Aires, he called for a Marshall Aid-style
programme of economic development for the continent.§33 Now, in the
Fifteenth General Assembly of the United Nations – which was bringing
together leading international statesmen against a backdrop of major
geopolitical and social change – he saw an unparalleled opportunity to
burnish his credentials on the world stage.

An insight into Fidel’s motivations in attending the General Assembly

can be found in the pages of Revolución – the official newspaper of the
26 July Movement, and the de facto mouthpiece of the government.
According to his biographer, Tad Szulc, from the beginning Fidel acted
as the newspaper’s ‘supereditor, visiting its offices, conferring almost
daily with Carlos Franqui, who was the editor and chief propagandist,
and seeing to it that the revolutionary line was phrased precisely the way
he wanted it to be every time’.34 On 15 September, Revolución’s Juan
Arcocha reported that the official announcement that the Maximum
Leader would be attending the Fifteenth General Assembly had
‘provoked enthusiasm in the streets … The citizenry, overjoyed,
commented that Fidel was going to New York “to throw the Americans
out”.’ This was, Arcocha claimed, ‘evidence that popular wisdom has
dutifully grasped one of the important aspects of the trip, one of its
advantages: the fact that the Prime Minister will thereby have a global
platform … from which he will be able to launch to all corners of the
world the revolutionary message of Cuba’. But, Arcocha continued, the
Cuban people ‘appear to have given very little thought to another aspect
of Fidel’s trip, less apparent and perhaps infinitely more important. Fidel
at the UN will be a historic event of the highest magnitude. It will be,
possibly, the first knock at the door marking the end of imperialism.’
At the end of the Second World War, Arcocha explained, Winston
Churchill had worried that, in creating the United Nations, the great
powers risked ‘giving life to a small Frankenstein’. In the years that had
followed, ‘the subjugated peoples began to wake up. The colonial
countries of Asia and Africa were liberating themselves one after another
… from the colonial yoke.’ In April 1955, in a striking display of their
new-found power, representatives of twenty-nine newly independent
countries from across Africa, Asia and the Middle East convened in the
Indonesian city of Bandung with the aims of fostering cooperation
among Third World nations, coordinating the ongoing fight against
colonialism and white supremacy, affirming the right of all nations to
self-determination, and promoting world peace. With the formation of the
Afro-Asian bloc, Arcocha explained, ‘winds of change began to blow in
the General Assembly of the United Nations’ and ‘imperialism began to
beat a hasty retreat’. ‘And then’, Arcocha continued, ‘Fidel came down
from the Sierra.’ Now, ‘the podium is ready … the little Frankenstein is
stirring, and Fidel is going to New York to rouse him.’35

Notes
1. Thomas J. Hamilton, ‘Leaders at the U.N.’, NYT, 2 October 1960, E11.
2. UN Charter at http://www.un.org/en/charter-united-nations/.
3. Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins
of the United Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 6–9, 16, 17, 196;
Sunil Amrith and Glenda Sluga, ‘New Histories of the United Nations’, Journal of World
History, vol. 19, no. 3 (September 2008). For a history of the UN see also Paul Kennedy,
 The Parliament of Man: The Past, Present and Future of the United Nations (London:
Penguin, 2007); for a recent study of America’s support for the creation of the UN see
Stephen Wertheim, ‘Instrumental Internationalism: The American Origins of the United
Nations, 1940–3’, Journal of Contemporary History, published online 20 February 2019.
4. Mazower, No Enchanted Palace, 152. For a thoughtful discussion of how anticolonial
nationalists were able to transform the General Assembly ‘into a platform for the
international politics of decolonization’ see Adom Getachew, Worldmaking After Empire:
The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019),
chapter 3: ‘From Principle to Right: The Anticolonial Reinvention of Self-
Determination’, 71–106.
5. For a discussion of this see Mazower, No Enchanted Palace, 149–89; Lorna Lloyd, ‘“A
Most Auspicious Beginning”: The 1946 United Nations General Assembly and the
Question of the Treatment of Indians in South Africa’, Review of International Studies,
vol. 16, no. 2 (April 1990), 131–53; Saul Dubow, Apartheid, 1948–1994 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2014), 47–9; and Nico Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared
Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2012), 179, 181–2.
6. http://www.un.org/en/sections/member-states/growth-united-nations-membership-1945-
present/index.html#footnote30; Mazower, No Enchanted Palace, 185.
7. Mazower, No Enchanted Palace, 188. For an interesting discussion of the UN’s role in
the decolonization process see Eva-Maria Muschik, ‘Managing the world: the United
Nations, decolonization, and the strange triumph of state sovereignty in the 1950s and
1960s’, Journal of Global History, vol. 13 (2018), 121–44.
8. Getachew, Worldmaking After Empire, 71, 73–4.
9. Getachew, Worldmaking After Empire, 73.
10. Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A World History (London: Allen Lane, 2017), 292–3;
William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man, His Era (London: The Free Press, 2005), 467,
482–3; Lawrence Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 58–60; ‘Memorandum of Discussion at the 460th
Meeting of the National Security Council’, 21 September 1960, Foreign Relations of the
United States, 1958–1960, Berlin Crisis, 1958–1960; Germany; Austria, Volume IX,
document 214; ‘Memorandum of Discussion at the 460th Meeting of the National
Security Council’, 7 September 1960, p. 11, in DDE Papers as President, 1953–61 (Ann
Whitman File), NSC Series, Box 13, 458th Meeting of NSC, 7 September 1960, DDE.
11. ‘Memorandum of Conversation: Possible Discussion of Germany and Berlin at
Forthcoming Session of United Nations General Assembly’, 9 September 1960, 320/9-
960, College Park.
12. Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2007), 136–7; Westad, The Cold War: A World History, 282; Aleksandr Fursenko and
Timothy Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War: The Inside Story of an American Adversary
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 297–9, 307; Roger Lipsey, Hammarskjöld: A Life (Ann
Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2013), 298; 387–95; Patrice Lumumba,
‘Speech at the Ceremony of the Proclamation of the Congo’s Independence’, 30 June
1960, available at
https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/lumumba/1960/06/independence.htm.
13. Westad, The Global Cold War, 138–9; Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War,
307–18; Lipsey, Hammarskjöld, 396–405, 410–11; Miles Larmer and Erik Kennes,
 ‘Rethinking the Katangese Secession’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth
History, vol. 42, no. 4 (2014), 741–61.
14. Westad, The Global Cold War, 138–9; Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War,
307–18; Lipsey, Hammarskjöld, 396–405, 410–11.
15. Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The KGB and the World: The Mitrokhin
Archive II (London: Penguin, 2006), 5.
16. Andrew and Mitrokhin, The KGB and the World, 5; Andreas Hilger, ‘Communism,
Decolonization and the Third World’ in Norman Naimark, Silvio Pons and Sophie Quinn-
Judge, eds, The Cambridge History of Communism, Volume II, The Socialist Camp and
World Power 1941–1960s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 322–5.
17. Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War, 57.
18. Sara Lorenzini, ‘The Socialist Camp and the Challenge of Economic Modernization in
the Third World’ in Naimark et al., eds, The Cambridge History of Communism, Volume
II, 344; Taubman, Khrushchev, 354.
19. Andrew and Mitrokhin, The KGB and the World, 6.
20. Westad, The Global Cold War, 138–9; Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War,
307–18; Lipsey, Hammarskjöld, 396–405, 410–11.
21. Robert Cook, Sweet Land of Liberty? The African-American Struggle for Civil Rights in
the Twentieth Century (London: Routledge, 2013), 113–15;
https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/sit-ins; Claude Sitton, ‘Negro Sitdowns
Stir Fear of Wider Unrest in South’ and David Halberstam, ‘A Good City Gone Ugly’ in
Reporting Civil Rights, Part One, American Journalism 1941–1963 (New York: The
Library of America, 2003), 433–46.
22. Devyn Spence Benson, Antiracism in Cuba: The Unfinished Revolution (Chapel Hill:
The University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 161. On the Cuban–African American
connection see also Manning Marable, ‘Race and Revolution in Cuba: African American
Perspectives’, Souls, Spring 1999, 6–17 and Lisa Brock and Digna Casteñeda Fuertes,
eds, Between Race and Empire: African Americans and Cubans before the Cuban
Revolution (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998).
23. Cook, Sweet Land of Liberty?, 113–21.
24. Howard Zinn, The Zinn Reader: Writings on Disobedience and Democracy (New York:
Seven Stories Press, 1997), 56–7.
25. Carl Nolte, ‘“Black Friday,” birth of U.S. Protest Movement’, 13 May 2010 at
https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Black-Friday-birth-of-U-S-protest-movement-
3188770.php and ‘May 14, 1960: Firehoses Confront Free Speech in S.F. City Hall’, Zinn
Education Project – https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/firehoses-confront-free-
speech/; Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam,
1993), 82–3.
26. On the heart attack see, for instance, Robert E. Gilbert, ‘Eisenhower’s 1955 Heart
Attack: Medical Treatment, Political Effects, and the “Behind the Scenes” Leadership
Style’, Politics and the Life Sciences, vol. 27, no. 1 (March 2008), 2–21 and Richard
Nixon, Six Crises (New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1962), 131–81. On Nixon’s
role within the Eisenhower administration see Irwin F. Gellman, The President and the
Apprentice: Eisenhower and Nixon, 1952–1961 (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2015).
27. Richard M. Nixon, Acceptance Address, 1960 Republican National Convention,
Chicago, 28 July 1960, available at
https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/richardnixon1960rnc.htm.
28. John F. Kennedy, Acceptance Speech, Los Angeles, 15 July 1960, available at
https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/historic-speeches/acceptance-of-democratic-
nomination-for-president.
29. Tony Perrottet, Cuba Libre! Che, Fidel, and the Improbable Revolution (New York: Blue
Rider Press, 2019), 33–4; Tad Szulc, Fidel: A Critical Portrait (London: Coronet Books,
1989), 91, 99.
30. Perrottet, Cuba Libre!, 34; Szulc, Fidel, 94–5.
31. Perrottet, Cuba Libre!, 24–6, 34–6, 37–41; Szulc, Fidel, 85, 98, 104, 111–12, 116, 135,
202; Michael Collins, ‘“Pure Feelings, Noble Aspirations and Generous Ideas”: The
Martí–Dana Friendship and the Cuban War of Independence’, Radical Americas, vol. 1,
no. 1 (2016), 1–24 and Lillian Guerra, ‘Re-evaluating the Influence of José Martí’, New
West Indian Guide, vol. 75, no. 1–2 (2001), 89–96. For more on Martí see Lillian Guerra,
The Myth of José Martí: Conflicting Nationalisms in Early Twentieth-Century Cuba
(Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005).
32. Simon Hall, 1956: The World in Revolt (London: Faber & Faber, 2016), 363–9. On the
legal practice see, for instance, Leycester Coltman, The Real Fidel Castro (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2003), 51–2. Fidel’s eventual victory owed a great deal to the
urban-based opposition and tacit alliances with the trades unions, the Church and the
middle classes, as well as the flaws of his enemy (Batista’s repressive tactics proved
counterproductive) and misjudgements of his rivals. See, for instance, Steve Cushion, A
Hidden History of the Cuban Revolution: How the Working Class Shaped the Guerrillas’
Victory (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016) and Julia E. Sweig, Inside the Cuban
Revolution: Fidel Castro and the Urban Underground (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2002). On the naming of the yacht see Perrottet, Cuba Libre!, 13, 76.
33. Szulc, Fidel, 536–43; Robert E. Quirk, Fidel Castro (New York: W. W. Norton & Co.,
1993), 236–43; Coltman, The Real Fidel Castro, 155–8; Lindesay Parrott, ‘Castro
Defends Election Delay’, NYT, 23 April 1959, 1, 2.
34. Szulc, Fidel, 575.
35. Juan Arcocha, ‘Fidel at the UN’ (‘Fidel en la ONU’), Revolución, 15 September 1960, 2.
On the Bandung Conference see, for example, Antonia Finnane and Derek McDougall,
eds, Bandung 1955: Little Histories (Caulfield: Monash University Press, 2010); See
Seng Tang and Amitav Acharya, eds, Bandung Revisited: The Legacy of the 1955 Asian-
African Conference for International Order (Singapore: NUS Press, 2008); Su Lin Lewis
and Carolien Stolte, ‘Other Bandungs: Afro-Asian Internationalisms in the Early Cold
War’, Journal of World History, vol. 30, no. 1–2 (June 2019), 1–19; Thomas
Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global
Era (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 95–7.

* Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo (Brazzaville), Congo (Léopoldville),

Dahomey, Gabon, Ivory Coast, Malagasy Republic, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal,
Somalia, Togo, Upper Volta.
† During the fight for independence from Spain, African Americans rallied behind the
Cuban cause, and drew particular pride from the role played by prominent Cubans of
African descent. In the twentieth century, meanwhile, many Cubans were inspired by –
and offered support to – African Americans’ efforts to secure first-class citizenship.
‡ This was an era when, having pushed the boundaries of the United States to the Pacific
(the frontier officially closed in 1890), some leading US politicians began calling for
overseas expansion, citing America’s ‘civilizing mission’ to the world. At the same time,
 vast amounts of wealth, as well as economic and political power, became concentrated in
the hands of a few ‘captains of industry’ (or, less charitably, ‘robber barons’), such as
Andrew Carnegie (steel), J. P. Morgan (finance), John D. Rockefeller (oil) and Cornelius
Vanderbilt (railroads).
§ Between 1948 and 1951, under the direction of Secretary of State George C. Marshall, the
United States provided some $13 billion (c.$100 billion in 2018 prices) in economic
assistance to sixteen European countries to help them to rebuild after the devastation of
the Second World War.
 CAPTION:

In a move that infuriated the Cubans, New York Police Officers prevent Fidel from greeting the
hundreds of cheering supporters who had gathered at Idlewild Airport.
Photograph by John Curran/Newsday RM via Getty Images
 2

INTO THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

Welcome Fidel, Give Them Hell

PRO-CASTRO PLACARD AT IDLEWILD AIRPORT

On the morning of Sunday 18 September, Fidel’s mother, Lina Ruz, and

his sister, Juanita, as well as thousands of supporters, gathered at Rancho-
Boyeros airport, south-west of Havana, to cheer the Cuban leader’s
departure. As his mother, concerned for his safety, began ‘fussing’ over
her son, Fidel exclaimed, ‘Ay! Don’t worry, old woman. I’ve taken worse
trips than this, and nothing’s happened to me yet. Remember the Granma
…’ As Lina Ruz began to sob, her son ‘consoled her with a look’. Then
he turned and strode purposefully towards the waiting aircraft,
accompanied by senior government figures, including his brother Raúl
and the Cuban president, Osvaldo Dorticós (‘dressed democratically in a
fresh loose white shirt’, Dorticós had, it was reported, even driven his
own car to the airport).
Wearing his trademark drab-olive fatigues and, according to reports,
carrying an army knapsack and a hammock (the same one, it was said,
that he had used while fighting in the Sierra Maestra), Fidel paused
briefly at the aircraft steps to exchange a few words with his brother, who
would be acting premier during the leader’s absence, and to present him
symbolically with his ammunition belt and pistol. Fidel then boarded the
plane, along with more than fifty of his fellow revolutionaries. ‘From the
wide terrace’, reported the leading pro-government weekly, Bohemia,
‘thousands of people witnessed the departure. Voices, slogans,
enthusiasm rained down on the Head of the revolution, beneath the
generous sun of Cuba.’ As the Britannia Jet-Prop airliner soared into the
bright, blue sky, and headed north, the compañeros settled back into their
seats and relaxed.1
But, despite his earlier display of bravado, Fidel was clearly rattled.
As his anxiety increased, the Maximum Leader turned to his security
chief, Ramiro Valdés, to ask whether an escort plane had been arranged.
When Valdés ‘stuttered out a no’, Fidel responded, ‘We’re in danger. If I
were running the CIA, I’d shoot down the plane at sea and report the
whole thing as an accident.’ According to Carlos Franqui, editor of
Revolución and part of the entourage, everyone now ‘started to look
around’ apprehensively. The mood on board was not improved when,
amid a ‘huge roar’, a squadron of American fighter jets suddenly
appeared alongside. ‘Everybody panicked’, Franqui recalled, ‘except
me.’ Having consumed several travel sickness pills and downed a couple
of daiquiris, he was able to sit back and observe ‘the warriors turn pale’.
But when Fidel realized that they were approaching the US mainland, he
quickly recovered his poise: after all, he reasoned, the Americans would
not dare risk shooting the plane down over their own territory. Soon
enough, the aircraft was descending through the grey clouds above
Manhattan, headed for the airport in the easternmost borough of Queens.2

New York was a city that Fidel knew reasonably well. Back in the
autumn of 1948 he had spent the best part of three months there,
honeymooning with his new bride, Mirta Díaz-Balart (the daughter of a
provincial mayor). Having rented an apartment in the Bronx, the future
revolutionary had enrolled in English language classes, dipped into Karl
Marx’s Das Kapital (a copy of which he had purchased from a local
bookstore) and driven around the city in a fancy Lincoln convertible. He
even briefly considered applying to study at Columbia University, before
deciding to return to Havana to resume both his legal studies and his
political activism.3 Then, in April 1959, just months after overthrowing
the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, Castro made a second trip to New
York, this time as part of a wider tour of North America under the
auspices of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. For Castro, this
was an ideal opportunity to launch a charm offensive that, he hoped,
would win the support of the American people. During four jam-packed
days in the Big Apple, Fidel visited the floor of the New York Stock
Exchange, climbed the Empire State Building, spoke about agrarian
reform at Columbia, met with baseball star Jackie Robinson, addressed a
rally of 35,000 Cuban Americans in Central Park (where he announced
that the goal of the Cuban Revolution was ‘Bread with Liberty’), and
took a tour of the Bronx Zoo – where he won over the press, and much of
the American public, by eating hot dogs and ice cream, hugging children,
patting a tiger and feeding peanuts to the elephants. He was even
presented with the keys to the city. Although Washington was lukewarm
about his trip (Eisenhower preferred to play golf at Augusta, and left it to
Vice President Richard Nixon to meet with Castro), for Fidel it had been
a public relations triumph.4
By the autumn of 1960, though, relations between Cuba and the
United States were at breaking point. Washington was particularly
alarmed by the new government’s economic policies, which, while
welcomed by many ordinary Cubans, proved less popular among those
who had done well under the old regime. The agrarian reform
programme, for instance, which was launched in May 1959, restricted
holdings to 1,000 acres, with a 3,333-acre exemption for land used for
rice, sugar and livestock. Many of the larger estates – including those
owned by US citizens and companies – were expropriated and
transformed into cooperatives. American-owned sugar mills, it was
estimated, stood to lose 1,800,000 acres of the 1,864,000 acres that they
had accumulated over the years. Worse still – at least from the point of
view of the proprietors – was that compensation was to be paid in long-
term government bonds, with a maturation of twenty years, and the value
of the land being determined by the amount that the former owners had
previously (under)declared for tax purposes.5 Havana also launched an
aggressive programme of economic intervention and nationalization –
opening up formerly private beaches to the public, taking hotels
(including the Havana Hilton) and private clubs (such as the Biltmore
Yacht and Country Club) into public ownership, and moving against
large financial, corporate and industrial interests.6 With some $1 billion
(roughly $8.5 billion in 2018 prices) invested on the island – in banking,
utilities, tourism, mining and agriculture – American business owners
had plenty to lose, and were understandably unnerved by the new, more
hostile climate.7 In January 1960, for instance, senior managers of the
United Fruit company informed the State Department that trade union
officials had begun to attend meetings with management ‘armed with
Tommy guns’. A month later, the owners of a bakery in Georgia, which
imported some 200,000 pounds of glazed pineapple from Cuba annually,
sought government advice about ‘whether it is your feeling that we will
be able to secure shipments out of Cuba during the next ninety days’.8 By
the early summer, the State Department was complaining that:
property has been confiscated, expropriated or intervened, frequently without receipt, and
the owners, many of whom have made substantial contributions to Cuban national
development, have physically been expelled from their lands. Individually owned
properties as well as large corporations with thousands of small stockholders, both Cuban
and American, have been subjected to arbitrary intervention and control by the
Government of Cuba, which has resulted in a tremendous loss in capital values and the
destruction of vital credit ratings.

They also pointed out that ‘payments due to American exporters for
goods shipped in good faith over the past year have accumulated to over
$100 million’.9 Many ordinary Americans were appalled. One outraged
Texan wrote to the White House to demand that the United States take
‘immediate action to avenge the barbaric thievery practiced by Fidel
Castro’. If the Cuban leader refused to ‘return’ all of the ‘stolen
American property’ then ‘we must go immediately and take it back’.
‘Our dignity’, he declared, ‘has been invaded by a gangster, and you must
not rest until he is punished.’10
If the direct challenge to its own economic interests (and the political
influence that came with it) was not bad enough, the Cuban government’s
‘authoritarian turn’ also set alarm bells ringing in Washington.
Throughout 1960, for instance, Fidel’s government bore down on the free
press and media, taking control – either directly or indirectly – of
newspapers, radio stations and television companies. In February, the
numerous radio and television stations that had been appropriated by the
government were reorganized into the FIEL (Independent Federation of
Free Radios) network, whose stated purpose was to ‘consolidate the
revolution and orient the people’ (tellingly, the acronym spelled out the
Spanish word for loyal). Meanwhile, what one British diplomat
characterized as a ‘spring-cleaning’ of the press eliminated the last
remaining independent Spanish-language dailies. Strong-arm methods
were sometimes deployed. On 10 May, for instance, an ‘armed band,
with police acquiescence’ invaded the offices of the highly respected
independent newspaper Diario de la Marina, where they proceeded to
smash up equipment, force the paper’s director into hiding and seize
control of the newspaper. A few days later, Prensa Libre suffered a
similar fate.11 In August, the University of Havana was purged – 120
faculty members were dismissed from their posts – and the independence
of the judiciary was compromised.12 Cuba was, President Eisenhower
was warned, ‘rapidly being taken to the point of no return’.13
As Fidel and his fellow revolutionaries strengthened their hold on
Cuba, they turned increasingly to Moscow and the wider communist
world for support – signing trade deals, instigating cultural links,
welcoming technical experts and advisers to the island, sending high-
profile delegations abroad, and purchasing sizeable quantities of arms.14
On 17 June, for instance, the American embassy in Havana reported that:
The first two weeks of June have seen an unprecedented number of Communist
commercial and cultural missions arriving in Cuba. The parade began on June 1 with the
arrival of the Peking Opera Company from Red China. On June 2 a Bulgarian mission
reached Havana. On June 6 the Minister of Foreign Commerce of Czechoslovakia arrived
to put the final touches on several agreements negotiated by a Czech commercial mission
that had been in Havana for some time.

During this same period ‘it was announced that a Polish Commercial
mission was on its way to Cuba as well as an 80-man ballet group from
the Soviet Union’. Meanwhile, Antonio Núñez Jiménez, the head of the
powerful National Agrarian Reform Institute (INRA) was in Moscow,
leading a Cuban trade mission (they had also visited Warsaw, Prague and
East Berlin), and Major William Gálvez, Inspector General of the Cuban
Armed Forces, was in the People’s Republic of China, being ‘wined and
dined’ by Chairman Mao and Prime Minister Zhou Enlai.15
This flurry of overseas diplomacy did yield concrete results. Back in
February 1960, Cuba signed a landmark trade deal with Moscow, under
which the Soviet Union would provide oil, manufactured goods and
technical assistance in return for 425,000 tons of sugar (in year one), and
one million tons in each of the following four years.16 But in June, when
the Cubans ordered Standard Oil and Texaco to process the first supplies
of Soviet crude, they refused (the pressure applied by the US government
proved critical); their refineries were promptly nationalized. Shortly
thereafter, President Eisenhower signed a law cutting the Cuban sugar
quota – under which the US government guaranteed to purchase an
annual amount of the sugar crop each year, at a price artificially inflated
so as to benefit the American-owned sugar producers. Fidel responded
with fury, telling a mass meeting of metalworkers that Cuba was the
victim of foreign ‘henchmen’, and pledging that they would never ‘bow
down under the yoke’ or ‘sell our independence’.17 The Soviets quickly
came to the rescue by agreeing to purchase the shortfall – albeit at world
prices, and in kind rather than in cash.18 The following month, while
speaking at the First Latin American Youth Congress, at Havana’s Cerro
Stadium, Fidel announced – to wild, raucous cheers – that, in the face of
continuing US economic aggression, the government would be
nationalizing a further twenty-six American-owned enterprises, including
the telephone and electricity companies; the Texaco, Esso and Sinclair oil
companies; United Fruit; and all of the Cuban sugar mills that were
owned by US firms.19
The economic tit-for-tat between Cuba and the United States was
accompanied by an increasingly bitter war of words. US foreign policy,
for instance, was described as the work of ‘political mafias and
gangsters’, while a leading Cuban newspaper pictured Uncle Sam as a
long-fanged vampire. In attacking ‘Yankee imperialism’, the
revolutionary government in Havana drew on long-suppressed
resentment at Washington’s oversized role in the island. Although Cuba
had achieved nominal independence in 1898, following the US victory in
the Spanish-American war, under the terms of the Platt Amendment the
Americans had retained the legal right to interfere in the republic’s
domestic affairs in order to protect property rights and uphold law and
order. They had restricted Cuba’s ability to forge an independent foreign
policy, and maintained a large naval presence at Guantánamo Bay. Even
after Franklin Roosevelt abrogated the Platt Amendment in 1934, the
United States continued to exert a decisive influence over Cuba’s
economy and political culture. And, of course, Washington had provided
crucial support, over many years, to the hated dictatorship of Fulgencio
Batista.20 When Fidel accused the United States of having robbed and
exploited Cuba, then, his remarks resonated with many millions of his
fellow countrymen who, having experienced first-hand the reality of
American imperialism, had welcomed the 1959 revolution
enthusiastically.21
During early 1960, as the island swirled with rumours of counter-
revolutionary plots and conspiracies – fuelled by the mysterious torching
of sugar cane fields – both the government in Havana and the
government-controlled radio warned that the United States was preparing
to launch a ‘criminal attack’ on Cuba.22 Such alarm was well founded: in
June 1954, for instance, the Eisenhower administration – convinced that
‘the Reds’ were now firmly in charge – had sponsored a coup in
Guatemala, overthrowing the democratically elected government of
Jacobo Árbenz. His government had outraged executives of United Fruit,
and other powerful American interests, by having the temerity to
expropriate land and then redistribute it to tens of thousands of
impoverished peasants.23
When it came to Cuba, despite a brief ‘cooling-off’ period at the start
of 1960, which was designed to try and improve relations, things took a
turn for the worse in the immediate aftermath of the La Coubre
incident.24 On the morning of 4 March, La Coubre – a French ship
containing a significant cargo of rifles, rifle-grenades and ammunition –
arrived in Havana harbour. Although standard procedure would have
been to anchor the vessel offshore and use barges to bring the arms
ashore, La Coubre was dockside, close to a number of buildings. An
official cable from the British Embassy described what happened next:
At about 3.00pm, when all the cases containing ammunition and some of those containing
grenades had been unloaded, there occurred the first explosion which killed all the
stevedores at work in the hold. The second explosion followed about three quarters of an
hour later, killing or wounding many of those engaged in rescue, including a number of
soldiers. Estimates of the casualties have differed widely, but the latest figures indicate
that about sixty persons may have been killed (there are still a number of persons missing)
and two hundred and seventy injured. Considerable damage was done to the dock and to
buildings in the neighbourhood.

The final death toll might have been as high as one hundred.
The following day – a national day of mourning – a state funeral took
place for many of the victims at Havana’s Colón cemetery. Perhaps as
many as half a million Cubans turned out to pay their respects that
afternoon. They waited in tense silence as Fidel prepared to speak. In
electrifying remarks that were broadcast on television and radio, he
claimed that the explosion must have been a result of sabotage and
pointed the finger firmly at the Americans, who had after all refused to
sell weapons to Cuba and then pressured other countries into doing the
same. Their aim, he stated, was to ‘keep us defenceless in order to
suppress us’. He declared, ‘We have the right to believe that those who
tried to prevent us by diplomatic means from receiving these arms might
also have tried by other means. We do not affirm that they did so,
because we do not have convincing proof, and if we had we would
present it to the people of the world […] But’, he continued, ‘I say we
definitely have the right to believe that those who sought to achieve their
ends one way, and in several ways, later turned to different procedures
…’25 The Americans responded with outrage: Secretary of State
Christian Herter hauled in the Cuban chargé d’affaires to inform him that
the accusations were ‘baseless, erroneous, and misleading’, and would
serve only to further worsen relations between the two countries.*26
The attacks on the ‘Yankee imperialists’, though, would continue.
Speaking on Cuban television, Foreign Minister Raúl Roa described his
US counterpart, Christian Herter, as a ‘blown-up pigskin with no capacity
for ideas’.27 President Eisenhower fared even worse. A Cuban radio
broadcast of 26 March characterized him as decrepit, bottle-fed and
senile, with a nurse on hand to wipe the drool from his mouth and feed
him his malted milk, while lamenting the fact that ‘world progress’ was
dependent on a ‘man so likeable and so foolish, so smiling and so
stupid’.28
By the summer, the bad feeling between Havana and Washington even
spilled over into baseball – which, in Cuba, was something of a secular
religion. On 7 July, under pressure from the Eisenhower administration,
Frank Shaughnessy, president of the International Baseball League (one
of the most prestigious minor leagues), announced that the Havana Sugar
Kings would be forcibly relocated to Jersey City, in order to secure the
players’ safety. The loss of the team – which had won the Little World
Series the previous year and seemed poised to gain a berth in the major
leagues – was a bitter blow. Fidel, who was a keen baseball fan, even
offered to pay the team’s debts to keep them in Havana. It was to no
avail. Just a week later, the Sugar Kings (hastily renamed the ‘Jerseys’)
were taking on the Columbus Jets in their new home, leaving Fidel to
fume about this violation of ‘all codes of sportsmanship’. One of the
most important cultural and psychological ties between Cuba and the
United States had now been ripped away, leading the influential
columnist Walter Lippmann to warn that ‘the thing we should never do in
dealing with revolutionary countries, in which the world abounds, is to
push them behind an iron curtain raised by ourselves’. ‘On the contrary’,
he argued, ‘the right thing to do is to keep the way open for their
return.’29
Alarmed by the Cuban Revolution’s drift to the left, Havana’s
growing closeness to Moscow, and what the State Department
characterized as a ‘campaign of slander against the United States’ that
was ‘among the most vicious ever encountered from any source’,
Washington eventually turned to the regional body, the Organization of
American States, for support.30 Founded in 1948, at the urging of US
Secretary of State George C. Marshall, the organization was designed to
provide collective security for the hemisphere, facilitate the peaceful
resolution of disputes, promote social, cultural and economic cooperation
and, crucially, act as a bulwark against communism.31 At a meeting of
OAS foreign ministers held in San José, Costa Rica, at the end of August,
Christian Herter managed to persuade his Latin American counterparts to
pass a resolution that condemned ‘emphatically the intervention or the
threat of intervention … by an extracontinental power in the affairs of the
American republics’ and reaffirmed that ‘the inter-American system is
incompatible with any form of totalitarianism’. But his attempt to single
Cuba out for criticism (which had prompted Foreign Minister Raúl Roa
to walk out of the meeting) ended in failure. Indeed, Mexico insisted on
issuing a separate statement making clear that the resolution was ‘general
in character’ and ‘in no way is it a condemnation or a threat against
Cuba, whose aspirations for economic improvement and social justice
have deepest sympathy of the Government and the people of Mexico.’32
On the afternoon of 2 September, before a sea of 400,000 people, who
had gathered in Havana’s Civic Plaza for what was termed a ‘General
National Assembly of the People’, Fidel – accompanied by the roars of
the crowd – ripped up the mutual aid treaty that had been signed by the
Cuban and US governments in 1952, before proclaiming the ‘Declaration
of Havana’ – his fiery response to the ‘Declaration of San José’.
Denouncing America’s ‘criminal’ history of imperialism in the region,
the Cuban leader called for hemispheric revolution, expressing the hope
that ‘Latin America will soon be marching, united and triumphant, free
from the control that turns its economy over to North American
imperialism and prevents its true voice from being heard’. He also
asserted the right of every nation to show solidarity with the oppressed,
the downtrodden and the exploited, on any continent: ‘all the peoples of
the world’, he declared, ‘are brothers.’33
It was dynamite stuff, guaranteed to rile the Yankees. Bob Taber, an
American journalist and supporter of the Cuban Revolution, warned that
‘when he descends from the plane at the international airport in New
York … Fidel will enter an atmosphere more poisonous than that which
the Cubans breathed in the hellish Havana of the days of Batista.’34 As
the Havana Airways jet began its final approach into Idlewild (modern-
day JFK), the Maximum Leader must have wondered just what kind of
reception lay in wait.

Mae Mallory, the Harlem-based black activist and supporter of the Cuban
Revolution, described Sunday 18 September as ‘wet and dreary. It was
one of those mornings that makes you decide to stay in bed all day.’ And
that, she confessed, was ‘where I certainly would have been’ had she not
noticed, on the way home from work the previous evening, a leaflet
calling for people to join a ‘motorcade to welcome Fidel Castro’. ‘It
was’, she declared, ‘wonderful to see the way the people responded, to
welcome the true leader of the Latin American countries.’ Buses were
lined up for five blocks, and more than a hundred cars – ‘of every
description and model, and from as far away as Texas’ – joined ‘this vast
motorcade’. Despite the grey clouds and persistent rain, an exuberant
crowd of some 3,000 – most of them Cuban and Cuban-American
supporters of the revolution, together with Puerto Ricans, Venezuelans,
Dominicans and others who took huge pride in Fidel’s historic
achievements – gathered at the main terminal in eager anticipation
(meanwhile, some enterprising supporters managed to hang a giant
‘Welcome, Fidel’ banner from the top of the Empire State Building).
Several hundred police officers were on hand to keep a watchful eye over
the demonstrators, who shouted ‘Viva Castro!’ and waved placards that
declared ‘Welcome Fidel, Give Them Hell’ as they strained for a glimpse
of their hero. Unfortunately for them, the authorities decreed that for
security reasons Fidel’s plane – which finally touched down at 4:32 p.m.,
two hours late – should be directed to Hangar 17, in a remote corner of
the airport some two miles away.35 They did, though, allow several
hundred of his supporters to gather there, where they were fenced in by
what one described as ‘a strong chicken wired stockade’. Even this could
not dampen their enthusiasm, and as the Cuban plane taxied to the
hangar, ‘a deafening roar of “Welcome Fidel” and “Venceremos” (“We
Shall Win”) thundered through the air’.36
A few minutes later, after cursory checks by immigration and health
officials, the Cuban prime minister emerged from the aeroplane,
accompanied by his foreign minister, Raúl Roa; Antonio Núñez Jiménez
– head of INRA; and Celia Sánchez, his personal assistant, gatekeeper
and confidante. After waving to the crowd, and clasping his hands above
his head, Fidel was greeted at the foot of the aircraft steps by Jehan de
Noue, the UN Chief of Protocol, who was representing the Secretary
General. According to one journalist, the Cuban leader ‘had to be coaxed
into smiling for the photographers’ and appeared ‘ill at ease’. After
conferring briefly with his aides, he then stepped to the waiting bank of
microphones and made a few brief remarks. Speaking in a ‘soft, hoarse
voice’, and with his hands firmly in his pockets, the Maximum Leader
declared that: ‘I want to salute the people of the United States. My
English, the same as last time, is not so good. All I have to say I will say
to the United Nations.’ And, with that, he was ushered into a waiting
black Ford Sedan for the journey to Manhattan.37
Flanked by police cruisers, and protected by officers armed with sub-
machine guns, Fidel’s car had barely begun moving when, while passing
by the fenced-in supporters, the Cuban leader began to wave and ordered
the driver to stop. In a ‘wild response’, a number of his more fervent
admirers now attempted to scale the wire fence; the police, armed with
nightsticks, forced them back.38 Simultaneously, a plain-clothes officer
pushed Fidel’s arm back into the car, while others prevented him from
opening the door and getting out to greet the crowds.39 ‘The insolent
police officer’, ran one Cuban report, then added insult to injury by
swearing at the prime minister while insisting that he remain inside the
vehicle. Fidel – who had informed the Americans in advance that he
wished to avoid being surrounded by security personnel and vehicles –
was by now ‘visibly angry’, and he ‘scowled and shouted to the others in
his car, gesticulating that he wanted to get out, but the police were
adamant’. When the Cuban driver proved reluctant to resume the journey,
some twenty officers put their shoulders to the wheel and began to propel
the car forward, which prompted the chauffeur to finally resume the
journey.40 The incident was quickly seized on by the Cuban press as
evidence of ‘barbarous’ and ‘insolent’ treatment, and the following day
the Cuban government filed an official complaint with the office of the
UN Secretary General.41 The US government, Celia Sánchez told Prensa
Latina (Cuba’s state news agency), wanted to avoid, at all costs, any
displays of popular enthusiasm among the American population for the
Cuban leader and his revolution.42
This was, perhaps, wishful thinking. While, for Washington, any pro-
Castro sentiment was unwelcome, the deteriorating relationship between
the two countries had already done a good deal to sour the public mood.
Moreover, by drawing closer to Moscow, the Cuban leader had made
himself persona non grata in the eyes of many Americans. Whereas, a
year earlier, children had run around wearing toy beards during Fidel’s
visit to the city, now residents of Long Island decided to burn him in
effigy. US officials were, then, understandably concerned about potential
threats to Fidel’s personal safety – General Thomas D. White, Chief of
Staff of the United States Air Force, even made the wild claim that there
were about 200,000 people who would quite like to assassinate him,
given half a chance. For all this, though, Sánchez did have a point.
Washington was keen to emphasize that Fidel was in the country under
forbearance and, in secret documents, the American Secretary of State,
Christian Herter, was clear that the security restrictions imposed on Fidel
(who was not permitted to leave Manhattan during his stay) had been
designed explicitly to ‘reflect [the] attitude of US Govt toward his
presence in US at this time’.43
The sixteen-mile journey to midtown took no time at all: citing
security concerns, police had closed the Van Wyck Expressway, Grand
Central Parkway and Long Island Expressway to traffic, causing chaos
and frustration for Sunday motorists. For added protection, police
officers were also stationed on the dozens of overpasses under which the
motorcade passed. Many Castro supporters – perhaps as many as 2,000 –
gathered along the route to catch a glimpse of the Maximum Leader,
along with a handful of opponents, who shook their fists, shouted for
Fidel to ‘go home’ and waved large American flags.44 Meanwhile, the
motorcade itself was followed by a raucous ‘people’s caravan’ of
supporters, honking their horns and shouting ‘Viva Fidel! Viva Cuba!’45
‘It was’, declared Bohemia, ‘truly a Cuban afternoon in New York.’46
Just after 5.30 p.m., Fidel’s car emerged from the Queens Midtown
tunnel and, moments later, pulled up outside the Shelburne Hotel, on
Lexington Avenue. Several thousand supporters had gathered there to
welcome the Cuban leader, who exited the car to the sight of Cuban flags
waving and raucous chants of ‘Viva Fidel!’ ‘The jubilation’, ran one
report, ‘was indescribable.’ After ‘nodding sternly’ to the waiting news
reporters, he strode through the main doors and headed for his third-floor
suite. Meanwhile, the 200 police officers – including mounted units –
under the personal command of Police Commissioner Stephen P.
Kennedy struggled to maintain order, amid violent skirmishes between
pro- and anti-Cuban protesters. Then, shortly before 7 p.m., amid
continuous shouts of ‘Fidel, Fidel!’ and ‘We Will Triumph!’ and
renditions of the Cuban national anthem, Fidel – hatless, and now
‘smiling broadly’ – appeared at his third-floor window where, as cheers
rang out, a giant police searchlight illuminated the scene. Three minutes
later, and he disappeared into the sanctity of his plush suite.47
The Cuban delegation had, in fact, encountered considerable
difficulties in securing accommodation in the city. Unlike some others,
the country’s mission to the UN did not maintain a spacious residence in
New York, and the State Department’s decision to confine Fidel to the
island of Manhattan for security reasons ruled out the possibility of
renting a large house further afield, in Long Island or Westchester. The
original plan had been to stay at the Hotel Elysée, at 60 East Fifty-fourth
Street, but its manager, Seymour Pinto, cancelled the reservation after
learning that Fidel would be coming to New York as part of a larger than
expected party. Pinto was at pains to explain that politics had had nothing
to do with the decision – ‘I don’t care who is coming as long as they pay
their bills and behave themselves,’ he declared – but maintained that
hosting the group would have overburdened his hotel. Cancelling other
reservations, he explained, would ‘kill business’ and ‘offend older
customers’.48 The fact that no hotel appeared willing to take the Cubans
eventually became a source of some diplomatic embarrassment, and –
under considerable pressure from officials from both the State
Department and the UN – Edward Spatz, the owner of the Shelburne,
was finally persuaded to make twenty two-room suites available to the
Cubans, at a rate of $20 per night.49 He was, though, a clearly reluctant
host, telling reporters that ‘we personally have strong feelings against the
Cuban leader and prefer not to accommodate him’ and, more bluntly, ‘I
hate him.’50 Concerned that anyone might doubt his patriotism, Spatz
also arranged for a large American flag to be flown from the front of his
hotel on the very evening that his Cuban guests checked in. When they
asked for their flag to be displayed beside it, he point-blank refused. And,
after receiving complaints from some of his other residents – elderly,
conservative men and women, who were evidently alarmed by the
sudden influx of young, bearded revolutionaries in battle fatigues – Spatz
decreed that the Cubans could not eat in the hotel dining room.51
As Spatz’s disgruntled foreign guests were settling in for the night,
another figure of whom the Shelburne’s owner thoroughly disapproved
was just hours away from New York, and intent on making as much
mischief as possible.

Notes
1. Quirk, Fidel Castro, 334; ‘La Voz de la Revolución’ (‘The Voice of the Revolution’),
Bohemia, 25 September 1960, 44; Revolución, 19 September 1960, 12.
2. Franqui, Family Portrait, 84.
3. Quirk, Fidel Castro, 27–8; Coltman, The Real Fidel Castro, 47–8.
4. See Alan McPherson, ‘The Limits of Populist Diplomacy: Fidel Castro’s April 1959 Trip
to North America’, Diplomacy & Statecraft, 18.1 (2007), 237–68; Perrottet, Cuba Libre!,
331.
5. Aviva Chomsky, A History of the Cuban Revolution (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011),
71; Louis A. Peréz, Jr, Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2006), 243; Lillian Guerra, Visions of Power in Cuba: Revolution,
Redemption, and Resistance, 1959–1971 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina
Press, 2012), 58.
6. Timeline of events, WHO – Office of Special Assistant NSA, NSC Series, Briefing
Notes Subseries, Box 6, DDE; ‘Cuba: Annual Review for 1960’, FO371/151637; Quirk,
Fidel Castro, 317; Alejandro de la Fuente, A Nation for All: Race, Inequality and Politics
in Twentieth-century Cuba (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 271;
Guerra, Visions of Power in Cuba, 57, 61, 135.
7. Hall, 1956, 361.
8. Braddock to Secretary of State, 5 January 1960, 611.37/1-560 and W. H. Benson to
Secretary of State, 611.37/2-660, Confidential State Department Files, Decimal 637, reel
3.
9. Department of State, for the Press, 6 June 1960, Confidential State Department Files,
Decimal 637, reel 3. See also, ‘Responsibility of the Cuban Government for Increased
 International Tensions in the Hemisphere’, 73–8, Report to the Inter-American Peace
Committee 1 August 1960, White House Office, Office of the Staff Secy: Records, 1952–
61, International Series, Box 4, Cuba (5), DDE.
10. Brooks Hamilton to James Hagerty, 30 June 1960, WHCF General File, Box 805, Cuba
(5), DDE.
11. ‘Progress Report on Cuba’, 17 May 1960, p. 2, WHO – Office of Special Assistant NSA,
NSC Series, Subject Series, Box 4, ‘Cuba (May 1959–September 1960) (2), DDE;
‘Responsibility of the Cuban Government for Increased International Tensions in the
Hemisphere’, 37–46, Report to the Inter-American Peace Committee, 1 August 1960,
White House Office, Office of the Staff Secretary: Records, 1952–61, International
Series, Box 4, Cuba (5), DDE; ‘Cuba: Annual Review for 1960’, 6, FO371/151637, Kew.
On the nationalization of the press see, for instance, Guerra, Visions of Power in Cuba,
chapter 3 (‘War of Words’), 107–34.
12. ‘Cuba: Annual Review for 1960’, 6, FO371/151637, Kew; Guerra, Visions of Power in
Cuba, 143–4.
13. Lloyd A. Free, ‘The Cuban Situation’, 1, 13 April 1960, Whitman-International, Cuba
(1), Box 8, DDE.
14. ‘Czechoslovakia-Cuba Relations and the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1959–1962: Evidence
from the Prague Archives’, Cold War International History Project Bulletin, Issue 17/18,
349–74.
15. Havana to State, 17 June 1960, 637.60/1-760, Confidential State Department Files,
Decimal 637, reel 1 and ‘Progress Report on Cuba, June 7, 1960’, ‘Cuba (May 1959–
September 1960’ (3), WHO-Office of Special Assistant NSA, NSC Series, Subject Series,
Box 4, DDE. See also AK10338/5, 24 June 1960, FO371/148211.
16. Chomsky, History of the Cuban Revolution, 77; Quirk, Fidel Castro, 295–6.
17. Quirk, Fidel Castro, 320. On the pressure from the US government see Bonsal to
Rubottom, 2 August 1960, 011/37/8-260, Confidential State Department Files, Decimal
637, reel 4; ‘Memorandum of Conversation re: Petroleum Situation’, 8 June 1960
(meeting participants included Roy Rubottom and the Chairman of Sinclair Oil’, Bureau
of Inter-American Affairs, Subject Files of the Assistant Secretary, 1959–62, Box 1,
College Park; and British Ambassador, Havana to Foreign Office, London, AK1531/11, 6
June 1960, FO371/148293.
18. Quirk, Fidel Castro, 321; Lisa Reynolds Wolfe, ‘Cold War Havana: Prelude to American
Sanctions’, 13 December 2010 at https://coldwarstudies.com/2010/12/13/cold-war-
havana-prelude-to-american-sanctions/.
19. Eugenio Suárez Pérez, ‘Cuba Nationalizes U.S. Companies’, Granma, 10 August 2015 at
http://en.granma.cu/cuba/2015-08-10/cuba-nationalizes-us-companies.
20. Hall, 1956, 361; Alex von Tunzelmann, Red Heat: Conspiracy, Murder and the Cold
War in the Caribbean (London: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 12–13.
21. See, for instance, Fidel Castro’s televised speech on the evening of 20 January 1960,
Philip Bonsal to Christian Herter, 21 January 1960, 611.37/1-2160, Confidential State
Department Files, Decimal 637, reel 3.
22. Quirk, Fidel Castro, 297–9; Bonsal to Herter, 26 January 1960, 611.37/1-2660,
Confidential State Department Files, Decimal 637, reel 3.
23. Westad, The Cold War, 345–7; von Tunzelmann, Red Heat, 56–9.
24. Quirk, Fidel Castro, 297–9; Bonsal to Herter, 26 January 1960, 611.37/1-2660,
Confidential State Department Files, Decimal 637, reel 3.
25. AK1015/21 – 9 March 1960, FO371/148180, Kew; Quirk, Fidel Castro, 301–2; Franqui,
Family Portrait, 69–70; ‘Cuban-U.S. Relations: Talking Points for Informal Discussions
Abroad’, Confidential State Department Files, Decimal 637, reel 3.
26. Quirk, Fidel Castro, 302.
27. Bureau of Inter-American Affairs, Subject Files of the Assistant Sec, 1959–62, Box 1,
College Park.
28. Bureau of Inter-American Affairs, Office of Coordinator Cuban Affairs, Box 8: script of
Juan Sintierra, ‘Bearing Witness to the Truth’, broadcast on Radio Mambi, 26 March
1960 at 23.30 GMT–E, College Park.
29. ‘Havana Will Lose its Baseball Club’, NYT, 8 July 1960, 24; Joseph O. Haff, ‘Ex-Sugar
Kings Get a Noisy Welcome in New Home’, NYT, 16 July 1960, 11; Travis Waldron,
‘Havana’s Forgotten Baseball Team Played a Key Role in US-Cuba Relations’,
Huffington Post, 19 March 2016; Stephen Kinzer, The Brothers: John Foster Dulles,
Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (New York: Times Books, 2013), 290–1.
30. ‘Cuban-U.S. Relations: Talking Points for Informal Discussions Abroad’, Confidential
State Department Files, Decimal 637, reel 3.
31. On the OAS see, for instance, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Organization-of-
American-States and Bertram D. Hulen, ‘Marshall Urges Latins to Put Need of Our Help
After ERP’, NYT, 2 April 1948, 1, 12.
32. ‘Declaration of San José’, in ‘Cuba (May 1959–September 1960) (6), WHO – Office of
Special Assistant NSA, NSC Series, Subject Series, Box 4, DDE. See also Quirk, Fidel
Castro, 328–31.
33. Bonsal to Herter, 2 September 1960, 737.00/9-260, and 3 September, 737.00/9-360,
Confidential State Department Files, Decimal 737, reel 6; Quirk, Fidel Castro, 331–2;
text of the First Declaration of Havana available at http://www.walterlippmann.com/fc-
09-02-1960.html. See also Guerra, Visions of Power in Cuba, 38.
34. ‘La Voz de la Revolución’ (‘The Voice of the Revolution’), Bohemia, 25 September
1960, 52.
35. Mae Mallory, ‘Fidel Castro in New York’, The Crusader, 8 October 1960, 5; Robert
McCarthy and Jack Smee, ‘Mob Serenades Fidel with Cheers & Jeers’, Daily News, 19
September 1960, 3, 6; Max Frankel, ‘Castro Arrives in Subdued Mood’, NYT, 19
September 1960, 1; ‘Castro Jeered, Cheered on New York Arrival’, Washington Star (AP
report), 19 September 1960; Revolución, 19 September 1960, 12.
36. Mallory, ‘Fidel Castro in New York’, The Crusader, 8 October 1960.
37. Frankel, ‘Castro Arrives in Subdued Mood’, NYT, 19 September 1960, 1.
38. Frankel, ‘Castro Arrives in Subdued Mood’, NYT, 19 September 1960, 1.
39. Max Frankel, ‘Cuban in Harlem’, NYT, 20 September 1960, 1, 16; McCarthy and Smee,
‘Mob Serenades Fidel with Cheers & Jeers’, Daily News, 19 September 1960, 3, 6.
40. McCarthy and Smee, ‘Mob Serenades Fidel With Cheers & Jeers’, Daily News, 19
September 1960, 3, 6; ‘La Voz de la Revolución’ (‘The Voice of the Revolution’),
Bohemia, 25 September 1960, 54; Bonsal to Secretary of State, 14 September 1960,
320/9-1460, College Park.
41. Coverage in Revolución, Bonsal to Secretary of State, 19 September 1960, 737.13/9-
1960, Confidential State Department Files, Decimal 737, 837, 937, reel 25; Frankel,
‘Cuban in Harlem’, NYT, 20 September 1960, 1, 16; Revolución, 19 September 1960, 1,
12.
42. Revolución, 19 September 1960, 12.
43. Department of State to US UN Delegation, NY and US Embassy, Havana, 14 September
1960 (outgoing telegram and aide-memoire), 033.3711/9-1450, College Park and ‘Notes
on Telephone Conversation, 4.45 p.m., Wednesday 14 September 1960, 033.3711,
College Park; Perrottet, Cuba Libre!, 332–3.
44. Frankel, ‘Castro Arrives in Subdued Mood’, NYT, 19 September 1960, 1.
45. Mallory, ‘Fidel Castro in New York’, The Crusader, 8 October 1960; Frankel, ‘Castro
Arrives in Subdued Mood’, NYT, 19 September 1960, 1.
46. ‘La Voz de la Revolución’ (‘The Voice of the Revolution’), Bohemia, 25 September
1960, 54.
47. Frankel, ‘Castro Arrives in Subdued Mood’, NYT, 19 September 1960, 1; McCarthy and
Smee, ‘Mob Serenades Fidel with Cheers & Jeers’, Daily News, 19 September 1960, 3, 6;
‘La Voz de la Revolución’ (The Voice of the Revolution), Bohemia, 25 September 1960,
55.
48. Max Frankel, ‘Castro Can’t Find Lodging Here; One Hotel Cancels Reservation’, NYT,
16 September 1960, 1.
49. ‘The Secretary’s Staff Meeting, 16 September 1960, p. 2, Minutes & Notes of the
Secretary’s Staff Meetings, 1952–1961’, College Park; Telegram, Office of International
Conferences, Department of State to Edward Spatz, 17 September 1960, 320/9-1760,
College Park; Frankel, ‘Cuban in Harlem’, NYT, 20 September 1960, 1, 16; Kennett
Love, ‘Castro Walkout Termed a Stunt’, NYT, 21 September 1960.
50. ‘Cuba Restricts U.S. Ambassador’, NYT, 17 September 1960, 1, 11; Michael Frayn,
‘Miscellany’, The Guardian, 23 September 1960, 11.
51. Victor Rabinowitz, Unrepentant Leftist: A Lawyer’s Memoir (Urban & Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 1996), 205.

* Officially the cause of the explosion remains a mystery, although in her 2012 book,
Visions of Power in Cuba: Revolution, Redemption and Resistance, 1959–1971, the
historian Lillian Guerra was, on the basis of her research, prepared to describe the ship’s
destruction as ‘deliberate’ (p. 108).
 CAPTION:

On arriving in New York, Nikita Khrushchev received a somewhat frosty welcome from central
and eastern European émigrés.
Photograph by Gerard Gery/Paris Match via Getty Images
 3

MONDAY 19 SEPTEMBER

DEAR K! DROP DEAD YOU BUM

PLACARD, ANTI-KHRUSHCHEV PICKET

The Baltika, a 7,500-ton, single-stack steam liner, sailed into New York
Harbor on the morning of Monday 19 September, escorted by a US navy
submarine and a fleet of US coastguard vessels overseen by Commander
Joseph Mazotta. In a show of force, the USS Franklin D. Roosevelt, the
fleet’s most powerful aircraft carrier, was also moored nearby. It was,
reported the New York Times, ‘the greatest exercise in harbor-security
measures’ since the end of the Second World War. As three police
helicopters buzzed overhead, the ship’s passengers – who included the
communist leaders of Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania as well as Nikita
Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union – struggled to make out the Statue of Liberty
through the heavy rain. A short, rotund figure in a yellow raincoat, the
Soviet leader was pacing the upper deck peering anxiously through
binoculars at a motley flotilla of fishing boats and other small craft, and
their cargo of jeering, placard-wielding protesters. One of the more
memorable signs read:
ROSES ARE RED
VIOLETS ARE BLUE
STALIN DROPPED DEAD
HOW ABOUT YOU?

The First Secretary would later dismiss this ‘carnival of fools’ who
wished only to ‘humiliate our country and its representatives’. But aboard
the Baltika that overcast morning, he couldn’t help but recall the very
different scenes that had greeted him only a year earlier, in September
1959, when 100,000 curious New Yorkers had lined the sidewalks of
Midtown to celebrate his arrival.1
 Born in 1894 in south-west Russia, of peasant stock, Khrushchev, a
former metalworker, had joined the Bolshevik cause in 1918 and risen
rapidly through the ranks – serving as Party boss in Moscow, and then in
Ukraine, before being appointed as a political commissar with the Red
Army after the Axis invasion in June 1941, winning medals for his role
in the victories at Stalingrad and Kursk. By the late 1940s, Khrushchev
was a key member of Stalin’s inner circle, but when the dictator
succumbed to a massive stroke on 5 March 1953, few people – either
inside or outside the Soviet Union – imagined that, within months,
Khrushchev would have outmanoeuvred his rivals to reach the very top.
He benefited, in part, from the fact that so many people underestimated
him – mistaking his garrulousness, buffoonery and earthiness for a lack
of guile.2 As a CIA personality report noted, on the surface Khrushchev
gave the impression of being ‘an impetuous, obtuse, rough-talking man,
with something of the buffoon and a good deal of the tosspot in him’.
But, as they had come to realize, ‘behind the exterior lay a shrewd native
intelligence, an agile mind, drive, ambition, and ruthlessness’.
Khrushchev was, they judged, resourceful, audacious, with a ‘good sense
of political timing and showmanship, and a touch of the gambler’s
instinct’.3
These virtues had certainly been on display in February 1956, when
Khrushchev stunned the world, and many of his own comrades, by
delivering the so-called secret speech, at the Twentieth Congress of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Over the course of several hours,
the new Soviet leader had denounced Stalin for promoting a ‘cult of
personality’, condemned the forced confessions, show trials, executions
and mass arrests of the 1930s, and rubbished Stalin’s carefully crafted
reputation as a great war leader. Khrushchev also embarked on a
programme of liberal reform, devolving some government power, freeing
hundreds of thousands of political prisoners from the gulag, placing curbs
on the secret police and encouraging a greater degree of cultural
freedom.4 But this new, more liberal dispensation had its limits – both at
home and abroad. Khrushchev, concerned that domestic dissent was
getting out of hand, moved to rein in the criticism, making it clear that
‘hostile outbursts’ and attempts to blame the Soviet system itself for the
excesses of Stalinism would not be tolerated. And when a popular
uprising in Hungary appeared to threaten Moscow’s hold on the whole of
Eastern Europe, Khrushchev sent 60,000 troops, thousands of tanks and
two air force divisions to crush a revolution that had, briefly, captured the
imagination of much of the world.5
Khrushchev’s 1959 visit to New York had come amid a dizzying two-
week tour of the United States, during which the Soviet leader had taken
tea with members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, inspected
the size of hogs in Beltsville, Maryland, sampled his first hot dog, thrown
a tantrum after being denied entry to Disneyland (due to security
concerns), and enjoyed the company of Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe
and Shirley MacLaine. He had also discussed disarmament with
President Eisenhower during a friendly summit meeting at Camp David,
the presidential retreat in Maryland that was, famously, named after Ike’s
only grandson.6
Hopes for a Cold War détente, though, had quickly soured. On 1 May
1960, the U-2 pilot Gary Powers had been shot down near Sverdlovsk
(Yekaterinburg), to the east of the Ural Mountains. When, a few days
later, Khrushchev announced that an American spy plane had been
downed, Washington – assuming that Powers had either died or
committed suicide (he had been issued with a poison injection pin) –
claimed that a weather plane had strayed off course. When the Soviets
countered with evidence of the U-2, surveillance photographs and a CIA-
trained pilot who was still very much alive, the Americans were
humiliated. The bitter fallout doomed any hopes for East–West
rapprochement at the Paris summit, held later that month – which ended
with Khrushchev angrily denouncing the Americans as ‘thieves’ and
describing Eisenhower, whose invitation to visit Moscow had been
summarily rescinded, as ‘stinky’.7
In the weeks following the failed summit, Khrushchev resolved to
return to the United States. Knowing full well – like Castro – that the
opening of the Fifteenth General Assembly provided an unparalleled
opportunity to stick it to the Americans, on their own turf, before a
worldwide audience of millions, he was determined not to miss out. He
was, moreover, keen to woo the new African countries and extend Soviet
influence in the underdeveloped world. There was just one problem:
although Khrushchev was the Soviet Union’s de facto leader, Nikolai
Bulganin, the Soviet premier, technically headed the government, while
Leonid Brezhnev, as Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet,
was the titular head of state. Lacking an automatic right to speak at the
UN, Khrushchev came up with an ingenious solution: he would appoint
himself head of the Soviet delegation to the UN. As his son Sergei later
recalled, the Soviet leader was ‘simply bursting to do battle’.8
The news that Khrushchev was planning to return to New York was
greeted with dismay in the United States: the Cleveland Plain Dealer
accused the Soviet leader of ‘sheer unmitigated gall’, while Time
magazine proclaimed that Khrushchev was ‘about as welcome in the U.S.
as the Black Plague’.9 Richard Nixon was scarcely more polite. Writing
privately to Llewellyn E. ‘Tommy’ Thompson, the American ambassador
in Moscow, on 8 September, the vice president (who had famously gone
toe to toe with the Soviet leader during the impromptu ‘kitchen debate’*
in Moscow, the previous summer) noted that he was ‘looking forward to
Khrushchev’s visit with interest’. Referring to the Soviet Union’s recent
success in sending two dogs, Belka and Strelka, into orbit (and, in
contrast to their more famous predecessor, Laika, returning them safely
to the earth), Nixon wondered whether the Soviet leader ‘might decide to
take the trip in one of their rockets. He isn’t, of course, a dog, but most
people think he is a son of a ——!’10 Secretary of State Christian Herter
and other senior Eisenhower administration officials also worried that the
Soviet leader was planning to turn the General Assembly into a
‘spectacular propaganda circus’ and cause as much trouble as possible.11
While they might have preferred him to stay at home, the authorities had
no choice but to accommodate him. They did, though, decide to restrict
his movements to the island of Manhattan, citing concerns for his
security (this same measure was subsequently applied to Castro).
Moreover, the government went out of its way to emphasize that
Khrushchev’s attendance at the United Nations did not ‘in any sense
imply that he is either a guest of the United States Government or that he
is being officially welcomed to United States territory’.12

Khrushchev chose to make his second trip to New York by sea because,
with his state-of-the art Tupolev TU-114 grounded due to mechanical
issues, he could not bear the humiliation of having to take a less
impressive plane that would have required a refuelling stop in London.
The savage storms that had marred the first few days of the voyage
doubtless caused many of Khrushchev’s travelling companions to regret
that particular decision, especially as the First Secretary took enormous
and very obvious delight in the seasickness that afflicted almost
everybody on the ship, apart from him (‘I have’, he later noted, ‘a
sturdier constitution’). Then, as the weather improved, Khrushchev took
to dictating speeches and reading the latest intelligence reports from a
deckchair, before whiling away the afternoons and evenings watching
movies, playing countless games of shuffleboard (with the competitive
ferocity, it was said, of a Florida retiree), drinking enormous quantities of
wine, vodka and cognac, and poking fun at the comrades.13
But no one was laughing as the Baltika approached Pier 73, on the
Manhattan side of the East River. Having balked at the rental costs,
Khrushchev had ordered the Soviet ambassador to bargain hard and rent
a cheaper place.14 His instructions had been followed with rather too
much enthusiasm: the pier was a wreck and, despite some last-minute
attempts to patch things up, ‘the roof leaked like a sieve. Plastic sheeting
covered broken panes in the skylights, but the weight of water soon broke
through and soaked everything below.’ Both the red carpet and the rich
Persian rug that had been laid out by Soviet officials earlier that morning
‘soaked up the water like giant blotting paper’.15 To add insult to injury, a
boycott by the International Longshoremen’s Union meant that the crew
were forced to moor the ship themselves, and diplomats to lug their own
baggage, as a hostile crowd looked on. Some 300 anti-communist
protesters (including a number of émigrés from central and eastern
Europe), ‘hemmed in’ behind a fenced area at the south-west corner of
25th Street and East River Drive, had waited for two hours in the pouring
rain to make their displeasure known. The New York Daily News
described how ‘when Khrushchev’s bald dome was seen moving from
the Baltika to the pier the crowd let loose a volley of names – in English
and assorted tongues – that would have blanched Captain Kidd’.16
In a calculated insult, no official representative of the national, state or
city government was in attendance – and Khrushchev, who walked down
the gangway to the strains of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake at precisely 9:48
a.m., was welcomed formally by Jehan de Noue, along with the
communist leaders of Czechoslovakia and Poland (Antonín Novotný and
Władysław Gomułka), and Cyrus Eaton, a multi-millionaire financier and
industrialist who, virtually alone among US businessmen, advocated
friendly relations with the communist world. Eight little girls – the
daughters of Soviet embassy employees – in ‘pretty dresses, pigtails and
white hair ribbons, greeted Mr. Khrushchev with armloads of salmon-
colored, white and orange gladioli’.17 Smiling, and tanned from his nine
days at sea, Khrushchev, wearing a dark blue suit, brown Oxfords and a
dark grey silk tie, strode towards the waiting microphone and, ‘with his
feet squarely planted on the oriental rug, he took his silver-rimmed
reading glasses from a leather case’ and pulled a crumpled sheaf of notes
from his pocket.18 ‘The thoughts and aspirations of a majority of people
in all countries’, he declared, ‘are now focused on one goal – how to
achieve a situation in which lasting peace will be ensured all over the
world.’ The Soviet Union was, he emphasized, ‘trying to do everything
to shape the development of relations in the direction of a peaceful
adjustment and the establishment of world peace’. Recalling the ‘best
feeling from my last year’s visit to the United States’, he expressed his
‘great respect for the American nation’ and predicted that ‘the relations
between our great countries will improve’. After all, he explained, ‘it is
common knowledge that no matter how dark a night might be, it is
invariably followed by dawn.’19 As he spoke, raindrops could be seen
bouncing off his head.
For those who had been expecting fireworks, these first remarks on
American soil were surprisingly emollient. Committed to the policy of
‘peaceful coexistence’ between the socialist and the capitalist blocs,
Khrushchev – a natural optimist – could turn on the charm when he
wanted to.20 As it turned out, though, he was merely keeping his powder
dry.
On finishing his speech Khrushchev was ushered into his shiny new
Cadillac for the short ride to the Soviet mission.21 As his motorcade
made its way up Second Avenue, one newspaper reported, ‘a waitress in
a luncheonette at 72nd Street suggested to a customer that she would like
to have Khrushy drop in for breakfast because she had “just the thing for
him”. She pointed to a can of insecticide.’22 The mission itself,
meanwhile, was targeted by Hungarian exiles who denounced
Khrushchev as a ‘Fat, Red Rat’ who was ‘Wanted for Murder’.23
 *

While Khrushchev was settling into his quarters in the Soviet mission – a
grand, neo-federal town house on Park Avenue – over at the Shelburne
on Lexington the Cuban delegation was becoming restless.24 Shortly
before 7 p.m., after some twenty-four hours holed up in the hotel, and
with wild rumours circulating that the Cubans had been plucking and
cooking chickens in their rooms, extinguishing cigars on the carpets and
filling the refrigerators with mouldy steaks, Fidel and his delegation
stormed out. The final straw had come when Edward Spatz, having
demanded an additional $10,000 as a security deposit, turned down a
Cuban bond as part payment because, in his words, it ‘looked wrong’.
Speaking at an impromptu news conference in the hotel’s (aptly named)
Satire Room, Fidel complained about a general ‘climate of inhospitality’
in New York, declaring that if the United States was unable to treat
visiting statesmen with respect then the United Nations should be moved
to a different country. As for Mr Spatz’s ‘troublesome’ demands, Fidel
countered that he was ‘not ready to let myself be robbed because the
money I have belongs to the Cuban people’.25 The Maximum Leader
declared that he and his delegation would ‘go any place, even Central
Park’ if necessary: after all, he explained, ‘we are a mountain people …
used to sleeping in the open air.’26 When asked if he was not worried
about being bothered by ‘thieves at night’, he shot back: ‘How can there
be thieves in this country? Don’t the workers earn decent salaries? Aren’t
there salaries for everyone here? In Cuba anybody can sleep in Havana’s
Central Park without being disturbed.’
Once the laughter had died down, Fidel sought to make a more
serious point. Declaring that the ‘rudeness and lack of hospitality’ that he
had encountered was ‘inexplicable’, he stated that ‘if a meeting as
important as the General Assembly of the United Nations’ took place in
Cuba, ‘we would double our efforts to be friendly with everyone who
attended it.’ After all, he explained, the embezzlers who had profited
under the Batista regime, and subsequently fled into exile, had ‘left us
magnificent houses’ that could be used to accommodate international
guests. The Cuban leader now rose to his feet, placed his arm around the
New York Times journalist Herbert L. Matthews – who had famously
interviewed him in the Sierra Maestra – and, as the cameras began to
flash, headed for the exit.27
As Fidel and a number of his aides ‘piled into a black Oldsmobile’,
‘others in their party ran frantically into the street to get car space while
the surprised police and security guards tried to maintain order’.28 Then,
amid the wailing of police sirens, and the revving of engines, the convoy
was off, headed to the United Nations headquarters in Turtle Bay. Fidel
Castro was taking his complaints to the top.

Following the resignation of the former Norwegian foreign minister,

Trygve Lie, in November 1952, after sustained pressure from the Soviet
Union over his support for the ‘police action’ in Korea, the United
Nations had eventually turned to the little-known Swedish academic and
public servant Dag Hammarskjöld as his successor as Secretary
General.29 One Dutch diplomat, who had viewed the search for Lie’s
replacement up close, explained that ‘in spite of the reputation of ability
and integrity which he had acquired among those who had met him in
negotiations or at conferences, it cannot be said that [Hammarskjöld]
was, at that moment, the obvious candidate for this high international
function.’ Rather, ‘his election was much more due to the wish of the Big
Powers to see – after Trygve Lie who had taken a strong position in
several questions – at the head of the Secretariat someone who would
concentrate mainly on the administrative problems and who would
abstain from public statements on the political conduct of the
Organization.’30 Hammarskjöld himself was rather more succinct: ‘I
was’, he said, ‘simply picked out of the hat.’31
In Hammarskjöld, the big powers thought that they had appointed the
archetypal bureaucrat: cautious, colourless, a man unlikely to cause them
any particular trouble. They were wrong. As his biographer Roger Lipsey
has explained, almost nobody had any ‘inkling of the breadth of his
political philosophy, integrity, capacity for dialogue and strategic
acumen. Had his full range been better known, he would not have been
elected’, because ‘the Big Powers would only compromise their separate
interests around someone believed to be safe.’32 Taking advantage of the
greater freedom for manoeuvre provided by the death of Stalin on 5
March 1953 and the Korean War armistice agreement, which was signed
on 27 July 1953, Hammarskjöld re-energized the role of Secretary
General, bringing a distinctive leadership style that was rooted in his
commitment to independence and impartiality, and his own personal
integrity and moral courage.33 As he settled into the role – he was re-
elected, unanimously, to a second term in 1957, partly because no one
wanted a fight over this issue – Hammarskjöld developed the use of
‘preventive diplomacy’ (negotiations to prevent conflict), invented the
concept of ‘shuttle diplomacy’ (direct, personal, private negotiations with
key protagonists), and showed a willingness to deploy UN peacekeepers
to the world’s trouble spots.34
With the accelerating pace of European decolonization fuelling the
rapid growth of the United Nations, Hammarskjöld also came to see the
organization as having a special role in supporting the rights of the
smaller nations in a world that was still dominated by the traditional big
powers. The UN had, he declared in August 1960, ‘increasingly become
the main platform – and the main protector of the interests – of those
many nations who feel themselves strong as members of the international
family but are weak in isolation’. These countries, he explained, ‘look to
the Organization as a spokesman and as an agent for principles which
give them strength in an international concert in which other voices can
mobilize all the weight of armed force, wealth, an historical role and that
influence which is the other side of a special responsibility for peace and
security’.35
Now, on the evening of 19 September, this aristocratic Swede was
sitting down to dinner with his staff in the office dining room when word
came through that a group of Cubans, dressed in drab-olive fatigues, had
entered the UN building. While most of the group enjoyed sandwiches
and bottles of rum and Mexican beer in the bar of the South Lounge,
Fidel was ushered into Hammarskjöld’s office on the thirty-eighth floor
of the iconic Secretariat Building.36 The Secretary General was, in the
words of one of his biographers, both a ‘great statesman and peacemaker
… of unshakeable integrity’, willing to stand up to the leaders of the
great powers, and a ‘vulnerable, questing man of spirit’ – a ‘sufferer, a
doubter, a discoverer’.37 The Secretary General listened patiently as
Castro complained about the humiliating treatment his party had received
at the Shelburne and demanded that the delegation be put up at the UN. If
enough sofas could not be found for them to sleep on, Castro declared,
then they would happily set up camp in the rose garden. During the
course of the discussions, Fidel asked Hammarskjöld if he agreed that
‘the time had arrived to move the headquarters of the United Nations to
another country’ (according to the Cuban press, the Secretary General
simply responded with a shrug). Despite being preoccupied by the fast-
moving crisis in the Congo following the coup against Lumumba only
five days earlier, Hammarskjöld nevertheless gamely turned travel agent.
Eventually, having worked the phones, he announced that William
Zeckendorf, the prominent real estate developer and hotel owner, had
offered the Cubans rooms, free of charge, at the Commodore Hotel, on
East 42nd Street. But his efforts had been for nought. The Cubans had, he
now learned, arranged to stay at the Hotel Theresa in Harlem – a heavily
African American area of the city, and one in which visiting dignitaries
would seldom set foot, never mind take up residence – and could not be
dissuaded, insisting on the ‘right to choose the hotel we want’. After a
discussion with John W. Hanes, Jr, State Department administrator for
security and consular affairs, Police Commissioner Kennedy
begrudgingly gave his approval for the Cubans to use the Theresa; and,
after finishing their drinks, they vanished into the night.38
Some have wondered whether this was all staged; part of a carefully
worked out plan to cause mischief on a grand scale. Teresa ‘Teté’ Casuso,
the Cuban intellectual and diplomat, who defected to the United States in
October 1960, certainly thought so. Casuso, who was head of the Cuban
mission at the UN, later claimed that, during conversations with members
of Fidel’s entourage, she ‘discovered the bitter truth that the whole thing
had been planned beforehand’:
[Fidel] had intended from the start to complain that he was overcharged at the first hotel,
to plant himself with his whole retinue and all their baggage at the United Nations and
thus present the spectacle that they had no place to stay, then to move to Harlem in order
to give the impression that it was only among the humble and despised people of the
United States, the Negroes, that the humble and despised Cubans and their leader were
able to find shelter.39

It is certainly the case that, before departing for New York, Fidel had
warned that he might have ‘to camp in New York’s Central Park if it
becomes necessary’ – and had made a point of packing his backpack and
hammock, just in case. But, to be fair, the Cubans had been finding it
almost impossible to secure suitable hotel reservations. 40 During their
increasingly frantic search for a hotel that would take them, the Hotel
Theresa had been suggested to them by leaders of the New York chapter
of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (founded by left-liberal supporters
of the revolution earlier in the year). This fact, in particular, would
subsequently fuel conspiracy theories in the American newspapers that
the entire thing was a well-planned stunt. On the other hand, if a move to
Harlem had, indeed, been the plan all along, it was curious – to say the
least – that Fidel had not ensured that Major Juan Almeida, one of the
few leading revolutionaries of African descent, was on the trip with him.
Either way, the move uptown worked a treat.
 Built in 1913, the Hotel Theresa – known as the ‘Waldorf of Harlem’ – was an architectural
wonder and a local landmark.
Photograph by Harry Hamburg/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images

Built in 1913 by the Jewish American financier and manufacturer

Gustavus Sidenberg, the Hotel Theresa bore graceful ornament on its all-
white facade – including spandrel panels consisting of ‘diamond shapes
made up of crisscross lines, something like the Islamic decoration of the
14th-century Alhambra’ and ‘projecting panels of glazed terra cotta
surrounding roughened, sandpaper-like rectangles’. ‘Unlike anything
ever seen in New York’, the thirteen-storey hotel was located in the heart
of Harlem – a neighbourhood that, for half a century, had been renowned
as a centre of African American cultural innovation and political
radicalism.41 Although, by the autumn of 1960, the ‘Waldorf of Harlem’
had definitely seen better days, it retained a reputation for being, as the
New York Times put it, ‘a kind of village green … that is, politicians hold
rallies in and around it, and Negro celebrities receive the acclamation of
the multitudes there.’42 In 1941, 10,000 people had turned out there to
celebrate Joe Louis’ latest victory in the boxing ring and, in 1959, the
Theresa had hosted the annual convention of the Communist Party of the
United States of America. For Castro, it was an inspired choice.43
As news of the Cubans’ move to Harlem spread, hundreds of locals
headed towards the Theresa, desperate to witness a slice of history. Some
were merely curious, but Fidel’s political appeal was clear enough. As
the community-owned Harlem weekly, the New York Citizen-Call,† put it:
‘To Harlem’s oppressed ghetto dwellers, Castro was that bearded
revolutionary who had thrown his nation’s rascals out and who had then
told white America to go to hell.’44
That evening, many of New York’s most talented African American
men and women of letters – including the historian John Henrik Clarke,
playwright Julian Mayfield and the writer John Oliver Killens – had
gathered in the home of poet and novelist Sarah Elizabeth Wright for a
meeting of the Harlem Writers Guild, when their proceedings were
interrupted by a telephone call. It was Richard T. Gibson, the African
American journalist and co-founder of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee,
relaying the ‘electrifying news’ of Fidel’s audacious ‘Harlem Shuffle’.
Maya Angelou, then a thirty-two-year-old poet, singer and budding civil
rights activist, explained how ‘in moments, we were on the street in the
rain, finding cabs or private cars or heading for subways’. But, to her
amazement, ‘at eleven o’clock on a Monday evening, we were unable to
get close to the hotel. Thousands of people filled the sidewalks and
intersections, and police had cordoned off the main and side streets.’
Angelou ‘hovered with my friends on the edges of the crowd, enjoying
the Spanish songs, the screams of “Viva Castro”, and the sounds of conga
drums being played nearby in the damp air’. As they looked around,
Wright recalled, ‘we could see people crammed onto rooftops, leaning
out of thousands of windows. And a steady chanting, “Cuba, sí, Yanqui
no!”’45 At one point, ‘people carried the manager of the hotel on their
shoulders and he was applauded for having offered the hotel to Castro to
serve as his residence during his stay in New York.’46 The crowd was in
good humour: one local observed how ‘that cat and his gang may have
fought in those mountains … and whipped that dictator Batista. But if
they can stand the bedbugs in the Theresa, I’ll know they’re real
revolutionaries!’47 When a waving, smiling Fidel finally arrived, flanked
by a heavy security presence, he was greeted by repeated cheers of ‘We
want Castro!’48
They were roaring for Fidel on the streets of Havana, too, where a
hastily called rally to protest against the ‘disrespectful’ treatment in New
York drew 25,000 to the square in front of the Presidential Palace (in the
capital’s movie theatres, films were stopped so that notices could be
flashed onto the screen, calling on Cubans to assemble at the palace
immediately). Amid a ‘din of blaring auto horns’, ‘shouting and surging
crowds’ waving Cuban flags, white handkerchiefs and giant banners
proclaiming, ‘With a hotel or without a hotel, they will have to listen to
Fidel’, welcomed acting prime minister Raúl Castro and President
Osvaldo Dorticós with ‘clamorous applause’. Speaking first, in remarks
that were broadcast nationwide via state TV and radio, Raúl (a ‘sinister-
looking young man’ with an ‘animated Pixie-like manner’ whose
influence on his brother was, according to the British Foreign Office,
‘almost wholly bad’) denounced the ‘aggression and provocation’ of a
‘stupid US imperialism’. An imperialism that was, he said, both ‘furious
with, but also fearful of, the Cuban Revolution’. ‘Our government’, he
declared, was:
different from the North American Government. We cannot act like they act simply
because we are a civilized government. We can tell President Eisenhower that if the seat of
the UN were here and despite the scorn felt by our people for what he represents, we
would be sure if the reverse were true and he had to come to an international meeting of
this nature that our people and government would be incapable of doing to him what they
there are doing to Fidel.
 In the event that the US president visited Cuba, Raúl continued, ‘our
people would be incapable of emitting one hiss’. President Dorticós also
addressed the crowds, emphasizing that, while revolutionary Cuba
respected the diplomatic representatives of the United States, they did not
respect – and would respect less with each passing day – ‘the financial
interests of North American imperialism […] we are able to say with
pride that we have failed to respect the American petroleum companies,
the sugar companies, the public service companies and the American
banks.’
The two men then presented the crowd with a formal declaration of
protest at the treatment afforded to Fidel and the Cuban delegation in
New York. Claiming that the United States was swimming against the
tide of history, the Cuban government characterized those ‘who insult
and attack us, those who try to smother the voice of our people’ as ‘the
same who walk hand in hand with the worst forces in the world: Nazi
reactionism, bloody fascism, the still-remaining despots in our
hemisphere … The company they keep unmasks them …’ But ‘those
who do not want the voice of our Prime Minister to be heard at the
United Nations are going to have to hear it, and with the voice of an
entire people that shouts with more fervor than ever; our country or
death! We shall conquer!’ While the crowds in Havana roared their
approval, it was reported that, out in the provinces, some of Fidel’s
supporters were preparing to sleep outdoors, in hammocks, in a show of
solidarity.49 Meanwhile, across town in the American embassy, senior
officials – fearing a possible mob attack – were burning sensitive files.50
Back in Harlem, Fidel had barely had time to settle into his two-room
suite on the ninth floor of the Hotel Theresa before his first guest came
calling.

Born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1925, Malcolm Little had endured a

troubled youth: his father, Earl, a supporter of the Jamaican-born black
nationalist Marcus Garvey, had been murdered by white supremacists
when Malcolm was six years old; his mother was later hospitalized
following a nervous breakdown. Separated from his siblings and
discouraged from pursuing a career in law (which was, his teacher said,
‘no realistic goal for a nigger’), he drifted into a life of crime – drug
dealing, gambling, racketeering and pimping. In 1946 he was arrested in
Boston and sentenced to ten years in prison for armed robbery. Two years
later, while serving his sentence in Charleston State Penitentiary,
Malcolm – attracted by its forceful condemnation of white ‘devils’ and
its powerful message of uplift for African Americans – converted to the
Nation of Islam. Abandoning his ‘slave name’, he now styled himself
‘Malcolm X’. Paroled in 1952, Malcolm quickly moved up the NoI’s
ranks, becoming leader of Temple Number 7 in Harlem two years later,
and helping to recruit thousands of new converts across the country.51
By the autumn of 1960, Malcolm X was one of the most famous black
nationalists – indeed, black men – in the United States. The Nation of
Islam, the organization that he had joined in 1948, and which he now
served as its most charismatic spokesperson, had shot to fame the year
before, following the screening of a documentary film, The Hate that
Hate Produced, on New York’s WNTA-TV. Produced by journalists
Mike Wallace and Louis Lomax, the film had highlighted the NoI’s
unorthodox religious beliefs (which included the notion that an evil black
scientist, Yacub, had been responsible for the creation of whites) and its
strident criticisms of the white race.52 The programme had begun with
minister Louis X (later, Louis Farrakhan), reading an indictment of the
white race as part of his play, The Trial, that the NoI were staging in
cities across the country:
I charge the white man with being the greatest liar on earth! I charge the white man with
being the greatest drunkard on earth … I charge the white man with being the greatest
gambler on earth. I charge the white man, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, with being the
greatest murderer on earth … I charge the white man with being the greatest robber on
earth. I charge the white man with being the greatest deceiver on earth. I charge the white
man with being the greatest trouble-maker on earth. So therefore, ladies and gentlemen of
the jury, I ask you, bring back a verdict of guilty as charged.53

Interviewed by Lomax, Malcolm had explained that followers of the

group’s leader, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, believed not only that
‘the black man, by nature, is divine’, but that the white man was the
devil. When pushed on whether white people were capable of doing
good, Malcolm responded, ‘History is best qualified to [judge] and we
don’t have any historic example where we have found that they
collectively for the people have done good.’54 His own sermons and
speeches, meanwhile, crackled with racially charged rhetoric. An FBI
informant reported that, at a meeting held on 20 April, Malcolm had
‘asked those in the audience who would like to see the white man go up
in smoke to raise their hands’. ‘Everyone’, he noted, ‘raised their hand.’
The fiery minister would also regularly reassure his audiences, reminding
them that ‘the black man is God and the white man is the devil, so you
know who will win this last great war’.55
Malcolm had quickly established himself as a leading figure in
Harlem’s radical scene, and had been appointed to the 28th Precinct
Community Council by its chairman, James Hicks – the influential editor
of the New York Amsterdam News – who had been impressed by his
masterful ability to control the crowds during a protest against police
brutality in the spring of 1957.56 But the NoI firebrand had also been
looking for a way to further establish his reputation as a major national –
and international – figure. And now, wrote his biographer Manning
Marable, Malcolm had been presented with ‘an opportunity to crash
international headlines’; one that came ‘gift wrapped from the Cuban
Revolution’.57
At around 1 a.m., Malcolm, together with his aides Captain Joseph
and John Ali, and three African American reporters – Jimmy Booker of
the New York Amsterdam News, the photojournalist Carl Nesfield, and
Ralph D. Matthews, Jr, of the New York Citizen-Call – were pushing their
way past the police officers who were guarding the building. Having
taken the one working elevator to the ninth floor, Malcolm’s party headed
down a corridor lined with white journalists and photographers who were
visibly put out at having been refused admission. As they entered Fidel’s
dimly lit suite, cigar smoke hanging heavy in the air, the Cuban leader,
still dressed in his immaculately pressed army fatigues, rose and shook
hands with each of his guests in turn. He was clearly in a fine mood – and
the ‘rousing Harlem welcome still seemed to ring in his ears’.58
After sitting down on the edge of the bed (the room was virtually
devoid of furniture), Fidel beckoned Malcolm, still wearing his trench
coat, to sit down beside him. The Maximum Leader’s first words of
broken English were lost in the hubbub, but prompted Malcolm to reply
that ‘downtown for you, it was ice, uptown it is warm’, whereupon Fidel
smiled broadly. ‘Aahh yes,’ he said, ‘we feel very warm here.’ ‘Ever a
militant’, reported Ralph Matthews, Malcolm could not resist claiming
that ‘I think you will find the people in Harlem are not so addicted to the
propaganda they put out downtown.’ Eager to avoid missing out on a
historic encounter between two figures who would come to embody
opposition to American imperialism, on the one hand, and the
uncompromising demand for black rights ‘by any means necessary’, on
the other, several compañeros were now squeezing themselves into the
already cramped room. Most of the Cubans smoked long cigars and,
when something amused them, they ‘threw back their heads and blew
smoke puffs as they laughed’. As he spoke, Fidel had a habit of pointing
to his temples and tapping his chest; when an interpreter translated some
of Malcolm’s longer sentences, though, the Cuban leader listened
attentively.59
The conversation, which lasted for about thirty minutes, ranged
widely. The two men discussed racial inequality (Fidel declared that ‘we
work for every oppressed person’ and expressed admiration for African
Americans – who had ‘more political consciousness, more vision than
anyone else’), the Congo crisis and the upcoming session of the UN
General Assembly. At one point, Fidel paused so that he and his aides
could pass round Cuban cigars, and signed copies of one of his recent
speeches.60 Then the conversation turned to US–Cuban relations.
According to an FBI informant, Malcolm stated that ‘usually when one
sees a man whom the United States is against, there is something good in
that man’. To this Castro replied that ‘only the people in power in the
United States are against him, not the masses’.61
 Fidel was, Malcolm explained, ‘the only white person that I have really liked’.
Photograph © Prensa Latina

With luggage now beginning to arrive at the cramped quarters, Fidel

sought to draw the conversation to a close by citing Abraham Lincoln:
‘You can fool some of the people some of the time …’ he began but,
visibly tiring, he simply threw up his hands while his interpreter finished
the quotation for him. As the visitors stood up and prepared to leave,
Malcolm delivered a parable: ‘No one knows the master better than his
servants. We have been servants ever since we were brought here. We
know all his little tricks. Understand? We know what he is going to do
before he does.’ Throwing his head back, and roaring with laughter,
Castro responded, ‘Sí, sí!’62
As Malcolm and his small entourage exited the hotel, just after 1.30
a.m., the crowd outside shouted out, ‘Viva Castro!’ In remarks to the
waiting, heavy-eyed journalists, he explained that Fidel had ‘told me that
he felt at home for the first time since his arrival in this country last
Sunday afternoon’. Pressed on his personal impressions of the Cuban
prime minister, Malcolm declared that ‘any man who represents such a
small country but who would stand up and challenge a country as large as
the United States on behalf of his people must be sincere’.63
In subsequent comments to the Pittsburgh Courier, Malcolm
contrasted the record of Havana and Washington when it came to racism.
‘Fidel Castro’, he noted, ‘has denounced racial discrimination in Cuba,
which is more than President Eisenhower has done here in America.’ The
Cuban leader had also ‘come out against lynching, which is also more
than Eisenhower has done … and has taken a more open stand for civil
rights for black Cubans.’ But, Malcolm continued, ‘no outside man can
help the “so-called” American Negro. No outside force, no outside
power. It takes God to correct the situation here because it is so
complicated. Muhammad represents that God. That’s why I am with
Muhammad.’64 These final words were, perhaps, an attempt to smooth
over disagreements with Elijah Muhammad. From their wiretap on his
phone, the FBI had quickly learned that the NoI leader had been
infuriated by the meeting between Malcolm and Fidel. There were
several reasons for Elijah Muhammad’s displeasure. Most fundamentally,
the encounter challenged the Nation’s strict apolitical stance: believing
that racial equality within the United States was impossible, Muhammad
resisted all efforts at involvement in black political issues, even opposing
efforts by NoI members to register to vote – which he saw as a waste of
time. The bar on political engagement was a restriction that the more
politically engaged Malcolm was constantly chafing against.
Additionally, Muhammad, who had seen his organization devastated by a
series of FBI raids during 1942, was fearful that the authorities would
seize on Malcolm’s meeting with Fidel – a suspected ‘Red’ and foreign
enemy – to justify another strike.65 ‘If I had known Malcolm was going
to visit Castro’, he told the Washington Post’s Wallace Terry in
December 1960, ‘I would have prevented it. The Muslim world is against
Communism. I don’t like it because it’s atheistic.’ But, he said,
communism was ultimately all part of Allah’s divine plan that would see
the white race destroyed and blacks – God’s ‘original people’ –
reasserting themselves.66
The tension between Muhammad and Malcolm over the meeting with
Fidel was a warning sign of a bitter conflict to come. Malcolm would
eventually leave the Nation in March 1964 in acrimonious circumstances
– his departure triggered by long-standing disagreements over political
activism, a desire to adopt a more orthodox version of Sunni Islam, and
vicious internecine scheming. The acrimony was exacerbated, moreover,
by Malcolm’s discovery that his beloved mentor, who was married, had
fathered several children with a string of teenage secretaries. Freed from
the constraints of the Nation, Malcolm founded the Organization of Afro-
American Unity in June 1964. Modelled on the Organization of African
Unity, the OAAU not only sought to ‘bring about the complete
independence of people of African descent here in the Western
Hemisphere, and first here in the United States’, under the slogan ‘we
want freedom, by any means necessary’, but it also explicitly sought to
internationalize the African American freedom struggle and learn from
the experiences of ‘our African brothers [who] have gained their
independence faster than you and I here in America have’.67 The 1960
meeting with Fidel was, then, an early signal of Malcolm’s growing
interest in Third World revolutionaries and his deepening conviction that
the African American struggle was an integral part of the wider revolt
against colonialism and white supremacy. The Cuban leader clearly made
a strong personal impression, too. Fidel, Malcolm told the Cuban
journalist Reinaldo Peñalver, was ‘the only white person that I have
really liked’.68

Fidel’s first few hours in New York City had, by any reckoning, been
pretty sensational. He had first stunned his American hosts – and much of
the rest of the world – by stalking out of the Shelburne and threatening to
set up camp at the United Nations. Then, he and his entire delegation had
relocated to Harlem – a neighbourhood few other international statesmen
would have deigned to visit, never mind stay in – where he had enjoyed
an iconic encounter with the black firebrand (and white America’s
bogeyman) Malcolm X. Inevitably, Fidel’s antics dominated the
following day’s headlines. Writing in the Washington Star, the respected
columnist Mary McGrory noted that ‘Mr. Castro’s bed has become the
cause célèbre of the opening of the General Assembly’ and everyone was
now wondering how Nikita Khrushchev, ‘who stayed quietly in the
Soviet headquarters all day’, would ‘manage to steal the spotlight from
the 34-year-old rebel’.69
Notes
1. Anthony Marino and Henry Lee, ‘K and His Pals Meet at Park Av. Kremlin’, New York
Daily News, 20 September 1960, 3, 30; Edward A. Morrow, ‘Premier Watches Pickets in
Harbor’, NYT, 20 September 1960, 1, 15; Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, Volume 3:
Statesman [1953–1964], edited by Sergei Khrushchev (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 264; Noel E. Parmentel, Jr, ‘East River Showboat …’, The
Nation, 1 October 1960, 193–5. For a detailed and entertaining account of Khrushchev’s
earlier trip to New York see Peter Carlson, K Blows Top (London: Old Street Publishing,
2009), 108–43.
2. The best biography of Khrushchev is William Taubman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning
Khrushchev (London: The Free Press, 2005); Hall, 1956, 49–56.
3. ‘Khrushchev – A Personality Sketch’, 2-3, CIA Research Reports – Soviet Union, 1946–
1976, Reel 3, RIAS.
4. Hall, 1956, 50–1, 58.
5. Hall, 1956, 65, 345. On reform under Khrushchev see, for instance, Miriam Dobson,
Khrushchev’s Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform Under
Stalin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009).
6. For a comprehensive account of this trip see Carlson, K Blows Top.
7. Carlson, K Blows Top, 253–60, 263; Taubman, Khrushchev, 445–60, 460–8.
8. Carlson, K Blows Top, 266; Taubman, Khrushchev, 472; Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev,
Volume 3, 258–9.
9. Lord Hood to Lord Home, 31 October 1960, AU2291/5, FO371/148649; Carlson, K
Blows Top, 268.
10. Nixon to Thompson quoted in Jenny Thompson and Sherry Thompson, The
Kremlinologist: Llewellyn E. Thompson, America’s Man in Cold War Moscow (Baltimore:
John Hopkins University Press, 2018), 226. On the Soviet dogs in space see Elizabeth
Dohrer, ‘Laika the Dog and the First Animals in Space’ at https://www.space.com/17764-
laika-first-animals-in-space.html. On the ‘kitchen debate’ see, for example, Nixon, Six
Crises, 252–60 and Gellman, The President and the Apprentice, 522–4.
11. Christian A. Herter to President Eisenhower, 2 September 1960, Foreign Relations of the
United States, 1958–1960, Volume II, United Nations and General International Matters
(Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1991), document 151, p.
305.
12. See, for instance, letter from William Macomber, Jr, to Paul G. Rogers, 16 September
1960 – 320/9-960, College Park.
13. Taubman, Khrushchev, 472–3; Carlson, K Blows Top, 266–8; Memoirs of Nikita
Khrushchev, Volume 3, 260–2.
14. Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, Volume 3, 264.
15. William Federici and Robert McCarthy, ‘K Visits and the Skies Weep’, New York Daily
News, 20 September 1960, 4; Harrison E. Salisbury, ‘Russian Bids Eisenhower Join in
New Summit Here’, NYT, 20 September 1960, 14.
16. Federici and McCarthy, ‘K Visits and the Skies Weep’, New York Daily News, 20
September 1960, 4.
17. Anthony Marino and Henry Lee, ‘K and His Pals Meet at Park Av. Kremlin’, New York
Daily News, 20 September 1960, 30.
18. Salisbury, ‘Russian Bids Eisenhower Join in New Summit Here’, NYT, 20 September
1960, 14. See also Taubman, Khrushchev, 474 and Carlson, K Blows Top, 269–70.
19. Nikita Khrushchev, ‘Statement at the Pier’, 19 September 1960, in Khrushchev in New
York: A Documentary Record of Nikita S. Khrushchev’s trip to New York, September 19th
to October 13th, 1960, including all his speeches and proposals to the United Nations
and major addresses and news conferences (New York: Crosscurrents Press, 1960), 7–10.
20. Vladislav M. Zubok, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to
Gorbachev (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 127, 129, 134.
21. Salisbury, ‘Russian Bids Eisenhower Join in New Summit Here’, NYT, 20 September
1960, 14.
22. Federici and McCarthy, ‘K Visits and the Skies Weep’, New York Daily News, 20
September 1960, 4.
23. Marino and Lee, ‘K and His Pals Meet at Park Av. Kremlin’, New York Daily News, 20
September 1960, 30.
24. http://www.bigapplesecrets.com/2014/01/russians-on-park-avenue-vyshinskiy-and.html;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKim,_Mead_%26_White#New_York_City.
25. Sidney Kline, ‘Fidel Quits His Hotel And Moves to Harlem’, New York Daily News, 20
September 1960, 2, 6; ‘Castro Moves Out of Hotel …’, Washington Post, 20 September
1960; Mary McGrory, ‘Harlem Gives Home to Volatile Castro’, Washington Star, 20
September 1960, 1, 6; ‘Castro Bitter Over Suite, Shuffles Off to Harlem’, Washington
News, 20 September 1960; Frankel, ‘Cuban in Harlem’, NYT, 20 September 1960, 1, 16;
‘Hotel Asks Cash, Castro Storms Out to the U.N.’, New York Herald Tribune, 20
September 1960. See also Quirk, Fidel Castro, 335.
26. Frankel, ‘Cuban in Harlem’, NYT, 20 September 1960, 1.
27. ‘La Voz de la Revolución’ (‘The Voice of the Revolution’), Bohemia, 25 September
1960, 68–9.
28. Frankel, ‘Cuban in Harlem’, NYT, 20 September 1960, 16.
29. Brian Urquhart, Hammarskjold (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 7, 9, 16.
30. Urquhart, Hammarskjold, 15.
31. Urquhart, Hammarskjold, 12.
32. Lipsey, Hammarskjöld, 67.
33. Lipsey, Hammarskjöld, 114; Andrew Gilmour, ‘Dag Hammarskjold: Statesman of the
Century’, The Nation, 9 September 2013 at https://www.thenation.com/article/dag-
hammarskjold-statesman-century/.
34. Gilmour, ‘Dag Hammarskjold: Statesman of the Century’; Lipsey, Hammarskjöld, 358,
422; Urquart, Hammarskjold, 13, 251, 256.
35. Urquhart, Hammarskjold, 256.
36. Urquhart, Hammarskjold, 457–8; Emery Kelen, Hammarskjöld (New York: G. P.
Putnam’s Sons, 1966), 201–2.
37. Lipsey, Hammarskjöld, xi.
38. Kline, ‘Fidel Quits His Hotel and Moves to Harlem’, New York Daily News, 20
September 1960, 6; Frankel, ‘Cuban in Harlem’, NYT, 20 September 1960, 16; ‘Mr.
Khrushchev in Harlem’, The Times, 21 September 1960, 12; William B. Macomber, Jr,
Assistant Secretary, to Senator Harry F. Byrd, 30 September 1960 – 320/9-2360, College
Park; ‘Intolerable Insolences and Insults’, Revolución, 20 September 1960, 3.
39. Teresa Casuso, Cuba and Castro (New York: Random House, 1961), 240–1.
40. ‘The Rucksack’, Revolución, 19 September 1960, 12.
41. Christopher Gray, ‘Streetscapes: The Hotel Theresa – Fidel Castro Slept Here’, NYT, 30
April 2009 at
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/2009/05/03/realestate/03scapes.html.
42. Philip Benjamin, ‘Theresa Hotel on 125th St. Is Unruffled by Its Cuban Guests’, NYT, 21
September 1960, 16.
43. For a history of the Hotel Theresa see Sondra Kathryn Wilson, Meet Me at the Theresa:
The Story of Harlem’s Most Famous Hotel (New York: Atria Books, 2004); ‘Hotel
Theresa’, Landmarks Preservation Commission, 13 July 1993 at http://s-
media.nyc.gov/agencies/lpc/lp/1843.pdf; Marcia Mayne, ‘Historic Harlem – The Hotel
Theresa’, 5 August 2011 at https://insidejourneys.com/historic-harlem-hotel-theresa/.
44. ‘A New Kind of Crowd’, New York Citizen-Call, 24 September 1960, 28.
45. Maya Angelou, The Heart of a Woman (London: Virago Press, 2008), 119–20; Rosemari
Mealy, Fidel and Malcolm X: Memories of a Meeting (Baltimore: Black Classic Press,
2013), 21–2.
46. ‘Solidarity and Support for the Cuban Revolution’, Revolución, 20 September 1960, 14.
47. Julian Mayfield, ‘Autobiographical Writings – Chapter Ten: To Monroe and Back’, 207,
in Julian Mayfield Papers, Box 15, Folder 9, Schomburg.
48. Carolyn Dixon, ‘Sidelights’, New York Citizen-Call, 24 September 1960, 27.
49. Bonsal to Secretary of State, 22 September 1960: 611.37/9-2260, Confidential State
Department Files, Decimal 637, reel 4; ‘Joint WEEKA No. 38, 24 September 1960,
737.00(W)/9-2460, Confidential State Department Files, Decimal 737, reel 23; ‘Castro
Bitter over Suite, Shuffles Off to Harlem’, Washington News, 20 September 1960; Bonsal
to Secretary of State, 20 September 1960, 737.13/9-2060, Confidential State Department
Files, Decimal 737, reel 25; ‘The Future is Ours’ (‘El Futuro es Nuestro’), Bohemia, 25
September 1960, 69, 73.
50. AK10345/154 (memo from Marchant, Havana), 22 September 1960, FO371/148219;
Bonsal to State, 20 September 737.13/9-2060. Description of Raúl taken from ‘Leading
Personalities in Cuba’, 7 (AK1012/1), FO371/139397 and AK1015/60, Havana to
London, 1 (6 August 1960), FO371/148182. On the organization of the rally (movie
theatre reference) see Bonsal to Secretary of State, 17 October 1960, 737.00/10-1760,
Confidential State Department Files, Decimal 737, reel 6.
51. See, for instance, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, with the assistance of Alex Haley
(London: Penguin Books, 1968); Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention
(London: Allen Lane, 2011).
52. For the NoI see, for instance, C. Eric Lincoln, The Black Muslims in America (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1961); Marable, Malcolm X, 77–90; and Garrett Felber, Those Who Don’t
Know Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State
(Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2020).
53. Manning Marable and Garrett Felber, eds, The Portable Malcolm X Reader (London:
Penguin, 2013), 150; Marable, Malcolm X, 174.
54. Marable and Felber, eds, The Portable Malcolm X Reader, 154.
55. ‘Comments by Malcolm Little at New York, New York’, NY105-8999, 12-16, Malcolm
X Project Records 1960–2008 (2001–2008), MS#1735, Series VII: Primary Source
Research, Box 37, Columbia University.
56. Marable and Felber, eds, The Portable Malcolm X Reader, 172; Karl Evanzz, The Judas
Factor: The Plot to Kill Malcolm X (New York: New Wave Books, 2011), Marable,
 Malcolm X, 127–9.
57. Marable, Malcolm X, 172.
58. Ralph Matthews, ‘Up in Fidel’s Room’, New York Citizen-Call, 24 September 1960, 5,
16; Jimmy Booker recollection in Mealy, Fidel and Malcolm X, 46–7. See also Elombe
Brath, ‘I Remember Malcolm (a narrative)’ in Klytus Smith and Abiola Sinclair, eds, The
Harlem Cultural/Political Movements 1960–1970 (Gumbs & Thomas: New York, 1995),
13.
59. Matthews, ‘Up in Fidel’s Room’, New York Citizen-Call, 24 September 1960, 16. On the
lack of furniture see Nancy Stout, One Day in December: Celia Sánchez and the Cuban
Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2013), 363.
60. Matthews, ‘Up in Fidel’s Room’, New York Citizen-Call, 24 September 1960, 16; Jimmy
Booker, ‘Castro Talks’, New York Amsterdam News, 24 September 1960, 1, 34.
61. Clayborne Carson, ed., Malcolm X: The FBI File (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1991),
198.
62. Matthews, ‘Up in Fidel’s Room’, New York Citizen-Call, 24 September 1960, 16;
Booker, ‘Castro Talks’, New York Amsterdam News, 24 September 1960, 34.
63. Malcolm quoted in Evanzz, The Judas Factor, chapter 7, ‘Castro Comes to Harlem’.
64. ‘Malcolm X Explains Wee-Hour Visit to Castro at Theresa’, Pittsburgh Courier, 1
October 1960, 3.
65. Claude Andrew Clegg, III, The Life and Times of Elijah Muhammad (Chapel Hill: The
University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 156, chapter 5; Dennis D. Wainstock, Malcolm
X, African American Revolutionary (London: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2009), 54;
Marable, Malcolm X, 109, 133–4, 173.
66. Karl Evanzz, The Messenger: The Rise and Fall of Elijah Muhammad (New York:
Vintage, 2001), 222–3.
67. ‘Roundtable – Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention’, Journal of
American Studies, vol. 47, no. 1 (February 2013), 39; ‘Fidel Castro in Harlem’, in
Marable and Felber, eds, The Portable Malcolm X Reader, 167; Malcolm X, ‘Speech on
the Founding of the OAAU, June 28, 1964 at
http://www.thinkingtogether.org/rcream/archive/Old/S2006/comp/OAAU.pdf.
68. Mealy, Fidel and Malcolm X, 58.
69. McGrory, ‘Harlem Gives Home to Volatile Castro’, Washington Star, 20 September
1960, A-6.

* The unplanned exchanges, which saw the two men debate the merits of their respective
systems and argue about the availability of modern appliances and consumer goods for
their citizens, took place at a model suburban home – replete with a generously equipped
General Electric kitchen – that was housed at the American National Exhibition in
Moscow’s Sokolniki Park.
† The Citizen-Call was published by the one of the country’s first black stockbrokers, John
Paterson.
 CAPTION:

A beaming Fidel and Khrushchev emerge from the Hotel Theresa following their historic first
meeting.
Photograph by -/AFP via Getty Images
 4

TUESDAY 20 SEPTEMBER

I am a Fidelista!
NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV

At first, the reporters thought that Nikita Khrushchev was simply heading
out for a lunchtime stroll when he emerged from the Soviet mission,
smiling broadly, at 12.05 p.m. But then, amid a ‘sudden flurry of activity
by his security personnel’, the Soviet leader was ushered towards his
waiting Fleetwood Cadillac. As journalists shouted out, ‘Where are you
going?’, the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union ‘leaned forward at the window, shaking his
forefinger like a good-natured school teacher to his dull-witted pupils’.
‘We Communists don’t tell our secrets,’ he exclaimed. Then the ten-car
motorcade, accompanied by noisy police outriders, swung out and
headed north, bound for Harlem. Newsmen, police and security
personnel – all of whom had been caught on the hop – now scrambled to
keep up.1
Khrushchev had decided on a meeting with Fidel even before the
Baltika had set sail from Kaliningrad; midway across the Atlantic he had
confided to a close aide his hope that Cuba would become a ‘beacon of
socialism in Latin America’. He also observed how the actions of the
United States were, inexorably, pushing the Cuban leader closer to
Moscow: ‘Castro’, he explained, ‘will have to gravitate to us like an iron
filing to a magnet.’ The Soviet leader – who, a few months later, would
pledge support for ‘wars of national liberation’ around the globe, as part
of his efforts to extend Soviet influence and promote socialism across the
Third World – well understood the romantic appeal of Castro’s
revolution. But he was also keen to ensure that Cuba, and its leader –
whom he had never met before – caused as much discomfort as possible
to the United States of America.2
 Earlier in the day, the Cubans had suggested that they would happily
travel to the Soviet mission for the meeting, but Khrushchev was having
none of it. For one thing, he knew that a trip to Harlem would be a
symbolic way to ‘emphasize our solidarity with Cuba and our indignation
at the discrimination with which Cuba was being treated’. But, just as
important, the Soviet leader understood that ‘by going to a Negro hotel in
a Negro district, we would be making a double demonstration against the
discriminatory policies of the United States of America toward Negroes,
as well as toward Cuba’.3 It was a move also guaranteed to deliver
newspaper headlines, both in the United States and around the world.
Given the Cold War competition for ‘hearts and minds’ across Asia and
Africa – parts of the world where Khrushchev was determined to best the
Americans – this was far too good an opportunity to pass up.
As Khrushchev’s motorcade approached the Theresa, it passed by
‘cut-rate department stores, cut-rate clothing, appliance, notions jewelry,
and furniture stores, two huge movie theaters, the Harlem Lanes bowling
alley, the Palm Café, and, on the corner diagonal to the hotel, a flashing
neon sign proclaiming, “Herbert’s – cash or credit. The home of blue and
white diamonds”.’4 At 12.12 p.m., the Soviet leader arrived outside the
Theresa. Already, the area was packed with thousands of onlookers, as
well as hundreds of police (including mounted units), detectives and
security personnel. One member of Khrushchev’s entourage recalled how
the noise was unbelievable. Antonio Núñez Jiménez, who had been
waiting patiently in the Theresa’s lobby, ran out to greet the Soviet leader
and escort him inside. But as they made their way through the Theresa’s
cramped, rather dreary lobby towards the rickety, manual-operated
elevator, scuffles between Cuban, Soviet and US security agents broke
out. As the New York Daily News put it, in typically breathless style:
Khrushy’s burly security chief, Lt. Gen. Nikolai Zakharov, 6-foot-3, 220-pounder, became
unaccountably irked with the way the city police were trying to squeeze his pudgy boss
through the jampacked lobby.
Zakharov flailed away with fists and elbows, landing mostly on police uniforms, until a
uniformed motorcycle captain clamped a restrictive collar on the mad Russian.5

As he was ushered into Castro’s corner suite, which overlooked

Seventh Avenue and 125th Street, Khrushchev was appalled by the poor
state of the hotel: it was shabby and the ‘air was heavy and stale.
Apparently the furniture and bedclothes had not been aired out
sufficiently, and perhaps they were not, as we say, of the first degree of
freshness – or even the second.’ He was further shocked by the state of
Fidel’s quarters: the bed was covered with books, and the floor littered
with records, maracas and cigar butts.6 But while his suite reminded
Khrushchev of a pigsty, the Cuban leader himself made a much more
favourable impact: ‘This was the first time that I had ever seen him in
person, and he made a powerful impression on me: a man of great height
with a black beard and a pleasant, stern face, which was lit up by a kind
of goodness. His face simply glowed with it and it sparkled in his eyes.’
They talked only briefly – Fidel ‘expressed his pleasure at my visit,
and I spoke words of solidarity and approval of his policies.’ ‘That was’,
Khrushchev recalled, ‘all there was to it…’7 The Soviet newspaper
Izvestia reported that, during the ‘sincere and brotherly meeting’, the two
men had ‘noted with great satisfaction’ that their views on a number of
issues that were to be discussed at the Fifteenth General Assembly
happily coincided.8 As the meeting broke up, Fidel introduced
Khrushchev to other members of the Cuban delegation, which included
the journalists Luis Gómez Wangüemert and Carlos Franqui, as
photographers snapped away.9
Fidel and Khrushchev may have said very little during their twenty-
two-minute encounter, but the symbolism was everything. For their part,
the Cubans took enormous delight from the fact that the Soviet leader
had come to them. An editorial in the Cuban daily El Mundo, for
instance, noted that a year earlier, the President of the United States had
refused to meet with Castro (Ike had, in fact, made sure to be out of town
rather than risk tarnishing the ‘dignity’ of his office). But now, one year
on, the leader of the world’s other superpower had made a point of
visiting Fidel ‘in his modest Harlem suite’. ‘Thanks to the Cuban
revolution’, they continued, ‘our little country is the center of world
attention today because it is expressing the desire and hopes of all small
and weak countries.’10 Revolución, meanwhile, declared the visit to be
‘the most prominent historical event’ to have taken place during the
General Assembly, thus far – and a welcome reaffirmation of Moscow’s
‘friendship’ towards ‘Cuba and its Revolution’.11 Not every Cuban,
though, was delighted by the news of Castro and Khrushchev’s growing
rapport. In a report filed from Santiago de Cuba, a couple of days after
the meeting at the Hotel Theresa, the American consul G. H. Summ
noted that he had seen people ‘arguing openly on the streets for the first
time since I have been here […] In particular I saw one argument right in
front of a local INRA office, where a man was gesticulating violently
while pointing to the Havana paper showing Castro and Khrushchev
embracing.’12
Washington, meanwhile, was even more irked by the meeting. By
going to Harlem, Khrushchev had exposed America’s greatest weakness
– racial discrimination – and underlined the USSR’s support for racial
equality, before the entire world, at the very moment when more than a
dozen new African countries were poised to join the United Nations.
Back on 2 September, shortly after Khrushchev had announced that he
would be travelling to New York, US Air Force Colonel John Robertson
had written to Roy Rubottom, Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-
American Affairs, with a proposal. ‘Let us tell Khrushchev and the
world’, he said, that the Soviet leader is ‘persona non grata on our soil’.
Urging the State Department to ensure that ‘no accommodations are
available in any first-class hotel’, Robertson – in remarks that betrayed
his own racial prejudice – suggested that if Khrushchev ‘should have to
reside in Harlem during his visit he would be better able to comprehend
the Congo problem. Let’s make his visit a howling success for us – not
for him.’13 In the event, Khrushchev’s sojourn in Harlem was a
propaganda triumph – for America’s enemies.
When the two leaders emerged onto the sidewalk, shortly after 12.30
p.m., they were greeted by crowds of cheering spectators, excited
journalists and hundreds of police, who were desperately trying to
maintain order. It was, declared the New York Times, ‘the biggest event
on 125th Street’ since the funeral of W. C. Handy, the ‘father of the
blues’, two years earlier.14 As the photographers snapped away,
Khrushchev and Castro embraced. Given the physical disparities between
them, it was a moment fraught with danger. As Khrushchev put it, ‘we
enclosed each other in an embrace … He bent over me as though
covering my body with his. Although my dimensions were somewhat
wider, his height overpowered everything. Besides, he was a solidly built
man for his height.’15 Writing in Izvestia, special correspondents Nikolai
Karev and Nikolai Polyanov noted how ‘the head of a great state had cast
aside the conventions of diplomatic etiquette and had come to Harlem to
call on the national hero of Cuba, a man whom capitalist America treated
without ceremony […] Never before’, they declared, ‘had anything like
this happened in Harlem.’16
While Castro returned to his suite, to feast on T-bone steak (medium-
rare), candied yams, French fries and a thick chicken soup (all prepared
by the Theresa’s chef, Marion L. Burgess, under the watchful eye of two
Cuban officials), Khrushchev headed back to the Upper East Side, the
cheers of the crowds still ringing in his ears.17 Turning to his aides, the
Soviet leader – well aware that Cuba was not, yet, fully within Moscow’s
orbit – exclaimed, ‘Castro is like a young horse that hasn’t been broken.’
In public, Khrushchev was more fulsome. Pressed by newsmen, the
Soviet premier declared that Fidel was a ‘heroic man’ who had freed his
people from ‘the tyranny of Batista and who has provided a better life for
his people’. Later that afternoon, while heading to the UN for the formal
opening of the General Assembly (where he would share a second
fraternal hug with Fidel, and see his favoured candidate for Assembly
president, Jiri Nosek of Czechoslovakia, lose out to the Irish diplomat
Frederick Boland by forty-six votes to twenty-five), Khrushchev was
asked whether the Cuban leader was a communist. The Kremlin boss
demurred, but proclaimed that he was, for his part, a Fidelista! The
Soviets’ enthusiasm for the Cuban Revolution was gathering pace.18

While the formalities of the UN General Assembly were getting

underway in Turtle Bay, a very different meeting was taking place just a
few blocks away. At 3 p.m., senior British and US officials, including Sir
Frederick Hoyer Millar, Permanent Under Secretary at the Foreign
Office, and Livingston Merchant, Under Secretary for Political Affairs at
the State Department, gathered in suite 2707 at the Waldorf-Astoria on
Park Avenue to discuss the Cuban situation. Amid discussions about the
relative strength of anti-Castro forces on the island (the Americans were
hopeful of an ‘early ripening of opposition’) and a brief appraisal of the
threat that the revolutionary government posed to the US naval base at
Guantánamo Bay, Sir Frederick cautioned that it would be ‘dangerous for
the United States to make any premature move against Castro’. If the
Cuban premier ‘were given rather more time’, he suggested, then Castro
‘might bring about his own downfall’. The Americans, he said, should
proceed carefully.19
London had had concerns about the approach being taken in
Washington for some time. Harold Macmillan, who had succeeded Sir
Anthony Eden as prime minister in the aftermath of the Suez debacle,
had worked assiduously to restore the ‘special relationship’ with the
United States. On 25 July 1960, he had written to Ike – with whom he
had forged a firm friendship during the Second World War – to urge
caution in the Antilles. Macmillan was at pains to stress that ‘we fully
share your concern at the way in which Castro has allowed his country to
become ever more open to communist and Soviet influence’ and agreed
that a communist-controlled Cuba would pose an ‘obvious menace’ to
the ‘security of the Western hemisphere and so to the whole free world’.
He also recognized that, though Britain had a valuable export trade with
Cuba and political interests in the region vis-à-vis the West Indies (where
it sought what it viewed as a smooth and orderly transition to
independence), this was a matter on which the Americans ‘must clearly
play the hand’. Nevertheless, the prime minister believed that there was a
real danger that, by increasing the economic and diplomatic pressure on
the island, ‘many Cubans who might otherwise have gradually drifted
into opposition to Castro will instead be inclined to regard him – and
themselves – as martyrs’. Might it not be wiser, Macmillan suggested, to
‘let the yeast rise of its own accord …’ In ending, he mentioned how it
would ‘make it easier for us to help if we had a rather clearer
understanding of your actual intentions. I know, and fully sympathize
with, your purpose – the unseating of Castro and his replacement by a
more suitable regime – but I am not very clear how you really mean to
achieve this aim.’ After all, Macmillan explained – the failed attempt to
unseat Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser still a source of pain – ‘we have
been through it all ourselves and know the difficulties and dangers …’20
The British, who, it transpired, would remain in the dark, were right to
be worried.

*
On the afternoon of Sunday 19 April 1959, a ‘somewhat nervous and
tense’ Fidel Castro had met with Richard Nixon at his office in the US
Capitol building for the best part of two and a half hours. After the
encounter, the vice president drew up a lengthy memorandum for senior
administration officials, including Eisenhower, Christian Herter and the
CIA director Allen Dulles, summarizing his impressions. Nixon
confessed that his own evaluation of Castro was ‘somewhat mixed’.
There was no doubt that the Cuban prime minister ‘has those undefinable
qualities which make him a leader of men’, and that ‘whatever we may
think of him he is going to be a great factor in the development of Cuba
and very possibly in Latin American affairs generally’. But, Nixon
cautioned, ‘he is either incredibly naïve about Communism or under
Communist discipline – my guess is the former …’ In the final analysis,
though, Castro’s leadership abilities meant that Washington had ‘no
choice but at least to try and orient him in the right direction’.21
By early 1960, however, the administration (including Nixon) had
decided that the revolutionary government in Havana was beyond
redemption. In January, at a meeting of the top-secret Special Group –
which had the responsibility for approving and overseeing covert
operations – Allen Dulles ‘noted the possibility that over the long run’
the United States would ‘not be able to tolerate the Castro regime in
Cuba’. He suggested, therefore, that ‘covert contingency planning to
accomplish the fall of the Castro government might be in order.’22 A
month later, following the high-profile (and highly successful) visit to
Cuba of Anastas Mikoyan, Khrushchev’s right-hand man, the US
embassy in Havana informed Washington that there was ‘little hope’ that
‘we can work out a satisfactory relationship with the Cuban
Government’.23 On 17 February, the CIA director presented President
Eisenhower with a plan of action to harass the Castro regime. Its focus
was on sabotaging sugar refineries in order to deny Castro the lucrative
and indispensable revenue from the 1960 sugar crop, thereby – it was
hoped – eroding Fidel’s popularity and destabilizing his regime.24 After
listening patiently, Eisenhower – who, in private, deemed Fidel a
‘madman’ who was ‘going wild and harming the whole American
structure’ – expressed some doubts about the efficacy of what was being
proposed. More broadly, though, he questioned ‘why we were thinking of
something on such a narrow basis. He said that he wondered why we
weren’t trying to identify assets for this and other things as well across
the board, including even possibly things that were drastic.’25 Dulles,
who was one of America’s most enthusiastic Cold Warriors, did not need
to be asked twice. Just weeks later, the president was presented with a far
more expansive plan, which aimed to bring about the ‘replacement of the
Castro regime with one more devoted to the true interests of the Cuban
people and more acceptable to the U.S.’ It consisted of four main
elements: the creation of a ‘responsible, appealing and unified opposition
to the Castro regime, publicly declared as such and therefore necessarily
located outside of Cuba’; the building of a radio broadcasting facility on
Swan Island (ninety-five miles off the coast of Honduras) to beam
opposition propaganda into Cuba; the establishment of a covert
intelligence organization inside Cuba that would ‘arrange for the illegal
infiltration and exfiltration of individuals’, help distribute propaganda
and facilitate the defection of key personnel; and the assembling and
training of a paramilitary force outside of Cuba and the development of
logistical support for covert military operations. An initial budget of $4.4
million (equivalent to something like $30 million in 2018 prices) was
proposed.26
Although he did not know it at the time, in signing off on Dulles’s
plan, Ike had planted the seeds of a national humiliation.

Notes
1. Harrison E. Salisbury, ‘Russian Goes to Harlem, Then Hugs Cuban at UN’, NYT, 21
September 1960, 16; William Frederici and Henry Lee, ‘Komrade Kop Fights Finest At
Castro HQ’, Daily News, 21 September 1960, 32; Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, Volume
3, 271.
2. Szulc, Fidel, 580; Taubman, Khrushchev, 487.
3. Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament, trans. and ed. by Strobe Talbott (Boston:
Little Brown, and Co., 1974), 477–9.
4. Edward J. Silberfarb, ‘When Castro Left, So Did Hotel Head – for Hospital’, New York
Herald Tribune, 21 September 1960.
5. Frederici and Lee, ‘Komrade Kop Fights Finest At Castro HQ’, Daily News, 21
September 1960, 2, 32; Nikolai Zakharov, ‘How Khrushchev Subdued America’, in
Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, Volume 3, 891; ‘Diplomacy: Flight to Harlem’, Time, 3
October 1960.
6. Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, Volume 3, 272; Quirk, Fidel Castro, 337–8.
7. Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, Volume 3, 271–2.
 8. Nikolai Karev and Nikolai Polyanov, ‘Handshake in Harlem’, The Current Digest of the
Soviet Press, vol. XII, no. 38, 5. See also ‘Record of Conversation Between N. S.
Khrushchev and Prime Minister of Cuba Fidel Castro’, 20 September 1960, available at
https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/208455.
9. ‘Rebel Zone: Khrushchev Goes to Meet Fidel’ (‘Zona Rebelde: Khrushchev Va al
Encuentro de Fidel’), Revolución, 21 September 1960, 4.
10. ‘Cuba’s Stature Proved by Castro Visit’, Havana, Radio Mambi (21 September 1960), El
Mundo Editorial, in Foreign Broadcast Information Service, Daily Report, Foreign Radio
Broadcasts, No. 185 (22 September 1960), g2–g3.
11. ‘Rebel Zone: Khrushchev Goes to Meet Fidel’ (‘Zona Rebelde: Khrushchev Va al
Encuentro de Fidel’), Revolución, 21 September 1960, 4.
12. G. H. Summ to Department of State, ‘Opposition Growing in Oriente Province’, 23
September 1960, 2, in Confidential State Department Files, Decimal 737, reel 6.
13. Letter, John Robertson (Colonel USAF, Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama) to Roy
Rubottom, 2 September 1960, 320/9-260, College Park.
14. Salisbury, ‘Russian Goes to Harlem, Then Hugs Cuban at UN’, NYT, 21 September
1960, 1.
15. Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, Volume 3, 271.
16. Karev and Polyanov, ‘Handshake in Harlem’, The Current Digest of the Soviet Press,
vol. XII, no. 38, 5.
17. Silberfarb, ‘When Castro Left, So Did Hotel Head – for Hospital’, New York Herald
Tribune, 21 September 1960; Edward J. Silberfarb, ‘Castro Stays in Room; Well Liked at
Hotel’, New York Herald Tribune, September 22, 1960.
18. Salisbury, ‘Russian Goes to Harlem, Then Hugs Cuban at UN’, NYT, 21 September
1960, 16; Georgie Anne Geyer, Guerrilla Prince: The Untold Story of Fidel Castro
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1991), 263; Coltman, The Real Fidel Castro, 175. For the details
of the formal opening, and election of the General Assembly president, see Foreign
Relations of the United States, 1958–1960, United Nations and General International
Matters, Volume II, document 177 – editorial note.
19. ‘Record of a meeting in Mr Merchant’s suite at the Waldorf at 3 p.m. on Tuesday 20
September 1960 – AK1015/74, FO371/148183.
20. Macmillan to Eisenhower, 25 July 1960, AK10345/138, FO371/148218. On British
policy towards Cuba during this period see Christopher Hull, ‘Parallel spheres: Anglo-
American cooperation over Cuba, 1959–61’, Cold War History, vol. 12, no. 1 (February
2012), 51–68.
21. Jeffrey J. Safford, ‘The Nixon-Castro Meeting of 19 April 1959’, Diplomatic History,
vol. 4, no. 4 (October 1980), 431. For the location of the meeting, see Szulc, Fidel, 537.
On the wider question of Washington’s response to the emergence of Castro see, for
instance, Alan H. Luxenberg, ‘Did Eisenhower Push Castro into the Arms of the
Soviets?’, Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, vol. 30, no. 1 (Spring
1988), 37–71 and Vanni Pettinà, ‘The shadows of Cold War over Latin America: the US
reaction to Fidel Castro’s nationalism, 1956–59’, Cold War History, vol. 11, no. 3
(August 2011), 317–39.
22. Special Group Meeting, 13 January 1960, 1, NSC, Presidential Records, Intelligence
Files, Box 1, DDE.
23. ‘Synopsis of State and Intelligence material reported to the President’, 13–20 February
1960, WHO Office of Staff Secretary, Subject Series, Alphabetical Subseries, Intelligence
 Briefing Notes, vol. II (1), Box 14, DDE.
24. ‘Covert Action Operations Against Fidel Castro’, 17 February 1960 – ‘Country
Files/INT Subject Files (6) [Cuba], US National Security Council Presidential Records,
Intelligence Files: 1953–61, Box 2, DDE.
25. Memorandum of meeting – Andy Goodpaster and Dwight David Eisenhower, 17
February 1960, 3 p.m., WHO – Office of Special Assistant NSA, Special Assistant Series,
Presidential Subseries, Box 4, Folder, ‘1960 – Meetings with President – Volume 1 (6)’;
Oral History – Gordon Gray (OH-#342), 27, DDE; Chester J. Pach, Jr, and Elmo
Richardson, eds, The Presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower (Lawrence: University Press
of Kansas, 1991), 223; Dwight David Eisenhower, The White House Years: Waging
Peace, 1956–1961 (London: Heinemann, 1966), 524.
26. ‘A Program of Covert Action Against the Castro Regime’, 16 March 1960, ‘CIA Policy
Paper re Cuba [17 March 1960], White House Office, Office of the Staff Secretary:
Records, 1952–61, International Series, Box 4, DDE. On the evolution of covert
operations against Cuba under Eisenhower see Richard M. Bissell, Jr., Reflections of a
Cold Warrior (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 152–63; Stephen G. Rabe,
Eisenhower and Latin America: The Foreign Policy of Anticommunism (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 126–33, 162–73; Howard Jones, The Bay of
Pigs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 9–44; Peter Kornbluh, ed., Bay of Pigs
Declassified: The Secret CIA Report on the Invasion of Cuba (New York: The New Press,
1998); Jim Rasenberger, The Brilliant Disaster: JFK, Castro, and America’s Doomed
Invasion of Cuba’s Bay of Pigs (New York: Scribner, 2011), 39–109; Don Bohning, The
Castro Obsession: U.S. Covert Operations Against Cuba, 1959–1965 (Washington, DC:
Potomac Books, Inc., 2005), 10–30. 2018 costs calculated using
https://www.measuringworth.com/calculators/ppowerus/.
 CAPTION:

Police officers struggle to restrain the crowds outside the Hotel Theresa. Placards read, ‘U.S. Jim
Crows Fidel Just Like U.S. Jim Crows Us Negroes!’ and ‘Fidel is Welcome in Harlem Anytime!
Cuba Practices Real Democracy. No Race Discrimination.’
Photograph by Andrew St. George. Courtesy of Yale University Manuscripts and Archives /
Andrew and Tom Szentgyorgy
 5

WEDNESDAY 21 SEPTEMBER

My impression of Harlem is that it’s wonderful. We are very happy here.

FIDEL CASTRO

On the afternoon of 21 September, Havana radio broadcast an open letter

to Love B. Woods, the owner of the Hotel Theresa, praising him for
accommodating the Cuban delegation.1 Woods, who was born on a farm
in the little town of Union, South Carolina, in 1887, had shown an early
interest in business and, after working as a Pullman porter to fund his
education, opened a clothing store and later a restaurant in the state
capital, Columbia. After moving to New York City in the early 1920s, he
entered the hotel business and, a few years later, opened the Woodside,
on Harlem’s Lenox Avenue and 147th Street. Popular with musicians,
including the Mills Brothers and Count Basie – who wrote ‘Jumpin’ at
the Woodside’ in its honour – and members of the ‘fast crowd’, the hotel,
with its hustlers and gangsters, had an unsavoury reputation. But it made
its owner rich. Before long, Woods, a lifelong bachelor who did not
smoke and refrained from drinking alcohol, was ‘a familiar figure riding
around Harlem in his chauffeured limousine’. Just four months before
Fidel arrived in New York, Woods – whose cash cow had been purchased
by the city as part of a redevelopment scheme – had taken on the
Theresa’s lease. He dreamed of restoring its reputation as the Waldorf of
Harlem.2
In taking in the Cuban delegation, Woods was at pains to point out
that ‘we don’t discriminate against anybody.’ ‘I just accept them’, he
said, ‘just like anybody else. They’re just like any other guests.’ Despite
the prominence of his new tenants, Woods, the New York Times reported,
‘remained unruffled, almost indifferent. He did not bustle officiously. He
did not wear a carnation in his button-hole’, although he was – briefly –
spotted wearing a new light grey hat, rather than his trademark cap. (‘I
sort of needed a new hat anyway,’ he explained, almost apologetically.)
Amid persistent rumours in the tabloid press that the Cubans were
littering their rooms with cigar butts and half-eaten food, Woods was
clear: ‘Their rooms are clean as a pin. No litter, no mess, nothing’; the
Cubans had behaved like gentlemen. When it came to the more salacious
rumours – such as the steady stream of ‘blondes, brunettes [and]
redheads’ who were allegedly paying late-night calls to the Cubans –
Woods smiled ruefully, before declaring that, while he did not intend to
run his hotel ‘like a church’, it was a ‘decent place’ and, in any case,
ladies were not allowed in the lobby after 9 p.m.3
By opening the doors of his hotel to Fidel, Woods briefly became
something of a folk hero in Cuba. The employees of the luxurious – and
recently nationalized – Havana Riviera (opened by the American mobster
Meyer Lansky in 1957) temporarily renamed it the ‘Havana Theresa’;
and their counterparts at the St John’s Hotel, in Havana’s Vedado district,
followed suit. A workers’ representative declared that:
The employees who work in the old St. John’s Hotel, adopting this resolution to change its
name, believe that it is one of the many tributes of gratitude that the Cuban people will pay
to the twenty million blacks discriminated against in the United States, for the enthusiastic
displays of sympathy and solidarity with the Cuban Revolution and its supreme leader,
Major Fidel Castro.4

Meanwhile, the leadership of the March 13 Revolutionary Directory, a

student organization, cabled the Theresa a message of thanks for
‘opening wide its doors to comrade Fidel’ and acting ‘without hesitation
and without fear’.5 From the streets of Havana, the African American
journalist William Worthy reported how ‘practically every Cuban who
has recognized me as a “Norte Americano” has asked with delight if I
had heard that “Fidel” is staying in Harlem at the Hotel Theresa’. There
was, he explained, ‘enormous satisfaction that their Prime Minister found
sanctuary, as it were, among that part of the United States population
with which they most readily identify’.6 Telegrams of congratulation
poured into the Theresa, from Castro sympathizers across the United
States, and the hotel’s switchboard lit up with calls from well-wishers –
some from as far away as London.7 Meanwhile, for its part, Cuban radio
emphasized ‘the profound gratitude of the Cuban people’ to Woods for
his ‘valiant and worthy gesture in offering lodging to Fidel Castro’.
Declaring that the names of Love B. Woods and the Hotel Theresa had
been etched into the pages of history, they informed Woods that liberty
had now been transferred symbolically from Bedloe Island, home of the
Statue of Liberty, to ‘the top of your hotel’.8

But it was not only Woods who had offered the Cubans a generous
welcome; for the duration of their stay at the Theresa, Fidel and his
compañeros were greeted with enthusiasm and genuine warmth both by
the local community and from further afield. Some admirers of the
Cuban Revolution made a special effort to show their appreciation. The
writer and social activist Margaret Randall – twenty-three years old and
heavily pregnant – was so desperate to see her hero in the flesh that she
prepared her special paella recipe for him, replete with giant
langoustines, chicken wings, sausage, bell peppers and saffron. She
carefully transported her tin-foil-wrapped platter from her Lower East
Side apartment on the subway, only for the NYPD to turn her away
outside the Theresa: ‘no amount of pleading convinced the police officers
to let me through.’9 Residents of East Harlem, with its large Puerto Rican
population, also came to the Theresa to cheer this new icon of Latin
American liberation, as did a smattering of beatniks from Greenwich
Village – one carried a placard, declaring ‘Man, like us cats dig Fidel the
most. He knows what’s hip and bugs the squares.’10 It was, though, the
welcome afforded to Fidel by Harlem’s African American population that
really stood out.
 Night after night, thousands gathered in the streets around the Theresa to show their support for
Fidel and the Cuban Revolution.
Photograph by Gerard Gery/Paris Match via Getty Images

On coming to power in January 1959, Fidel had committed the

revolutionary government to dismantling the racism and racial
segregation that had long marred Cuban society. Within weeks, a flurry
of new laws had been passed that sought to integrate previously all-white
schools, beaches, swimming pools, restaurants and other facilities – both
public and private – and wage war against racial discrimination in the
workplace.11 Later, historians would question the effectiveness of (and
even the motivation behind) the revolutionaries’ loudly proclaimed
attempt to fashion a unified Cuba, free from racial divide or
demarcation.12 It was, after all, unrealistic to imagine that a system of
racial prejudice that had been entrenched over centuries – and the
ideology and attitudes that underpinned it – could be eradicated, in just a
few months, via government decree.13 At the time, though, the
government’s crusade caused a palpable sense of excitement for many –
both inside Cuba and overseas. The presence of a government, less than a
hundred miles off the coast of the segregated South, that was committed
– in both word and deed – to ending the colour bar inevitably attracted
the attention of African Americans. The New York congressman Adam
Clayton Powell, Jr – one of only two African Americans in the US House
of Representatives – flew to Havana just weeks after Fidel had taken
power and, standing alongside the Maximum Leader before a million-
strong rally in the capital, lavished praise on the new government’s racial
policies.14 Much of the black press in America was also effusive. Writing
in the Baltimore Afro-American, on 7 February 1959, Ralph Matthews
(Sr) famously declared that: ‘Every white man who cuffs, deprives, and
abuses even the lowest colored person, simply because he is white and
the other colored, should have seared upon his conscience the fact that it
is possible for the tables to be turned. Castro has proved it in our time.’15
Five years after the US Supreme Court’s ruling, in Brown v. Board of
Education, that segregated schools were unconstitutional, only 0.2 per
cent of black children in the Deep South attended classes alongside
whites. Meanwhile, millions of African Americans across the states of
the former Confederacy were still excluded from first-class citizenship –
including the right to vote – through a combination of legal impediments,
economic coercion and violence. And, although the cities of the north
might have lacked the ‘Whites Only’ signs of the Jim Crow South, a
powerful combination of poverty, prejudice and segregation (both formal
and informal) worked to keep black Americans firmly ‘in their place’. As
one historian has it, ‘Northern blacks lived as second-class citizens …
trapped in an economic, political, and legal regime that seldom
recognized them as equals … In nearly every arena, blacks and whites
lived separate, unequal lives.’ Public policy and discriminatory market
practices confined African Americans to the worst neighbourhoods (real
estate agents routinely refused to sell properties, and banks declined to
issue loans, to African Americans seeking to purchase homes in ‘white’
areas); bars, social clubs and restaurants were often off limits, or simply
unwelcoming; police brutality was a fact of daily life; and segregated
education and employment discrimination kept the full promise of the
American dream out of reach for many.16 It was hardly surprising, then,
that the apparently radical changes underway in Cuba – an island that had
long captivated the African American imagination – inspired such
interest among black Americans.17 Urging his fellow African Americans
to ‘take a close look at the Cuban revolution’, the playwright Julian
Mayfield – who had travelled to Cuba back in July – noted that, while
there, he ‘saw proof that it doesn’t take decades of gentle persuasion to
deal a death blow to white supremacy’. ‘Great social change’, he
explained, ‘need not wait on the patient education’ of segregationists.18
The contrast with the Eisenhower administration’s approach was stark:
speaking to a group of black leaders in May 1958, the president had
explained that ‘no one is more anxious than I am to see Negroes receive
first-class citizenship in this country … but you must be patient.’19 With
Ike continuing to offer a counsel of patience and gradualism in the face
of growing demands for meaningful change, it was little wonder that
many black Americans glimpsed, in revolutionary Cuba, the possibilities
of a new, and much better, world.20
One of those black Americans was Robert F. Williams who, by 1960,
had forged a reputation as one of America’s foremost black freedom
fighters. He was an uncompromising champion of racial equality, and the
right to use armed self-defence in order to achieve it. As president of the
Monroe, North Carolina branch of the NAACP, he had led by example –
facing down the Ku Klux Klan with machine guns and dynamite.
Williams visited Cuba twice in the summer of 1960; the absence of
‘white only’ signs, the integrated schools, and his ability to stroll,
unhindered, along the streets of Havana, all made a powerful impression
on him. Writing in his weekly newsletter, The Crusader, Williams – who
had been censured by the NAACP national leadership the year before
over incendiary comments about the need to ‘meet violence with
violence’ and ‘stop lynching with lynching’ – told his followers how ‘on
the streets of Cuba I learned for the first time in my life what it feels like
to be respected as a fellow human being, and to be accepted in the human
race’. It was in Cuba, he explained, that ‘I realized that I was born and
have lived all my life in a land that was never home’.21 As for the
swirling accusations in the American press that Cuba was going ‘red’,
Williams had a pithy retort: ‘If this is communism’, he told journalists, ‘I
vote for communism. Cuba is an inspiration for me.’22
Williams was not alone. From the Havana Riviera, Richard Gibson,
the head of the New York chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee –
and the first African American journalist to be employed by CBS –
dashed off a postcard, sending ‘greetings from a really free country,
where our kind of people are given a tremendous welcome’. ‘The
progress here’, Gibson declared, was ‘incredible’.23 For the historian
John Henrik Clarke, meanwhile, the Cuban Revolution had ‘challenged
all oppressive regimes throughout the world and given hope to people
still longing to be free’. William Worthy, the foreign correspondent for
the Baltimore Afro-American, hailed Fidel’s ‘bold measures that
overnight established equality as the law of the land’ while also warning
that the punitive economic measures being taken in Washington, together
with a press campaign vilifying the revolution, suggested the possibility
of an American military intervention. Such a prospect was, he declared,
entirely without justification: there was absolutely ‘nothing going on’ in
Cuba that should ‘scare anyone except those Yankees and wealthy
Cubans whose ill-gotten profits are being taken away […] The State
Department’, Worthy claimed, ‘knows this as well as I do.’24

Mainstream public opinion in America began to move against the Cuban

Revolution during the early months of 1960, amid accusations of
growing communist influence on the island. But African Americans
were, as one leading historian has pointed out, ‘much slower to turn away
from Castro’.25 After all, they had grown used to hearing that supporters
of civil rights were, in fact, ‘reds’, and were all too aware that some of
Castro’s biggest critics just happened to be vociferous southern
segregationists. In the autumn of 1960, there was likely no more
receptive location for Fidel and his fellow revolutionaries in the whole of
the United States than Harlem – the unofficial capital of black America.
Founded in 1658 as a Dutch village (and named after Haarlem in the
Netherlands), nineteenth-century Harlem was a predominantly Italian and
Jewish neighbourhood until the onset of the Great Migration, which saw
some 1.6 million African Americans leave the rural South between the
First and Second World Wars, headed for the cities of the north. New
York was, unsurprisingly, one of the most popular destinations and,
between 1916 and 1930, tens of thousands of African American migrants
settled in Harlem, whose population went from being ten per cent black
in 1910 to seventy per cent in the space of just two decades.26 This
dramatic population influx was accompanied by an explosion of political
organizing, with the NAACP (which was committed to eradicating racial
prejudice and promoting equal rights) and Marcus Garvey’s Universal
Negro Improvement Association (whose slogan, ‘Africa for the Africans,
at home and abroad’, encapsulated its Pan-African orientation) leading
the fight for civil rights.27 The neighbourhood was also home to a
remarkable cultural flowering, which has come to be known as the
‘Harlem Renaissance’. From the end of the First World War through the
start of the Great Depression, artists such as Aaron Douglas, poets
including Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen, writers like Claude
McKay and Zora Neale Hurston, and musicians, including Duke
Ellington and Louis Armstrong, were at the forefront of the ‘New Negro’
movement, which challenged racial stereotypes, celebrated black pride,
and promoted racial ‘uplift’. It was one of the most exciting and
consequential periods in modern African American history.28
By 1960, Harlem’s renaissance heyday lay more than three decades in
the past. You could still catch a show at the Apollo (Fred Barr and ‘Doc’
Wheeler’s Gospel Caravan were playing there the week of Fidel’s visit)
and, after a hard night at Club Baron on Lenox and 132nd Street, enjoy
soul food at Jenny Lou’s, where James Baldwin and Sidney Poitier liked
to eat; but the ravages of the Great Depression had taken a heavy toll.29
Many of Harlem’s famous tenement buildings were now little more than
rat-infested slums; garbage was too often piled up in the streets; crime
was endemic, and drug addiction on the rise; rates of asthma, venereal
disease and tuberculosis were shamefully high (in 1952, the mortality
rate for TB in Harlem was fifteen times that for Flushing, the largely
white neighbourhood of Queens).30 Forty-eight hours before Fidel
descended on Harlem, the New York Amsterdam News ran a story on the
plight of one Lillie M. Bradley, a mother of four who was paying an
extortionate rent for what was little more than a dilapidated firetrap a
mile or so north-west of the Theresa. The six-room apartment, which was
in desperate need of a fresh coat of paint, was blighted by alarming
cracks in the walls, gaping holes in the floors and ceilings, and doors that
were hanging off their hinges. The ceiling in one of the bedrooms had
recently caved in (luckily no one had been sleeping at the time), and the
bathroom had at times been rendered unusable by overflows from the
dwellings above. Although a spokesperson for the landlord claimed that
Bradley, a ‘trouble maker who is always starting something’, must have
been responsible for ruining the ‘beautiful’ apartment, other tenants
confirmed that the entire block was in a dire state.31
Moreover, despite post-war New York’s reputation as a bastion of
liberalism, Harlem was no oasis of racial equality. The neighbourhood’s
black children, for instance, had to settle for a substandard education in
poorly funded, overcrowded and segregated public schools that were
staffed by unqualified or under-qualified teachers. Meanwhile, police
brutality and corruption were rife – with many officers implicated in the
‘numbers game’ (an illegal daily lottery) and others in the pay of
organized crime. And while the white NYPD officers who walked the
beat in Harlem were all too willing to turn a blind eye to crime, they
nevertheless insisted on respect, and were quick to demean, humiliate
and brutalize any individual who – as they saw it – had been
insufficiently deferent, or had deigned to challenge their authority.32
Writing in 1960, Harlem native James Baldwin gave voice to the
community’s feelings when it came to New York’s finest:
None of the Police Commissioner’s men, even with the best will in the world, have any
way of understanding the lives led by the people they swagger about in twos and threes
controlling. Their very presence is an insult, and it would be, even if they spent their entire
day feeding gumdrops to children. They represent the force of the white world, and that
world’s real intentions are, simply, for that world’s criminal profit and ease, to keep the
black man corralled up here, in his place. The badge, the gun in the holster, and the
swinging club make vivid what will happen should his rebellion become overt. Rare,
indeed, is the Harlem citizen, from the most circumspect church member to the most
shiftless adolescent, who does not have a long tale to tell of police incompetence,
injustice, or brutality. I myself have witnessed and endured it more than once. The
businessmen and racketeers also have a story. And so do the prostitutes.

The verdict of local NAACP leader L. Joseph Overton was equally

scathing: Harlem, he said, was a ‘police state’.33
But as the black feminist intellectual Michele Wallace, who grew up
in Harlem in the 1950s and 1960s, has pointed out, ‘Harlem isn’t what
you think it is’. It is ‘not merely one seething ghetto but a place where
people, black people of all different sorts, actually live and choose to
live’. With its burgeoning black middle and professional class, Harlem
was ‘mink coats and two-car families … as well as no hot water and
welfare checks’. When walking down Seventh Avenue with her
grandmother on Sunday mornings, she later recalled, ‘all along our way
to the opulence of Abyssinian Baptist Church, the old men would tip
their hats and old women in mink stoles and smart black suits would stop
to say hello.’34 The neighbourhood’s diversity and nonconformity were
captured by the African American poet, and Fidel admirer, LeRoi Jones
(who later changed his name to Amiri Baraka). In his essay ‘City of
Harlem’, he described a 125th Street that was ‘jammed with shoppers
and walkers’, with the record stores ‘scream[ing] through loudspeakers at
the street’: ‘Young girls, doctors, pimps, detectives, preachers, drummers,
accountants, gamblers, labor organizers, postmen, wives, Muslims,
junkies, the employed: all going someplace – an endless stream of
Americans, whose singularity in America is that they are black and can
never honestly enter into the lunatic asylum of white America.’35
The neighbourhood certainly retained something of its old cultural
magnetism. Romare Bearden and Norman Lewis, for instance, continued
to produce internationally acclaimed art, even as a new generation came
to the fore (Harlem native Faith Ringgold, for instance, was poised to
create some of the most remarkable and provocative art of the 1960s).36
The Harlem Writers Guild, founded by John Oliver Killens, Rosa Guy
and John Henrik Clarke in 1950, was still going strong. Growing from
modest origins in a small storefront office, over the years the group
nurtured the talents of Maya Angelou, Alice Childress, Lorraine
Hansberry, Audre Lorde, Julian Mayfield and numerous other
distinguished poets, novelists and playwrights.37 It was jazz, though, with
which Harlem was synonymous. During the early 1940s, a generation of
young musicians, including Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and
Thelonious Monk, had pioneered the bebop style in Harlem’s jazz clubs,
especially Minton’s Playhouse and Monroe’s Uptown House. (In contrast
to the popular swing style of big band jazz, bebop was characterized by
rapid chord progression, a fast tempo, improvisation, dissonance and
harmonic richness.38) In the decade that followed, jazz retained its appeal
among the denizens of Harlem.39 On Friday 23 September 1960, for
instance, Wells’ Restaurant – famous for its chicken and waffles, said to
be the best in the world – launched a new addition to Harlem’s night-time
scene, ‘Jazz at the Upstairs’. The vibraphonist Dave Pike and his Quartet
were booked for the launch.40 Meanwhile, the legendary nightclub
Smalls’ Paradise offered live performances from the likes of Charlie
Mariano and the King Curtis Quintet.41 Just around the corner from the
Theresa, at 319 West 125th Street, was the Baby Grand, a legendary art
deco saloon bar that featured some of the hottest acts of the day –
including Charles Mingus and stars from rhythm and blues like Big
Maybelle, Etta James and Mary Ann Fisher. Fisher, who had toured with
Ray Charles (he wrote the hit song ‘Mary Ann’ about her), was on the
bill during Fidel’s stay.42 Harlem was not, though, all high-end jazz,
abstract expressionism and literary sophistication. As the community’s
numerous bowling leagues prepared to resume, following the summer
break, the excitement of the new season was augmented by the
announcement that, at the end of September, Harlem Lanes – a beautiful
new state-of-the-art ‘bowling palace’, featuring thirty AMF automatic
pinspotters, as well as a cocktail lounge, restaurant and snack bar –
would be opening its doors, seven days a week.43
In addition to its cultural richness, Harlem had an exceptionally strong
sense of political vitality, and its streets fizzed with political activism.
Rallies, protests, fundraisers and boycotts were common features of the
local political culture, as black Harlemites, often excluded from formal
political and economic power, mobilized in impressive numbers to
protest inequalities, and organized at the community level to demand
their rights.44 In September 1955, for instance, 10,000 people had turned
out for a rally protesting the brutal lynching of fourteen-year-old Emmett
Till, in Mississippi, while, in the spring of 1960, as the lunch-counter sit-
ins rocked the Jim Crow South, the New York-based Congress of Racial
Equality organized sympathy protests outside the F. W. Woolworth’s
Store on 125th Street.45 That autumn, Ornette Coleman, the controversial
pioneer of free jazz, was one of the main draws at a ‘Jazz for Sit-In’
concert that was held to raise money for the southern movement.46 But
while there was plenty of sympathy for the southern struggle, black
Harlemites were also engaged in a fierce civil rights fight of their own.
One of the more high-profile campaigns involved a battle against
segregated schools (the situation in New York was just as bad as in
southern cities like Atlanta, Memphis and New Orleans), led by the
‘Harlem Nine’. In the autumn of 1958, this group of black mothers –
whose number included the activist Mae Mallory – outraged by the poor
quality of the education on offer, kept their children out of the three all-
black junior high schools to which they had been assigned, and
demanded that they be allowed to enrol them in better schools, elsewhere
in the city. That December, Judge Justine Polier ruled that the three
schools in question offered an ‘inferior education’ as a result of racial
discrimination and, in a compromise settlement, the children were
enrolled in a better school elsewhere in the neighbourhood.47 Police
brutality, meanwhile, sparked growing pressure for meaningful reforms,
as well as angry protests on the streets. More than five hundred gathered
outside the West 123rd Street police station on 13 July 1959, for
example, after Charles Samuel, a black postal clerk, was beaten – and
then arrested – after intervening in the brutal arrest of Carmela
Caviglione. The boxing champion Sugar Ray Robinson was summoned
to help calm the crowd – eventually persuading them to disperse quietly
only after assuring them (wrongly) that Caviglione and Samuel had not
been beaten.48
Harlem was also, as one scholar has put it, the historic ‘incubator for
black nationalism in the United States’. The Hate that Hate Produced
might have made the Nation of Islam famous, but the Muslim
Brotherhood, the United African Nationalist Movement (led by James B.
Lawson) and the Universal African Nationalist Movement were just
some of the organizations that were competing with it for followers, for
money and for influence. ‘Harlem Square’, the area in front of Lewis H.
Michaux’s National Memorial African Book Store (nicknamed ‘the
House of Common Sense and the Home of Proper Propaganda’) on
Seventh Avenue and 125th Street – just around the corner from the
Theresa – served for decades as an informal meeting place. Under the
watchful eye of Michaux – himself an assured, rapid-fire speaker, who
typically sported a fez – activists pushed newspapers, enterprising
vendors hawked pies and cakes, and street orators, including the
legendary Edward ‘Pork Chop’ Davis and Carlos Cooks, soapboxed their
particular versions of black nationalism. Amid all the diversity of opinion
and debate, the nationalists agreed that, as Clarke put it, ‘the Afro-
American constitutes what is tantamount to an exploited colony within a
sovereign nation. Their fight is for national, and personal liberation. No
people are really free until they become the instrument of their own
liberation.’ They were also united in disparaging the ‘respectable’,
middle-class spokesmen of the mainstream NAACP and National Urban
League: a ‘crumb-crunching, cocktail-sipping Uncle Tom leadership’ that
was ‘paid by colonialists’, according to Abbey Lincoln, the jazz singer,
activist and founder of the Cultural Association for Women of African
Heritage.49
Black Harlemites – whether Christian or Muslim, nationalist or
integrationist – together with their fellow African Americans across the
country, shared a keen interest in political developments across Africa
and Asia, where the pace of decolonization was quickening. In May
1960, the NAACP’s official magazine, The Crisis, editorialized that
‘American Negroes take courage and hope from an independent Ghana
and Guinea; revolts in the Congo stiffen the resolve of Africans in South
Africa’. ‘Everywhere’, it proclaimed, ‘the colored peoples are resolved
that the arrogance and domination of whites must go.’50 At the end of
July, Jaja Anucha Wachuku, the speaker of the Nigerian House of
Representatives, visited Harlem to address leading figures from the
worlds of business, education and politics. At a meeting held at the
offices of the United Mutual Insurance Company on Lenox Avenue,
Wachuku declared that ‘We in Nigeria want to know you, your men, your
women, your business women. We want you to help us build our
country,’ and proclaimed that ‘the people in Nigeria will not be satisfied
until the whole of Africa is liberated.’51 In the run-up to the opening of
the UN General Assembly, meanwhile, the New York Citizen-Call ran a
series of articles on African leaders, including the Congo’s Patrice
Lumumba, Togo’s Sylvanus Olympio, Tanganyika’s Julius Nyerere, and
Kenneth Kaunda of Northern Rhodesia.52 For its part, the influential
Chicago Defender heralded the arrival of the ‘voice of New Africa’ at the
United Nations: an ‘Africa which is seething with nationalism and whose
speedy rise out of the dust of colonialism has bewildered the white
world’.53 As they watched European colonialism crumble and a new
generation of black Africans take power in their own right, many of
Harlem’s African Americans not only took inspiration from these
movements for national liberation, but asserted that their own fight for
justice, dignity and freedom was a part of the same, global struggle. In
Harlem, then, Fidel was among friends.54

*
There was no hiding the fact that, from the moment that he arrived at the
Theresa, Fidel was greeted as a hero by the local community. It seemed,
the Cuban magazine Bohemia noted, as if Harlemites now lived
‘permanently outdoors’ as day after day, and night after night, thousands
gathered in the streets around the hotel, shouting ‘Viva Castro, Viva
Cuba!’ and carrying placards. As one slogan had it, ‘Fidel is Welcome in
Harlem Anytime. Cuba Practices Real Democracy. No Race
Discrimination.’ When some opponents of the revolution attempted to
drive past the Theresa, FIEL radio reported how ‘the “lads” of Harlem
responded to this insolence with a shower of rotten eggs’. Many locals
strained to catch a glimpse of the Theresa’s most famous guest, and
raucous cheers broke out whenever Fidel appeared at the window to
wave or emerged from the hotel’s lobby onto the street.55 Writing from
London, the activist Eslanda Robeson declared that she and her husband,
Paul – who was in England to record a BBC radio series – felt ‘especially
proud that we are colored Americans’ in light of the warm and very
public welcome that Fidel had received from Harlem. The friendliness of
the reception had, she explained, made for ‘a very heartwarming sight on
television, and it reads beautiful in the newspapers …’56 Speaking to the
African American journalist Alfred Duckett, one taxi driver encapsulated
the reaction of many locals: ‘them downtown white folk didn’t treat him
right so he come up here to Harlem where he could feel at home.’ This
warmth was explained, in part, by the Cubans’ commitment to racial
equality.57 Just in case anyone doubted this commitment to racial justice,
though, Fidel made a point of flying in his Army Chief of Staff, Juan
Almeida, less than twenty-four hours after checking in at the Theresa.
When, on the evening of Wednesday 21 September, Almeida took a
(much-trailed) stroll around the neighbourhood before dropping in to
Teddy’s Shanty for a cup of coffee, he ‘received wild applause from
many of the estimated 20,000 spectators in the vicinity’ who viewed him
as one of their own.58 In fact, he had hardly managed to get halfway
down the block before being surrounded by hundreds of locals, who
greeted him with shouts of ‘Viva Almeida!’ and ‘Brother!’ Soon the army
chief and Antonio Núñez Jiménez, who accompanied him on the walk,
were caught up in a ‘whirlwind’ of several thousand supporters. Almeida,
who took the opportunity to flirt with the waitresses, appeared to enjoy
the attention.59

Although Fidel himself spent much of 21 September holed up in his

suite, working on his speech for the United Nations, sustained by nothing
more than a ham-and-egg breakfast and a lunch of fried chicken, he let it
be known that he was keen to meet with local black leaders.60 However,
when word reached NAACP headquarters at 20 West 40th Street, just
south of Bryant Park, it immediately set alarm bells ringing.
The NAACP had survived the McCarthyism of the late 1940s and
early 1950s by expelling the small number of known communists from
its ranks, distancing itself from the American Communist Party,
Communist Front organizations and suspected ‘fellow travellers’, and
burnishing its patriotic credentials. Theirs was to be a fight against
American racism waged in strict accordance with America’s own
constitutional framework. As the ideological struggle between the Soviet
Union and the United States intensified, the organization had adopted a
policy of what historian Mary Dudziak has termed ‘Cold War civil
rights’: Washington, it argued, would be better able to meet the challenge
of leading the ‘free world’, counter Soviet propaganda that emphasized
American hypocrisy, and win the ‘hearts and minds’ of the newly
independent peoples of Africa and Asia by delivering on the promise of
first-class citizenship and democratic freedom for all of its citizens. The
destruction of Jim Crow segregation, then, was a patriotic act that would
help the nation to win the Cold War.61 On hearing of Fidel’s overtures,
Gloster Current, the NAACP’s staunchly anti-communist director of
branches, promptly fired off a telegram to the organization’s entire New
York leadership: ‘Understand Castro seeking conference with NAACP
leaders in New York. Urgently request that you check with National
Office before accepting any invitations for such a meeting.’
One NAACP leader who did not get the message was Joe Overton,
president of the New York City branch – he was not at his Lenox Avenue
home when the courier called.62 Overton, a long-time civil rights and
labour leader, had been elected to office in November 1958, promising to
revitalize the branch. His preference for direct action, rather than
committee meetings, had already led him to clash with the NAACP
national leadership when a campaign on behalf of Harlem’s black liquor
salesmen – who were restricted to working in African American
neighbourhoods – had led to embarrassing accusations of ‘cheap
demagoguery’ and ‘racial chauvinism’ amid claims that, by seeking
‘preferential treatment’ for black salesmen, the organization was
promoting ‘reverse discrimination’.63 Overton knew full well that his
willingness to meet with Castro would cause palpitations among the
Association’s top brass and, when pressed by a reporter on whether he
was offering an official endorsement of the Cuban Revolution, he ‘beat a
hasty retreat’.64 Little surprise that, just a few weeks later, Roy Wilkins,
the NAACP’s executive secretary, and Gloster Current eased their errant
colleague from office.65 For the coming generation of activists – who
were less worried than their parents about being redbaited, who evinced a
refreshing enthusiasm for taking the battle to the streets and were pretty
relaxed about the politics of radical or even revolutionary change – at
times the NAACP appeared hopelessly out of step.

While some Harlemites were undoubtedly fans of Fidel’s politics, many

more simply took pride in the fact that their community – a ‘maligned
ghetto’, typically hidden away from public view and off limits to foreign
dignitaries* – was now the centre of worldwide attention.66 As Duckett
put it, the locals were ‘plainly, simply and understandably flattered and
appreciative’ that Fidel Castro had paid them the compliment of staying
‘uptown’.67 Jackie Robinson – the baseball star who had integrated the
major leagues back in 1947 – decried the ‘obvious attempts’ by
communists to curry favour. But even he was forced to concede that
Castro’s decision to stay at the Theresa had given Harlem ‘a real lift – a
sense of pride’.68 It was a sentiment echoed in the pages of the New York
Citizen-Call, which noted how several Harlemites had ‘expressed
hostility for some daily papers who were saying “nasty” things about
Castro. One man said, “they just don’t want us to have nothing. I’m glad
Castro came up here to show these people we are somebody”.’69
 It was, though, hard to escape the broader consequences of Fidel’s
stay. According to one Havana radio station, Harlem was ‘boiling’, and –
by relocating to the Theresa – Fidel had ‘pulled aside the screen, showing
the world that the Negroes, kept apart in a quarter as if they had the
plague’, wanted freedom and – as their cheers demonstrated – liked him.
Harlem’s African Americans, whose ‘only crime is not to be white in a
country like the United States, know that only a revolution can save
them’. ‘Every day’, they claimed, ‘it is harder for the … masters to
contain the slaves.’70
Fidel’s move to the Hotel Theresa was especially embarrassing for the
US government precisely because it challenged directly the story about
race relations that they liked to tell – both to Americans and to the wider
world. They sought to frame segregation and institutionalized white
supremacy as a regional problem, largely confined for historic reasons to
the South and – thanks to a combination of court rulings, federal
legislation and carefully crafted initiatives – in the process of being
eradicated in a peaceful and democratic manner, as mandated by the
country’s constitutional form of government. By shining the world’s
media spotlight on Harlem, Fidel exposed this as little more than a self-
serving myth: the stain of segregation was alive and well in the urban
north, including in New York, one of the country’s most famous and
important cities, and a citadel of mid-century American liberalism (the
city’s mayor, Robert F. Wagner, Jr., was a champion of organized labour,
who supported affordable housing and health-care, and presented the Big
Apple as a thriving, tolerant and cosmopolitan city).71
* When Khrushchev had insisted on visiting Harlem during his 1959 visit to New York, he
had been whisked along the neighbourhood’s near-deserted streets in his limousine, at
seven o’clock on a Sunday morning, on his way to the airport.

Many commentators agreed that Fidel’s move to the Theresa constituted

a ‘direct slap in the face of US racial practices’.72 The ‘stiff-necked’
officials at the State Department, proclaimed one, were likely chewing
‘their linen cuffs to shreds’.73 Writing in the New York Amsterdam News,
James Hicks described racial discrimination as the point where the US
was ‘most vulnerable to foreign attack. It is our Achilles heel – our soft,
unprotected underbelly.’74 Meanwhile, Drew Pearson – one of America’s
best-known journalists – declared in his syndicated column that Fidel’s
‘sudden flutter from a midtown New York Hotel to one in Harlem,
leaving chicken feathers behind, was part of a carefully calculated move
to hit the United States where the Communist world considers us weak –
with our Negro population’. It was also, Pearson claimed, intended to
appeal to the new African countries that had joined the United Nations,
whose leaders had noted ‘the spectacular manner’ with which Fidel had
‘planted his entourage in Harlem’.75
Even better – as far as many African Americans were concerned –
Harlem’s gain had come at the expense of ‘The Man’. As one bystander
put it, Castro ‘sure made a fool out of them white folks’.76 There was
particular delight at widespread (though untrue) rumours that the
government had been so desperate to prevent the Cubans from moving to
Harlem that they had offered to put them up, for free, in midtown. Little
wonder, then, that – as Duckett put it – Harlem was ‘laughing up its
sleeve at the clumsy goof which this country has made in international
diplomacy’.77

Much of Harlem might have been laughing, as well as cheering, but not
everyone was quite so enamoured with the Cubans. Several hundred
Baptist ministers voiced their displeasure and, speaking at a reunion of
the 369th Veterans Association – the famed ‘Harlem Hellfighters’ – on
Sunday 25 September, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr, deplored what he
viewed as ‘Fidel Castro’s use of Harlem as a battleground for his own
political ends’. The congressman – who had soured on Fidel amid
concerns about growing communist influence and, perhaps more
important, wounded pride that his own advice to Cuba’s new leader had
been consistently ignored – exclaimed that ‘we, the Negro people, have
enough problems of our own without the additional burden of Dr.
Castro’s confusion’.78
While Powell was content to launch verbal missiles, Cuban opponents
of Castro, including former Batista supporters who had fled after the
revolution, took to the streets to challenge the Fidelistas directly.
Inevitably, these interactions occasionally boiled over into physical
confrontation: pro- and anti-Castro groups jostled each other in the
streets, threw eggs and traded punches.79 But a far more serious
altercation took place on the afternoon of 21 September at the El Prado
restaurant, eight blocks south of Central Park. At about 3.20 p.m. a dozen
or so supporters of the Cuban Revolution descended on the ‘dimly lit’
restaurant, famous for its Creole food, to confront five members of the
leading anti-Castro organization, the Cuban Democratic Revolutionary
Front, who were wearing buttons that declared ‘Khrushchev Kastro Not
Wanted’. Amid a hail of insults and beer bottles, shots suddenly rang out.
Luis Rodriguez, a twenty-five-year-old opponent of Castro, was hit in the
shoulder. But in the chaos, a far greater tragedy unfolded. A bystander,
nine-year-old Magdalena Urdaneta, was shot in the right side of her back.
The young Venezuelan was holidaying in New York with her family: a
treat, it was said, for ‘getting good marks in school’. Magdalena
underwent emergency surgery at a nearby hospital, but succumbed to her
injuries the next day. As her distraught parents made plans to fly her
body back to Caracas, the Cuban Democratic Revolutionary Front issued
a statement from its office at 1650 Broadway. Little Magdalena was, they
declared, ‘the innocent victim of a blood-hungry tyrant’. The State
Department, meanwhile, declared that the young girl was the victim of
‘an aggressive attack by adherents of the Castro regime’. While the
Cubans railed against this ‘monstrous’ lie, much of the US press seemed
to agree with Washington’s version of events.80 As one provocative
headline writer had it: ‘Because Castro Is in Harlem, A Child Is Dead’.81

Notes
1. ‘Liberty’s Torch Now Atop Hotel Theresa’, Havana, Radio Mambi (21 September 1960),
Foreign Broadcast Information Service, Daily Report, Foreign Radio Broadcasts, No.
186 (23 September 1960), g4–g5.
2. Les Matthews, ‘Love B. Woods to Pass By Hotels’, New York Amsterdam News, 3 June
1967, 1–30; Wilson, Meet Me at the Theresa, 63, 160; ‘Love Woods Dies; Ran the
Theresa’, NYT, 30 May 1967, 19; Alvin White, ‘Historic Theresa in the News Again’,
Baltimore Afro-American, 1 October 1960, 8.
3. Benjamin, ‘Theresa Hotel on 125th St. Is Unruffled by Its Cuban Guests’, NYT, 21
September 1960, 16; ‘Diplomacy: Flight to Harlem’, Time, 3 October 1960; ‘Love B.
Woods and the Summit Set’, New York Citizen-Call, 1 October 1960, 3, 29; McGrory,
‘Harlem Gives Home to Volatile Castro’, Washington Star, 20 September 1960, 1; Love
B. Woods to President Eisenhower, 31 October 1960, Confidential State Department
Files, Decimal 637, 611.37/10-3160, reel 4; ‘Figura Estelar de Harlem’ (‘Stellar Figure of
 Harlem’), Bohemia, 2 October 1960, 49. One of the more outlandish articles was Phil
Santora, ‘Tale of a Little Red Hen in the Castro Coop’, New York Daily News, 26
September 1960, 26.
4. ‘Cuban Hotel Now the “Theresa”’, NYT, 21 September 1960, 17; ‘They Rename St.
John’s Hotel the “Theresa”’ (‘Denominan “Theresa” al Hotel St. John’s’), Revolución, 22
September 1960.
5. ‘Harlemites Cry “Cuba Si, Yanquis No”’, Radio Garcia Serra (21 September 1960),
Foreign Broadcast Information Service, Daily Report, Foreign Radio Broadcasts, No.
184 (21 September 1960), g2.
6. William Worthy, ‘20-Story Hotel in Cuba is now Habana Theresa’, Baltimore Afro-
American, 1 October 1960, 1.
7. Alvin White, ‘Fidel calls Harlem “an Oasis in Desert”’, Baltimore Afro-American, 1
October 1960, 2.
8. ‘Liberty’s Torch Now Atop Hotel Theresa’, Havana, Radio Mambi (21 September 1960),
Foreign Broadcast Information Service, Daily Report, Foreign Radio Broadcasts, No.
186 (23 September 1960), g4–g5.
9. Margaret Randall, To Change The World: My Years in Cuba (New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 2009), 1.
10. ‘Police Break Up Harlem Crowd as Groups Mingle’, NYT, 22 September 1960, 14;
Marable, Malcolm X, 172.
11. Chomsky, History of the Cuban Revolution, 134–6; Benson, Antiracism in Cuba, 1–3;
Guerra, Visions of Power in Cuba, 54–6.
12. The most famous revisionist critique of Castro’s Cuba and race is Carlos Moore, Castro,
the Blacks, and Africa (Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American Studies, University of
California, 1988). See also Guerra, Visions of Power in Cuba, 265–78. For a concise
summary of the historiographical debate, see Benson, Antiracism in Cuba, 18–21.
13. Marable, ‘Race and Revolution in Cuba’, 13.
14. Timothy B. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 221; Van Gosse, Where the Boys
Are: Cuba, Cold War America and the Making of a New Left (New York: Verso, 1993),
120–1; Adam Clayton Powell, Jr, Adam By Adam: The Autobiography of Adam Clayton
Powell, Jr. (New York: Kensington Publishing, 1994), 189–94.
15. Gosse, Where the Boys Are, 122. On the wider history of Cuba and Afro-America see,
for instance, Marable, ‘Race and Revolution in Cuba’, 6–17; Brock and Castañeda
Fuertes, eds, Between Race and Empire – which contains ‘The African-American Press
Greets the Cuban Revolution’ by Van Gosse (pp. 266–80); John A. Gronbeck-Tedesco,
Cuba, the United States, and Cultures of the Transnational Left, 1930–1975 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2015), 198–234; Besenia Rodriguez, ‘“De la Esclavitud
Yanqui a la Libertad Cubana”: U.S. Black Radicals, the Cuban Revolution, and the
Formation of a Tricontinental Ideology’, Radical History Review, 92 (Spring 2005), 62–
87; Cynthia A. Young, Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism, and the Making of a U.S. Third
World Left (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), esp. 18–53; Cynthia Young, ‘Havana
Up in Harlem: LeRoi Jones, Harold Cruse and the Making of a Cultural Revolution’,
Science & Society vol. 65, no. 1 (Spring 2001), 12–38; and H. Timothy Lovelace, Jr,
‘William Worthy’s Passport: Travel Restrictions and the Cold War Struggle for Civil and
Human Rights’, Journal of American History (June 2016), 107–31.
16. Thomas Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the
North (New York: Random House, 2009), xv; Matthew D. Lassiter, ‘De Jure/De Facto
 Segregation: The Long Shadow of a National Myth’ in Matthew D. Lassiter and Joseph
Crespino, eds, The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2009), 25–48; Chin Jou, ‘Neither Welcomed, Nor Refused: Race and Restaurants
in Postwar New York City’, Journal of Urban History, vol. 40, no. 2 (2014), 232–51;
Brian Purnell, ‘Desegregating the Jim Crow North: Racial Discrimination in the Postwar
Bronx and the Fight to Integrate the Castle Hill Beach Club (1953–1973)’, Afro-
Americans in New York Life and History, vol. 33, no. 2 (July 2009), 47–78. See also Brian
Purnell and Jeanne Theoharis, ‘Introduction. Histories of Racism and Resistance, Seen
and Unseen: How and Why to Think about the Jim Crow North’ in Brian Purnell and
Jeanne Theoharis, eds, The Strange Careers of the Jim Crow North: Segregation and
Struggle outside of the South (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 1–42.
17. On the longer history of the African American-Cuban connection, see Brock and
Castañeda Fuertes, eds, Between Race and Empire.
18. Rodriguez, ‘“De la Esclavitud Yanqui a la Libertad Cubana”’, 70.
19. Pach and Richardson, The Presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower, 137.
20. Hall, 1956, 248–51, 386. There was, in fact, a long history of African Americans
identifying with Cuba’s struggles against racism. See, for instance, Lovelace, ‘William
Worthy’s Passport’, 112; Brock and Casteñeda Fuertes, eds, Between Race and Empire
and Frank Andre Guridy, Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African Americans in a
World of Empire and Jim Crow (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press,
2010).
21. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie, esp. 149, 150–65; Robert F. Williams, ‘The Streets of Cuba’,
The Crusader, 3 September 1960; Besenia Rodriguez, ‘“De la Esclavitud Yanqui a la
Libertad Cubana”’, 73–8.
22. Translation of interview with Robert F. Williams while in Cuba, published in Revolución,
14 July 1960, translation by Paul Joseph Lalli, 1 August 1960 in Fair Play for Cuba
Committee, FBI file, 99-4196-91, p. 3.
23. Postcard to Irene Rose, sent 6 July 1960, Richard T. Gibson Papers, Box 12, Folder 11,
Gelman Library, George Washington University.
24. Statement by John Henrik Clarke, July 1960, John Henrik Clarke Papers, Box 35, Folder
24, Schomburg; Lovelace, ‘William Worthy’s Passport’, 113. Worthy travelled to Cuba
several times and was eventually convicted for violating the State Department’s travel
ban, a verdict that he overturned in the US Supreme Court.
25. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie, 222.
26.
https://web.archive.org/web/20100212141227/http://gothamgazette.com/article//2008082
7/255/2635.
27. On the NAACP see Patricia Sullivan, Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of
the Civil Rights Movement (New York: The New Press, 2009); on Garvey and the UNIA
see Colin Grant, Negro with a Hat: Marcus Garvey (New York: Vintage, 2009) and E.
David Cronon, Black Moses: The Story of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro
Improvement Association (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006).
28. On the Harlem Renaissance see, for example, Nathan Irvin Huggins, Harlem
Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971); David Levering Lewis, When
Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Penguin, 1997) and Cheryl A. Wall, The Harlem
Renaissance: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
29. ‘Gospel Caravan New Show at Apollo Friday’, New York Amsterdam News, 17
September 1960, 17; ‘Finger Popping Time’, New York Amsterdam News, 24 September
 1960, 17; Sidney Poitier, ‘Life in Black and White’ in Herb Boyd, ed., The Harlem
Reader (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2003), 158.
30. Marable, Malcolm X, 108, 127.
31. ‘How Some People Live: $150 a Month …’, New York Amsterdam News, 17 September
1960, 5.
32. On police brutality and corruption see Themis Chronopoulos, ‘Police Misconduct,
Community Opposition, and Urban Governance in New York City, 1945–1965’, Journal
of Urban History, vol. 44, no. 4 (2018), 643–68.
33. Marable, Malcolm X, 108, 127; James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of
a Native Son (New York: Dell, 61–2). On police brutality and corruption see
Chronopoulos, ‘Police Misconduct, Community Opposition, and Urban Governance in
New York City’, 643–68: quotations from 654–5.
34. Michele Wallace, ‘Memories of a Sixties Girlhood: The Harlem I Love’ in Boyd, ed.,
The Harlem Reader, 244, 245.
35. LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, ‘City of Harlem’, in LeRoi Jones, Home: social essays
(London: Macgibbon & Kee, 1968), 93.
36. On Romare Bearden see https://beardenfoundation.org/romare-bearden/. For Faith
Ringgold see, for instance, https://nmwa.org/exhibitions/american-people-black-light and
https://nmwa.org/sites/default/files/shared/educator_guide-faith_rinngold.pdf.
37. On the Harlem Writers Guild see http://theharlemwritersguild.org/about.html.
38. Roger W. Stump, ‘Place and Innovation in Popular Music: The Bebop Revolution in
Jazz’, Journal of Cultural Geography, vol. 18, no. 1 (1988), 11–34, esp. 22–7; Peter
Rutkoff and William Scott, ‘Bebop: Modern New York Jazz’, The Kenyon Review, vol.
18, no. 2 (Spring 1996), 91–121; and Charles Waring, ‘What is Bebop? Deconstructing
Jazz Music’s Most Influential Development’, 13 April 2019 at
https://www.udiscovermusic.com/stories/what-is-bebop-jazz/.
39. David H. Rosenthal, ‘Jazz in the Ghetto: 1950–70’, Popular Music, vol. 7, no. 1 (January
1988), 51–6.
40. ‘Upstairs Room to Feature Jazz’, New York Amsterdam News, 17 September 1960, 16.
On Wells’ see https://www.harlemworldmagazine.com/wells-restaurant-in-harlem-the-
best-chicken-and-waffles-in-the-world-1938-1982/.
41. ‘Guide to Harlem’s Gay Spots’, New York Amsterdam News, 17 September 1960, 16.
42. ‘Guide to Harlem’s Gay Spots’, New York Amsterdam News, 17 September 1960, 16; on
the Baby Grand see https://www.harlemworldmagazine.com/the-baby-grand-harlem-
1953/.
43. ‘Bowling News’, New York Amsterdam News, 17 September 1960, 26 and ‘Opening
September 30: Harlem Lanes’, New York Amsterdam News, 24 September 1960, 27.
44. On the civil rights movement in New York City see, for example, Martha Biondi, To
Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Clarence Taylor, ed., Civil Rights in New York
City: From World War II to the Giuliani Era (New York: Fordham University Press,
2011); Brian Purnell, Fighting Jim Crow in the County of Kings: The Congress of Racial
Equality in Brooklyn (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013).
45. Marable, Malcolm X, 108–9. On the New York demonstration see, for example, Brian
Purnell, Fighting Jim Crow in the County of Kings: The Congress of Racial Equality in
Brooklyn (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2013), 38.
46. ‘Mr. Controversy’, New York Amsterdam News, 17 September 1960, 16; ‘Harlem Labor
Union Gift’, New York Amsterdam News, 17 September 1960, 35. For more on Ornette
Coleman see https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ornette-Coleman.
47. Adina Back, ‘Exposing the “Whole Segregation Myth”: The Harlem Nine and New York
City’s School Desegregation Battles’ in Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard, eds,
Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South, 1940–1980 (New York:
Palgrave, 2003), 65–91: quotations from 74, 77; Kristopher Bryan Burrell, ‘Black Women
as Activist Intellectuals: Ella Baker and Mae Mallory Combat Northern Jim Crow in New
York City’s Public Schools during the 1950s’ in Purnell and Theoharis, eds, The Strange
Careers of the Jim Crow North, 89–112.
48. Chronopoulos, ‘Police Misconduct, Community Opposition, and Urban Governance in
New York City’, 653–4.
49. John Henrik Clarke, ‘The New Afro-American Nationalism’, Freedomways, vol. 1, no. 3
(Fall 1961), 285–95; Marable, Malcolm X, 108–9; Tyson, Radio Free Dixie, 204; C.
Gerald Fraser, ‘Lewis Michaux, 92, Dies; Ran Bookstore in Harlem’, NYT, 27 August
1976, 34; Thomas Morgan, ‘Street-Corner Orator’s Death Marks End of Era in Harlem’,
NYT, 15 March 1987, 37. See also Nab Eddie Bobo, ‘Carlos Cooks: African
Nationalism’s Missing Link’ and Abiola Sinclair, ‘Harlem Street Speakers of the 1960s’
in Smith and Sinclair, eds, Harlem Cultural/Political Movements, 21–6; 39–42. On post-
war Harlem and black organizing see Peniel E. Joseph, ‘Malcolm X’s Harlem and Early
Black Power Activism’ in Peniel E. Joseph, ed., Neighborhood Rebels: Black Power at
the Local Level (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 21–43 (description of Michaux
on p. 23). For a brief history of Lewis (or Louis) Michaux and the National Memorial
African Bookstore see Abiola Sinclair, ‘Louis H. Michaux: The Bookman’, in Smith and
Sinclair, eds, Harlem Cultural/Political Movements, 43–7.
50. James H. Meriwether, Proudly We Can Be Africans: Black Americans and Africa, 1935–
1961 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 194.
51. Chuck Stone, ‘Top Nigerian Tells Harlem Group “We Must Unite Around World”’, New
York Citizen-Call, 30 July 1960, 3, 28.
52. See, for example, ‘Profiles of African Leaders: No. 2 – Patrice Lumumba’, New York
Citizen-Call, 13 August 1960, 13; ‘Profiles of African Leaders – Sylvanus Olympio’,
New York Citizen-Call, 20 August 1960, 13; ‘Profiles of African Leaders: No. 4 –
Kenneth Kaunda’, New York Citizen-Call, 27 August 1960, 13; ‘Profiles of African
Leaders: No. 5 – Julius K. Nyerere’, New York Citizen-Call, 3 September 1960, 13.
53. Meriwether, Proudly We Can Be Africans, 197.
54. The historic association between the African American freedom struggle and the wider
struggle for decolonization has produced a rich historiography. Some of the most recent
works include Nicholas Grant, Winning Our Freedoms Together: African Americans and
Apartheid, 1945–1960 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017);
Meriwether, Proudly We Can Be Africans; John Munro, The Anticolonial Front: The
African American Freedom Struggle and Global Decolonisation, 1945–1960 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2017); Brenda Gayle Plummer, In Search of Power: African
Americans in the Era of Decolonization, 1956–1974 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2013); Penny M. Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and
Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); Young, Soul
Power.
55. Alfred Duckett, ‘Why Castro Fled to Harlem’, Chicago Defender, 1 October 1960, 1;
‘Harlem Mood is Pro-Castro’, New York Citizen-Call, 1 October 1960, 2; Max Frankel,
‘Diplomats Study His Ties to Soviet’, NYT, 22 September 1960, 14; Mallory, ‘Fidel
 Castro in New York’, The Crusader, 8 October 1960; ‘Fidel at the UN – He Broke the
Barrier of the Dollar’ (‘Fidel en la ONU – Rompió la Barrera del Dólar’) Bohemia, 2
October 1960, 71.
56. Eslanda Robeson, ‘K and C in Harlem’, Baltimore Afro-American, 15 October 1960, 4.
57. Steve Duncan, ‘Exclusive: Castro Interview’, Baltimore Afro-American, 1 October 1960,
2.
58. Duncan, ‘Exclusive: Castro Interview’, Baltimore Afro-American, 1 October 1960, 2;
Sherry Finer, ‘Castro Has Shown the Way to Freedom’, Young Socialist, November 1960,
6.
59. ‘Brother!, the People Shouted to Almeida’ (‘Hermano! Gritó el Pueblo a Almeida’),
Revolución, 22 September 1960, 1, 12; Perrottet, Cuba Libre!, 334.
60. ‘Castro Toils on Speech’, Washington Post, 22 September 1960, A6; Silberfarb, ‘Castro
Stays in Room’, New York Herald Tribune, 22 September 1960; Frankel, ‘Diplomats
Study His Ties to Soviet’, NYT, 22 September 1960, 14.
61. Simon Hall, Peace and Freedom: The Civil Rights and Antiwar Movements in the 1960s
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 94; Gerald Horne, Black and
Red: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944–1963
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986); Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil
Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2000); Azza Salama Layton, International Politics and Civil Rights Policies in the
United States, 1941–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Carol
Anderson, Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for
Human Rights, 1944–1955 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Von Eschen,
Race Against Empire, 109–10; Manfred Berg, ‘Black Civil Rights and Liberal
Anticommunism: The NAACP in the Early Cold War’, Journal of American History
(June 2007), 75–96; Carol Anderson, ‘Bleached Souls and Red Negroes: The NAACP
and Black Communists in the Early Cold War, 1948–1952’ in Brenda Gayle Plummer,
ed., Window on Freedom: Race, Civil Rights, and Foreign Affairs, 1945–1988 (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 93–113; Sullivan, Lift Every Voice, 346–
9, 369–70, 374–5.
62. Telegram, Gloster Current to multiple NY officials, 21 September 1960, in NAACP
1956–65, General Miscellany, ‘Telegrams July–Dec, 1960’; Jesse H. Walker, ‘Joe
Overton, labor leader, was AmNews circulation director’, New York Amsterdam News, 2
November 1991, 16.
63. https://munchies.vice.com/en_us/article/9kznep/harlem-whiskey-rebellion; NAACP
Administration 1956–1965, General Office File, ‘Liquor Salesmen Dispute, 1956–1961’,
NAACP Records Part III, LoC; NAACP Board of Directors Meeting, Minutes, 11 April
1960, 2, in NAACP Administration 1956–65, Board of Directors, ‘Minutes, 1960’. On
Overton’s election see ‘Committee for the Election of L. Joseph Overton: President New
York Branch NAACP’, New York Amsterdam News, 3 December 1958, 4; ‘Mr Overton
States Why He’s Candidate’, New York Amsterdam News, 3 December 1958, 4.
64. Frankel, ‘Diplomats Study His Ties to Soviet’, NYT, 22 September 1960, 14; White,
‘Fidel Calls Harlem “an Oasis in Desert”’, Baltimore Afro-American, 1 October 1960, 2.
65. ‘Text of Wire Received at WLIB, December 20, 1960’ in Records of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Part III, Box C102.
66. Kevin K. Gaines, African Americans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Right
Era (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 181.
67. Duckett, ‘Why Castro Fled to Harlem’, Chicago Defender, 1 October 1960, 1.
68. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie, 234; Silberfarb, ‘When Castro Left, So Did Hotel Head – For
Hospital’, New York Herald Tribune, 21 September 1960.
69. ‘Harlem Mood is Pro-Castro’, New York Citizen-Call, 1 October 1960, 2.
70. ‘Kennedy, Nixon Both See Red Phantoms’, Cadena Oriental (Havana), 23 September
1960, Foreign Broadcast Information Service, Daily Report, Foreign Radio Broadcasts,
No. 187 (26 September 1960), g3.
71. On Robert F. Wagner, Jr, see Clarence Taylor, ‘Conservative and Liberal Opposition to
the New York City School-Integration Program’ in Taylor, ed., Civil Rights in New York
City, 97–100.
72. White, ‘Fidel Calls Harlem “an Oasis in Desert”’, Baltimore Afro-American, 1 October
1960, 1.
73. Earl Brown, ‘Visitors to Harlem’, New York Amsterdam News, 1 October, 11.
74. James L. Hicks, ‘Our Achilles Heel’, New York Amsterdam News, 24 September 1960,
10, 35.
75. Drew Pearson, ‘American Sold Castro on Overture to U.S. Negroes’, Easton Express, 26
September 1960, in RFW Papers, Newspaper and Periodical Articles on Robert F.
Williams 1 January 1959–31 December 1960.
76. ‘The Other Side of the Picture …’, Special to Associated Negro Press, 28 September
1960, 4, in Claude A. Barnett Papers, Part 1, Series C, ‘Coverage of 1960 Olympics in
Rome and other news from the Associated Negro Press’.
77. Duckett, ‘Why Castro Fled to Harlem’, Chicago Defender, 1 October 1960, 1.
78. ‘Powell Blasts Fidel’, New York Citizen-Call, 1 October 1960, 3; Powell, Adam By
Adam, 194–8; Gosse, Where The Boys Are, 120–1, 134 n. 49; Steven Cohen, ‘When
Castro Came to Harlem’, The New Republic, 21 March 2016 at
https://newrepublic.com/article/131793/castro-came-harlem.
79. See, for instance, ‘Picketing Groups Clash in Harlem’, NYT, 26 September 1960, 16 and
‘Police Swarm to Castro’s Hotel; Alarm Follows a Day of Quiet’, NYT, 27 September
1960, 21.
80. ‘Girl Shot in Fray of Cubans is Dead’, NYT, 23 September 1960, 17; ‘Diplomacy: Flight
to Harlem’, Time, 3 October 1960; ‘Innocent Girl Dies – Victim of Political Terrorist’s
Bullet’, Philadelphia Inquirer, 23 September 1960; Eugene Spagnoli and Joseph
McNamara, ‘Girl, 9, and Man Shot In Castro Tavern Riot’, New York Daily News, 22
September 1960, 2; ‘War Criminals’ (‘Criminales de Guerra’), Bohemia, 2 October 1960,
51, 71; ‘Monstruosa conjura contra cubanos planea el “State Department”’ (‘Monstrous
Conspiracy Against Cubans Planned by the State Department’), Revolución, 23
September 1960, 1.
81. ‘Diplomacy: Flight to Harlem’, Time, 3 October 1960; ‘Because Castro Is in Harlem, a
Child Is Dead’, New Journal and Guide, 24 September 1960.
 CAPTION:

Excluded from President Eisenhower’s reception for Latin American leaders, Fidel joins the
employees of the Theresa for lunch – and picks up the tab.
Photograph by Michael Ochs Archives via Getty Images
 6

THURSDAY 22 SEPTEMBER

… the President does not intend, under any circumstances, to be present at the UN
while Khrushchev is there and will not address the General Assembly during the
opening general debate. This is a final decision.
US STATE DEPARTMENT, 2 SEPTEMBER

For President Eisenhower, Thursday 22 September began early, with a 6

a.m. breakfast at the White House, before heading to the helicopter that
was stationed on the South Lawn for the short flight to Andrews Air
Force Base in Maryland. There, he boarded the presidential VC137
Boeing 707 Stratoliner that would fly him to New York for the UN
meeting. Eisenhower’s plane touched down just after eight o’clock and,
after he was welcomed by the city’s mayor, Robert Wagner, and the
Secretary of State, Christian Herter, the presidential motorcade set off for
Turtle Bay. Eisenhower’s astute and long-serving secretary, Ann C.
Whitman, accompanied the president on the trip, and was struck by the
‘wonderful’ crowds who had turned out and the ‘charged’ atmosphere in
the city. ‘As the president’s limousine emerged from the Manhattan end
of the Queens Midtown Tunnel’, reported the New York Times, ‘it was
greeted by cheering office workers and residents.’ It was a welcome sight
for the sixty-nine-year-old, who had less than four months left in office,
and his ‘pleasure was apparent as he responded by standing up in the
half-open car to wave’.1

At the start of September, when Nikita Khrushchev formally announced

his intention to lead the Soviet delegation, the president’s initial instinct
was to ‘totally ignore the fact that he was coming’. Rather than risk going
toe to toe with a man whom he now derided, in private, as a ‘murderer’,
Eisenhower decided instead to attend the Assembly in December to
deliver a valedictory address.2 In Washington’s opinion, it was clear that
the Soviets intended to create a sort of ‘grandiose propaganda circus’3 in
New York, and it was therefore considered ‘inappropriate and
undignified for heads of state or government to lend themselves to such
[an] exercise’. On 2 September, the State Department issued a circular to
all US diplomatic posts, clarifying that Eisenhower would neither
‘participate in UN General Assembly or be there while Khrushchev is’,
nor would he address the General Assembly during its opening general
debate.4 It was a position that was supported by some of America’s
closest allies: Paris, for instance, concurred that it was ‘wise not to
attempt to compete with Khrushchev in demagoguery’.5
Within days, though, everything had changed. In addition to
announcing his own attendance at the UN, Khrushchev had, behind the
scenes, been busily urging the leaders of the so-called non-aligned
countries to join him at the Assembly, in order to discuss disarmament
and ‘world peace’.6 Made up of nations, mainly in Asia and Africa, that
challenged the bipolar framework of the Cold War (they offered fealty to
neither Moscow nor Washington and supported peaceful coexistence),
the neutralist bloc represented a sizeable proportion of the world’s
population, and was capable of exercising real influence in the United
Nations.7 In short order, Yugoslavia’s Josip Broz Tito, Gamal Abdel
Nasser of the United Arab Republic, Indonesia’s Sukarno, Ghanaian
president Kwame Nkrumah and India’s Jawaharlal Nehru all intimated
that they, too, would be travelling to New York – in addition to the
leaders of Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania and, of course,
Cuba. Washington’s stance of cool indifference was no longer tenable.
Just before noon on Thursday 8 September, Andrew Goodpaster –
who, as Eisenhower’s Staff Secretary, was one of the most powerful men
in the White House – reported to Herter that:
the UN meeting had been on the President’s mind and the President was inclined to think
he should go up … He feels that if he waits and then goes up that Khrushchev has gotten
the jump here. Khrushchev could stay around for some time working up the situation and
snarling and accusing the U.S. The President thought he should make the opening speech.
He said it would probably be attacked and rebutted by Khrushchev but it would be better
that than the other way around.8

On 14 September James Hagerty, the White House Press Secretary,

announced that the president would now be travelling to the United
Nations on the morning of 22 September, for the purpose of addressing
the General Assembly.9 For Washington, it now became imperative to
ensure that there would be ‘a number of strong voices’ in New York, able
to ‘speak out’ in defence of the West and to counter the anticipated
communist offensive.10 It was a position with which London agreed
wholeheartedly: on 15 September, for instance, the prime minister
informed his cabinet that there was now ‘a serious danger’ that
Khrushchev would ‘dominate’ the General Assembly and, by impressing
the new African members of the United Nations, ‘secure [a] considerable
political advantage’. Sir Patrick Dean, Britain’s ambassador to the United
Nations, called for the ‘big guns’ to help take on the ‘Communist
barrage’.11 The prime ministers of Canada and Australia, John
Diefenbaker and Robert Menzies, were primed and, on 20 September,
Eisenhower wrote to his old friend Harold Macmillan (who had already
floated the prospect of attending), stating that ‘I now believe that your
attendance at the General Assembly would be a real service to the
West’.12 After discussing the matter with the Queen at Balmoral and with
his cabinet in London, the British prime minister readily agreed to fly to
New York.13
The game was on.

President Eisenhower might have decided to speak at the UN, but he had
absolutely no intention of circulating on the floor of the General
Assembly – where he risked running into the Soviet leader.14 At 10.46
a.m., in a piece of pre-arranged choreography, Eisenhower arrived at the
General Assembly Building. Based on a Le Corbusier design, this
impressive trapezoid structure featured concave, windowless longitudinal
facades and a north wall constructed of translucent glass, set between
broad marble columns. Pulling up outside the building’s public entrance,
he was met by Jehan de Noue, who escorted him to the Secretary
General’s office, tucked away behind the podium of the giant, domed
General Assembly chamber. Although the US president had initially
hoped to give the first of the day’s speeches from a member state, Brazil
had proved reluctant to give up its traditional slot at the top of the bill.*
And so, while Foreign Minister Horacio Lafer was finishing his remarks,
Eisenhower chatted amiably with Dag Hammarskjöld and Frederick
Boland.15
At 11.12 a.m., Eisenhower stepped onto the podium to address his
fellow leaders, and the wider world.16 Speaking against the backdrop of
the UN’s iconic olive branch emblem, the US president began by
welcoming those nations – including Cameroon, the Central African
Republic, Congo, Ivory Coast and Niger – who were ‘represented here
for the first time’. N0ting that the ‘drive of self-determination and of
rising human aspirations’ was producing ‘ferment’ across great swathes
of the globe, Eisenhower called for a ‘renewed attack on poverty,
illiteracy, and disease’, and promised substantial additional American aid
for Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. After urging the
international community to commit to the exclusively peaceful
exploration of outer space, the president called on the communist nations
to resume efforts to create a ‘workable system of disarmament’, pledging
that the United States was prepared to ‘submit to any international
inspection, provided only that it is effective and truly reciprocal’.
Imploring that ‘narrow national advantage’ be set aside in favour of
positive and constructive international action, Eisenhower declared that it
was ‘only through the United Nations and its truly democratic processes’
that humanity would be able to make ‘real and universal progress toward
the goal of peace with justice’. The president ended his address by
looking to the future:
As we enter the decade of the 1960s, let us launch a renewed effort to strengthen this
international community; to forge new bonds between its members in undertaking new
ventures on behalf of all mankind.
As we take up this task, let us not delude ourselves that the absence of war alone is a
sufficient basis for a peaceful world. I repeat, we must also build a world of justice under
law, and we must overcome poverty, illiteracy, and disease.

‘Let us go forward together’, he said, ‘leaving none behind.’17

As Eisenhower left the rostrum, both Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel
Castro ostentatiously refused to join with the customary applause.18
Writing in the British Guardian newspaper, James Morris complained
that the president’s speech lacked ‘vision, inspiration, emotion’; ‘Hardly
a heart, a fear, did he stir, hardly a tear of gratitude did he raise, not one
flickering vision of conciliation did he evoke among his yearning
listeners.’ Instead, Morris declared, the leader of the free world ‘spoke
like a man who has shrugged his shoulders’.19 But, while Le Monde
described the speech as ‘a bit pale’ and the Soviet news agency TASS
dismissed it as containing ‘nothing new’, not everyone was quite so harsh
in their judgement.20
The British Foreign Office, rather predictably, praised the speech as
‘one of the most constructive and important’ in the history of the United
Nations, while Andrew Cordier, executive assistant to Dag
Hammarskjöld, privately welcomed what he characterized as ‘by far the
most sweeping support that the United States has given to the United
Nations in fifteen years’. Perhaps more important, representatives of the
so-called uncommitted nations appear to have been genuinely impressed
by what one Indonesian diplomat described as the ‘temperate and
restrained quality’ of Eisenhower’s remarks, as well as with some of his
specific proposals to support the developing world.21
Some commentators, too, were supportive. The Times of London, for
instance, editorialized that ‘the great merit of President Eisenhower’s
speech is that it was not an attempt to answer Mr. Khrushchev’s points
before they were made but a direct appeal to the Assembly to take the
measure of its capabilities’ and see the UN as ‘at least an effective
nucleus of world government’.22 There was a positive reaction in Turkey,
Greece, Italy and India, while the New York Times columnist James
Reston hailed the speech as a master stroke, commending the president
for playing ‘this country’s strongest card … that the ideals and national
interests of the United States are closer to the ideals and interests of the
small nations than are the national interests of the Communist world.’23
When pressed by reporters, even Nikita Khrushchev was forced to
concede that Eisenhower’s proposals on disarmament contained some
‘good aspects’, and that the speech, overall, had been ‘conciliatory’.24
When it came to US–Cuban relations, however, there was precious
little evidence of conciliation. On finishing his speech at the UN,
Eisenhower returned immediately to the Waldorf-Astoria where, at 1
p.m., in an effort to improve regional relations, he hosted a lavish
luncheon for the heads of eighteen Latin American delegations to the
United Nations.25 In brief remarks, the president declared that ‘our
nations are bound together not merely by inescapable ties of geography.
We are strong, and we are worthwhile only because we are bound
together by things of the spirit. The dedication we have to imperishable
values, of human dignity and liberty, and the sovereignty of our
respective nations – these are the things that are worthwhile.’ ‘But,’
Eisenhower continued, ‘because we do believe in these values … we
must devote ourselves’ to ensuring a better life ‘not merely for such
people as sit around this table, but for the lowliest peon, the lowliest
farmer’ and – in a clear sign that the antics at the Hotel Theresa were
playing on his mind – ‘the lowliest dweller in Harlem …’26
Four miles away, Harlem’s most famous new resident was treating
twelve employees of the Theresa to steaks and a round of beers in the
hotel’s downstairs coffee shop. In a deliberate and, as it turned out,
spectacularly counterproductive White House snub, Fidel had not been
invited to join his fellow Latin American leaders at the president’s table.
But the Cuban premier was in a magnanimous mood. ‘We are not sad,’
he said. ‘We are going to take it easy. We wish them a good appetite.’ In
any case, he declared, he was ‘honored to lunch with the poor and
humble people of Harlem’. 27 For their part, the surprised employees
declared themselves more than satisfied to be hosting the Maximum
Leader in their hotel, and chatted with Fidel and other members of the
Cuban delegation ‘in a friendly and cordial tone’.28 The whole thing was
a brilliant PR retort. Revolución led with front-page photographs of the
two, very different lunch gatherings, pointing out that while ‘The shark
and the sardines eat together’ Fidel had deemed it an ‘honour to eat with
humble’.29 Cuban radio, meanwhile, disparaged the ‘rude and idiotic’
behaviour of the US government. Rather than being offended, they
declared, Cubans should feel ‘proud’. After all, why break bread with the
‘imperialist rulers’ and their ‘Latin American lackeys’, when one could
eat, instead, with the ‘Negroes in Harlem … who are denied their rights
and who live in horrible conditions’.30

While President Eisenhower might not have wanted to party with Fidel
Castro (whose ‘public performances’, the commander-in-chief privately
suggested, ‘appeared to be the acts of a man mentally unbalanced’),
others proved more enthusiastic. That evening, while Ike was enjoying a
stag dinner in his Waldorf-Astoria suite with friends – including Clifford
Roberts, chairman of Augusta National (home of the Masters golf
championship), and the businessman George E. Allen – Fidel and his
compañeros were honoured guests at an altogether different party, which
was held in the Theresa’s ballroom, the Skyline Room.31
Organized at short notice by the New York chapter of the Fair Play for
Cuba Committee, the reception drew the great and the good of Harlem –
the sort of ‘high-rated’ figures, quipped the Baltimore Afro-American,
who could usually be found ‘swarming at such events’ – as well as black
activists and a host of left-liberal celebrities, actors, artists and
intellectuals.32 Among the 250 or so guests were the black freedom
fighter Robert F. Williams, the black poet, playwright and activist LeRoi
Jones/Amiri Baraka, the New Left intellectual and Columbia University
sociologist C. Wright Mills and the radical campaigning journalist I. F.
Stone. The Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, who had achieved international
fame with the publication of ‘Howl’ in 1956, managed the extraordinary
feat of rendering the Cubans momentarily speechless when, after shaking
Fidel’s hand, he explained to them that ‘Marijuana is revolutionary, but
the imperialists have invented all kinds of stories about it so no one will
smoke and rebel.’ What, he wondered, did they think about pot, and
when were they going to legalize it? Caught off guard, the Cubans
mumbled that they did not want anything to interfere with the important
revolutionary work that remained to be done. Ginsberg, who believed
that no ‘good society’ could be successfully founded ‘on the basis of old-
style human consciousness’, was not convinced. Reflecting on the
encounter a year later, he explained that, while he was ‘NOT down on the
Cubans or anti their revolution’, no revolution could succeed in truly
liberating the masses unless it also challenged ‘the rules of identity
forced on them by already outmoded means of consciousness’ and
rejected ‘puritanical censorship’.33
Carleton Beals, who had travelled from his home in Clinton,
Connecticut, to attend the party at the Theresa, was something of a hero
in Cuba for his 1933 exposé of the Machado dictatorship (and American
complicity with it), The Crime of Cuba. Although he had initially been
dismissive of Castro’s 26 July Movement (they were, he said, ‘rebels
without a cause’), he had been won around, and in February 1960
became a founding member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. When
Fidel had arrived in New York on 18 September, a telegram from Beals
was waiting for him: ‘Welcome’, it said. ‘I am ashamed of my people’s
lack of courtesy, so generous with gold for its lackeys, but so poor in
generosity of spirit.’ Other prominent figures circulating in the Skyline
Room were Claude Bourdet, a one-time member of the French
Resistance, an opponent of colonialism and co-founder of the French
weekly France-Observateur; and the British theatre critic Kenneth
Tynan. Tynan, who was just finishing up a successful stint at the New
Yorker, had visited Cuba back in April 1959, where he had turned down
the opportunity to view a public execution (despite having had tickets)
but had readily met with Fidel, who struck him as ‘excellent, ebullient
and a real radical’. Tynan had returned to the US captivated by the
‘libertarian fervour’ of Havana and the possibilities of this ‘genuine do-
it-yourself revolution’. His support for the Cuban Revolution, though,
eventually drew unwelcome attention from the US authorities. In May
1960 he found himself hauled before the Senate Internal Security
Subcommittee, where he was – among other things – asked about why he
had signed the Fair Play for Cuba Committee’s statement in support of
Fidel and the revolution, which had appeared in the New York Times the
previous month, ‘in defiance of the views of President Eisenhower’.
Recalling this episode in the pages of Harper’s Magazine that autumn,
Tynan observed that he had ‘brooded over’ the question ‘for a long,
incredulous moment’ before responding ‘that I was English, and that I
had been forming opinions all my life without worrying for a second
whether or not they coincided with those of the President of the United
States.’34
Security for the reception was tight: admittance was strictly by
invitation only, and, as the New York Daily News reported, ‘detectives
frisked each person on the way in.’35 Julian Mayfield, who attended with
his wife, the Puerto Rican doctor and political activist Ana Livia
Cordero, was asked whether he was carrying a pocket-knife, prompting
one fellow writer to declare that the pen was mightier than the sword.36
The checks did, though, yield a few weapons: two penknives and an
automatic revolver.37 The latter belonged to Commander José Moleón
Carrera, military attaché at the Cuban Embassy, who objected
vehemently to the confiscation of his weapon. If the gun was not
returned, he fumed, then all of the Americans living in Cuba would be
disarmed, with anyone who resisted thrown into jail.38
Carrera might have been in a foul temper, but everyone else appeared
to be in a fine mood – despite the somewhat ‘desolate’ surroundings (the
Theresa, Mayfield wrote, ‘is about as dingy a place as you can find’).39
As the legendary Magnum photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson snapped
away, and the guests sipped on their cocktails and enjoyed the home-
made cakes and cookies that had been provided, Fidel made himself
‘available to everyone present, talking animatedly to individuals and to
groups and predicting changes in his native land that were to benefit the
“humble and poor”, which he vowed were long overdue’.40 Michael
Conant, the young student editor of Columbia University’s Owl,
managed, ‘after much pushing’, to make his way to Fidel’s table, where
he secured a brief interview (they discussed agrarian reform, Cuban
tourism and a possible student exchange programme).41 Others swarmed
around the Maximum Leader, eager to secure their hero’s autograph.42

At a reception in the Theresa’s ballroom Fidel was – naturally – the centre of attention.
Photograph © Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos
 During a short, informal ceremony, Fidel presented Love B. Woods
with a small statue of the famed nineteenth-century Cuban revolutionary
José Martí, inscribed: ‘He who incites and propagates racial hatred and
opposition is sinning against mankind.’43 For his part, Fidel was
presented with a bust of Abraham Lincoln by Fair Play for Cuba
Committee leader Richard Gibson, who quipped: ‘from one liberator to
another.’ Visibly moved, the Cuban leader ‘made a brief talk about how
difficult it is for people to accept new ideas, but how, in the end, if the
ideas are good they prevail’. He felt, he said, ‘like a man travelling
through a desert who suddenly reached an oasis. We know how capable it
is of producing propaganda, but we also know that, in spite of this, we
have many friends in the United States, and that the more propaganda
they make against us, the stronger we are.’ Someone shouted out, ‘Fidel
for President of the U.S.!’, and a great cheer erupted.44
Although at times he appeared a little fatigued, Fidel was, Mayfield
recalled, ‘in great form’. In a letter written a couple of days later,
Mayfield described the Cuban leader as ‘a beautiful man’:
He is a hero, we know – one of the few of our times, almost anachronistic – but his
manner is that of a young fellow who has done what had to be done and he cannot
understand what all the excitement is about. They are all so young! And when we think of
what they have done to change the world and make the Washington golf-player tremble in
his boots – well, it’s something to think about.45

Mayfield was not the only one to come over all star-struck. The
Polish-born journalist K. S. Karol was in the Skyline Room – seated at
the same table as Bourdet, Cartier-Bresson, Stone and Maria Winn, the
young assistant to the British documentary film-maker Richard Leacock
– and he captured the mood of the occasion brilliantly. ‘I shall always
remember that evening’, he wrote, ‘not least for its fraternal and free-
and-easy atmosphere, which formed a glaring contrast to that of all the
diplomatic receptions … I had attended on previous evenings in
Manhattan’:
The proletarian staff of the hotel, the olive-green uniforms of the guerrilleros, the general
lack of formality, all helped to emphasize the gaiety and the stimulating, if not
revolutionary, character of the meeting. Fidel Castro arrived rather late, and was
immediately surrounded by a group of Negroes, each as imposing in stature as Fidel
himself. They flung themselves into his open arms. Everyone else then wanted to follow
their example, and there were a few moments of pandemonium …46
 Ten years later, this sort of thing would be satirized memorably by
Tom Wolfe, whose ‘Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s’ – an account of
a fundraiser for the Black Panthers hosted by Leonard Bernstein and his
wife, Felicia, at their Park Avenue penthouse – appeared in the 8 June
1970 edition of New York magazine. In his celebrated essay Wolfe poked
fun at the fashionable, au courant sensibility of the artists, socialites and
intellectuals who, it seemed to him, were all too keen to fawn over a
group whose ideology, tactics and goals were wildly divergent from their
own life experience (as well as inimical to their own social, economic
and political interests). At one point he wondered,
what the Black Panthers eat here on the hors d’oeuvre trail? Do the Panthers like little
Roquefort cheese morsels wrapped in crushed nuts this way, and asparagus tips in
mayonnaise dabs, and meatballs petites au Coq Hardi, all of which are at this very
moment being offered to them on gadrooned silver platters by maids in black uniforms
with hand-ironed white aprons.47

The party at the Theresa, though, took place in rather more innocent
times. Castro’s uncanny ability to attract the support of young, liberal
middle-class Americans had been observed by the historian and public
intellectual Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, a year earlier, when the Cuban leader
had drawn a crowd of 8,700 on a visit to Harvard University. Schlesinger,
who as a special assistant to President John F. Kennedy would have a
ringside seat as Washington sought to deal with the ‘Castro problem’
once and for all, noted that ‘the undergraduates saw in him, I think, the
hipster who in the era of the Organization Man had joyfully defied the
system, summoned a dozen good friends and overturned a government of
wicked old men’.48
As the presence of Bourdet, Cartier-Bresson, Karol and Tynan at the
Theresa attests, Fidel’s appeal was by no means restricted to Americans.
Haunted by Khrushchev’s revelations about the crimes of Stalin and
appalled by the Soviet Union’s brutal response to the Hungarian uprising,
a generation of European progressives and left-wing artists and
intellectuals also looked to the Cuban Revolution for inspiration. As the
renowned Marxist historian (and lifelong communist) Eric Hobsbawm
observed, the revolution could hardly have been better designed to appeal
to Western leftists. ‘The Cuban Revolution’, he noted, ‘had everything:
romance, heroism in the mountains, ex-student leaders with the selfless
generosity of youth – the eldest was barely past thirty – a jubilant people,
in a tropical tourist paradise pulsing with rumba rhythms.’ And, lacking
(at this stage) a fixed ideological position, † it could be welcomed
enthusiastically by revolutionaries from across the political Left.49 Just a
few months before the reception at the Theresa, the French intellectuals
Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir had travelled to Cuba, in order
to see, with their own eyes, a revolution that was actually unfolding.50
The couple had arrived in Havana on 22 February, during the midst of
the Carnival celebrations, and were immediately smitten: ‘the gaiety of
the place’, declared de Beauvoir, ‘exploded like a miracle under the blue
sky.’51 Based in the Hotel Nacional – the ‘fortress of luxury’ – on the
Malecón, the city’s historic esplanade, the couple were shown the sights
of the old town, introduced to leading revolutionaries, spoke at the
University of Havana, appeared on Cuban television and were fêted by
some of the island’s most prominent novelists, artists, poets and
playwrights.52 On one famous occasion, immortalized by the legendary
photographer Alberto Korda, they paid a midnight visit to Cuba’s
National Bank, where they were ushered through the lobby, past rebel
soldiers – including, at the reception desk, a young rebel officer ‘curled
up … his long black hair spread on his shoulders, his cap on his nose, his
eyes closed … snoring very lightly’ – into the director’s office. There,
over coffee and cigars, they chatted for more than two hours with Che
Guevara, who had been appointed as the bank’s director the previous
autumn: ‘I am first of all a doctor,’ Che said, ‘then somewhat of a soldier,
and finally, as you see, a banker.’53 Sartre and de Beauvoir were also
given a personal tour of the island by Fidel, who drove them around in
his jeep. They visited sugar cane fields, new agricultural cooperatives
and tourist developments on the newly public beaches, as well as a
former rebel hideout, and Santiago, Cuba’s second city. They also took a
memorable fishing trip in the waterways of the Península de Zapata,
where – dumbfounded – they watched the Maximum Leader blast a
shotgun into the water before scooping out the stunned fish.54
The visit of the French existentialists was headline news. Carlos
Franqui described how ‘Sartre came into town like an enfant terrible …
and within a week both he and Simone de Beauvoir were incredibly
popular, in large measure because the people got to see the both of them
– Sartre, ugly but simpático, and Simone, more reserved but interested in
everything Cuban.’55 Wherever they appeared, they were greeted with
chants of ‘Saltre, Saltre, Saltre. Simona, Simona, Simona,’ and jostled by
cheering, boisterous crowds. Their names were even incorporated into a
popular carnival refrain: ‘¡Saltre, Simona: un dos tres! / ¡Saltre, Simona:
echen un pie!’‡56
For their part, Sartre and de Beauvoir were clearly impressed by what
they found in Cuba. De Beauvoir later recalled a revolution characterized
not by bureaucratic machinery ‘but a direct contact between leaders and
people, and a mass of seething and slightly confused hopes. It wouldn’t
last forever, but it was a comforting sight. For the first time in our lives,
we were witnessing happiness that had been attained by violence’, and it
‘restored a pleasure in just being alive that I thought I had lost forever’.57
She wrote that: ‘To watch the struggle of six million men against
oppression, hunger, slums, unemployment, illiteracy, to understand the
mechanisms of the struggle and discover its significance was a
passionately interesting experience.’58 Sartre was, if anything, even more
effusive. In a series of articles entitled Hurricane over the Sugar
(Ouragan sur le sucre) and published in the leading French daily France-
Soir later that summer, he lauded Cuba’s organic, bottom-up revolution,
free from ideological hang-ups; it was an exercise, he said, in ‘direct
democracy’.59 Sartre was not at all perturbed by the purges and public
trials that had led to scores of former Batista supporters being sent to the
firing squad during the early months of the revolution. Indeed, he
understood perfectly well that revolution was, by definition, ‘une
médecine de cheval’ (a phrase that translates, rather disappointingly, as
‘strong medicine’). ‘A society breaks its bones with hammer blows,
demolishes its structures, overthrows its institutions, transforms the
regime of property and redistributes its wealth, orients its production
along other principles, [and] attempts to increase its rate of growth as
rapidly as possible,’ Sartre told the conservative, middle-class readers of
France-Soir. But then, ‘in the very moment of most radical destruction,
[it] seeks to reconstruct, to give itself by bone grafts a new skeleton.’
Sartre acknowledged that the remedy was extreme, ‘and it is often
necessary to impose it by violence’. While the ‘extermination of the
adversary and of several allies is not inevitable’, it was, he declared,
‘prudent to prepare for such an event’.60
As for the Cuban revolutionaries themselves, they had formed a ‘cult
of energy’. Liberated from the ‘latifundias of sleep’, they ‘live energy,
they exercise it, they invent it, perhaps’. Che – at least in Sartre’s telling
– was the archetypal existentialist hero: a man defiant in the face of
injustice and absolutely committed to action.61 And as for Fidel? This
fearless opponent of injustice, ‘who fought, who is fighting, for a whole
people’ with ‘no other interest than theirs’, was a sort of everyday
superman ‘prepared even to give the people the moon if they asked for it,
because, he tells Sartre, “If someone asked me for the moon, it would be
because someone needed it”.’62 The desire of the Cubans to defend their
hard-won freedom and to maintain the revolution had Sartre’s full
support: ‘I do not see’, he wrote, ‘how any people can propose today a
more urgent goal nor one more worthy of its efforts.’ ‘The Cubans must
win’, Sartre declared, ‘or we will lose all, even hope.’63

There were, to be sure, some voices of caution in the air during the
second half of 1960. Visiting the island in July, LeRoi Jones/Amiri
Baraka was moved by the collective struggle of the Cuban people and,
like so many of his contemporaries, was captivated by Fidel’s personal
charisma. But, on the eve of his departure to Havana, his good friend and
fellow Greenwich Village poet, Gilbert Sorrentino, had exclaimed that ‘I
don’t trust guys in uniforms’.64 And while Ginsberg may have viewed
Fidel as an ‘honest rat’, his fellow Beat poet Gregory Corso felt
compelled to remind his friend that, for all their apparent good humour
and playfulness, the barbudos did also carry Sten guns. It was a prescient
observation: during a 1965 trip to Havana, Ginsberg would witness first-
hand the Cuban government’s repression of homosexuals. And, after
speaking out once too often (‘well, the worst thing I said was that I’d
heard by rumour that Raúl Castro was gay. And the second worst thing I
said was that Che Guevara was cute’), Fidel had him placed on the next
plane out of Havana, which just happened to be travelling to Prague.§65
In 1971, Sartre and de Beauvoir would themselves denounce Havana’s
‘use of repressive measures against intellectuals and writers’, in the
process making themselves personae non gratae (‘Cuba’s door’, Fidel
declared, ‘is definitely, definitively and eternally closed to you’).66 That,
though, lay in the future. In the autumn of 1960, Castro, who combined
the rebelliousness of a James Dean character with a programme of social
and political reform that appeared untainted by communist
totalitarianism, seemed to many on the literary and artistic Left to be the
ideal revolutionary for a generation that was chafing against the drab
consensus of the 1950s.
As 22 September drew to a close, Fidel had good reason to feel
cheerful. He had, first of all, turned the snub of being excluded from the
luncheon for Latin American leaders into a (very funny) PR triumph, and
taken the opportunity – yet again – to place his government on the side of
the ‘poor’ and ‘humble’ people of Harlem. Then, he had spent the
evening basking in the adoration of intellectuals, artists and leftists,
during an event that augured the close connection between the Cuban
Revolution and the 1960s New Left, anti-war and student movements
that would animate the coming decade.
Fidel’s appeal, though, was not restricted to the coming generation of
American writers, poets and radicals. In one of history’s ironies, he also
quickened the pulse of many of the old men in the Kremlin.

Notes
1. Felix Blair, Jr, ‘Eisenhower Busy, But He Enjoys It’, NYT, 23 September 1960, 1;
Whitman – Ann Whitman Diary Series, Box 11. Folder – ‘[ACW] Diary September
1960’, 22 September, DDE; ‘The President’s Appointments, Thursday, September 22,
1960’, DDE Diaries, Reel 27, Schedules (2) September 1960, RIAS.
2. Memorandum of Conversation, Eisenhower and Herter, 1 September 1960, re:
President’s Speech at UN General Assembly, 320/9-160, College Park. On Khrushchev as
a ‘murderer’ see, for instance, Eisenhower phone call with Herter, 4 October 1960, 9.30,
DDE Diaries, reel 27, Box 54 phone calls, RIAS; Eisenhower to John Diefenbaker, 30
September 1960, Meeting with Diefenbaker, 30 September 1960, 3, Whitman – DDE
Diary Series, Box 53. Folder, ‘Staff Notes – September 1960 (1), DDE.
3. Memo of conversation, 2 September 1960, Italian Ambassador Brosio and Kohler, Lewis
– 320/9-260
4. Department of State circular to diplomatic posts, 2 September 1960, 320/9-260, College
Park.
5. Paris (Houghton) to Secretary of State, 8 September 1960, 320/9-860, College Park.
6. Khrushchev wrote to various heads of state – including Nehru – in late August,
encouraging heads of state/heads of government to attend the forthcoming UNGA to
 discuss important matters of disarmament and world peace. See New Delhi to Sec of
State, 1 September 1960 – 320/9-160, College Park.
7. On the Non-Aligned Movement see, for example, Lorenz M. Lüthi, ‘Non-Alignment,
1946–1965: Its Establishment and Struggle against Afro-Asianism’, Humanity, vol. 7, no.
2 (2008), 201–3; Nataša Mišković et al., eds, The Non-Aligned Movement and the Cold
War: Delhi – Bandung – Belgrade (London: Routledge, 2014); and Jürgen Dinkel, The
Non-Aligned Movement: Genesis, Organization and Politics (1927– 1992) (London:
Brill, 2018).
8. Goodpaster to Herter, 8 September, 11.55 p.m., Herter Papers, Box 10, folder
‘Presidential Telephone Calls’ 7/1960-1/20/1960, DDE.
9. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/the-presidents-news-conference-224.
10. Acting Sec. Dillon, discussion with Ambassador Beale (Australia), 20 September 1960,
State to USUNNY and AmEmbassy, Canberra, 21 September – 320/9-2160, College
Park.
11. Cabinet discussion quoted in Alessandro Iandolo, ‘Beyond the Shoe: Rethinking
Khrushchev at the Fifteenth Session of the United Nations General Assembly’,
Diplomatic History, vol. 41, no. 1 (2017), 134; Sir Patrick Dean to Foreign Office, 13
September 1960, FO371/153631 UN22812/30.
12. Dwight D. Eisenhower to Harold Macmillan, 20 September 1960, FRUS – UN,
document 176; Macmillan to Eisenhower, 15 September 1960, in Presidential and
Secretary of State Correspondence with Foreign Heads of State, 1953–1964, College
Park.
13. Dwight D. Eisenhower to Harold Macmillan, 20 September 1960, FRUS – UN,
document 176; Letter, Harold Macmillan to Dwight D. Eisenhower, 22 September 1960,
DDE Office Files, Part 2, Reel 14 – GB(2), RIAS; Macmillan’s diary entry for 22
September 1960 in Peter Catterall, ed., The Macmillan Diaries, Volume II: Prime
Minister and After, 1957–1966 (London: Macmillan, 2014), 328; Harold Macmillan,
Pointing the Way, 1959–1961 (London: Macmillan, 1972), 270.
14. State to London, Paris, Rome, Ottawa, 13 September 1960; 320/9-1360, College Park.
15. ‘The President’s Appointments, Thursday, September 22, 1960’, DDE Diaries, Reel 27,
Schedules (2) September 1960, RIAS; United Nations General Assembly, Fifteenth
Session, 22 September 1960, 43–4 at http://www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?
symbol=A/PV.868; ‘The Voice of Brazil’, NYT, 23 September 1960, 28; ‘Telegram from
the Department of State to the Mission at the United Nations’, 18 September 1960, FRUS
– United Nations, document 172; UNGA NY, Substantive miscellaneous, vol. VI, CF-
1772 – Frank Mewshaw and Andrew Cordier ‘had agreed the President should be at the
public entrance at 10:50 am, and then proceed to the entrance to the Podium offices,
arriving behind the Podium at 10:55 am. He goes on at 11:00 am. He [Mewshaw] wanted
both of you [Krebs and Bane] to have this information, saying that it supercedes the
memo he sent you previously on this subject.’;
https://www.unmultimedia.org/s/photo/detail/761/0076195.html; Ingeborg Glambek, ‘The
Council Chambers in the UN Building in New York’, Scandinavian Journal of Design
History, vol. 15 (2005), 8–9.
16. ‘Challenge to the Soviets’, NYT, 23 September 1960, 28.
17. Dwight D. Eisenhower, ‘Address Before the 15th General Assembly of the United
Nations’, New York City, 22 September 1960,
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-before-the-15th-general-assembly-
the-united-nations-new-york-city.
18. Max Frankel, ‘Cuban Is Cautious on Issues at U.N.’, NYT, 23 September 1960, 17.
19. James Morris, ‘Eisenhower’s Speech Falls Flat’, Guardian, 23 September 1960, 1.
20. Houghton (Paris) to Secretary of State, 23 September 1960, 320/9-2360, College Park;
Moscow to Secretary of State, 24 September 1960 (no. 830), 320/9-2460, College Park.
21. Wadsworth to Secretary of State, 22 September 1960, 320/9-2260; Andrew Cordier to
Blair Helman, 26 September 1960, Andrew W. Cordier Papers, Columbia University;
Wadsworth to Sec of State, 22 September 1960, 320/9-2260; Zellerbach (Rome) to
Secretary of State, 23 September 1960, 320/9-2360, College Park; Dwight D.
Eisenhower, Waging Peace, 579.
22. ‘Call to Greatness’, The Times, 23 September 1960, 15.
23. ‘Reactions to the UN Issues: Near East and South Asia’, 30 September 1960, Records of
the US Information Agency, Part 1, Series A, Reel 14 – S-18-60, RIAS; James Reston,
‘Eisenhower’s Bold Political Strategy’, NYT, 23 September 1960, 28.
24. Harrison E. Salisbury, ‘Khrushchev Calls Speech by President Conciliatory’, NYT, 23
September 1960, 1, 13.
25. ‘The President’s Appointments, Thursday, September 22, 1960’, DDE Diaries, Reel 27,
Schedules (2) September 1960, RIAS.
26. Dwight D. Eisenhower, ‘Remarks at a Luncheon for Latin American Delegates to the
U.N. General Assembly, New York City’, 22 September 1960, PPPUS.
27. Frankel, ‘Cuban Is Cautious on Issues at U.N.’, NYT, 23 September 1960, 17.
28. ‘The Employees Satisfied’ (Prensa Libre), Revolución, 23 September 1960, 15.
29. Bonsal to Secretary of State, 23 September 1960, 320/9-2360 – see also Revolución, 23
September 1960, 1.
30. ‘Cuba “Honored” by Eisenhower Slight’, Radio Mambi, 21 September 1960, Foreign
Broadcast Information Service, Daily Report, Foreign Radio Broadcasts, No. 185 (22
September 1960), g1.
31. ‘The President’s Appointments, Thursday, September 22, 1960’, 6, DDE Diaries, Reel
27, Schedules (2) September 1960, RIAS; Eisenhower, Waging Peace, 524.
32. White, ‘Fidel Calls Harlem “an Oasis in Desert”’, Baltimore Afro-American, 1 October
1960, 1.
33. Gosse, Where the Boys Are, 151; Carlos Franqui, Family Portrait, 89–90; Quirk, Fidel
Castro, 339; Barry Miles, Allen Ginsberg: Beat Poet (London: Virgin Books, 2010), 272;
Allen Ginsberg, ‘Prose Contribution to the Cuban Revolution’ in Bill Morgan, ed., Allen
Ginsberg: Deliberate Prose. Selected Essays 1952–1995 (London: Penguin Books, 2000),
142, 143–4; Todd F. Tietchen, ‘The Cubalogues (and After): On the Beat Literary
Movement and the Early Cuban Revolution’, Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American
Literature, Culture, and Theory, vol. 63, no. 4 (Winter 2007), 141–3.
34. Gosse, Where the Boys Are, 151; Carlos Franqui, Family Portrait, 89–90; Quirk, Fidel
Castro, 339; Miles, Allen Ginsberg, 272; Dominic Shellard, Kenneth Tynan: A Life (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 236–8. On Tynan’s appearance before the Senate
subcommittee see Kenneth Tynan, ‘Command Performance: A British Critic’s Report on
His Interrogation by a Senate Committee’, Harper’s, October 1960, 39–44 (quotation p.
43). The full-page advert in the New York Times was headed, ‘What Is Really Happening
in Cuba’, and appeared on page 33 of the 6 April 1960 edition. For a discussion of the
Beat poets and the Cuban Revolution see Tietchen, ‘The Cubalogues (and After)’, 119–
52. On C. Wright Mills and the Cuban Revolution see Daniel Geary, ‘“Becoming
International Again”: C. Wright Mills and the Emergence of a Global New Left, 1956–
 1962’, Journal of American History, vol. 95, no. 3 (December 2008), 726–36; A. Javier
Treviño, C. Wright Mills and the Cuban Revolution: An Exercise in the Art of
Sociological Imagination (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017). On
Carleton Beals see Gosse, Where The Boys Are, 17–19, 125–6, 140; ‘Carleton Beals’
Energetic Protest’, Revolución, 19 September 1960, 12.
35. Nathan Kanter and Jack Smee, ‘Cops Take Weapons from 3 at Fidel Fete’, New York
Daily News, 23 September 1960, 2, 6.
36. Julian Mayfield to ‘Maga’, 25 September 1960, in Julian Mayfield Papers, Box 7, Folder
2, Schomburg.
37. Kanter and Smee, ‘Cops Take Weapons from 3 at Fidel Fete’, New York Daily News, 23
September 1960, 2, 6; Michael Conant, ‘Reception at the Theresa’, Columbia Owl, 5
October 1960, 1, 4.
38. Theodore C. Achilles, ‘Memorandum for the Files’, 23 September 1960, in Executive
Secretariat Conference Files, 1949–1963, CF1767-1773, College Park.
39. Julian Mayfield to ‘Maga’, 25 September 1960, in Julian Mayfield Papers, Box 7, Folder
2, Schomburg.
40. White, ‘Fidel Calls Harlem “an Oasis in Desert”’, Baltimore Afro-American, 1 October
1960, 2; Casuso, Cuba and Castro, 243.
41. Conant, ‘Reception at the Theresa’, Columbia Owl, 5 October 1960, 1, 4.
42. Caption, photograph, Revolución, 24 September 1960, 7 (bottom right).
43. Moore, Castro, The Blacks, and Africa, 82.
44. ‘Fidel in Harlem’, Fair Play, 7 October, 3; Julian Mayfield to ‘Maga’, 25 September
1960, in Julian Mayfield Papers, Box 7, Folder 2, Schomburg; ‘Fidel at the UN – He
Broke the Barrier of the Dollar’ (‘Fidel en la ONU – Rompió la Barrera del Dólar’),
Bohemia, 2 October 1960, 44.
45. Julian Mayfield to ‘Maga’, 25 September 1960, in Julian Mayfield Papers, Box 7, Folder
2, Schomburg.
46. K. S. Karol, Guerrillas in Power: The Course of the Cuban Revolution (London:
Jonathan Cape, 1971), 37.
47. Tom Wolfe, ‘Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s’, New York, 8 June 1970, 27–56.
48. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 220.
49. Eric Hobsbawm, ‘The Cuban Revolution and Its Aftermath’, in Leslie Bethell, ed., Viva
La Revolución: Eric Hobsbawm on Latin America (London: Little, Brown, 2016), 262.
50. William Rowlandson, Sartre in Cuba – Cuba in Sartre (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2018), 2.
51. Rowlandson, Sartre in Cuba, 4.
52. Rowlandson, Sartre in Cuba, 4–5, 59.
53. Rowlandson, Sartre in Cuba, 50–2; Jean-Paul Sartre, Sartre on Cuba (Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 1974), 94, 98–9.
54. Rowlandson, Sartre in Cuba, 5; Sartre, Sartre on Cuba, 138–9.
55. Franqui, Family Portrait, 68.
56. Rowlandson, Sartre in Cuba, 4–5.
57. Eugene Wolters, ‘Incredible Candid Photos of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir
in Cuba’, 20 June 2014 at http://www.critical-theory.com/incredible-can-did-photos-of-
jean-paul-sartre-and-simone-de-beauvoir-in-cuba/; Rowlandson, Sartre in Cuba, 97;
 Simone de Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance, trans. Richard Howard (London: Penguin,
1985), 503.
58. De Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance, 501.
59. Rowlandson, Sartre in Cuba, 30.
60. Rowlandson, Sartre in Cuba, 39.
61. Rowlandson, Sartre in Cuba, 53, 54, 55.
62. Rowlandson, Sartre in Cuba, 33; Sartre, Sartre on Cuba, 44
63. Sartre, Sartre on Cuba, 146.
64. LeRoi Jones, ‘Cuba Libre’, in Mealy, Fidel and Malcolm X, 62–78 (originally published
in Evergreen Review, November/December 1960); Gosse, Where the Boys Are, 183–7.
65. Bill Morgan, ed., An Accidental Autobiography: The Selected Letters of Gregory Corso
(New York: New Directions Publishing, 2003), 263–4; Miles, Allen Ginsberg, 272, 337–
48, 349–51; Michael Schumacher, Dharma Lion: A Critical Biography of Allen Ginsberg
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 419–28; Bill Morgan, I Celebrate Myself: The
Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg (London: Penguin, 2006), 402– 3; José Quiroga,
Cuban Palimpsests (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 235 n. 28. On
the Cuban government’s sustained campaign against homosexuals see, for instance,
Guerra, Visions of Power in Cuba, 227–9, 245–55.
66. Rowlandson, Sartre in Cuba, 88–9. The protest was triggered by the arrest and
humiliation of the poet Heberto Padilla. See Guerra, Visions of Power in Cuba, 353–60.

* Asked about the origins of this tradition in 2010, Desmond Parker, UN Chief of Protocol,
explained that ‘in very early times, when no one wanted to speak first, Brazil always
offered to speak first. And so they … earned the right to speak first at the General
Assembly.’
† Fidel declared Revolutionary Cuba to be a socialist nation on 1 May 1961; on 2
December that same year he came out as a Marxist-Leninist, proclaiming that ‘Marxism
or scientific socialism has become the revolutionary movement of the working class’.
‡ This translates as ‘Sartre, Simone, one two three! Sartre, Simone, get on the dance floor!’
§ An anxious and somewhat bewildered Ginsberg soon recovered his poise. Putting his
disappointment with the Cuban ‘police state’ behind him, he made the most of his time in
the Czechoslovakian capital – visiting Kafka’s grave, writing some new poems, reciting
‘Howl’ to 500 students at Charles University and enjoying the adulation of his many
admirers.
 CAPTION:

In a pugnacious speech at the UN General Assembly, Nikita Khrushchev urged his fellow world
leaders to ‘bury colonialism’.
Photograph by Bettman via Getty Images
 7

FRIDAY 23 SEPTEMBER

Cuba makes us feel like boys again.

ANASTAS MIKOYAN

Standing outside the entrance to the Soviet mission, glancing repeatedly

at his watch, Nikita Khrushchev looked, said one observer, ‘like a bride
who had been left at the altar’. Fidel, who liked to keep people waiting,
had also misjudged the evening traffic and was running seriously late;
Khrushchev, having mistaken the sound of a passing fire truck for the
Cuban motorcade, had come down from his rooms and now found
himself trapped out on the sidewalk. As the minutes ticked by and the
Cuban leader failed to appear, the Soviet leader began joshing with
reporters. When one reporter asked where Castro was, Khrushchev
replied, ‘He will come. Meanwhile, we will take some air. It is not quite
fresh,’ he said, in a reference to the city’s pollution, ‘but still, it’s air.’
Pressed on how long he intended to remain in New York, the Soviet
leader responded, with a grin, ‘I feel like staying, so I’m not going … but
apparently I will not be granted citizenship.’ At one point an election
campaign truck, featuring a rocket bearing the slogan ‘Nixon In,
Khrushchev Out’, passed by, and Khrushchev ‘grinned from ear to ear,
put his arms up, and pretended to shudder in terror’.1
Earlier that day, in a ‘fighting speech’ at the United Nations, the
Soviet leader had called for Dag Hammarskjöld, whom he accused of
siding with the colonial powers, to be replaced with a ‘triumvirate’ –
representing the Western, communist and neutral blocs – and suggested
that the UN headquarters itself be moved to either Austria or
Switzerland.2 Picking at the open sore that was the U-2 incident,
Khrushchev accused the United States of ‘piracy’ and ‘perfidy’ and
suggested that Washington was stoking an atmosphere in which the
nations of the world were forced to live in constant fear of war. Moscow,
in contrast, stood ready to ‘do everything we can so that general and
complete disarmament becomes reality and mankind is saved from the
arms race and the threat of a new destructive war’. But the Soviet leader
was quick to dismiss Eisenhower’s plans for a system of international
control as nothing more than a subterfuge for international espionage.
Khrushchev also reaffirmed the Soviet Union’s support for peaceful
coexistence. ‘Relations between all states should’, he said, be allowed to
‘develop in a peaceful way, without resort to force, without wars, without
interference in the internal affairs of another’. If not, the alternative was
coexistence ‘at dagger’s point’.
Welcoming the admission of the new African states to the United
Nations, Khrushchev celebrated the rolling back of colonialism as ‘a
great hallmark of our epoch’ and declared that the world was entering a
new era, in which the countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America were
‘beginning to take an active part in the determination of the destinies of
the whole world’. Much, though, remained to be done: as well as calling
for a return to order in the Congo under the ‘legitimate leadership’ of
Patrice Lumumba, Khrushchev saluted the ‘heroic selfless struggle’ for
independence in Algeria (where the Front de Libération Nationale was
engaged in a bitter struggle against the French), as well as the fight for
national self-determination in Kenya, Tanganyika, Uganda and other
colonies. ‘When the peoples rise up to struggle for their freedom, for a
better life’, Khrushchev declared, ‘no force in the world can stop this
mighty movement.’
After speaking for some two hours, Khrushchev ended his peroration
with a rallying call: ‘let us talk, argue, but let us solve the questions of
general and complete disarmament. Let us bury colonialism that has been
condemned by mankind.’ The peoples of the world, he declared, ‘are
expecting the United Nations General Assembly … to adopt decisions
meeting the aspiration of the peoples’.3

Khrushchev’s speech did not win any friends in Washington (although

Eisenhower joked that he did agree with the Soviet leader on one thing:
the desirability of moving the UN out of New York*). The criticism of
Hammarskjöld caused particular consternation, with Secretary of State
Herter declaring that it amounted to ‘an all-out attack, a real declaration
of war against the structure, the personnel, and the location of the United
Nations’.4 In a meeting with Jawaharlal Nehru, held in the Waldorf
Hotel, Eisenhower confided that he was ‘astonished’ by the ‘virulence’ of
Khrushchev’s remarks. With some commentators speculating that the
Soviet Union might even quit the UN, Ike worried that the collapse of the
organization would be a ‘terrible disaster for the world’, above all for the
smaller nations. As for how long Khrushchev intended to remain in New
York, the president was resigned to the fact that he would likely ‘remain
as long as he can make trouble’.5 Herter, meanwhile, urged the president
to refrain from making any public statement for the time being.
Telephoning the White House from New York on the morning of 24
September, he advised that, for all of Khrushchev’s bluster, the situation
was ‘riding along very well … Mr. K did not make many friends
yesterday.’ The attack on the UN appeared to have gone down badly with
many of the Afro-Asian nations (a resolution sponsored by seventeen of
them, which was broadly supportive of Hammarskjöld’s handling of the
Congo crisis, had been passed 70-0 on the eve of the Assembly),
triggering what the New York Times called ‘something like a sympathetic
counter-reaction’.6 It was clear, though, that Khrushchev had succeeded
in needling the president. Writing in her diary on 25 September, his
secretary, Ann Whitman, recorded how:
The other night, talking about Mr. K and his threats, the President told me what Lord
Home [the British foreign secretary] said, with sarcasm, that sometimes he wished ‘the
world could go back to the old methods of diplomacy.’ … meaning of course the big stick.
The President strongly intimated that he wished there was no moral restriction that
prevented him from one night pushing the proper button and sending all of our atomic
bombs in the direction of the Communist bloc. This is the strongest statement I have ever
heard him make on the subject.7

Reporting from Moscow a couple of days later, the British

ambassador noted that Khrushchev’s speech had been covered in the
Soviet press ‘in terms of semi-religious adulation and awe. It has
supposedly confounded the warmongers and shown the way to a brighter
cleaner world.’ It was an impression that was, though, undermined by the
first newsreels of the General Assembly proceedings that were
subsequently screened in Moscow’s cinemas. As the British embassy
reported, ‘an opening shot of the United Nations skyscraper drew “ooh’s”
of admiration’ and ‘later on there was a shot of Soviet factory workers
avidly drinking in the radio broadcast of Khrushchev’s … speech.’
Unfortunately, though, the sound quality was ‘under par and the Soviet
leader’s voice came over as a high-pitched gabble’ – prompting
widespread laughter.8 In any case, commentators in the West were far
from impressed by Khrushchev’s performance: ‘a dreadful speech […]
dishonest, rude, threatening, drab, unyielding, and far too long’,
concluded the Guardian’s James Morris (who was evidently hard to
please).9 The Washington Post described the speech as ‘chilling’, while
the New York Post concluded that ‘mankind’s hopes for a better day were
hardly brightened by anything the Soviet leader said.’10 Commenting on
Khrushchev’s ‘harangue’ in the New York Times, James Reston wondered
whether the new Soviet strategy was ‘to bore us to death’.11 The speech
fared little better in continental Europe: La Giustizia, the newspaper of
the Italian Social Democratic Party, characterized Khrushchev’s remarks
as an ‘insult to truth’; Frankfurt’s Abendpost declared that the Soviet
leader had ‘run out of ideas’; and the Scandinavian press was,
unsurprisingly, scathing about his attack on the Secretary General.12
Khrushchev’s speech did, though, have one high-profile fan. Indeed,
Fidel Castro had leaped to his feet and offered vigorous and very public
applause merely at the sight of the Soviet leader entering the Assembly
Hall. During Khrushchev’s actual remarks, Fidel had led the Cuban
delegation in enthusiastic clapping and other demonstrations of support;
and, as he left the assembly – wearing a ‘freshly pressed fatigue uniform
and highly polished boots’, reported the New York Times – he declared
the speech to have been ‘good. Very good.’13 The Cuban press followed
suit, giving what the US ambassador in Havana described as ‘prominent
and panegyric play to Khrushchev speech in U.N.’ Revolución, for
instance, praised Khrushchev for having ‘expressed in precise terms
ideas of great force and clarity’ and lauded the Soviet leader as ‘just and
valiant … a firm but serene statesman’.14 Many Cubans, it was said, had
even taken the trouble to listen to the speech, which was broadcast live
on all Cuban radio and television stations.
During his address to the UN General Assembly, Nikita Khrushchev
had made sure to single out his new friends from the Antilles.
‘Courageous Cuba’ had, he declared, ‘become the object of all kinds of
attacks, intrigues and subversion, economic aggression and finally,
poorly concealed threats of intervention’. After years of exploitation by
the ‘American monopolies’, the Cuban people had now, thanks to a
popular revolution, ‘freed themselves’ and ‘taken their fate into their own
hands firmly declaring to the United States monopolists: No more
plundering of our country. We ourselves shall utilize the wealth of our
labour and our land!’ Referring to the US-sponsored coup that had
overthrown the leftist government of Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala back
in the summer of 1954, Khrushchev declared that it was vital that the
United Nations ‘do all it can to remove from Cuba the overhanging threat
of interference from outside’.15

The close relationship between Cuba and the Soviet Union was not
preordained. As Khrushchev’s biographer has noted, ‘when Fidel
Castro’s forces came sweeping out of the Sierra Maestra and seized
Havana in January 1959, Moscow had no clear idea of who they were
and what they stood for.’16 Although Raúl had joined the Cuban
Communist Party (Partido Socialista Popular, or PSP) in 1953, Fidel
seemed committed to pursuing a more independent course, and, in the
early days of the revolution at least, it was not inconceivable that some
sort of modus vivendi with the United States could have been worked
out.17 But, in the face of implacable American opposition to its radical
economic policies, the government in Havana began to reach out to the
Soviet Union.18 Encouraged by enthusiastic reports from Aleksandr
Ivanovich Alekseyev, the KGB’s new Rezident (station chief) in Havana
– who had, he later recalled, immediately ‘fallen in love’ with the
revolution – the leadership in Moscow responded positively.19 To begin
with, Fidel was keen to impose limits and to keep the extent of the
relationship secret (not least because of the island’s ingrained culture of
anti-communism, fuelled in part by the Catholic Church). Havana was
prepared to purchase arms from Eastern bloc countries, including Poland
and Czechoslovakia, and welcomed seventeen Spanish republican army
officers, who had been living in exile in the USSR, as military advisers.
But Fidel would not countenance requesting weapons directly from
Moscow, partly because he feared provoking a response from
Washington, which had long opposed any ‘interference’ by foreign
powers in an area of the world that they viewed with proprietorial zeal. †
He did, though, concede that the Soviets could play ‘a decisive role in the
strengthening of our revolution by helping us economically’.20
A key moment in what one leading historian has called the ‘Cuban-
Soviet minuet’ arrived in February 1960, when Anastas Mikoyan, the
number two in the Kremlin and Nikita Khrushchev’s favoured
international troubleshooter, arrived in Havana at the head of a technical
and cultural mission.21 The son of an illiterate village carpenter, Mikoyan
– a native Armenian – had joined the Bolsheviks in 1915 and quickly
risen through the ranks, serving as people’s commissar for trade and
becoming a leading member of the politburo. Having survived the bloody
purges of the 1930s, he emerged as one of Khrushchev’s key allies
following Stalin’s death in 1953, as a champion of greater freedoms and
liberal reforms. In February 1955, Khrushchev appointed him First
Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers.22
Mikoyan arrived in Cuba on 4 February, where he was greeted by a
‘throng of people’, including musicians who serenaded him with Cuban
melodies. For the next ten days, he barely had time to pause for breath.
Mikoyan laid a wreath at the memorial to José Martí on the Paseo del
Prado; opened the Soviet Trade Exhibition; watched the cabaret at the
famed El Tropicana; met with economists, government officials,
businessmen and leading revolutionaries (including Che Guevara, Raúl
Castro and Raúl Roa); visited cooperative farms; chatted with Ernest
Hemingway (the old Bolshevik, it turned out, was a big fan); viewed the
construction of new workers’ housing in Havana; visited the Isla de
Pinos, where Fidel had spent two years in prison; swam in the warm
waters off Cayo Largo; enjoyed a fishing trip with the Maximum Leader;
toured around Santiago de Cuba; and spent a night roughing it in the
Gran Piedra mountains. On his final day in Cuba, the First Deputy
Chairman signed a major commercial agreement, providing Havana with
$100 million in trade credits, and agreeing to purchase significant
quantities of Cuban sugar and to supply the island with oil.23
Mikoyan was won over. Speaking before a rally of textile workers on
7 February, he declared, to raucous cheers, that ‘the Cuban revolution can
accomplish miracles too’, and ended his speech by proclaiming, in
‘heavily accented Spanish’, ‘Long live the Cuban People!’24 Ever since
his arrival, he had felt surrounded by ‘kindred spirits’, and was struck by
‘the Cuban leaders’ youth and revolutionary ardour, their enthusiasm,
complete sincerity, faith in their cause, as well as the belief in the
Revolution and the enthusiasm among large segments of the population –
all this indicated that the Cuban Revolution answered the hopes and
expectations of the working masses’.25
The spirit of enthusiasm was infectious: Mikoyan’s thirty-year-old
son, Sergo, who accompanied him on the trip, watched his father deliver
an impassioned speech at a rice-hulling plant, standing on an improvised
podium constructed of bags of rice. ‘Everything in Cuba’, he noted, ‘had
its own special, inimitable flavour’, and he had, he confessed, ‘fallen in
love with this country, its Revolution, its leaders and its people’.26
For Mikoyan senior, meanwhile, Cuba had stirred powerful memories
of his own youthful idealism and revolutionary fervour.27 Reporting to
Khrushchev on his return to Moscow, the old Bolshevik assured his boss
that, yes, Castro was ‘a revolutionary. Completely like us.’ In Cuba, he
explained, ‘I felt as though I had returned to my childhood.’28
Soon, Khrushchev – encouraged by Fidel’s increasingly strident anti-
Americanism – was preparing to throw his weight behind the
revolutionary government in Havana. In early July, he warned publicly
that if the ‘aggressive forces in the Pentagon’ dared to launch an
intervention against Cuba, ‘Soviet artillerymen’ would be able to
‘support the Cuban people with their rocket fire’.29 A few weeks later, on
26 July – the anniversary of the eponymous attack on the Moncada
Barracks – the Soviet leader declared that ‘the cause of heroic Cuba …
has today become the banner of all progressive forces in Latin America
which are rising to the struggle for liberation from the imperialist yoke.’
Arguing that ‘the Cuban people are not alone’, he pledged Moscow’s
support for their ‘just struggle’.30 Scoring propaganda victories, gaining
the tactical upper hand and securing strategic advantage via third-party
states were all prominent features of the global superpower rivalry, and
Khrushchev knew full well that the establishment of a successful socialist
republic in America’s own backyard promised to cause no end of trouble
for Washington. Just as important, it would allow the Soviets to steal a
march on the Chinese, with whom tensions had been rising ever since
Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin’s ‘cult of personality’ during his
‘secret speech’ of 1956 (a critique that was viewed, in China, as a thinly
veiled attack on Chairman Mao). Beijing, believing Moscow to be
insufficiently revolutionary (too cautious, they said, when it came to the
political uses of violence; too committed to the ‘bourgeois’ goal of
peaceful coexistence), was vigorously challenging its leadership of
international communism and competing with it for hearts and minds in
the Third World – including in Cuba, where, Mao declared, the battle had
been carried ‘to the imperialist rear’.31 Now, in the autumn of 1960,
Khrushchev had the chance to display the strength of Soviet–Cuban
friendship before the whole world. The temptation was irresistible.

So it was that, just hours after his speech at the UN, and following his
own pilgrimage to Harlem three days earlier, Khrushchev was preparing
to receive Castro and his entourage as honoured guests at the Soviet
mission on Park Avenue.
The Cuban leader eventually arrived just after 7.30 p.m. – almost
forty minutes late. Brushing aside the Cubans’ profuse apologies, the
Soviet leader ‘flung his arms’ around Fidel and ushered him inside.
‘Protocol’, he declared, putting any personal irritation to one side, ‘has
no importance.’32
Amid the plush surroundings of the mission – with its thick rugs, fine
paintings, white linen and delicate porcelain – Khrushchev broke the ice
by removing his jacket and inviting his guests to do the same. The dinner,
which lasted for four hours, featured consommé, caviar, salmon, stuffed
pigeon and roast lamb, with fruit and chocolate for dessert, all washed
down with countless shots of Khrushchev’s favourite Ukrainian pepper-
infused vodka – which made the Cubans ‘feel their throats’: Carlos
Franqui recalled that, by the end of the night, more than one of his fellow
countrymen found himself ‘shipwrecked in a sea of vodka and cigars’.
Although Fidel would have preferred to stick to politics, the Soviet
premier was in a playful and jovial mood. He ribbed his foreign minister,
Andrei Gromyko, for having afforded official recognition to the Batista
regime in the 1940s (the Cubans, he said, should put him on trial for
treason), and even poked fun at the Maximum Leader himself by
recalling a joke that, he said, was doing the rounds: Fidel, he explained,
was standing among a group of people outside the Pearly Gates. When St
Peter called for all communists to step forward, Fidel remained
motionless. ‘Hey, what about you!’ St Peter shouted out. ‘You must be
deaf!’ Khrushchev, at least, appeared to find it funny.
Around midnight, gifts were exchanged, and the Soviets were
presented with cigars, alligator-skin wallets, small wooden statues of
Camilo Cienfuegos – a hero of the Cuban Revolution who had sailed
with Fidel aboard the Granma (and who had died in an unexplained
plane crash on the night of 28 October 1959) – and a bust of José Martí
with the inscription ‘Now, war is the last resort, and in the future war will
be a crime.’ On a slightly lighter note, Fidel also presented Khrushchev
with a pair of maracas for his granddaughter, Julia‡ – which Khrushchev
immediately began to play – as well as a tumbadora (or conga drum).
The two leaders emerged onto the sidewalk for another photocall at 12.10
a.m.: ‘smiling broadly, they brushed past security guards and strode to a
microphone.’ Fidel was effusive. In pointed remarks, given his treatment
by the Americans, he thanked his hosts for their ‘great hospitality’. The
Soviets were ‘very polite and respectful people’, and he declared that he
and his companions had gained a ‘wonderful impression’ of Khrushchev
and the whole Soviet delegation. When asked what the two leaders had
discussed, he responded that they had ‘talked about peace’. Pressed on
whether Khrushchev would now travel to Cuba aboard the Baltika, the
Maximum Leader refused to be drawn.33
In the words of Carlos Franqui, ‘the honeymoon between Fidel and
the Russians had begun.’34

Notes
1. Harrison E. Salisbury, ‘Khrushchev Dinner Waits for Tardy Castro’, NYT, 24 September
1960, 9.
2. Thomas J. Hamilton, ‘Premier Is Harsh’, NYT, 24 September 1960, 1, 9.
3. Nikita Khrushchev, Statement in the General Debate at the Fifteenth Session of the
United Nations General Assembly, 23 September 1960, in Khrushchev in New York: A
documentary record … (New York: Crosscurrents Press, 1960), 11–57 (esp. 15–17, 22,
24, 26, 39–41, 46, 53–4, 57).
4. Remarks by the Secretary of State, Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, New York, 23 September
1960, 3.30 p.m., FRUS-UN, doc. 184.
5. DDE Office Files, Part 2, Reel 17 (5), meeting with Nehru, 26 September, Waldorf, 3
p.m., RIAS.
 6. DDE Diaries, reel 27, Phone Calls September 1960: Whitman memo, 24 September,
RIAS; Benjamin Welles, ‘New States Are Aroused by Khrushchev’s Attack’, NYT, 25
September 1960, 1, 36.
7. Whitman – Ann Whitman Diary Series, Box 11, Folder – ‘[ACW] Diary September
1960’, 25 September, DDE Library.
8. NS1022/114 – 26 September, Moscow to London, FO371/151930; NS1014/8 – 11
October 1960, Moscow to London, FO371/151910.
9. James Morris, ‘Week of Futility at UN’, Guardian, 26 September 1960, 9.
10. ‘Little New Seen in Premier’s Talk’, NYT, 26 September 1960, 14.
11. James Reston, ‘The New Soviet Strategy: Boring Us to Death’, NYT, 25 September
1960, E12.
12. See, for instance, Dillon to USUN, 24 September 1960, discussing world reaction to
Khrushchev’s speech, 320/9-2460; Rome to Secretary of State, 26 September 1960,
320/9-2660; ‘Opinion of the Week: At Home and Abroad’, NYT, 25 September 1960,
E13.
13. Max Frankel, ‘Castro Plays Fan to Soviet Premier’, NYT, 24 September 1960, 3.
14. Bonsal to Secretary of State, 24 September 1960 (no. 1144), 320/9-2460.
15. Nikita Khrushchev, Statement in the General Debate at the Fifteenth Session of the
United Nations General Assembly, 23 September 1960, in Khrushchev in New York: A
documentary record … (New York: Crosscurrents Press, 1960), 18–19. On the coup in
Guatemala see von Tunzelmann, Red Heat, 56–9 and Rabe, Eisenhower and Latin
America, 42–63.
16. Taubman, Khrushchev, 532; Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, Volume 3, 315–16.
17. Piero Gleijeses, ‘Cuba and the Cold War, 1959–1980’ in Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne
Westad, eds, The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Volume II: Crises and Détente
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 328.
18. Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976
(Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 14, 15–18.
19. Andrew and Mitrokhin, The KGB and the World, 35–6; Sergo Mikoyan, The Soviet
Cuban Missile Crisis (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2012), 41–2, 53–
5.
20. Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War, 295–7.
21. Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions, 17–18.
22. Mikoyan, The Soviet Cuban Missile Crisis, 3, 11–24.
23. Mikoyan, The Soviet Cuban Missile Crisis, 61–79; Andrew and Mitrokhin, The KGB and
the World, 36.
24. ‘Mikoyan Lauded at Cuban Meeting’, The Stanford Daily, 8 February 1960, 1. On the
assassination scare see Guerra, Visions of Power in Cuba, 113–14.
25. Mikoyan, The Soviet Cuban Missile Crisis, 82.
26. Mikoyan, The Soviet Cuban Missile Crisis, 74.
27. Mikoyan, The Soviet Cuban Missile Crisis, 82; Anne E. Gorsuch, ‘“Cuba, My Love”:
The Romance of Revolutionary Cuba in the Soviet Sixties’, American Historical Review,
April 2015, 497–526 (esp. 505).
28. Taubman, Khrushchev, 532–3.
29. Jonathan C. Brown, Cuba’s Revolutionary World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2017), 80.
30. Bonsal to Secretary of State, 26 July 1960, 637.61/7-2660, Confidential State
Department Files, Decimal 637, reel 1.
31. Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War, 305; Brown, Cuba’s Revolutionary World,
76–81.
32. Salisbury, ‘Khrushchev Dinner Waits for Tardy Castro’, NYT, 24 September 1960, 9;
Quirk, Fidel Castro, 340.
33. Quirk, Fidel Castro, 340–1; Franqui, Family Portrait, 88–9; Salisbury, ‘Khrushchev
Dinner Waits for Tardy Castro’, NYT, 24 September 1960, 9; ‘Fidel at the UN – He Broke
the Barrier of the Dollar’ (‘Fidel en la ONU – Rompió la Barrera del Dólar’), Bohemia, 2
October 1960, 52, 53, 71; ‘Informal Dinner between Khrushchev and Fidel’ (‘Cena sin
Protocolo de Jruschov a Fidel’), Revolución, 24 September 1960, 1, 16.
34. Franqui, Family Portrait, 89.

* When the United Nations voted in 1945 to locate its headquarters in the United States,
rather than in Europe, other American cities – notably San Francisco and Philadelphia –
were considered the front runners. The eventual triumph of New York owed much to the
energetic lobbying of city officials and the donation, by the financier and philanthropist
John D. Rockefeller, Jr, of an eighteen-acre property, formerly the site of a row of
slaughterhouses, along the East River. When reminded of this gift, Ike quipped that he
would happily give it back. He commented that ‘the only virtue … of having the UN in
New York is that by being so located it does not unduly exacerbate the balance of
payments problem in the light of the amount of money we pour into it.’ For more see
Charlene Mires, Capital of the World: The Race to Host the United Nations (New York:
New York University Press, 2013).
† Under the ‘Monroe Doctrine’, originally formulated in 1823 by the Secretary of State,
John Quincy Adams, and articulated by the country’s fifth president, James Monroe,
European attempts to exert control over any independent state in the Americas would, by
definition, be viewed as an ‘unfriendly act’, ‘dangerous to our peace and safety’.
‡ Khrushchev had adopted Julia following the death of her father, Leonid (his eldest son),
during the Second World War.
 CAPTION:

Nikita Khrushchev holds an impromptu press conference outside the USSR’s

Glen Cove retreat, on Long Island.
Photograph by Gerard Gery/Paris Match via Getty Images
 8

SATURDAY 24 SEPTEMBER

The victory of a small revolutionary force over the much larger forces of the imperialist
puppets in Cuba shows … that the imperialists are ‘paper tigers’.
MAO ZEDONG

For the editorial writers of Rodong Sinmun, the official organ of North
Korea’s Workers’ Party, the ‘insulting provocations’ that Fidel Castro had
endured at the hands of his American hosts revealed that the ‘U.S.
imperialists’ were little more than ‘shameless beasts’ with ‘human faces’;
‘gangsters’, opposed to the cause of world peace.1 In similar vein,
Beijing radio observed that, on arriving in New York, the Cubans had
‘received the kind of rifle-butt welcome that the State Department gives
all those who work for peace, national independence, and social
progress’. Declaring that ‘those who try to insult Fidel are joining up
with all the foulest things in the world’, the Chinese communists
expressed confidence that ‘the people – united, vigilant, and refusing to
be insulted, deceived, or disunited’ would ultimately ‘defeat imperialism,
reaction, and war …’2
Given these expressions of support, and the evident growing closeness
between the government in Havana and their counterparts in Beijing and
Pyongyang, it was not particularly surprising when, late on the evening
of 24 September, news broke that the Cuban government had decided to
offer formal diplomatic recognition to the communist governments of the
Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the People’s Republic of
China. Neither was a member of the United Nations – China’s seat would
continue to be occupied by representatives of the nationalist government-
in-exile, based in Taiwan, until 1971; North Korea did not join the
organization until 1991. Although Havana had held back from formally
recognizing the government in Beijing earlier in the year, to avoid further
straining relations with the US, by the autumn such considerations had
been brushed aside; the final decision was reached during a late-night
cabinet meeting that Fidel chaired by telephone from his suite in the
Theresa, and which concluded in the early hours of Saturday morning.3
Cuba’s decision to extend official recognition to the People’s Republic
of China was, the New York Times declared, ‘like the explosion of a time
bomb. We all knew it was coming, but could not know just when.’ But
there was no doubt that this was a move of great international
significance – giving Communist China ‘its first diplomatic foothold in
the Western Hemisphere’. Even more important, the New York Times
noted, Castro’s latest act of defiance was ‘symbolic of the completeness
with which he is waging what amounts to an all-out cold war against the
United States’. Convinced that Washington was determined to
‘overthrow them and the Cuban revolution … their policies have taken
on a “do or die” quality. They are risking all in the belief that the United
States is demanding unconditional surrender.’ ‘For the sake of Cuba as
well as the United States’, the Times editorial cautioned, ‘one must hope
that the struggle is not carried much further.’4

Keen to secure international allies, and win diplomatic, economic and

military backing for their revolution, William Gálvez, Inspector General
of the Cuban armed forces, had been despatched on a goodwill trip to
China four months earlier. During a private meeting with Chairman Mao
on 10 May, he explained that the Cuban people wished to strengthen their
‘intimate relationship’ with the Chinese people, in opposition to the
‘imperialists of the U.S.’5
Gálvez was pushing at an open door. A year earlier, Mao and other
Chinese communist leaders had gone out of their way to schmooze with
the Latin American delegates who were in Moscow for the Twenty-first
Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. They had also
invited a group of them – including Juan Marinello, president of Cuba’s
Communist Party, the PSP – to visit Beijing immediately afterwards.
Latin America, which was economically underdeveloped and had a
history of exploitation by ‘the imperialists’, was viewed by Mao as
fruitful terrain. Like the Soviets, the Chinese were keen to extend their
global influence, and this was a region where they spied an opportunity
to wrest the initiative from Moscow. Mao expressed his hopes that
concerted action by communists, and an accompanying increase in
international tensions in the region, would ‘distract and disperse the
imperialist forces over a vast area’, thereby enabling communist
insurgents to take the fight to them. In the months that followed, Chinese
propaganda efforts in Latin America were stepped up, and a training
programme for Latin American communist leaders was intensified.6
Moreover, the Chinese were increasingly enthusiastic about the Cuban
Revolution. Mao, who had championed guerrilla warfare during the
Chinese Revolution (‘the guerrilla’, he wrote, ‘must move among the
people as a fish swims in the sea’), argued that ‘the victory of a small
revolutionary force over the much larger forces of the imperialist puppets
in Cuba’ had revealed the imperialists to be nothing more than ‘paper
tigers’.7 In June 1960, Peng Zhen, a leading member of the Chinese
politburo, declared that ‘the valiant people of Cuba have given a brilliant
example for the peoples of Latin America’.8 But China was prepared to
offer more than warm words: technicians were despatched to advise the
Cuban armed forces and to work with the Institute for Agrarian Reform;
the Peking State Opera Company and delegations from student, trade and
labour organizations followed soon after.9 Then, on 23 July, Cuba and the
People’s Republic of China signed a landmark trade deal, under which
Beijing agreed to buy up to 500,000 tons of Cuban sugar per annum, at
world prices, for the next five years, with promises of further economic
aid and technical assistance to come. This was, concluded the American
intelligence services, concrete evidence of Beijing’s ‘willingness to back
anti-US movements with considerable material support’.10 Fidel agreed,
telling the National Congress of Cuban Women, during a speech in
August, that ‘we shall be friends with the … Chinese People’s Republic
because they have proven to be our friends, while the imperialists attack
us and want to destroy us.’11
Having overseen the economic reconstruction of his country
following the ravages of the Korean War, Kim Il Sung was also keen to
establish alliances across the Global South. A champion of the Third
World, which he viewed as a ‘powerful revolutionary force’, Kim, who
had waged guerrilla warfare against Japanese colonialists in Manchuria
during the 1930s, also identified personally with the new generation of
anticolonial revolutionaries who emerged during the 1960s.12 Developing
a strategy that historian Benjamin R. Young has termed ‘guerrilla
internationalism’, Pyongyang sought to nurture and strengthen anti-
imperialist solidarity across Africa, Asia and Central America.13 Cuba –
which, like North Korea, was on the front line of the struggle against
American imperialism – was an obvious potential ally, and ultimately
provided Kim with a bridgehead into the rest of Latin America.14 On 29
August, just a few weeks before establishing formal diplomatic relations,
Cuba and North Korea had signed an agreement for the exchange of
scientists, educators, artists and athletes.15 Che himself would visit
Pyongyang in November 1960, while on a global tour of socialist
countries. He was, he later said, immensely impressed by this ‘tiny
country’ that had been ‘resurrected from the ashes of American
bombardment and invasion’.16 In the coming years, the two countries
would offer each other ideological, diplomatic, military and economic
support* – as well as warm words of friendship.17 Kim Il Sung described
the Korean and Cuban peoples as ‘comrades-in-arms and intimate
brothers who are fighting shoulder to shoulder on the front of the struggle
for the revolutionary cause of the international working class and of the
struggle against U.S. imperialism, our common enemy’. Fidel
reciprocated. Piling on the flattery in good communist fashion, he lauded
Kim’s ‘eminent, outstanding [and] heroic’ leadership of the socialist
cause.18 Although no one knew it at the time, then, the autumn of 1960
marked the beginning of what would become a ‘long and enduring
friendship’ between Cuba and the Democratic People’s Republic of
Korea; a friendship that has survived into the twenty-first century.19

The granting of official recognition to ‘Red China’ and North Korea

might have generated headlines but, for Fidel, Saturday 24 September
passed relatively quietly. After sleeping late, he spent most of the day
holed up in his suite at the Theresa, working on his UN speech. The New
York Times reported that the Cuban premier ‘sent out for a lunch of
chicken and rice’ and left it to his aides to oversee the raising of the
Cuban flag outside the hotel. Just after 12.30 p.m. a dozen pro-Castro
Cubans, headed by Jorge Orihuela – a diamond-cutter, and New York-
based member of Castro’s 26 July Movement – had marched up Seventh
Avenue and entered the Hotel Theresa, carrying a Cuban flag. After
obtaining permission from Love B. Woods and consulting with members
of the NYPD – who advised that, according to protocol, the American
flag had to fly to the right of any foreign flag – they held a modest
ceremony on the hotel’s mezzanine. At 1 p.m., after the American flag
had been moved, the two-by-four-foot Cuban banner was raised and, as
the blue-and-white-striped ensign, with its distinctive red triangle and
white star, fluttered in the breeze above the Theresa’s main entrance,
members of the Cuban delegation stood for their country’s national
anthem: ‘do not fear a glorious death’, they sang, ‘for to die for the
homeland is to live.’ The Maximum Leader made a brief appearance at a
ninth-floor window at around 6 p.m., to wave to the crowd of 500 or so
cheering supporters who had gathered outside; there was also a brief
flurry of excitement when two Spanish-speaking ladies ‘of uncertain
status’ – one a ‘plump redhead, the other a tall, slim brunette with an
artificial streak of gray in her locks’; both from Coney Island – were
given ‘the bounce’ by the hotel’s owner, who was keen to avoid ‘any
irregularities’. But for the reporters who, hoping for more ‘dramatic
public behaviour by Havana’s bearded revolutionaries’, had ‘lingered
lazily among the large detail of security forces’, it had been a
disappointingly quiet day.20
Nikita Khrushchev, too, was keen to relax. A little after 11 a.m., the
Soviet leader – ‘his usual ebullient self’ – walked out of the mission
towards his waiting limousine. The New York Daily News reported how,
on opening the rear door, he beckoned to ‘several satellite leaders to join
him. Bashfully, the underlings went through an Alphonse-and-Gaston
routine before … Antonín Novotný of Czechoslovakia, Gheorghe
Gheorghiu-Dej, Communist Chief of Romania, and a third Red VIP,
name unknown, entered the car.’ Khrushchev took the front seat, next to
the driver, and in short order the motorcade was off, headed for Glen
Cove on the north shore of Long Island – the mansion-dotted ‘Gold
Coast’, whose opulence had been immortalized by F. Scott Fitzgerald in
his 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby.21
Built in 1912–13 by the American oil magnate George Dupont Pratt,
Killenworth – a thirty-nine-room house, designed in the Tudor Revival
style – had been purchased by the Soviet Union in April 1946 as the
country retreat for its UN delegation.22 With its wood panelling, beautiful
fireplaces and low retaining garden wall ‘embedded with broken pieces
of white statuary’ that, it was claimed, had been sourced from Pompeii,
Glen Cove certainly provided the Soviets with a place to relax in style.23
The State Department had initially insisted that Khrushchev would have
to remain confined to Manhattan for the duration of his stay in New York
City but, after sustained protests from the Soviet Union and a personal
intervention from the UN Secretary-General himself, it had relented.24
Having kicked up such a fuss, Khrushchev was now determined to take
advantage of his new freedom.
Khrushchev’s motorcade – which reportedly consisted of forty-three
cars and a fifty-man motorcycle escort – made its way through Queens to
Nassau County, the joy of the ‘sparkling sunshine’ offset only by the
occasional small group who gathered at street corners to jeer or shout out
‘Go back to Siberia!’ or ‘Murderer!’ Glen Cove’s mayor, Joseph A.
Suozzi, annoyed that the Soviets cited diplomatic exemption to avoid
paying local property taxes, had urged residents to ignore their high-
profile guest. But as many as seventy-five children, many of them
teenagers, though some as young as six, had gathered on Dosoris Lane,
about a hundred yards from the entrance to the estate. ‘They stood along
a rustic fence where late fall flowers were growing, and strewed their
bicycles about the grass’, eagerly awaiting the arrival of the Soviet leader
– for whom they had ‘pencilled small placards with derisive greetings
and made up rhymes to shout’. Maria Rybka, nine-year-old daughter of a
Ukrainian immigrant, carried a sign – in Russian – that declared, simply,
‘Murder.’ As a police helicopter, complete with sharpshooter, hovered
overhead, the motorcade swept through the imposing iron gates and into
the sanctuary of the sprawling thirty-four-acre compound.25
Late in the afternoon, Gamal Abdel Nasser arrived at Glen Cove for
talks. Although he had not originally planned to attend the General
Assembly, the lure of the international spotlight had proved too strong.
Like other neutralist leaders, Nasser believed that he could play a
moderating role in the Cold War, thereby helping to ease global tensions,
and he also saw an invaluable opportunity to extend his influence – and
that of the UAR – among the new African nations. Having long since
given up hopes of receiving an official invitation from the White House,
Nasser was also keen to pay a first visit to the United States (the furthest
west that he had previously travelled was Yugoslavia). During an
audience with the American ambassador, G. Frederick Reinhardt, at the
Barrage Rest House, a government residence on the outskirts of Cairo, on
21 September, Nasser had explained that he was keen to develop a
greater understanding of, and sympathy for, the ‘Arab point of view’
among the American public.26 His meeting with Khrushchev – on his
first full day in New York – was part of a breathless schedule that also
saw the Arab leader confer with the prime minister of Lebanon, Saeb
Salam, Tito of Yugoslavia and Nkrumah of Ghana.27
Ninety minutes later, after posing for photographs and waving his
guest off, Khrushchev stood on the driveway where, for more than an
hour, he chatted amiably with journalists.28 On the discussions with
Nasser, he explained that they had ‘mainly talked of disarmament and the
effort for a stronger peace’. The two men were, he said, ‘old
acquaintances and we maintain good relations’ and, yes, the meeting had
been fruitful (although, according to Nasser’s confidant, Mohamed
Heikal, nothing of any great seriousness had been discussed because, on
arrival, Khrushchev had immediately warned his guest that ‘this place is
bugged and we have discovered the bugging.’)29 When asked why he had
travelled to Glen Cove, Khrushchev responded that ‘there are no hares in
Manhattan, whereas they can be found here. I like them a lot.’ In
response to an invitation to reflect on ‘your stay here, in the heart of
capitalism, so to speak’, the First Secretary explained that ‘this is the
heart of capitalism and I have the heart of a Communist. Evidently, we
can coexist on one planet.’ Then, to laughter, he continued, ‘in the
capitalist world it often happens that an old but rich widow marries a
young man. And they live together, though he evidently doesn’t thirst for
the old woman’s love. Still he lives with her.’ ‘In the same way’,
Khrushchev explained, ‘capitalist and socialist states must coexist even
though there is no love lost between them.’ When asked why he was not
holding his press conference from the balcony, as he had been doing
while staying at the Soviet mission, Khrushchev prompted further mirth
when he shot back, ‘There is no need for that here. You felt offended that
then we were talking “on different levels”. Now I can talk with you on
the same level, on the ground.’ Then, after making a lengthy defence of
his plans to reform the United Nations (which were not, he stressed,
motivated by any personal animosity towards the Secretary General
himself), Khrushchev called a halt to proceedings. Noting that it was
getting dark and increasingly difficult to make notes, he assured the
‘gentlemen of the press’ that he was merely concerned about saving their
eyesight.30
While Khrushchev was retiring for the evening, Nasser was still in
talks with Nkrumah at the Ghanaian mission.31 It is not known whether
the subject of Fidel Castro had come up in conversation – according to a
joint statement the two men had discussed ‘matters of mutual concern,
including those of concern to Africa’. But the next morning, Nasser
would emulate Khrushchev by making his own pilgrimage to Harlem.

Notes
1. Text of article, ‘The U.S. Imperialists Reveal Their True Colors as Robbers More
Nakedly’, from Rodong Sinmun, 23 September 1960, Foreign Broadcast Information
Service, Daily Report, Foreign Radio Broadcasts, No. 186 (23 September 1960) JJJ1,
JJJ3.
2. ‘Insults to Castro Bare U.S. Hysteria’, Peking, 22 September 1960, Foreign Broadcast
Information Service, Daily Report, Foreign Radio Broadcasts, No. 185 (22 September
1960), AAA6–AAA8.
3. The cabinet discussion was reported in ‘Diplomacy: Flight to Harlem’, Time, 3 October
1960 and ‘Cuba Backs Khrushchev’s Plans; Recognizes China, North Korea’, NYT, 25
September 1960, 36. See also Szulc, Fidel, 583.
4. ‘Cuba Woos Red China’, NYT, 4 September 1960, 126.
5. Daniel M. Braddock to State Department, 17 June 1960, 637.60/1-760, Confidential
State Department Files, Decimal 637, reel 1; Tad Szulc, ‘Havana Reported Set to
Recognize Regime in Peiping’, NYT, 6 June 1960, 1, 3; ‘Cuban Ends Visit to Peiping’,
NYT, 7 June 1960, 46; Brown, Cuba’s Revolutionary World, 78.
6. Charles P. Cabell (deputy director CIA) to Gordon Gray, n.d. and ‘Observations of Latin
American CP Delegations to the 21st CPSU Congress and their Experiences with CP
China in Peiping’, 4, 16–18, 21, WHO – Office of Special Assistant NSA, NSC Series,
Briefing Notes Subseries, Box 12, DDE Library; Communist Propaganda Activities in
Latin America, 1960’ (7 June 1961), iv–v, Records of the USIA, Part 3, Series A, Reel 4,
RIAS; ‘Responsibility of Cuban Government for Increased International Tensions in the
Hemisphere’, 54; Brown, Cuba’s Revolutionary World, 77. See also Andrés Suárez,
Cuba: Castroism and Communism, 1959–1966 (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1967),
102–6.
7. Charles P. Cabell (deputy director CIA) to Gordon Gray, n.d. and ‘Observations of Latin
American CP Delegations to the 21st CPSU Congress and their Experiences with CP
China in Peiping’, 4, 21, WHO – Office of Special Assistant NSA, NSC Series, Briefing
Notes Subseries, Box 12, DDE Library. On Mao’s guerrilla tactics see Mao Tse-tung, On
Guerrilla Warfare (Urbana-Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2000).
 8. ‘Responsibility of Cuban Government for Increased International Tensions in the
Hemisphere’, 47.
9. Brown, Cuba’s Revolutionary World, 81.
10. ‘Synopsis of State and Intelligence material reported to the President’, 27 July 1960, 4,
WHO Office of Staff Secretary, Subject Series, Alphabetical Subseries, ‘Intelligence
Briefing Notes, vol. II (4), box 14, DDE Library.
11. Fidel Castro speech before the National Congress of Cuban Women (August 1960), in
Dillon to San José, 611.37/8-2460, Confidential State Department Files, Decimal 637,
reel 4.
12. Benjamin R. Young, Guerilla Internationalism: North Korea’s Relations with the Third
World, 1957–1989, A Dissertation submitted to The Faculty of The Columbian College of
Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University (2018), 2–3.
13. Young, Guerilla Internationalism, 10.
14. Young, Guerilla Internationalism, 26, 44.
15. Young, Guerilla Internationalism, 43.
16. Young, Guerilla Internationalism, 43–4.
17. Young, Guerilla Internationalism, 45–8; ‘From a 2 June 1967 Memo of the Soviet
Embassy in the DPRK (1st Secretary V. NemChinov) About Some New Factors in
Korean–Cuban Relations’, AVPRF f. 0102, op. 23, p. 112, d. 24, pp. 53–7. Obtained by
Sergey Radchenko and translated by Gary Goldberg, available at
https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/116706.
18. Young, Guerilla Internationalism, 53–4.
19. Young, Guerilla Internationalism, 43.
20. Max Frankel, ‘Castro Remains Out of Spotlight’, NYT, 25 September 1960, 36; Henry
Machirella, ‘Castro’s Hotel Thins Out the Ladies’ Auxiliary’, New York Daily News, 25
September 1960, 3.
21. Harrison E. Salisbury, ‘Premier Is Firm’, NYT, 25 September 1960, 1, 37; Edward
Kirkman, ‘K Takes Another Crack at Dag and a Backhand Slap at Nasser’, New York
Daily News, 25 September 1960, 26; ‘Gatsby’s Gold Coast’ at
https://www.discoverlongisland.com/things-to-do/famous-long-island/gatsbys-gold-
coast/.
22. ‘Glen Cove and the Russians’ at http://northshorehistorical-
museum.org/glen%20cove%20history/Russians.htm;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killenworth; ‘Russians Buying Glen Cove Estate as a
Recreation Center for Aides’, NYT, 5 April 1946, 26.
23. PRI’s The World, ‘This Is the Long Island House the US Is Letting the Russians Keep’,
30 December 2016 at https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-12-30/long-island-house-us-
letting-russians-keep.
24. Telegram from the Department of State to the Mission at the United Nations, 18
September 1960, FRUS, 1958–1960, United Nations and General International Matters,
Volume II, document 173.
25. Salisbury, ‘Premier Is Firm’, NYT, 25 September 1960, 1, 37; Kirkman, ‘K Takes
Another Crack at Dag and a Backhand Slap at Nasser’, New York Daily News, 25
September 1960, 26; ‘Glen Cove and the Russians’ at
http://northshorehistoricalmuseum.org/glen%20cove%20history/Russians.htm.
26. Cairo to Secretary of State, 22 September 1960, telegram #681, 320/9-2260, College
Park; ‘Memorandum for the President, 25 September 1960, Subject: Your appointment in
 New York on September 26 at 4:00 p.m. with President Nasser of the United Arab
Republic’, 1, DDE Diaries, Reel 27, Box 53, Staff Notes (2) September 1960, RIAS.
27. Robert Stephens, ‘Conciliation Efforts in New York’, Observer, 25 September 1960;
Foster Hailey, ‘Nasser Kept Busy in Round of Talks’, NYT, 25 September 1960, 36.
28. Salisbury, ‘Premier Is Firm’, NYT, 25 September 1960, 1.
29. ‘News Conference at Glen Cove’, 24 September 1960, in Khrushchev in New York, 97–8;
Mohamed Heikal, The Cairo Documents: The Inside History of Nasser and His
Relationship with World Leaders, Rebels, and Statesmen (New York: Doubleday &
Company, 1973), 151.
30. ‘News Conference at Glen Cove’, 24 September 1960, in Khrushchev in New York, 97–
103.
31. Hailey, ‘Nasser Kept Busy in Round of Talks’, NYT, 25 September 1960, 36.

* In the aftermath of Hurricane Flora, which wreaked havoc on Cuba in the autumn of
1963, for instance, the North Korean government sent thousands of tons of rice, as well as
five tractors, construction equipment and medicine. Later in the decade, some 700
volunteer fighters, together with weapons and equipment, arrived in Havana, as part of
North Korea’s commitment to defend Cuba against possible armed aggression.
 CAPTION:

Fidel and Nasser smile for the crowds – and the cameras – outside the Hotel
Theresa.
Photograph by Stan Wayman/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images
 9

SUNDAY 25 SEPTEMBER

Like Egypt, Cuba Will Triumph

REVOLUCIÓN

At 10.45 a.m. on Sunday 25 September, Gamal Abdel Nasser, his

entourage of police detectives, FBI agents, government aides and
personal security guards ‘flanking him like barnacles on a battleship’,
arrived outside the Hotel Theresa. The forty-two-year-old president of
what was now the United Arab Republic* – known to his colleagues as
al-ra’īs, or ‘the boss’ – radiated energy: as one historian has put it, in
somewhat exotic terms, ‘tall and muscular, he moved like a panther. His
olive-skinned countenance, white teeth gleaming between aquiline nose
and prognathous jaw, was spellbindingly expressive.’1 After flashing his
famous smile for the cameras and waving to the 3,000-strong crowd that
had swarmed around the hotel to greet him, the Egyptian leader was
hustled into the Theresa. The Arab world’s most famous revolutionary
was about to meet the enfant terrible of Latin America for the very first
time.2

Four years earlier, Nasser – the first native Egyptian to rule the country
for more than two and a half millennia – had stunned the world, as well
as members of his own government, by nationalizing the Suez Canal. His
audacious move proved wildly popular across the Middle East and North
Africa but caused outrage in Britain, the former colonial master, and
France – each of which owned a fifty per cent stake in the company that
ran the waterway. Prime ministers Anthony Eden and Guy Mollet quickly
determined that this act of ‘aggression’ could not be allowed to stand.
Eden, who viewed Nasser as a sort of Arab Mussolini, was determined
not only to force Nasser to ‘disgorge his spoils’ and to recover the canal,
on which Western Europe was dependent for two-thirds of its oil
supplies, but to sweep aside the Egyptian regime itself. On 5 November,
Britain and France launched a coordinated military operation against
Egypt under the pretext of protecting the Suez Canal from an Israeli
invasion that had begun a week earlier, and which had been secretly
encouraged by, and coordinated with, London and Paris. For a time, it
looked as if Nasser was finished: after taking to the roof of his suburban
villa to watch Royal Air Force bombers pound Cairo, he briefly
considered surrendering in a ‘final sacrifice’ for his country. But he
quickly recovered his poise, rallying the Egyptian people with a pledge to
‘defend our country, our history and our future’. ‘We will fight’, he had
declared, ‘to the last drop of blood.’
The Anglo-French attack prompted widespread outrage across the
Middle East and Africa and brought heavy condemnation from the
communist world. Moscow and Beijing denounced the aggression of the
Western colonialists and pledged solidarity with the Egyptian people, and
Khrushchev even threatened to send in the Red Army. Tellingly, there
was strong criticism from close allies, too, including Canada, Australia
and the United States. President Eisenhower, furious that he had been
‘double-crossed’ by the British (who had kept him entirely in the dark
about their plans), insisted on a ceasefire, even threatening London with
oil sanctions if they persisted. On 7 November, with the so-called special
relationship between the United Kingdom and the United States under
unprecedented strain, Eden ordered that the allied advance be halted. Two
months after this humiliating climbdown, and with his health broken,
Eden resigned the premiership.3
By successfully facing down the combined military might of Britain
and France, Nasser – the son of a postal clerk from Alexandria – had
emerged as a genuine hero of the Arab world and a global icon of
anticolonial resistance.4 In addition to his considerable personal
magnetism, Nasser’s main strengths – according to a biographical sketch
drawn up by the US State Department – were ‘self-confidence,
willingness to take great risks, tactical skill, drive, a flare [sic] for
intrigue, and a strong will’. Since coming to power, he had also proven
remarkably consistent in promoting ‘the independence of Egypt and the
Arab states, increased Arab military strength, and assertion of Egyptian
leadership in three concentric zones – the Arab world, Africa, and the
Moslem world’.5 Given his unparalleled status, it was hardly surprising
that the new Cuban government had turned to Nasser in their quest for
international legitimacy, ideological support and material assistance.
Even before their dramatic seizure of power in January 1959, the
young Cuban rebels had admired the Egyptian leader for his agrarian
reforms (which saw fifteen per cent of the country’s viable agricultural
land redistributed to the peasantry, or fellahin) and for his dramatic
standoff with the former colonial powers over Suez.6 Eager to win new
friends (a task made more urgent by Cuba’s growing isolation in the
Western hemisphere), in June 1959 Fidel sent Che Guevara on a major
international tour that, over the course of three months, took in India,
Pakistan, Ceylon, Japan, Indonesia and Yugoslavia. His first stop was
Egypt.7
Che, accompanied by his personal bodyguard and two government
officials, arrived in Cairo on 12 June. Nasser, who had initially dismissed
the Cuban rebels as ‘a bunch of Errol Flynns, theatrical brigands but not
true revolutionaries’, nevertheless rolled out the red carpet. Che was
given a tour of the pyramids and spent a night at the stunning Montaza
Palace, in Alexandria. He also visited the Suez Canal, Port Said (a site of
fierce fighting during the 1956 war) and Aswan, where construction of
the High Dam had begun in January, thanks to Soviet technical and
financial support.8 The Cuban revolutionary also met with Nasser for
face-to-face talks, during which – extraordinarily – he challenged the
president directly. When Nasser explained that relatively few Egyptians
had been compelled to leave the country as a result of his reforms, Che
retorted, ‘that means that nothing much happened in your revolution.’ ‘I
measure the depth of the social transformation’, he explained, ‘by the
number of people who are affected by it and feel that they have no place
in the new society.’9 Che also spoke ‘in bitter terms’ about the United
States, though Nasser reportedly cautioned the young firebrand ‘that if
one dealt with the imperialists, one would suffer a five per cent loss in
one’s resources. However, if one dealt with the Communists, one would
lose one hundred per cent of his assets.’10
Despite their differences, the trip was a success: as one historian has
explained, Nasser ‘recognized Cuba as the only anticolonial, anti-
imperialist nation in Latin America’ – a status that was confirmed when
the Egyptian government invited Cuba to attend the next meeting of the
Afro-Asian Congress. (Che was ‘thrilled’, writing that Cuba was now
officially ‘part of an historical convergence of all the oppressed peoples
in the world at this hour of their liberation’.) During a public show of
support in Gaza (the strip was occupied by Egypt between 1959 and
1967), Palestinians declared that, just as Nasser had become a symbol for
the Arab people, so Fidel had become a symbol of Latin American
liberation. Cuba and Egypt also began discussions on future trade
relations (Cairo was particularly keen to sell cotton to the Cubans).11
The exchange of high-level dignitaries continued apace. In March
1960, one of Nasser’s key foreign policy lieutenants, Hussein Zulficar
Sabri, was in Havana, in another sign of the growing warmth between the
two governments. Sabri made clear Cairo’s support for the Cuban
Revolution. ‘We are’, he stated, ‘ready to help the people of Cuba by
giving them assistance against any possible foreign aggression.’12
In August, the Cuban minister of defence, Raúl Castro, was in
Alexandria, where he attended the official celebrations marking the
eighth anniversary of the expulsion of King Farouk. Speaking to a rally at
the city’s municipal stadium, he told the crowds that his country was
facing the same challenge that Egypt had – opposition from
‘monopolists’. What was needed, he said, was a united front to ‘fight
against imperialism in Asia, Africa, and Latin America’. Nasser in turn
urged the Cubans to resist the ‘intimidation and pressure’ and issued a
powerful rhetorical statement of support, declaring that ‘we, the people
of the United Arab Republic, fully support the cause of liberty
throughout the world; we support the cause of liberty in Cuba; we
support the fight put up by Fidel Castro.’13
Now, finally, Nasser and Fidel were meeting face to face.
Upstairs at the Theresa, the two men conferred for an hour and a half
– initially alone apart from Regino Boti, Cuba’s minister of the economy,
who served as interpreter, and then accompanied by aides. The discussion
was wide-ranging, with Nasser making frequent references to the
similarities between Egypt and Cuba in terms of their history of colonial
exploitation, their recent revolutions and the challenge that they faced in
seeking to modernize what were, essentially, one-crop economies. The
two leaders chewed over the pros and cons of trading raw materials
(namely cotton and sugar) to the communist bloc in exchange for long-
term credits, technical assistance and weapons. Fidel listened eagerly as
Nasser recounted the Egyptian experience during the Suez Crisis. The
UAR leader also cautioned Fidel against being drawn into a military
conflict with the United States over the naval base at Guantánamo Bay,
and emphasized the importance of ‘the idea of Arab unity’ to the
Egyptian revolution, prompting a discussion about the situation in Latin
America. While Fidel said that there were some shared bases, namely
religion, language and an ‘oppression of the peasants’ that was common
to all Latin-American countries, thus far ‘there had been no unifying
factor as strong as the idea of Arab unity’. As for the leadership of the so-
called Third World nations, Nasser invited Cuba to join the neutralist
camp and help to ‘construct a diplomatic alliance to stand between East
and West’ (Fidel was polite but non-committal at this stage, though in
1961 Cuba would be a founder member of the Non-Aligned Movement,
which sought to organize the neutralist countries on a more formal basis).
Asked whether he planned to attend Fidel’s speech at the UN the
following day, Nasser expressed his regrets. Much as he would have
liked to be there, the Egyptian leader explained, his meeting with
President Eisenhower ‘had been fixed for precisely the time that Castro
would be talking’; a revelation that prompted Fidel to mutter that the
Americans were deliberately trying to hinder the development of good
relations between their two countries (in truth, the timing was probably
just a coincidence).14
At 12.30 p.m. the two men emerged from the Theresa, ‘a study in
contrasts’. In his light blue suit, starched shirt and dark blue tie, Nasser
had the appearance of ‘a prosperous Cairo salesman’, while Castro,
wearing his ‘open-throat fatigues’, stood uncharacteristically shyly
alongside him. As the assembled crowds chanted ‘Viva Nasser!’ and
‘Viva Castro!’ and waved blown-up pictures of the Arab hero, the two
leaders ‘thrust through the security men’ and posed for the cameras,
smiling and shaking hands.15 Speaking to reporters, Fidel declared that
Nasser’s visit had been a ‘source of great inspiration for our delegation,
which finds itself practically confined and surrounded by the hostility of
an imperialist power like the United States’. ‘They have had to make
many sacrifices’, Fidel continued, ‘but in the end they triumphed, and
we, like the Arabs, will also win. We are fighting against a ferocious
imperialism, just as Nasser faced.’ The two men also affirmed their
desire to trade visits to Havana and Cairo, although no dates had yet been
fixed.16
In a statement to Egyptian radio, which was also published in the
Cairo-controlled daily Al Gomhuria (The Republic) on 28 September,
Fidel was effusive. He had, he said, been ‘pleased to have the opportunity
to meet with the Arab leader whose struggle embodies a beautiful
meaning – the liquidation of imperialism. The personality of the great
Arab leader is loved not only in the Arab countries but is also a great
hope for all the peoples of the world who seek freedom, dignity, and
independence.’ During their historic encounter at the Theresa, Fidel
explained, he had felt Nasser’s ‘great personality, which was shaped by
his wonderful accomplishments. The great effect of this meeting on me
intensifies my conviction that the growing peoples of the world will
achieve all their victories and aspirations.’ And he looked forward to
Nasser’s visit to Cuba, promising that ‘The Arab people will see that
their leader has had a great place and a greater love in every heart.’17
For his part, Nasser was keen to put his support for the Cubans on
record: ‘the government and the people of the United Arab Republic’, he
declared, ‘express their solidarity with the Cuban revolution.’18
Despite the warm words and public expressions of support, the New
York Times journalist Max Frankel noted that Nasser and Castro had
‘avoided the demonstrative hugging and backslapping that has been a
feature of Castro–Khrushchev encounters’.19 It was a sharp observation.
Nasser had, in fact, found their encounter rather uncomfortable: he was
repulsed by the ‘terrible smells’ and general squalor of the Cubans’
accommodation. Even worse, he had taken great offence when, upon
presenting Fidel with a beautiful silver tea service, the latter had
expressed his disappointment at not having been given a crocodile. An
astonished Nasser explained that there were precisely four crocodiles in
Egypt, all of them to be found in the zoo; for days after, the Egyptian
leader could be heard muttering, ‘A crocodile … a crocodile.’
Meanwhile, reports soon reached both British and American diplomats
that, in private, some members of the UAR delegation were making
disparaging comments about ‘Castro’s show in Harlem’.20 In fact the
poor personal chemistry was an early sign of the somewhat discordant
relationship that would develop between the two leaders, who disagreed
from the outset about how best to construct a transnational movement of
the left. When Cuba sent guerrillas to Zaire – formerly the Republic of
the Congo – in 1965 in an attempt to overthrow the US-backed
government in Léopoldville, for instance, Nasser dismissed the whole
enterprise as futile.21
After some prodding by his security guards, Nasser gave a final wave
to the crowds before climbing into his sleek, black Cadillac for the
journey back to his Sands Point estate.22 His visit to Harlem had been a
public relations triumph, and the huge crowds that had gathered were
testament to his ‘star status’, particularly among black nationalists who
admired his unwavering opposition to colonialism. But, while local taxi
driver Paul Smith conceded that ‘Nasser is a great man. There’s no doubt
about that’, he was getting ‘tired of the traffic jams these leaders are
making’. ‘Streets are blocked off’, he explained, which ‘slow up my
business’.23

As the crowds began to thin out and the traffic around the Theresa got
back to normal, Castro returned to his suite. A group, largely good-
natured, remained on the streets, banging bongo drums and chanting,
‘Yellow press, yellow press, cha, cha, cha.’ The good mood was
interrupted briefly when, as the Daily News put it, ‘pro- and anti-Castro
factions clashed in a battle royal – fists and baseball bats’ outside the
hotel (fifteen people were arrested, and several protesters and two police
officers suffered minor injuries). ‘Except for occasional, flitting
appearances of a beard in a ninth-floor window’ – which drew loud,
enthusiastic cheers from the hundreds of ‘flag-waving supporters’ on
125th Street – the Cuban premier remained largely out of sight. One
rumour – which, if true, was highly ironic – had it that Khrushchev had
advised the Cuban leader to ‘stop his clowning so that he would be taken
more seriously when he addresses the UN’.24
Fidel’s address before the General Assembly was now less than
twenty-four hours away.

Notes
 1. Piers Brendon, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781–1997 (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 484–6.
2. ‘Nasser Caravan Visits Harlem Oasis’, New York Citizen-Call, 1 October 1960, 3; Sara
Slack, ‘Nasser, Nehru, Visit Harlem’, New York Amsterdam News, 1 October 1960, 1.
3. Hall, 1956, 209–21; 317–35; 392 (for collusion see 257–69).
4. On the wider role of Nasser, and Egypt, in the anticolonial struggle see, for example,
Reem Abou-El-Fadl, ‘Building Egypt’s Afro-Asian Hub: Infrastructures of Solidarity and
the 1957 Cairo Conference’, Journal of World History, vol. 30, no. 1–2 (June 2019), 157–
92, esp. 164–5, 170–3.
5. ‘Biographic Sketch’, DDE Diaries, Reel 27, Box 53, Staff Notes (2) September 1960,
RIAS.
6. Frederico Vélez, Latin American Revolutionaries and the Arab World: From the Suez
Canal to the Arab Spring (Farnham: Ashgate, 2016), 23; Ray Bush, ‘Coalitions for
Dispossession and Networks of Resistance? Land, Politics and Agrarian Reform in
Egypt’, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, vol. 38, no. 3 (2011), 395.
7. Jorge Castañeda, Compañero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara (London:
Bloomsbury, 1997), 159, 160–5.
8. Heikal, The Cairo Documents, 343; Castañeda, Compañero, 161.
9. Heikal, The Cairo Documents, 344; Vélez, Latin American Revolutionaries and the Arab
World, 29–30.
10. ‘Memorandum of Discussion at the 411th Meeting of the National Security Council,
Washington, June 25, 1959’, FRUS, 1958–1960, Volume VI, Cuba, 542 (document 325).
11. Vélez, Latin American Revolutionaries and the Arab World, 31–2; ‘Memorandum from
the Deputy Director of Intelligence and Research (Arneson) to the Secretary of State’, 19
August 1959, Subject: ‘“Che” Guevara’s Mission to Afro-Asian Countries’, FRUS, 1958–
1960, Volume VI, Cuba, 589–90 (document 355); ‘Memorandum of Discussion at the
429th Meeting of the National Security Council, Washington, December 16, 1959’,
FRUS, 1958–1960, Volume VI, Cuba, 703 (document 410).
12. ‘The UAR Backs Cuba’, Boletin (Prensa), Public Relations Department, Ministry of
Foreign Relations, 20 March 1960, 1, WHCF – General File, Box 805, Cuba (5), DDE.
13. Vélez, Latin American Revolutionaries and the Arab World, 37.
14. Max Frankel, ‘Nasser Asks Cuba to Join Neutrals’, NYT, 26 September 1960, 1, 16;
Heikal, The Cairo Documents, 346–7; Vélez, Latin American Revolutionaries and the
Arab World, 39.
15. Sara Slack, ‘Nasser, Nehru, Visit Harlem’, New York Amsterdam News, 1 October 1960,
1; Frankel, ‘Nasser Asks Cuba to Join Neutrals’, NYT, 26 September 1960, 16; ‘Nasser
Caravan Visits Harlem Oasis’, New York Citizen-Call, 1 October 1960, 28.
16. ‘Fidel and Nasser’ (‘Fidel y Nasser’), Bohemia, 2 October 1960, 54.
17. ‘Castro Elated at Chance to Meet Nasir’, Cairo, Egyptian Home Service, 27 September
1960, Foreign Broadcast Information Service, Daily Report, Foreign Radio Broadcasts,
No. 189 (28 September 1960), B19–20.
18. ‘Fidel and Nasser’ (‘Fidel y Nasser’), Bohemia, 2 October 1960, 54.
19. Frankel, ‘Nasser Asks Cuba to Join Neutrals’, NYT, 26 September 1960, 16.
20. Geyer, Guerrilla Prince, 264; Heikal, The Cairo Documents, 346–7; The Secretary’s
Staff Meeting, 26 September 1960, Minutes & Notes of the Secretary’s Staff Meetings,
1952–1961, Box 10, College Park; ‘UAR/United Nations – Comments of UAR Officials
in NY on Proceedings in UNGA’, 24 September 1960, 2 in White House Office, Office of
 the Staff Secretary: Records, 1952–61, International Series, Box 16, ‘United Nations
General Assembly – September 1960 (2)’, DDE.
21. See, for example, Remi Benoit Piet, ‘What Was Behind Fidel Castro’s Strong Ties with
the Middle East’, Al Arabiya English, 27 November 2016, at
http://english.alarabiya.net/en/perspective/features/2016/11/27/What-was-behind-Fidel-
Castro-s-strong-ties-with-the-Middle-East-.html; Heikal, The Cairo Documents, 349,
352–3.
22. Slack, ‘Nasser, Nehru, Visit Harlem’, New York Amsterdam News, 1 October 1960.
23. Slack, ‘Nasser, Nehru, Visit Harlem’, New York Amsterdam News, 1 October 1960.
24. Frankel, ‘Nasser Asks Cuba to Join Neutrals’, NYT, 26 September 1960, 16; ‘The Talk of
the Town’, The New Yorker, 8 October 1960, 36; Henry Machirella and Henry Lee, ‘Cops
Seize 15 in Rioting at Castro Hotel’, New York Daily News, 26 September 1960, 2, 26.

* The United Arab Republic was formed out of the merger of Egypt and Syria in 1958.
Although Syria seceded from the union in 1961, Egypt continued to be known as the
UAR until 1971.
 CAPTION:

According to one wag, Fidel’s four-and-a-half-hour speech to the UN

General Assembly covered everything except the dispute between Britain
and Iceland over the sardine harvest.
Photograph by Bettman via Getty Images
 10

MONDAY 26 SEPTEMBER

Today, Fidel, 2 p.m.

REVOLUCIÓN

Although it has been said that I speak at great length’, Fidel declared,
‘you may rest assured that we will endeavor to be brief.’ It was not to be.
Even some of his closest supporters had to concede that the Maximum
Leader had a tendency to ‘go on for hours and hours’. ‘Even in Cuba’,
noted Carlos Franqui, ‘people fell asleep during Fidel’s harangues. And
this despite their affection for Fidel and their interest in what he had to
say.’1
Asked the day before about rumours that the Cuban leader was
planning to speak for four hours, Khrushchev had responded, animatedly,
that even if Fidel ended up talking for six hours, ‘I shall still be listening
to him with pleasure’.2 In the event, Fidel’s four-and-a-half-hour speech
(still a UN record) would sorely test the stamina of his new, sixty-six-
year-old fan. Earlier that morning, the Soviet leader had attended the
General Assembly, where he heard the Canadian prime minister, John
Diefenbaker, mount a robust defence of the West. In contrast to the
‘restrained, wise and conciliatory’ address that had been delivered by
Eisenhower, Khrushchev had, he claimed, offered little more than ‘a
gigantic propaganda drama of destructive misrepresentation’. The
Canadian leader also offered a categorical rejection of ‘the unjust and
intemperate attacks’ that had been made on the ‘office and person’ of the
Secretary General. As for Khrushchev’s call for the final elimination of
colonialism, Diefenbaker contrasted the thirty or more nations who had
achieved independence from Britain and France since the end of the
Second World War with the ‘record of Soviet domination over peoples
and territories, sometimes gained in the name of liberation, but always
accompanied by the loss of personal and political freedom’. How, he
wondered, would member states be able to reconcile the ‘tragedy’ of
Hungary (whose revolution Moscow had crushed) with Khrushchev’s
support for the right of nations ‘to establish systems of their own free will
and choosing’?3
Then, much more agreeably, Khrushchev had headed to the Biltmore
Hotel’s palatial ballroom, for a luncheon hosted in his honour by Cyrus
S. Eaton and his wife, Anne. Three years earlier, the philanthropist
couple had hosted the first Pugwash Conference on Science and World
Affairs, which sought to encourage international dialogue between
scientists, intellectuals and public officials, with the eventual aim of
creating a world free from nuclear weapons.4 In his welcoming remarks,
Eaton expressed his hopes that ‘this luncheon [will] not only lead to
strengthened friendships, but also serve as a forum for discussion of ways
and means to increase business between the Soviet Union and North
America, and to secure cooperation to the mutual advantage of all three
nations in the markets of the world’. Expressing his faith in the Soviet
leader’s ‘complete sincerity in desiring peace’, he looked forward to the
time when ‘the United States, Canada and the Soviet Union will declare
for collaboration on a program dictated by common sense’.5 For his part,
Khrushchev told the audience of some two hundred bankers,
industrialists and public officials, drawn from both the United States and
Canada, that ‘the representatives of the capitalist and the socialist states
have to learn to understand one another in order to settle questions
between states by peaceful means’ and avoid the prospect of another
world war. The Soviet government would, he reiterated, spare no effort in
seeking to achieve disarmament. ‘After all,’ he noted, ‘the people both in
the socialist and in the capitalist countries want to live in friendship.’6
After lunching on consommé, filet de boeuf and tartes aux fraises,
served on elegant gold-crested china and washed down with finest claret
and champagne, Khrushchev was back in the General Assembly to see
Fidel take centre stage.7

Fidel’s black Chevrolet, escorted by motorcycle outriders, had pulled up

outside the General Assembly building at precisely 3.40 p.m. The Cuban
leader, accompanied by Major Juan Almeida, Ramiro Valdés and Antonio
Núñez Jiménez, was met by his foreign minister, Raúl Roa, and escorted
inside. After taking the escalator to the first floor, he entered the chamber
and took his seat at the head of the Cuban delegation, near the front of
the hall. Fidel ‘listened attentively’ to the Albanian prime minister,
Mehmet Shehu, as he wrapped up his own speech, although the Cuban
leader was observed nervously touching his shirt pocket from time to
time.8
Fidel, wearing neatly pressed battle fatigues, took to the floor at 3.50
p.m.9 Striding purposefully to the podium, he carried a brown leather
briefcase, containing a number of documents and aidesmémoire, which
he opened and placed on the lectern. Then, after taking two sips of water,
he was off.10 ‘At first’, the New York Times reported, ‘he spoke slowly,
his hands behind his back … But later, at key junctures, he waved papers
and gesticulated with a powerful hand.’ Although he had promised to
speak slowly in order to assist the interpreters, the writer and Fair Play
for Cuba Committee activist Waldo Frank – who in 1959 had been hired
by the Cubans to write a history of their revolution – observed how, after
just a few minutes, Fidel’s ‘words were so flowing and so flooding that
the interpreters could attempt no more than minute digests, snatched as
from a torrent’.11
The four and a half hours that Fidel spent at the rostrum were, Frank
concluded, a study in contrasts. Almost everything about the UN
Assembly Hall was, he explained, designed to instill a sense of coolness:
the walls – gold, black-ribbed – are immense half-opened fans, faintly a-sway in the airs
of the orations. The two rostrums, one above the other … suggest marble, bluish and
aquamarine … the lounge and the bar are cool. The six women telephone operators near
the bar cool the delegates with cool voices.

But the coolness and calm of the General Assembly were now thrown
into sharp relief by the presence of Cuba’s fiery and unorthodox young
leader. Even Fidel’s beard – bushy, and black ‘suffused with overtones of
red wherever sun or the hall’s light struck it’ – served to ‘disturb the
decorous delegates, many of whom wear dapper goatees and Van Dykes’.
There was, Frank declared, ‘a radical difference of heat between the
passionate Cuban and the Assembly. And although they listened, more
patient than rapt … the difference of temperature excluded comfort on
both sides: the delegates’ and Castro’s.’12
 The speech to the UN – ostensibly the reason for his trip to New York
in the first place – offered Fidel an incomparable platform from which to
assert his legitimacy as a revolutionary leader, to claim a leadership role
in the wider struggle against imperialism and to make a pitch for support
from the newly admitted nations of Africa. He was also able to address
his fellow world leaders (although neither Christian Herter nor his British
counterpart, Lord Home, was in the Assembly Hall while Fidel spoke) as
well as those, especially across Africa, Asia and Latin America, who
were listening via television or radio or following the coverage in the
newspapers.13
Fidel began by complaining about the ‘degrading and humiliating
treatment’, including ‘efforts at extortion’, that he had endured at the
Shelburne Hotel, and expressing his gratitude to the Theresa – a ‘humble
hotel in Harlem’ – for its hospitality. Then, after a lengthy account of
US–Cuban relations over the previous six decades (during which Cuba
had been ‘an appendage … a virtual colony of the United States’), he
celebrated the triumph of his revolution: ‘we are proud that we can now
say’, he declared, that ‘our people govern themselves!’ Justifying his
government’s programme of economic nationalization and land reform,
Fidel lashed out at the hysterical reaction of the United States, which had,
he claimed (with some justification), engaged in all sorts of punitive
actions – including sabotage against sugar refineries, black propaganda
and economic coercion – in an attempt to ‘punish the revolutionary
government’ in Havana.14
Fidel was keen to highlight the success of his new government before
the world. Despite the hostility of the United States, the revolution had
already achieved much: it had created 10,000 new schools and built
25,000 houses, agricultural production was rising, teams of doctors had
been sent into the countryside to battle disease and improve sanitary
conditions, corruption was being rooted out and industrial production
was up, he claimed, by thirty-five per cent. What ‘was yesterday a land
without hope, a land of misery, a land of illiteracy’, Fidel declared, ‘is
gradually becoming one of the most enlightened, advanced and
developed nations of this continent’. Turning to his fellow Latin
American leaders, Fidel stated baldly that they should ‘welcome a
revolution like the Cuban revolution, which has forced the monopolies to
return at least a small part of their profits from the natural resources and
the sweat of the peoples of Latin America’.15
After speaking for some two hours, Fidel turned his attention to the
US naval base at Guantánamo Bay. Secured by the United States under a
1903 lease giving Washington ‘sole jurisdiction’ over roughly forty-five
square miles of Cuban territory, the naval facility was a permanent
reminder of America’s exploitation of the island. It was little wonder that
the new revolutionary government wanted it gone. But while Fidel
admitted that his government was ‘seriously considering requesting,
within the framework of international law, that the naval and military
forces of the United States be withdrawn from the Guantánamo base’, he
was determined to proceed with caution. Aware that Admiral Arleigh
Burke, Eisenhower’s Chief of Naval Operations, had pledged that if the
Cubans ‘would try to take the place by force, we would fight back’, Fidel
made it absolutely clear that his government had ‘never spoken a single
word that could imply any type of attack’ on the American facility. After
all, he explained, ‘it is clearly in our interest not to give imperialism the
slightest pretext to attack us.’ According to Fidel, all the recent talk in
Washington about defending the base was merely designed to ‘create a
climate of hysteria and to set the stage to attack us’.16
Turning next to the global stage, the Maximum Leader explained that
‘the case of Cuba’ was not ‘an isolated one’. ‘It is the case of the Congo,
it is the case of Egypt, it is the case of Algeria … the case of Cuba is the
case of all the underdeveloped and colonized countries.’ All across Latin
America, he declared, the economic resources were in the control –
directly or indirectly – of ‘the monopolies’. And he warned his sister
republics that, if they attempted to enact agrarian reform, ‘any
representative coming here to the United Nations will be confined to
Manhattan; they will have hotel rooms denied to them; they will have
insults poured on them and they may, possibly, be mistreated by the
police themselves […] How long’, he asked, ‘must Latin America wait
for its development? As far as the monopolies are concerned, it will have
to wait ad calendas Graecas [forever].’17
Revolutionary Cuba was, Fidel declared, fully behind Patrice
Lumumba – the only Congolese leader who had ‘stood firm against the
interests of the monopolies and shoulder to shoulder with his people’ –
and on the side of the Algerians, who were engaged in a ‘heroic’ struggle
against the French. Indeed, Cuba was on the side of all the African
countries that remained subject to colonial control, as well as ‘the blacks
who are discriminated against in the Union of South Africa’. ‘We are’,
Fidel proclaimed, ‘on the side of the people who wish not only to be
politically free – because it is very easy to raise a flag, choose a coat of
arms, sing an anthem and put another color on the map – but also to be
economically free.’ There could be no true political independence, he
stated, ‘unless there is economic independence’.18
On this, Fidel certainly had a point. While many in Washington were
happy to give rhetorical support to decolonization, and welcomed the
independence of former colonies, there was a distinct lack of empathy
when it came to economic reforms that either threatened America’s
existing interests (including access to markets as well as to strategic
resources such as oil and uranium) or smacked of communism (a
distinction that often appeared to exist only on paper). Government
officials – under the sway of modernization theorists, and keen to see off
the communist threat – sent billions of dollars in development aid to the
Global South during the 1950s, covering everything from agricultural
assistance to the development of a consumer society, in the belief that the
economic development of the region, along capitalist lines, would serve
to strengthen the dynamism and overall stability of the so-called Free
World. Alongside aid, more robust measures were also available to
protect what America believed to be its vital national interests: the CIA,
for instance, helped to sponsor regime change in Iran (1953) and
Guatemala (1954); while, by the end of 1960, there were some 700 US
military advisers in South Vietnam, helping to shore up the government
of Ngo Dinh Diem. The Soviet Union, to be sure, was no paragon of
virtue: having imposed ‘people’s democracies’ in Eastern Europe through
the ruthless application of force and police terror, Moscow was now
attempting through military and economic aid to draw newly independent
states in Africa and Asia into the Soviet orbit.19
Fidel, though, was not about to start criticizing his new friends in the
Kremlin. After speaking in support of Khrushchev’s proposals for
disarmament and calling for the admission of the People’s Republic of
China to the United Nations, he turned his attention once more to the
United States. The government in Washington ‘cannot’, he declared, ‘be
on the side of the peasants who want land because it is an ally of the
landowners. It cannot be on the side of workers seeking better living
conditions, in any part of the world, because it is an ally of the
monopolies. It cannot be on the side of the colonies seeking liberation,
because it is an ally of the colonizers.’ World opinion, including public
opinion in the United States, needed to look afresh at the world’s
problems: the underdeveloped countries (who were, after all, in the
majority) ‘cannot always be painted as the aggressors; revolutionaries
cannot always be presented as … enemies of the US people.’ Cuba,
meanwhile, was, ‘and will always be, on the side of the just. We are, and
always will be, against colonialism, against exploitation, against the
monopolies, against warmongering, against the arms race and against the
playing at war. That is, and always will be, our position.’20
As the clock approached 8.15 p.m., Fidel ended by quoting from the
recent Declaration of Havana. The Cuban people, he explained, stood for
nothing less than:
The right of the peasants to the land; the right of the workers to the fruit of their labor; the
right of children to education; the right of the sick to medical treatment and hospital
attention; the right of youth to work; the right of students to free education …; the right of
Negroes and Indians to full dignity as human beings; the right of women to civil, social
and political equality; the right of the elderly to a secure old age; the right of intellectuals,
artists, and scientists to fight, with their work, for a better world … the right of nations to
their full sovereignty; the right of peoples to turn fortresses into schools, and to arm their
workers, peasants, students, intellectuals, blacks, Indians, women, the young and the old,
and all the oppressed and exploited people, so they themselves can defend their rights and
their destiny.

‘Some of you wanted to know what line the revolutionary government in

Cuba was following,’ Fidel proclaimed. ‘There it is!’21
Exaggerating just a bit, Bohemia reported that Fidel’s speech had
been:
interrupted thirty times by outbreaks of applause, which in certain moments became
ovations. In the press-box, to the surprise of those who were accustomed to UN sessions,
claps were often heard. First the Latin American journalists clapped, caught up in the
stirring and true words of the speaker. Then their European colleagues joined the wave of
enthusiasm that was gaining ground with every paragraph of the denouncement launched
against the very face of the northern colossus.

He stepped from the podium and returned to his seat at 8.20 p.m.
Bohemia reported that ‘numerous delegates … approached Fidel … to
shake his hand’; ‘whilst the Assembly members in league with
imperialism left in frosty silence, there was a human whirlwind around
the Cuban Prime Minister.’22
The delegates from the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc had offered
repeated applause throughout (Khrushchev was particularly
demonstrative – at one point standing up and raising his fist), and
representatives from Ghana and Guinea now crowded round Fidel,
shaking his hand enthusiastically. Others, though, appeared rather less
enamoured. As Fidel’s speech passed the two-hour mark, some in the
audience had begun looking at their watches, while others shifted
restlessly in their seats. Nehru even appeared to take a nap (though, in
fairness, he was seventy years of age), while others discreetly left the
chamber; by the time Fidel finished speaking, reported the New York
Times, the hall was half empty. At one point, Celia Sánchez, Castro’s
loyal confidante and a dynamic figure within the 26 July Movement,
turned to her cousin, Julio Girona, who was sitting beside her in the
Assembly Hall, and declared, ‘Fidel is talking too much.’ Afterwards,
one friendly Italian journalist ‘observed that Fidel had said all he had to
say in the first hour, and that it was a shame he had gone on so long’.23

In Cuba, the entire country had shut down for the afternoon. People
gathered in parks and public spaces to hear the speech, including 500
who congregated outside the National Capitol building, where a
television screen and speakers had been rigged up; those with a radio or
TV set in their home were asked to leave their windows and doors open,
so that those without access to one would not miss out.*24 Fidel’s historic
address before the General Assembly was greeted with acclaim:
‘FORMIDABLE! A DAY OF GLORY FOR CUBA’, proclaimed the
front page of Revolución, which hailed his ‘sensational’ and ‘brilliant’
speech. By using his speech not only to defend the Cuban Revolution,
but to launch a wider attack on US imperialism and to champion the
rights of the peoples of the so-called underdeveloped world to seize
control of their own destinies, Fidel had laid claim to a wider, global
role.25 His voice, declared one commentator, had ‘transformed a small
Caribbean people into an example for America, Asia and Africa’; it was a
‘voice that was the bane of imperialists, monopolists, of bastard egos, of
feudal mentalities, of historical banalities, and of myths and prejudices
manufactured in the workshops of Wall Street by jugglers of the dollar’.
It was a voice that ‘continue[d] to shout in the name of all those who …
had long suffered from the hunger and thirst for justice’.26 As one Latin
American diplomat is said to have remarked, ‘the presence of Cuba has
disrupted the geography of America. The Caribbean island now seems
like a continent, and the continent seems like an island.’27 Cuba’s Radio
Mambi, meanwhile, declared that ‘no one has ever spoken so precisely,
so clearly, so sincerely, and so patriotically at any international event as
Fidel Castro did … in the U.N. General Assembly’. Anyone who ‘really
desires freedom’ and ‘every true Cuban’ would, they said, ‘feel proud of
the role that our country and our leader are playing in the future of
humanity’.28
Not everyone was convinced. In Costa Rica, whose centre-right
government led by Mario Echandi had no time for Fidel, the press
condemned the speech as ‘disordered, incoherent and vulgar invective’;
nothing but ‘words, words, and more words’.29 American commentators
were scarcely more enthusiastic: Time magazine dismissed Fidel’s ‘anti-
U.S. farrago’, while the New York Herald Tribune poured scorn on a
‘boorish four and a half hour talkathon’ that ‘not only imposed on his
distinguished listeners’ time and patience, but insulted their intelligence’.
The United Nations, they declared, deserved ‘more respect’.30 In
comments to the Cambodian leader, Prince Sihanouk, President
Eisenhower noted, wryly, that ‘despite their passion for complete
coverage’ the American television networks had finally given up and
pulled the live feed of Fidel’s speech.31
Writing in the London Observer, Cyril Dunn lamented how Fidel’s
speech had been treated by the US press ‘only with derision’ – according
to one wag, it had covered everything except ‘the [recent] row between
the British and Iceland over the sardine harvest’. This was, Dunn argued,
profoundly unfair: despite its great length, it had presented ‘an
impressively coherent version of Cuba’s sad history, as seen by a
revolutionary Socialist as old-fashioned as Keir Hardie’.32 It was a view
shared by the left-wing France-Observateur: in attacking US imperialism
Fidel had, they declared, ‘touched on something that is very sensitive for
Latin Americans and for the rest of the colonial peoples’, something that,
far from simply being a matter for rational discussion, was ‘part of their
history, part of their blood’.33
In private, some senior Western diplomats agreed. Sir Patrick Dean,
Britain’s Permanent Representative at the United Nations, cautioned
against underestimating Castro’s speech: ‘repetitive and tedious though it
became’, he wrote in a report filed on 12 November, ‘his diatribe found
many anti-American echoes among Latin American representatives here
– echoes which will presumably be heard in less muted tones among the
populations of the Latin American countries.’34 While some delegates
had ‘objected to being addressed in the General Assembly as if they were
a Cuban crowd in the streets of Havana’, British officials noted privately
that ‘later, when this impression also had faded somewhat, they admitted
grudgingly that he had said many things that wanted saying …’35 It was a
view that was shared on the other side of the Atlantic: in a briefing paper
submitted in advance of the cabinet meeting of 7 October, Richard F.
Pederson – a senior American diplomat at the UN – noted that Castro had
‘made an effective verbal attack on the United States which impressed
many delegates, including the new Africans, at the time’.36

Fidel’s over-preparation, lack of self-discipline and natural

loquaciousness had made it easy for his enemies to dismiss the speech as
nothing more than an over-long tirade.37 But this – his only real misstep
of the entire trip – appeared to do him, and the Cuban cause, no great
harm. Notably, the Fair Play for Cuba Committee was quick to declare
his speech ‘one of the most outstanding political documents of a
generation’, while I. F. Stone praised it as a ‘tour de force’.38 Indeed,
Fidel’s powerful critique of what he viewed as American empire was one
that would resonate increasingly among the emerging New Left. Inspired
by the revisionist scholarship of William Appleman Williams – whose
The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, published in 1959, argued that the
search for overseas markets and commercial expansion had been the
driving force behind US foreign policy since the closing of the frontier in
1890 – a new generation of intellectuals, students and activists were
increasingly vocal in their disillusionment with Washington’s support for
a series of repressive anti-communist dictatorships overseas (including in
South Korea, South Vietnam and the Dominican Republic). They were
also ever more willing to criticize their country’s deployment of military,
economic and cultural power in an effort to secure global hegemony.39 It
was a critique that would reach its apogee just a few years later, during
the mass protests against America’s military involvement in Vietnam,
when many leading opponents of the war argued that, rather than
defending South Vietnamese ‘freedom’ against communist aggression,
the United States, in seeking to crush a legitimate struggle for national
liberation, was instead playing the role of a colonial power.40 Meanwhile,
Fidel’s affirmation of the ‘rights of nations to their full sovereignty’ and
of the right of ‘all oppressed and exploited people’ to ‘defend their rights
and their destiny’ foreshadowed Havana’s robust, even daring support for
revolutionaries across Latin America and Africa in the years ahead.

Notes
1. Franqui, Family Portrait, 85. On the significance and purpose of Fidel’s speeches see
Guerra, Visions of Power in Cuba, 44–5.
2. ‘Khrushchev Follows Madison Avenue Line’, NYT, 26 September 1960, 14; ‘News
Conference at Glen Cove’, 25 September 1960, in Khrushchev in New York, 103.
3. Excerpts from John Diefenbaker’s speech to the UN General Assembly, NYT, 27
September 1960, 18.
4. https://pugwash.org/history/ and https://www.thinkerslodgehistories.com/anne-
eaton.html.
5. ‘Address of Cyrus Eaton, American Industrialist, at Luncheon Honoring Nikita S.
Khrushchev, Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR and Attended by
Representative Americans and Canadians, New York City, Monday, September 26, 1960,
1, 5, 320/10-360, College Park.
6. ‘Speech at Cyrus Eaton Luncheon’, 26 September 1960, in Khrushchev in New York,
107–13; Harrison E. Salisbury, ‘Khrushchev Places Disarmament First, With Control
Later’, NYT, 27 September 1960, 1.
7. Marcus Gleisser, The World of Cyrus Eaton (Kent, Ohio: The Kent State University
Press, 2005), 256–8.
8. ‘Favourites of Washington – the Governments of Force’ (‘Favoritos de Washington – los
Gobiernos de Fuerza’), Revolución, 27 September 1960, 3, 13.
9. Max Frankel, ‘Cuban Puts Case’, NYT, 27 September 1960, 21.
10. ‘Favourites of Washington – the Governments of Force’ (‘Favoritos de Washington – los
Gobiernos de Fuerza’), Revolución, 27 September 1960, 13.
11. Frankel, ‘Cuban Puts Case’, NYT, 27 September 1960, 1, 21; Waldo Frank, Cuba:
Prophetic Island (New York: Marzani & Munsell, Inc., 1961), 12.
12. Frank, Cuba, 11, 12, 15; Rafael Rojas, Fighting over Fidel: The New York Intellectuals
and the Cuban Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 71.
13. Sam Pope Brewer, ‘Cuban’s Address Fails to Stir New African Nations at U.N.’, NYT, 27
September 1960, 20.
14. Fidel Castro, ‘At the United Nations General Assembly’, 26 September 1960, in David
Deutschmann and Deborah Shnookal (eds), Fidel Castro Reader (Melbourne: Ocean
Press, 2007), 138–40, 142, 151, 153–6.
15. Castro, ‘At the United Nations General Assembly’, 160–7.
16. Castro, ‘At the United Nations General Assembly’, 169.
17. Castro, ‘At the United Nations General Assembly’, 171–2.
18. Castro, ‘At the United Nations General Assembly’, 176–8.
19. For a good overview of this see Mark Philip Bradley, ‘Decolonization, the Global South,
and the Cold War, 1919–1962’ and David S. Painter, ‘Oil, resources, and the Cold War,
1945–1962’, in Leffler and Westad, eds, Cambridge History of the Cold War: Volume I,
464–85; 486–507.
20. Castro, ‘At the United Nations General Assembly’, 184–6.
21. Castro, ‘At the United Nations General Assembly’, 187.
22. ‘Fidel at the UN – He Broke the Barrier of the Dollar’ (‘Fidel en la ONU – Rompió la
Barrera del Dólar’), Bohemia, 2 October 1960, 74.
23. Geyer, Guerrilla Prince, 263; Quirk, Fidel Castro, 342; Franqui, Family Portrait, 86;
‘Castro Backs Nkrumah’, Ghanaian Times, 28 September 1960, 1; Stout, One Day in
December, 367; ‘Castro Vowed Brevity And Spoke 4 ½ Hours’, NYT, 27 September
1960, 21.
24. 737.00, Joint WEEKA no. 39, 3 October 1960, Psychological – 4. ‘Fidel in the United
Nations’, Confidential State Department Files, Decimal 737, reel 23; various photo
captions in Revolución, 27 September 1960, 9.
25. Revolución, front page, 27 September 1960; caption in Bohemia, 2 October 1960, 50;
‘Favourites of Washington – the Governments of Force’ (‘Favoritos de Washington – los
Gobiernos de Fuerza’), Revolución, 27 September 1960, 2.
26. J. M. Vázquez Mora, ‘What They Could Not Prevent’ (‘Lo Que No Pudieron Impedir’),
Revolución, 3 October 1960, 12.
27. José Antonio Cabrera, ‘The Historic Role of Cuba at the UN’ (‘El Papel Histórico de
Cuba ante la ONU’), Revolución, 3 October 1960, 18.
28. Havana, Radio Mambi, 27 September 1960 – Armando Nuñez Commentary, Foreign
Broadcast Information Service, Daily Report, Foreign Radio Broadcasts, No. 189 (28
September 1960), g4.
29. Editorial in La Nación, San José to State Department, 27 September 1960, 737.00/9-2760
and article by Guido Fernandez S. in Diario de Costa Rica, San José to State Department,
28 September 1960, 737.00/9-2860 in Confidential State Department Files, Decimal 737,
reel 6.
30. ‘United Nations – The Bad Loser’, Time, 10 October 1960; ‘Farewell, Fidel’, New York
Herald Tribune, 28 September 1960.
31. Meeting with Prince Sihanouk, 27 September 1960, 10.45 a.m. (Waldorf-Astoria), 3, in
Whitman, DDE Diary Series, Box 53, Folder, ‘Staff Notes – September 1960’ (1), DDE.
32. Cyril Dunn, ‘Picking the Stars on the World’s Stage’, Observer, 2 October 1960, 5.
33. ‘It’s Part of their History’ (‘Es Parte de la Historia de Ellos’), Bohemia, 2 October 1960,
50. See also Thomas J. Hamilton, ‘Leaders at the UN: Unique Galaxy Has Added Interest
But Has Slowed the Heavy Schedule’, NYT, 2 October 1960, E11.
34. FO371/153638 – UN22912/153 – 12 November 1960.
35. FO371/148345 – AK2291/4 (8 October 1960) Patrick Dean (UK UN Mission) to H. N.
‘Norman’ Brain (FO).
36. Richard F. Pederson to Ambassador Wadsworth, Memo for Cabinet Meeting, 6 October
1960, in Records and Document of the Cabinet Meetings of President Eisenhower, Reel
10, RIAS.
37. Quirk, Fidel Castro, 342; Moore, Castro, the Blacks, and Africa, 77.
38. Fair Play, 7 October 1960, 3; D. D. Guttenplan, American Radical: The Life and Times
of I. F. Stone (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), 351.
39. William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York: World
Publishing Company, 1959); J. A. Thompson, ‘William Appleman Williams and the
“American Empire”’, Journal of American Studies, vol. 7, no. 1 (April 1973), 91–105
(esp. 92); Gosse, Where the Boys Are, 158; Van Gosse, Rethinking the New Left: An
Interpretative History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 66; Paul Buhle, History
and the New Left: Madison, Wisconsin, 1950–1970 (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 1990).
40. See, for example, Paul Potter, ‘Naming the System’, 17 April 1965 at https://www.sds-
1960s.org/sds_wuo/sds_documents/paul_potter.html; Carl Oglesby, ‘Let Us Shape the
Future’, 27 November 1965 at https://www.sds-
1960s.org/sds_wuo/sds_documents/oglesby_future.html; and Christian G. Appy, ‘What
Was the Vietnam War About?’, NYT, 26 March 2018 at
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/26/opinion/what-was-the-vietnam-war-about.html.

* At the time, only the United States boasted more televisions per capita than Cuba – where
the rate was one in twenty-five – while radio ownership, at one for every six inhabitants,
was broadly similar. Figures from Lillian Guerra, Visions of Power in Cuba: Revolution,
Redemption, and Resistance, 1959–1971 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina
Press, 2012), 41.
 CAPTION:

Fidel and Nehru outside the Theresa. The Indian prime minister made the
pilgrimage to Harlem, where he lauded his Cuban counterpart as a ‘very
brave man’.
Photograph by Michael Rougier/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty
Images
 11

TUESDAY 27 SEPTEMBER

The process of liberation is irresistible and irreversible.

UN RESOLUTION 1514

Early on the morning of Tuesday 27 September, Harold Macmillan – who

had flown in to McGuire Air Force Base, New Jersey, aboard an RAF
Comet thirty-six hours previously – sat down for an informal catch-up in
President Eisenhower’s Waldorf-Astoria suite. As the two old friends ate
breakfast, Ike outlined his wish to pay a three- or four-day visit to Great
Britain in November, after the US election, so that he might ‘pay his
respects to the Queen’, and also hold useful talks with senior politicians
‘on the prospects for continued collaboration under the new
administration’. Then, at 9 a.m., the two men were joined by senior
officials, including Lord Home and Christian Herter, for a more formal
review of recent foreign policy developments.1
Macmillan noted that the mood of the General Assembly appeared to
be improving and ‘there is a feeling that Khrushchev has overplayed his
hand’. The mere mention of the Soviet leader’s name, though, prompted
an interjection by Eisenhower, who denounced the recent luncheon that
had been hosted by Cyrus Eaton as ‘about as despicable a thing as he
knew of’. Steering the conversation back to the UN, Herter ‘said that
Hammarskjöld has told him that it begins to look as though the United
Nations had imported from the Congo some of the political chaos that
now exists there’. But Eisenhower was optimistic that ‘after Khrushchev,
Castro and their associates go home, the United Nations discussions may
take a better turn’. As for the Congo itself, Lord Home – speaking with a
frankness that, sixty years on, is striking – ‘raised the question of why we
are not getting rid of Lumumba at the present time’, and ‘stressed’ that,
with Lumumba now holed up in his official residence following a coup,
the time to act was now (a week earlier, British diplomats had told the
Americans that they were rather proud of the fact that they had been
‘cultivating Colonel Mobutu for some time’). According to Herter,
Hammarskjöld had told him that ‘the United Nations would interpose no
objection to the arrest of Lumumba if it were done by legal means’.* The
whole issue was, though, highly emotive – it was reported that, in
conversations with both the British and the Americans, Nehru had spoken
with great feeling about the ‘wickedness’ of Belgium for having ‘left the
Congo without having made any provision for its government’. The
meeting ended with Eisenhower expressing his hopes that Nigeria, which
was ‘more populous and more advanced than the other countries’, might
be able to exercise real leadership in Africa. But as the meeting broke up,
Lord Home provided a telling reminder that America’s domestic
difficulties over racial inequality, including in what some historians have
come to call the ‘Jim Crow North’, were never far away. The First
Secretary of the Nigerian delegation had approached him, he explained,
to ‘say that he is finding it impossible to get a place to live in New York
because of his color’. Herter noted that ‘this problem is a terribly difficult
one’, while Eisenhower advised that ‘it should be taken up with Mayor
Wagner and Police Commissioner Kennedy at once’.2 This was, though,
just one of a series of high-profile incidents of racial discrimination
affecting delegates to the Fifteenth General Assembly, which ultimately
prompted the NAACP to offer the UN Secretary General its help in
resolving the situation.3 The incidents included complaints from African
officials about ‘slow’ service or ‘condescending treatment’ in hotels and
restaurants; Fonmin Dejain of the Central African Republic reported that
a newsboy had thrown a newspaper at him; and a Cameroonian diplomat
accused the NYPD of having ‘manhandled’ him as he approached the
UN headquarters.4
Eschewing his fellow leaders’ fondness for limousines and
motorcades (the city, noted one Soviet newspaper report, was ‘echoing
almost continuously to the wild, not to say hysterical, wail of sirens’),
Macmillan, accompanied by a solitary detective, made the short walk to
the United Nations General Assembly Building, where Nasser provided
the day’s main draw.5 The British prime minister, who as chancellor of
the exchequer had been one of the cabinet’s most enthusiastic hawks
during the Suez Crisis, must have had mixed feelings about Britain’s old
foe. But, the previous day, during a lull in proceedings at the General
Assembly, Macmillan had made a point of walking over to the UAR
delegation, so that he could shake hands with the Arab leader. The two
men, it was reported, had ‘wished each other a good day and exchanged
other pleasantries’.6
‘Almost unknown five years ago’, noted Foster Hailey of the New
York Times, today Nasser was ‘a spokesman to whom world leaders
listened closely’.7 The UAR president began by welcoming the nations
who had recently joined the United Nations, having ‘struggled for their
political independence’ and making ‘great sacrifices to achieve it’, before
urging member states to rally in defence of the UN Charter and ensure
that the organization could pursue ‘peaceful development and achieve its
high ideals’. ‘The work of safeguarding peace’ at a time of heightened
Cold War tensions was, he declared, ‘not only a vital necessity’ but ‘a
moral duty’.
After adding his voice to those calling for the admission of the
People’s Republic of China to the UN, Nasser turned his attention to
‘imperialism’. Whereas ‘the aggression of Suez was the end of unmasked
imperialism and its graveyard’, the UAR president warned that ‘today we
find the Congo presenting us with masked imperialism’. ‘All who believe
in freedom and in the United Nations’ should, he said, stand united in
defence of the people of the Congo.
Calling for the ‘restoration of the full rights of the people of Palestine’
(who had, he declared, not just been deprived of their homes but been
‘robbed of their very lives’) and reiterating his support for ‘the right of
the Algerian people to self-determination’, Nasser celebrated the fact that
‘the remnants of imperialism’ were ‘retreating everywhere before the
march of the peoples’. But he captured the headlines with his call for
Eisenhower and Khrushchev – these two ‘great leaders’ whom ‘our
peoples hold in high respect and esteem’ – to meet ‘either by themselves
or with whoever may be selected among those who are present here in
order for them to set up, under the aegis of the United Nations, guiding
rules for a new attempt toward disarmament’. After all, he warned, in an
age of nuclear weapons ‘a miscalculation by any party’ could ‘in minutes
destroy the greatest and most beautiful achievements of mankind
throughout its long and glorious struggle’.8
The speech, which lasted for an hour and twenty minutes, was warmly
received in the hall: Khrushchev, as was to be expected, was especially
demonstrative – interspersing his clapping with ‘gestures toward the
United States delegation’ – but, as the New York Times reported, ‘even
delegates from two of the Western countries whose policies he attacked –
Britain and the United States’, joined in the applause as Nasser stepped
from the podium. Thronged by leaders from Asia, Africa and the Arab
world, it took the UAR president fifteen minutes to make his way to the
delegates’ lounge, where he spent a further half an hour ‘signing
autographs and receiving congratulations’.9 Praised by many Western
commentators (according to the Guardian’s James Morris, the address
was ‘as sensible as any we have heard in this Assembly’10), Nasser’s
speech also received top billing – and ‘eulogistic’ commentary – in Cuba.
Revolución, for instance, praised his ‘impassioned’ defence of ‘all the
peoples of the world who have risen up against the slavery imposed by
imperialism’.11
For Fidel Castro, who had paid a final visit to the General Assembly
in order to hear Nasser, the next stop was the Ghanaian mission, at 144
East 44th Street, and a meeting with Kwame Nkrumah, the country’s
president and renowned Pan-African revolutionary.
A Christian, a Marxist and a Pan-Africanist who remained captivated
by Marcus Garvey’s vision of a proud, unified Africa freed from
European colonialism, Nkrumah – born in a small village in the south-
west of the country in 1909 – had initially been disparaged by the British
as ‘our local little Hitler’. But, by demanding ‘Self-government Now!’
and launching a campaign of nonviolent civil disobedience in January
1950, he had wrested the initiative away from an older generation of
more moderate nationalists and forced the colonial authorities, and the
government in London, to recognize both his personal popularity and his
legitimacy. Becoming the colony’s prime minister in 1952, he led Ghana
to independence from the British in March 1957 (three years later, it
voted overwhelmingly to become a republic). Ghanaian independence –
the first surrender of colonial power in sub-Saharan Africa – was a
transformative moment in the history of European empire, energizing
nationalist movements across Africa and the Caribbean. For a time, this
signal achievement made Nkrumah one of Africa’s most inspiring and
admired leaders, and it was a striking sign of the respect in which he was
held that Fidel decided to pay homage in person.12
 Nkrumah had flown out of Accra, aboard a specially chartered Pan-
Am aeroplane – the ‘Jet Clipper Osagyefo’ † – on the morning of
Wednesday 21 September (the occasion of his fifty-first birthday), seen
off in typically understated fashion by an honour guard, a twenty-one-
gun salute and thousands of cheering, waving supporters.13 The
following afternoon, he met with Eisenhower at the Waldorf; he had, he
explained, been keen to see the US president prior to any talks with
Khrushchev. The discussions went well: Nkrumah thanked the
Americans for their financial support for the ambitious Volta River
hydroelectric power project – construction of the dam would begin the
following year – and congratulated Eisenhower on his speech at the UN
earlier that day (Nkrumah was, he said, ‘most enthusiastic of all’ about
the proposals to send aid to Africa for education). Moreover, when it
came to the ongoing crisis in the Congo, there appeared to be a strong
consensus: the United Nations, they agreed, had to take the lead in
resolving the situation, and both leaders held Dag Hammarskjöld in high
esteem.14
The following morning, Friday 23 September, Nkrumah – ‘dressed in
traditional robes of gold and orange kente cloth’, and with an elegant
cane hanging from his left wrist – took to the podium in the General
Assembly.15 Celebrating ‘the momentous impact of Africa’s awakening
upon the world’ and welcoming the ‘dawn of a new era’, the African
leader requested permanent seats on the Security Council for
representatives of Africa, Asia and the Middle East; attacked Portuguese
colonialism and South African apartheid; called for a negotiated
settlement to the war in Algeria; and demanded that the Cold War be kept
out of Africa. No African state, he said, should enter into a military
alliance with ‘any outside Power’. The bulk of his speech, though,
focused on the Congo. Criticizing the record of Belgium and denouncing
continuing colonialist intrigue, Nkrumah declared that this was ‘an acute
African problem which can be solved by Africans only’. In remarks that
drew ‘enthusiastic applause’, he suggested that the UN command in the
Congo should be restricted to Africans and tasked with supporting the
‘legitimate’ government of Patrice Lumumba.16 Fidel had been the first
to his feet and when Khrushchev noticed the African delegates joining in
the ovation, he too stood and gestured to his comrades to join him. As the
Ghanaian president returned to his seat the Soviet leader, who was
scheduled to speak next, made sure to grasp his hands and offer him
warm – and very public – congratulations.17
One person who was not cheering was Christian Herter. Speaking to
members of the Foreign Press Association a few hours later, the
American Secretary of State (who, he freely admitted, had not even
listened to the whole speech) declared that Nkrumah ‘sounded to me as
though he were definitely making a bid for the leadership of what you
would call a left-wing group of African States […] I think he has marked
himself as very definitely leaning toward the Soviet bloc.’18 Later, in a
private meeting with the Israeli foreign minister, Golda Meir, Herter
explained that ‘he was frankly upset’ by the speech because ‘Nkrumah
had talked entirely differently the day before …’ He had, he confessed,
also been ‘disturbed that Nkrumah felt it desirable to make a great show
of shaking hands with Khrushchev and comporting himself generally like
a satellite’.19
Herter’s outburst did the United States no favours. Naturally, it went
down very badly in Ghana itself. The Ghanaian Times declared that
Africans were ‘sick and tired’ of the ‘vanity of the self-appointed
mentors and spokesmen of the world’, while the Daily Record noted that
Nkrumah’s uncompromising stance on how best to deal with Africa’s
problems was ‘bound to frighten those world leaders’ who sought to
‘continue to dictate the course of world events and “keep the African in
his place”’.20 Nkrumah himself was diplomatic, though firm: Herter was,
he said, ‘the last person from whom I would have expected such a
remark. I thought that [he] understood the African viewpoint …’21 In the
United States, the Washington Post decried Herter’s ‘gaffe’, while a New
York Times editorial lamented how the Secretary of State had permitted
himself to fall into a trap of equating Nkrumah with the communists,
simply because, on some questions, he took a similar position to that of
the Soviet Union. ‘The deep desire of many of the less-developed
nations, especially in Asia and Africa, to remain outside of the power
struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union’ was, they
explained, ‘not fully appreciated in this country’.22 In remarks to
Malcolm MacDonald, Britain’s outgoing High Commissioner to India,
Nehru lamented Herter’s lack of tact, pointing out that the issuing of
‘such a public, as well as misplaced, reproof could only do damage
among America’s would-be friends’. Notably, even some of
Washington’s staunchest allies were irritated.23 On the afternoon of 27
September, the Canadian prime minister John Diefenbaker told Herter
directly that he had ‘never considered Nkrumah a Communist’ and
pointed out that ‘the publicity concerning the Secretary’s comment had
discouraged Nkrumah whereas a few kind words might have brought him
back into line.’24
It was a damaging episode, and one that augured a deterioration in
US–Ghanaian relations in the months ahead.25 But the spat with
Nkrumah was also indicative of how, in its attempts to win over the
newly independent states of Africa, Washington was too often on the
back foot. When it came to the crunch, Eisenhower was unwilling to risk
damaging relations with key allies in Europe by, for example, publicly
criticizing their continued presence on the African continent. And, eager
not to reward countries that ‘played both sides in the Cold War’, the
administration was also deeply suspicious of ‘neutralism’ (John Foster
Dulles, who had served as Ike’s influential Secretary of State until April
1959, had viewed it as merely a ‘transitional stage to communism’).26
During a meeting with Jordan’s King Hussein, on 7 October, for instance,
Eisenhower ‘said he was sometimes puzzled regarding the attitudes of
some countries. He quite understands that they might say that they will
be neutral as between the two power blocs. He does not understand how
any nation can be neutral as between being free and not being free, or
between right and wrong.’27 It was a blinkered view of the emerging
Global South that severely limited America’s flexibility and succeeded
only in handing the initiative to her enemies in Moscow and Beijing.
In contrast with Khrushchev, who launched something of a ‘charm
offensive’ while in New York – eagerly pressing the flesh, and attending
every reception going – Eisenhower was reluctant to expend too much
energy on courting the new African leaders.28 He did meet – briefly –
with the leaders of fifteen African countries (including Cameroon,
Nigeria and Ivory Coast) in the White House on 14 October, but as he
told his cabinet, ‘he couldn’t have a lunch or a dinner for each of them –
it takes too much out of the day’.29 It was a stance that evidently caused
some frustration among State Department officials, who understood the
importance of getting off to a ‘good start’ with the delegates from the
new African nations: ‘in our judgment’, stated an internal memorandum,
‘[the] first few weeks at UNGA may determine patterns of relationships
that could have long-lasting influence on [the] outlook [of] these new
delegations.’30 When Eisenhower did engage directly with African
leaders, though, it could do more harm than good. On the morning of 23
September, for instance, the president met with Sylvanus Olympio, leader
of the Togolese Republic. Eisenhower found his African counterpart to
be ‘most impressive’, and particularly admired his ‘wonderful sense of
humor’ – which was, he later wrote, ‘an unusual trait in the leaders of
some of the newer nations’. But, as one historian has pointed out,
Olympio, a proud and educated man (he had degrees from three
European universities), was likely ‘infuriated’ by Eisenhower’s
‘insensitive and condescending’ comments after he raised the subject of
why Togo had to share an ambassador with faraway Cameroon. After
Herter had mentioned budgetary constraints, Eisenhower, apparently
unaware that ‘civilization’ had reached Togo’s capital, Lomé, followed
up with a suggestion that ‘there would be no harm in a few of these
Ambassadors living in tents. It would have a salutary effect if our
Ambassadors would, in some of these regions, live in simple
surroundings.’31
Even more damaging was the American decision – following a
personal plea from Harold Macmillan – to abstain in a General Assembly
vote on resolution 1514. Debated on 14 December, the measure, which
had been proposed by delegates from the Afro-Asian bloc, declared that
‘the process of liberation is irresistible and irreversible’ and called for ‘a
speedy and unconditional end [to] colonialism in all its forms and
manifestations’. The United States was one of only nine countries who
failed to support the measure (Australia, Belgium, the Dominican
Republic, France, Portugal, Spain, South Africa and the UK also
abstained), and the decision prompted ‘an audible gasp of surprise’ in the
Assembly Hall. Later, the head of the Nigerian delegation asked if
Washington was ‘trying to commit political suicide’.32

*
The Eisenhower administration might have been wittingly – or
unwittingly – antagonizing the leaders of the newly independent nations,
but Cuba’s young leader was eager to show his support for the heroes of
the anticolonial struggle. It was, then, in a mood of some excitement that
Fidel arrived at the Ghanaian mission late on the afternoon of Tuesday 27
September, where, amid the throng of rush-hour commuters, he was
loudly booed and hissed at by many of the hundreds of pedestrians who
were passing by. He endured a twenty-minute wait until Nkrumah’s
‘gleaming Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith’ – with the flag of Ghana and the
president’s personal emblem flying from the front bumper – finally drew
up outside. After embracing warmly, the two leaders then chatted for
about forty minutes, and Fidel presented the Osagyefo with a gift: a
wooden box of Cuban cigars.33 While the Cuban prime minister was
delighted to meet with Nkrumah, the Ghanaian leader likely had rather
more mixed feelings about the encounter. Carlos Moore, Fidel’s eighteen-
year-old translator, later noted that, in moving to Harlem, the Cuban
leader had ‘psychologically outflanked Africa’s most politically radical
leaders on their own terrain’.34 And for Ghana’s president, this was
personal. When, during the course of their discussions, Fidel sought to
steer the conversation on to the ‘embarrassment of racial discrimination
in the United States’, Nkrumah’s response was telling:
Doctor Castro, you may not know that when I was young, I lived here. One day, I
wandered the streets, entered a cafe and asked for water. I can never forget the white
waiter’s response: ‘If you want me to give you water, you have to drink it in the spittoon
that is on the floor.’35

In fact, for ten years from 1935, while a student at Lincoln University,
Pennsylvania (where he studied theology, politics and philosophy),
Nkrumah had spent his summers in Harlem, working a series of odd jobs
– including stints in a soap factory and peddling fish from a wooden cart
– and immersing himself in the neighbourhood’s rich cultural life. He had
browsed the shelves of Lewis Michaux’s bookstore, attended revivalist
church services and participated in meetings of the Blyden Society,
which was dedicated to the study of African history. In July 1958, as
prime minister of the newly independent Ghana, he had received a
rapturous welcome on returning to Harlem, as ten thousand locals lined
the parade route along Seventh Avenue, and a similar number packed into
the 369th Anti-Aircraft Group Armory for an emotional ‘homecoming’
rally.36 A week and a half after Fidel’s departure from New York, the
Osegyefo made a last-minute decision to go to Harlem himself. Standing
outside the Theresa on the evening of 7 October, he addressed a 1,500-
strong rally and, to cries of ‘Long Live Nkrumah!’ proclaimed that
‘Africa is on the march’, called on skilled African Americans to travel to
Africa and ‘help your brothers’, and celebrated the ‘solid bond we feel
between the people of Africa and the Afro-Americans in this country’.37
But, as Carlos Moore observed, Fidel’s earlier ‘theatrics’ had stolen
much of his thunder.38
After taking tea with Nkrumah, Castro headed back to the Theresa for
a date with Jawaharlal Nehru, who had made the pilgrimage up to
Harlem. ‘I wanted to meet you for many reasons,’ the Indian statesman
told Castro, ‘above all, because you are a very brave man.’ ‘If you had
not come, I would have come to you,’ Fidel replied. Speaking in a mix of
broken English and Spanish (which he reverted to when the correct word
or phrase evaded him), the Cuban leader told Nehru that ‘you are a man
of peace’, and ‘you are doing the work of all of us’. In the relaxed,
informal and slightly chaotic setting of Fidel’s suite, Nehru began by
recalling how, when he was a young boy, his tutor’s brother had regaled
him with stories about the Cuban War of Independence (1895–8). He
had, he explained, subsequently taken a keen interest in the Cuban
Revolution. Fidel, who was clearly delighted by all this, then moved the
conversation on to the current world situation before focusing on the
question of land reform and the economic challenges facing Cuba.
Reporting live from the Theresa, the influential radio commentator – and
Fidel supporter – José Pardo Llada described how, having discussed these
topics at some length, Fidel then:
presented Nehru with a complete collection of the INRA [National Agrarian Reform
Institute] magazine. Nehru put on his glasses and scanned the magazines carefully. He was
especially interested in the Cuban system of house-building, the cooperatives, and the land
reform. Then Nehru asked Fidel about the events that led to the Cuban revolution and
listened with interest while Fidel explained them to him. Mr. Nehru was also interested in
the conditions under which the nationalization policy has been carried out.

Apologizing for his hoarse voice, Fidel explained that the New York
climate ‘did not agree with him’, though he was quick to clarify that he
had been talking about the weather rather than the politics: ‘they boo me
in the middle-class areas,’ he explained (the hostile reaction of the
bystanders near the Ghanaian mission still fresh in his mind), but ‘here in
Harlem, where the poor live, they cheer me.’ As Nehru prepared to
depart, Fidel handed him a gilded bust of José Martí, as well as an
alligator-skin handbag for his daughter, Indira Gandhi, who was planning
a visit to Cuba.39 His decision to meet with Castro had, Nehru later
learned, ‘incensed’ the Americans. But, he said, it would have been
‘impossible for him not to see Castro’ when he was ‘making a point of
meeting everyone else of importance’.40
Later that evening, Fidel was one of only fifty guests at a party hosted
by Nehru in the Victorian Suite, on the second floor of the Carlyle Hotel,
on Madison Avenue and 76th Street, as part of an attempt by the Indian
leader to ease Cold War tensions and encourage meaningful
disarmament. Over a buffet dinner of lobster, Dover sole, chicken curry
and roasted saddle of lamb, the guests, who represented countries from
across NATO (although no British or American representative attended‡),
the Warsaw Pact, Israel and the Arab world, and South America, chatted
informally. The Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev – whose favourite dish
was known to be a Cossack stew made of millet and pork fat – ‘sent
guests into peals of laughter when, pointing to his girth, he resolved that
he was henceforth going to live on cabbages. But he was, he said, also
going to make up for it by a hearty meal now.’41 It was a jocular display
that contrasted starkly with his behaviour at the UN General Assembly.
Just two days later, for instance, the Soviet leader appeared to take great
offence at Harold Macmillan’s speech (in which the British prime
minister praised the ‘energy’ and ‘integrity’ of the UN Secretary General,
and, turning to disarmament, called for a system of international
inspection and control). Glowering, gesticulating and banging on his
desk, Khrushchev eventually leaped to his feet and began shouting (in
Russian). The prime minister paused, looked up from his notes and, in an
effective put-down that prompted ripples of laughter throughout the
chamber, simply said, ‘I’d like that translated, if I may.’42 Most famously
of all, on 12 October, when a Filipino diplomat attacked Soviet
‘colonialism’ in Eastern Europe, Khrushchev, his face flushed red,
suddenly leaped to his feet and began pounding on his desk with his right
shoe (a brown loafer, it was said). Although some have questioned
whether this extraordinary incident ever actually took place, it was later
used against Khrushchev when he was removed from power in the
autumn of 1964: evidence, his rivals said, of his increasingly erratic
behaviour.43

In the course of just seventy-two hours, Fidel had enjoyed high-profile

meetings with three men – Nasser, Nehru and Nkrumah – who were icons
of the global struggle against colonialism, and leading lights among the
non-aligned nations. It had been, if nothing else, a public relations
triumph for Latin America’s young firebrand. But some observers
wondered whether the revolutionary government in Havana might be
preparing, after all, to plot a middle course: accepting financial,
economic and technical support from all who were willing to provide it,
while refusing to slavishly take sides in the Cold War. Maybe. But,
within hours, Cuba’s increasing reliance on Moscow would be on public
display once again.

Notes
1. ‘Support for UN Secretary?’, Guardian, 26 September 1960, 1; Peter Kihss, ‘Nehru Flies
Here; Arranges Talks’, NYT, 26 September 1960, 1; ‘Memorandum of Conference with
the President, September 27, 1960’, DDE Papers as President of the United States, 1953–
61 [Ann Whitman File], DDE Diary Series, Box 53, Staff Notes – September 1960 (1),
DDE.
2. ‘Memorandum of Conference with the President, September 27, 1960’; Secretary’s
Delegation to the Fifteenth Session of the United Nations General Assembly, New York,
19–24 September 1960, Memorandum of Conversation, 20 September 1960, 3.00 p.m.,
Suite 2707, Waldorf Towers, 320/9-2060, College Park.
3. For the NAACP’s response see, for example, letter, Roy Wilkins to Dag Hammarskjöld,
7 October 1960, in NAACP Records, Group III, A326, ‘United Nations – General, 1959–
63’, and ‘Radio-Television News from the NAACP’, 19 October 1960, in NAACP
Records, Group III, A326, ‘NAACP Press Releases, 1960–61’, Library of Congress.
4. New York (Wadsworth) to Secretary of State (Herter), 30 September 1960, telegram
#859, ‘Discrimination Against New African Dels’, 320/9-3060 and New York
(Wadsworth) to Secretary of State (Herter), 13 October 1960, telegram #973, ‘Incident
Involving Oyono Cameroon Delegate’, 320/10-1360, College Park.
5. ‘President Nasser Suggests New Disarmament Approach’, The Times, 28 September
1960, 12; A. Adzhubei, ‘New York Roars and Howls’, Izvestia, 23 September in The
Current Digest of the Soviet Press, vol. XII, no. 38, 6.
 6. Foster Hailey, ‘Macmillan and Nasser Trade Smiles and Handshakes at U.N.’, NYT, 27
September 1960, 19.
7. Foster Hailey, ‘Nasser Wins Hearty Applause in First Address Before U.N.’, NYT, 28
September 1960, 16.
8. President Nasser’s speech before the Fifteenth Session of the UN General Assembly, 27
September 1960, A/PV.873, 145–53.
9. Hailey, ‘Nasser Wins Hearty Applause in First Address Before U.N.’, NYT, 28
September 1960, 16.
10. James Morris, ‘Day of Back-stairs diplomacy’, Guardian, 28 September 1960, 1.
11. Cable from Havana to State (E. A. Gilmore, Acting Deputy Chief of Mission’, 4 October
1960, Confidential State Department Files, Decimal 737, reel 6; ‘Nasser’s Speech to the
UN’ (‘Discurso de Nasser en la ONU’), Revolución, 28 September 1960, 6.
12. Max Frankel, ‘Winds Up His Stay Visiting Leaders’, NYT, 28 September 1960, 19. On
Nkrumah see, for instance, Hall, 1956, 114–16, 118–19, 388–9; David Birmingham,
Kwame Nkrumah: The Father of African Nationalism (Athens: Ohio University Press,
1998). On Ghana’s appeal to African Americans during the long 1960s see Gaines,
American Africans in Ghana.
13. ‘Now – Off to a Big Welcome’, Daily Graphic, 22 September 1960, 1; ‘Countless
Thousands See Osagyefo Off to U.N.’, The Ghanaian Times, 22 September 1960, 1.
14. ‘Memorandum of Conversation, 22 September 1960, Subject: President Nkrumah’s Call
on the President’, in Executive Secretariat Conference Files, 1949–1963, CF1767-1773,
College Park.
15. ‘Kwame Makes His Big Speech’, Daily Graphic, 26 September 1960, 1; ‘Osagyefo
arrives at General Assembly in Grand Style’, The Ghanaian Times, 24 September 1960,
1.
16. Kwame Nkrumah speech before the UN General Assembly, 23 September 1960,
A/PV.869.
17. ‘The big applause’, Daily Graphic, 24 September 1960, 1; Dana Adams Schmidt,
‘Nkrumah Speaks’, NYT, 24 September 1960, 1.
18. David Anderson, ‘American Angry’, NYT, 24 September 1960, 1, 10.
19. Memorandum of Conversation, 28 September 1960 [Herter–Meir], Executive
Conference Files, 1949–1963, CF1767-1773, College Park.
20. ‘Herter & Co. Blunder’, Ghanaian Times, 27 September 1960, 2; ‘Herter and the
African’, Daily Graphic, 26 September 1960, 1.
21. ‘Nkrumah: I’m Surprised’, Ghanaian Times, 26 September 1960, 1.
22. ‘The Neutralists’, NYT, 27 September 1960, 36. For other examples of criticism see C. L.
Sulzberger, ‘Our Case Is Better Than Our Argument’, NYT, 1 October 1960, 18, and
Letter, St Clair Drake, Professor of Sociology, Roosevelt University (Chicago) and
University College, Ghana, ‘The “Black Presence” at UN’, Guardian, 1 October 1960, 6.
23. UN22912/141 – 14 October 1960, Delhi to Commonwealth Relations Office,
FO371/153638; ‘Mr. MacDonald Ends His Term in India’, The Times, 18 October 1960,
10.
24. ‘Memorandum of a Conversation, Waldorf Towers, New York, September 27, 1960, 2:45
p.m.’, FRUS, 1958–1960, Volume II, United Nations and General International Matters,
363.
25. Philip E. Muehlenbeck, Betting on the Africans: John F. Kennedy’s Courting of African
Nationalist Leaders (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 24. See also W. Scott
 Thompson, Ghana’s Foreign Policy, 1957–1966: Diplomacy, Ideology, and the New State
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 165–6.
26. Muehlenbeck, Betting on the Africans, 3–4, 8–9, 12; Al Sabah editorial, 24 September
1960, in US Embassy, Tunis, to Secretary of State, 26 September 1960, 320/9-2660,
College Park. See also Cary Fraser, ‘An American Dilemma: Race and Realpolitik in the
American Response to the Bandung Conference, 1955’ in Plummer, ed., Window on
Freedom, 115–40 and James H. Meriwether, ‘“Worth a Lot of Negro Votes”: Black
Voters, Africa, and the 1960 Presidential Campaign’, Journal of American History, vol.
95, no. 3 (December 2008), 752–3.
27. ‘Memorandum of Conference with the President, October 7, 1960’, 3, Box 53 Staff
Notes (2) October 1960, DDE Diaries, Reel 27, RIAS.
28. Alessandro Iandolo, ‘Beyond the Shoe: Rethinking Khrushchev at the Fifteenth Session
of the United Nations General Assembly’, Diplomatic History, vol. 41, no. 1 (2017), 137.
29. ‘Minutes of the Cabinet Meeting, White House, Washington, October 7, 1960’, FRUS,
1958–1960, Volume II, United Nations and General International Matters, 404.
30. Drew Pearson, ‘American Sold Castro on Overture to U.S. Negroes’, Easton Express, 26
September 1960, in ‘Newspaper and Periodical Articles on Robert F. Williams, 1 Jan
1959 – 31 Dec 1960’, Robert F. Williams Papers; Department of State, outgoing telegram,
320/9-860, College Park.
31. Muehlenbeck, Betting on the Africans, 5; Eisenhower, Waging Peace, 581–2;
‘Memorandum of Conference with President Eisenhower, 23 September 1960’, Foreign
Relations of the United States, 1958–1960, Africa, Volume XIV, document 74.
32. Iandolo, ‘Beyond the Shoe’, 146; Harold Macmillan to Dwight Eisenhower, 9 December
1960 and 12 December 1960, in Presidential and Secretary of State Correspondence with
Foreign Heads of State, 1953–1964, College Park; telephone calls, Ike and Herter, 8
December 1960, 4.10 p.m. and 9 December, 10.50 a.m. and 5.25 p.m. in Christian A.
Herter Papers, Box 10, ‘Presidential Telephone Calls, 7/1960– 1/20/61’, DDE.
33. William Federici and Henry Lee, ‘Castro Is Leaving Us Today’, Daily News, 28
September 1960, 2; Thomas Buckley, ‘Hussein Finally Gets His Chance at a Rolls-Royce
Nkrumah Used’, NYT, 6 October 1960, 17.
34. Moore, Castro, the Blacks, and Africa, 83.
35. Antonio Núñez Jiménez, En Marcha con Fidel 1960 (Havana: Editorial de Ciencas
Sociales, 2003), 287.
36. Gaines, American Africans in Ghana, 42–3; Meriwether, Proudly We Can Be Africans,
172–6; Peter Kihss, ‘Harlem Hails Ghanaian Leader as Returning Hero’, NYT, 28 July
1958, 1, 4.
37. ‘Nkrumah Makes Visit to Harlem’, New York Amsterdam News, 8 October 1960, 1, 11.
38. Moore, Castro, the Blacks, and Africa, 83.
39. ‘Need to Check Current Trends Stressed’, The Times of India, 29 September 1960, 8;
‘Land Reform Topic and Castro-Nehru Talks’, FIEL network, 28 September 1960,
Foreign Broadcast Information Service, Daily Report, Foreign Radio Broadcasts, No.
189 (28 September 1960), g5.
40. Delhi to Commonwealth Relations Office, 14 October 1960, FO371/153638,
UN22912/141.
41. H. R. Vohra, ‘Dinner Diplomacy Proves a Success’, The Times of India, 29 September
1960, 1; Kennett Love, ‘Foes Meet Foes at Nehru’s Party’, NYT, 28 September 1960, 18.
For Khrushchev’s diet see, for instance, Dmitry Sukhodolsky, ‘The Kremlin Diet: From
 Lenin to Gorbachev’, 28 May 2014, Russia Beyond – at
https://www.rbth.com/arts/2014/05/28/the_kremlin_diet_from_lenin_to_gorbachev_3700
5.html.
42. Harold Macmillan, address before the UN General Assembly, 29 September 1960,
A/PV.877; D. R. Thorpe, Supermac: The Life of Harold Macmillan (London: Chatto &
Windus, 2010), 480.
43. Taubman, Khrushchev, 475–6. There is some debate on whether Khrushchev actually
banged his shoe on the desk: see William Taubman, ‘Did He Bang It? Nikita Khrushchev
and the Shoe’, NYT, 26 July 2003.

* Lumumba left Léopoldville on 27 November, in an effort to rally support in his

stronghold of Stanleyville, in the north-east of the country. He was captured by Mobutu’s
troops, with the active connivance of US and Belgian forces, on 1 December. After being
humiliated in public and beaten mercilessly while in custody, he was executed by firing
squad on 17 January 1961, in the presence of Tshombe, the Katangese leader. Lumumba’s
body was then dismembered before being dissolved in acid. To date, no one has been held
accountable for this heinous crime.
† Nkrumah had taken the title Osagyefo, which means ‘redeemer’ in the Akan language.
‡ Christian Herter later apologized to Nehru: the significance of the event had, he claimed,
not been made clear to him and, having already made dinner plans, he had ‘regretfully
declined your kind invitation’. But, he said, he ‘felt very badly about this
misunderstanding on my part and hope you will understand the circumstances’.
 CAPTION:

Before heading home, Fidel made time for one final press conference outside the Hotel Theresa.
Photograph by Bettman via Getty Images
 12

WEDNESDAY 28 SEPTEMBER

Castro, Go Home!
NEW YORK CITIZEN-CALL

After ten frenetic days in New York, it was finally time for Fidel to head
home. For the New York Daily News, the Cuban’s departure was a cause
for celebration: ‘Hurricane Fidel will roar homeward’, they exclaimed,
‘providing the rare but delightful meteorological spectacle of a big
Caribbean wind going in a reverse, southward direction.’1 But even
among those who had been sympathetic to Fidel, there was a feeling that
the Cuban premier now risked outstaying his welcome. ‘Castro, Go
Home!’ proclaimed the front page of the New York Citizen-Call. Under
pressure, it was said, from advertisers, the paper – which had earlier
commented favourably on the Cuban ‘invasion’ of Harlem – now argued
that Fidel had already ‘proven his point’. By the ‘simple act’ of moving
to Harlem, he had succeeded in shaping ‘a most powerful propaganda
image for the African nations, for all dark peoples of the world to see’
and had focused international attention on black Americans’ second-class
citizenship. But, the paper now declared, the continued presence of
Fidel’s face ‘bent forward from the window of the Theresa’ was ‘not
going to solve anything for us’.2 Standing outside his beloved hotel, Love
B. Woods told the press that his Cuban guests ‘didn’t give me any trouble
while they were here’. The party had paid in full and left their rooms in
‘very good condition’. But, pressed repeatedly on whether he would be
happy to ‘take Castro back’, Woods replied, ‘Voluntarily, no.
Compulsory, yes. This is the greatest country in the world,’ he explained,
and ‘I don’t agree with any guest, be he an American or foreigner who
will lambast my country.’3
Having welcomed Cyrus Eaton to the Theresa for a thirty-minute
meeting (the Cuban leader was, declared the industrialist, ‘a man with
great energy and ambition and devoted to helping his people’), Fidel
motored to the UAR mission, on Park Avenue, for a courtesy call on
President Nasser. Finally, at 1.40 p.m., the Cuban leader left the Theresa
for the last time (ever the businessman, Woods had threatened to charge
the Cubans for every hour that they stayed beyond the agreed 2 p.m.
checkout time). Declaring that he was ‘completely satisfied’ with his UN
performance, Fidel also thanked the NYPD for taking ‘such good
security measures’, a comment that left James B. Leggett, Chief of
Detectives, ‘visibly startled’. Then, waving to the crowds, he bade them
‘Good-bye and good luck’ and ‘buena cabeza’ (‘don’t do anything
stupid’). Seconds later, his twenty-car motorcade – transporting Fidel as
well as a large part of his delegation – was heading east, along 125th
Street and over the Triborough Bridge, bound for the Grand Central
Parkway, and then the Van Wyck Expressway that would take them to
New York’s international airport.4
Within hours of their departure, anti-Castro Cuban exiles had
swooped in, staging a ‘fiesta-like street “clean-up” for what they called
an unwelcome guest, complete with rhumba music and sweep-up
equipment’.5 But not everyone was pleased to see Fidel go. Although
some local store owners had suffered as a result of the heavy police
barricades and tight security, the nightly pro-Castro crowds had, it was
estimated, brought as much as half a million dollars in extra business to
Harlem.6 Julian Mayfield noted that ‘the Baby Grand and every nearby
bar did a thriving business, along with the pick-pockets and the sellers of
“liberated” goods (records, clothing, home appliances), and they all must
have shed a tear when Fidel finally went home.’7
On arriving at Idlewild Field, amid heavy security (some 300 police
officers and detectives were on hand), Fidel was escorted to Hangar 17,
where there was – naturally – time for one last press conference.
Americans were, he declared, ‘good people’ who were ‘not guilty’ of all
of the lies that were being told about his country and its revolution.
Similarly, US reporters were ‘wonderful’, though ‘not the bosses of the
papers, they belong to the monopoly’. Asked ‘if he wasn’t afraid of being
swallowed by the loveable Russian bear’, Fidel responded by claiming
that ‘never before have the Cuban people felt so free as now’. As for
whether he was a communist, the Maximum Leader declared, ‘I am the
same man, doing in Cuba what we promised to do in Cuba. This
revolution is the revolution of humble people and for humble people –
something like Lincoln said.’ Pressed again, he responded, ‘Wait for
history, history will tell who we are.’ In any case, he said, in his
trademark broken English, the Americans were confused: ‘When you are
nationalistic here they say you are Communistic […] You don’t know
what you call Communist. You call that of everyone.’8
In the end, the manner of Fidel’s departure – forced to fly home in an
Ilyushin Il-18, loaned by the Soviets, after his own plane had been
impounded by American creditors – was telling. Not only did it
encapsulate the chaotic and unpredictable nature of his stay in New York,
as the US authorities attempted to thwart him one final time, but it also
foreshadowed his country’s growing reliance on Moscow for economic
and military support.
The drama had unfolded shortly after 1 p.m. when, with fifteen
members of the Cuban delegation already on board the Cubana Airways
Bristol Britannia, Joseph Slavin, a Brooklyn attorney representing a US
owner of stock in the newly nationalized company, suddenly appeared in
Hangar 17. Holding a court order declaring that the aircraft was now the
property of receivers – and backed up by two security guards as well as
officers from the Port Authority Police Department – Slavin insisted that
the plane, which bore the inscription ‘Cuban Delegation to the UN’ as
well as the coat of arms of the Republic of Cuba, could not be moved. On
hearing the news, Raúl Roa, who was leading the UN delegation in
Fidel’s absence, raced to Idlewild to remonstrate in person. When warned
that ‘any person who boards [the plane] will be arrested’, he called their
bluff, and spent an hour inside the aircraft, before heading to a nearby
office to lobby the State Department for its release. In a classic case of
bureaucratic incompetence, local officials had impounded the Cuban
plane even though the State Department regarded it as a ‘public aircraft
immune from the jurisdiction of our courts’. Senior officials did
eventually intervene: Thomas C. Mann, Assistant Secretary of State for
Inter-American Affairs, issued a formal request that ‘the appropriate
United States attorney be instructed to suggest to the court hearing this
matter … that the Department of State recognizes the immunity of the
aircraft from the exercise of jurisdiction by the court’. But, with no judge
immediately on hand, the hearing at Brooklyn Supreme Court had to wait
until 8 a.m. the following day (whereupon the aeroplane was promptly
released). In the meantime, with the Soviet aircraft accommodating only
thirty-three passengers, thirty-one members of the Cuban delegation were
left stranded – several of them camped aboard the impounded jet,
wrapped in blankets to ward off the chilly night air; others, ‘tough
campaigners all, bivouacked in Cubana Airlines’ offices … sleeping on
benches’.9
This final drama of Fidel’s trip provided a striking illustration of the
deteriorating relationship between the United States and Cuba. But it also
offered the revolutionaries one further opportunity to attack their hosts:
the seizure of the plane, in violation of all accepted international norms,
was, they declared, ‘a new attempt by the American authorities to
provoke a serious incident’. A cartoon in Revolución, meanwhile,
showed the figure of Uncle Sam, wearing a bandit mask and with an
aeroplane tucked under his arm, running away from a Cuban, who was
shouting ‘STOP!’10

On board the replacement Soviet aeroplane were several purchases that

Fidel had made during his stay in New York. The idiosyncratic haul
included a new refrigerator, two cages of white mice and a ‘goodly
supply of new checked, striped, and plaid sports jackets’, as well as an oil
painting of the Cuban leader, carrying a naked woman on his shoulder
before hundreds of cheering admirers. The painting, entitled Castro and
the Victory of the People, had been presented to him by the artist, Sarah
Beach, a sixty-three-year-old Brooklyn dressmaker. His brand-new
Oldsmobile, though, would have to be shipped back to Havana later.11
As he boarded the aircraft, Fidel declared: ‘the Soviets are our friends.
Here you took our planes – the authorities robbed our planes. Soviets
gave us plane.’ The friendship was, it seemed, reciprocated. Interviewed
for Cuban radio, Nikita Khrushchev announced that ‘Not only today, but
throughout the course of your struggle for independence, we shall be
with you.’12 At 3.14 p.m., Fidel’s aircraft, piloted by its Russian captain,
Ivan Grouba, roared down the runway and soared into the clouds.

*
The opening session of the General Assembly did not, of course, come to
an end with Fidel’s departure. The following evening, for instance, in an
effort to kick-start talks between Washington and Moscow, Harold
Macmillan met with Khrushchev at the Soviet mission for almost two
hours. The British prime minister turned on the charm, praising
Khrushchev as a wise statesman and complimenting him on the quality of
his oratory, before turning to the vexed issues of disarmament and the
future of Berlin.13 Although the exchanges were perfectly friendly it was,
explained Macmillan, ‘evident to both of us that in view of all that had
happened no serious negotiation could take place during this late stage in
Eisenhower’s presidency’.14 A treaty banning the testing of nuclear
weapons in the atmosphere, under water and in outer space was
eventually concluded in the summer of 1963, but serious progress on
disarmament would have to wait until the 1970s.15 As for Berlin, the
crisis was resolved, in a manner of speaking, by the construction of the
Berlin Wall (or, as the GDR authorities had it, the ‘anti-fascist protection
rampart’) in August 1961, which left the city permanently divided until
the end of the Cold War, almost thirty years later.
Although he had threatened to stay until Christmas, Khrushchev
eventually left New York on 13 October. His ‘boorish’ behaviour in the
General Assembly appears to have played rather poorly among the new
African members, and his demand for Dag Hammarskjöld’s resignation
went unheeded. But Khrushchev had grounds to feel pleased,
nonetheless. His ‘barbs’ against Hammarskjöld ‘helped consolidate the
opinions of several neutralist leaders’ who came to believe that the UN
mission in the Congo had been afflicted by a pro-Western bias. And,
though he viewed Khrushchev’s idea of a ‘troika’ as ‘wholly
impractical’, Nehru did raise with Eisenhower the possibility of
appointing three Assistant Secretaries General, to help ‘deal with all the
African developments’, or undertaking some other reorganization to give
the Soviets ‘rather more apparent influence’ (the suggestion was politely
rebuffed). More broadly, the Soviet Union’s call for an immediate end to
colonialism helped inspire the tabling of Resolution 1514 by a number of
Afro-Asian nations.16 Declaring that ‘the subjection of peoples to alien
subjugation, domination and exploitation’ constituted a ‘denial of
fundamental human rights’, and proclaiming the right of ‘all peoples’ to
‘self-determination’, the resolution called for ‘immediate steps’ in ‘Trust
and Non-Self-Governing Territories or all other territories which have not
yet attained independence, to transfer all powers to the peoples of those
territories, without any conditions or reservations, in accordance with
their freely expressed will and desire, without any distinction as to race,
creed or colour, in order to enable them to enjoy complete independence
and freedom.’17 Passed in mid-December (in a vote in which France, the
United Kingdom and the United States were prominent abstainers), the
resolution was, according to the historian Mark Mazower, ‘the most
powerful call yet from the UN against a continuation of European
empires’.18 And, of course, Khrushchev had worked hard, both in public
and in private, to cement the alliance with a man whom, on his return to
Moscow, he lauded as ‘the heroic son of the Cuban people’ – Fidel
Castro.19

At Rancho-Boyeros airport, thousands of ordinary Cubans – as well as

senior government officials and the Soviet and Czechoslovakian
ambassadors – had gathered to welcome Fidel home. Revolución
described how a giant banner, declaring ‘Fidel, we feel proud of you’,
had been hoisted from the airport terrace by the Federation of Cuban
Women, and ‘hundreds of multi-coloured parasols, caps, [and] banners
glittered in the blue, pink, mauve twilight’. In sentimental mode, they
declared that ‘it was as if Mother Nature had also done her bit in the
people’s homage to the leader who was returning, triumphant, once
more’. Suddenly, the cry went up, ‘Fidel has arrived’, and ‘hundreds of
men and women rushed to the airport’s runway, and thousands of
tricolour flags fluttered, on which a star shone, a single star, pure and
solitary’. At 6.46 p.m., Fidel ‘emerged from the plane door, smiling’, his
military cap flapping ‘in the darkness of the twilight, which was already
drifting away’, to be greeted by a rapturous ovation. After the playing of
the national anthem and the 26 July Movement song, the Maximum
Leader descended the aircraft steps and was met by President Osvaldo
Dorticós, Che Guevara and Raúl Castro, who ceremonially presented him
with his pistol and ammunition belt. After ‘warm hand-shakes and
embraces’ – and, we are told, ‘a knot in the throat of the humble women
and men’ who were there to witness these scenes – it was time to head
into Havana.20
A convoy of several hundred cars, with Fidel standing in an open-top
jeep, now made its way along streets ‘lined with militia, well-wishers and
the curious’, to the Presidential Palace, where people had been gathering
since the early evening. The scenes along the highway were, Revolución
gushed, evidence of ‘the most enthusiastic demonstrations of affection,
the most emotional proof of the faith and confidence of his people’. The
‘flowers thrown from the hands of Cuban women, the chanting of
revolutionary slogans, handshakes from men of the people’ and the
raucous cheers all served to show Fidel that ‘his people had understood
precisely the significance of his speech to the UN, and what it will mean
in the future of the world’. The American ambassador, Philip Bonsal, his
wife, Margaret, and several guests were settling down to watch the live
television feed, following dinner in the embassy residence (in retaliation
for the security measures in New York, Bonsal had been restricted to the
Vedado district, site of his residence and the US embassy, for the duration
of Fidel’s trip). He reported that, while the crowds in the public square
waited for Fidel to appear, their enthusiasm ‘was maintained with
chanting of slogans, singing and presentation of dignitaries’. He was also
struck by how ‘the militia were a dominating component’ at the rally. At
8.30 p.m., the crew of the Soviet aircraft that had carried Fidel back to
Cuba were presented; five minutes later, Fidel himself appeared on the
balcony of the palace – prompting wild cheers, and the singing of both
the Cuban national anthem and that of the 26 July Movement.21
Just before 9 p.m., Violeta Casals – the revolutionary and radio
announcer (she had, famously, broadcast for Radio Rebelde from the
Sierra Maestra) – introduced Osvaldo Dorticós. The Cuban president
declared that, in New York, Fidel had spoken ‘not only for Cuba but also
for the peoples of Latin America and all underdeveloped areas of the
world’. His speech before the General Assembly had, he said, won the
‘respect, admiration and support’ of the world. To applause, Dorticós
proclaimed that ‘today, today we all have, over anything else, nurtured in
our chests an uncontainable feeling that swells inside of us. It is the
powerful and legitimate feeling of our patriotic pride, and of having seen
raised on the highest flag-pole, just a few hours ago, our flag, placed
there by Fidel.’ Speaking in the name of the people of Cuba, Latin
America and all the underdeveloped nations, Dorticós declared, simply,
‘Gracias, Fidel!’22
Fidel, who according to some reports appeared rather ‘more tense and
nervous’ than normal, took to the stage at 9.05 p.m., to a thunderous
ovation that lasted some ten minutes. According to the UPI news agency
the crowds, who were waving banners proclaiming ‘Viva Russia’ and
‘Down with the Yankees’, now numbered around 150,000. The start of
Fidel’s speech was marred by a technical glitch (the microphones did not
work), prompting the Cuban premier to quip that they had been
sabotaged by the imperialists.23 But, soon, he was into his stride.
His recent experience ‘inside the empire’ had, he explained, only
increased his pride at what they were building in Cuba – ‘we are no
longer a colony’ but ‘a nation, truly sovereign and free’. Fidel attacked
the ‘cold and hostile’ United States – a so-called ‘super-free … super-
democratic … and super-civilized country’ – as a place where ‘the
nightstick’ and ‘the truncheon’ were ‘an institution of terror’. He paid
special tribute to Harlem, noting that ‘from the time our delegation began
travelling through Harlem, from the instant a Negro saw us, he began to
wave to us in greeting’. There were warm words, too, for the members of
the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, who ‘have had the courage to express
publicly their sympathy for the Cuban Revolution’.24
As Fidel lauded the ‘honor and hospitality and generous conduct and
decency among the humble Negroes’, the sound of a small explosion
rang out – a firecracker, or perhaps a bomb (there had been a series of
clashes with anti-Castro forces over the previous few weeks). Cries of
‘Paredón!’ (‘To the wall!’) broke out, and Casals led the crowds in a
chant of ‘Cuba Sí, Yanqui No!’ Resuming his speech after a brief pause
during which music was played to quieten the crowd, Fidel exclaimed,
‘We all know who is responsible for that little bomb! Imperialism!’ He
counselled, ‘Let us be calm. But how naïve. When 500 lb bombs made in
USA, napalm bombs, rockets and cannons could not defeat us in Sierra
Maestra, how do they think throwing little bombs like this will deter us.
These are mistakes of imperialism and cowardice.’ Fidel was defiant.
‘For every bomb’, he declared, ‘we shall build five hundred houses,
construct three rural cooperatives, nationalize one Yankee property,
refine hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil, convert a barracks into a
school, arm and equip at least a thousand militiamen.’25
 Fired up, the Maximum Leader declared that Cuba now found itself
‘on the frontline’ in the battle against ‘Yankee imperialism’ (a
‘barbarous’, aggressive force, led by ‘men with fangs’). But, he
continued, they would ‘defend ourselves with the fierceness of slaves
who have rebelled’. This was a battle not only for the liberation of Cuba
but for ‘all the other exploited nations of the world’, and the Cuban
people needed to ‘redouble their efforts’ and ‘be aware of the great role
we are playing in the world’.26
Rallying the crowds after a second small explosion was heard, Fidel
finished by expressing ‘thanks for the two little bombs’, which had:
demonstrated the mettle of our people, the courage of our people [Applause] for not a
single woman budged from her place [Applause] not a single man budged [Applause] nor
will anyone budge from his post in face of any danger, any attack. We are soldiers of the
country. We do not belong to ourselves: We belong to our country. [Applause] It does not
matter if any one of us falls; what matters is that this flag shall remain high, the Idea shall
go forward, our country shall live. [Applause].27

Later that evening, Fidel made an impromptu appearance on a

television talk show, where, among other things, he derided Richard
Nixon and his Democratic opponent, John F. Kennedy, as ‘young,
beardless men. They are ignorant, illiterate, and cowards’ who ‘look like
toys of the great vested interests’. Cuba might not, Fidel conceded, have
‘swallowed the shark [the USA] in the United Nations’, but, he declared,
‘we certainly gave him a good bite.’28

Reporting back to Washington, Philip Bonsal acknowledged that, even

allowing for its staged nature, the reception and rally at the Presidential
Palace had clearly demonstrated the depth of Castro’s popularity among
the lower classes. And, although the speech had, in many ways, been ‘in
much the same vein as previous demagogic harangues’, the ambassador
drew attention to two aspects: Fidel’s ‘new bitterness against the United
States, stemming from his experience with the security measures taken in
New York, and his treatment at the hands of the United States press’, and
‘a deeper intoxication with the illusion that the Cuban Revolution is a
great historic event with world-wide implications arising, no doubt, from
the attention paid him by world figures at the UN and his four and a half
hour speech at the General Assembly.’29 Britain’s ‘man in Havana’, Sir
Herbert Marchant (a former Bletchley Park codebreaker), agreed: ‘in his
reference to the role of the Cuban revolution in the world’, he explained,
ominously, Castro ‘was more megalomaniac than ever’.30

Notes
1. Federici and Lee, ‘Castro Is Leaving Us Today’, New York Daily News, 28 September
1960, 2.
2. ‘Castro, Go Home!’, New York Citizen-Call, 1 October 1960, 14, 19; Julian Mayfield,
‘Chapter Ten: To Monroe and Back’, 207, in Julian Mayfield Papers, Box 15, Folder 9,
Schomburg.
3. William Federich, ‘“Castro Was Here” – Theresa Ain’t The Same’, New York Daily
News, 29 September 1960, 6; ‘Theresa Hotel Owner Doesn’t Want Castro Back’,
Associated Negro Press, 10 October 1960, Claude Barnett Papers.
4. ‘Harlem Hotel Doesn’t Want Fidel Castro Back’, Chicago Daily Defender, 29 September
1960, 2; Gerald Kessler and Henry Lee, ‘Cuban Plane Seized, Reds Fly Fidel Home’,
New York Daily News, 29 September 1960, 3, 6; Max Frankel, ‘Castro Flies Home With
Praise for Khrushchev and U.S. People’, NYT, 29 September 1960, 15.
5. ‘Harlem Hotel Doesn’t Want Fidel Castro Back’, Chicago Daily Defender, 29 September
1960, 2.
6. James Booker, ‘Castro Leaves an Unruffled Harlem’, New York Amsterdam News, 1
October 1960, 1, 35.
7. Mayfield, ‘Chapter Ten: To Monroe and Back’, 207.
8. Kessler and Lee, ‘Cuban Plane Seized, Reds Fly Fidel Home’, New York Daily News, 29
September 1960, 3, 6; Frankel, ‘Castro Flies Home With Praise for Khrushchev and U.S.
People’, NYT, 29 September 1960, 15.
9. ‘Cold Comfort for Castro Strandee’, New York Daily News, 29 September 1960, 1;
Kessler and Lee, ‘Cuban Plane Seized, Reds Fly Fidel Home’, New York Daily News, 29
September 1960, 3; Frankel, ‘Castro Flies Home With Praise for Khrushchev and U.S.
People’, NYT, 29 September 1960, 15; Thomas C. Mann to George Cochran Doub
(Assistant Attorney General, Department of Justice), 28 September 1960, Bureau of Inter-
American Affairs, Office of the Coordinator of Cuban Affairs, Subject Files, 1960–1963,
Box 4, College Park; ‘Cubana Plane Released’, NYT, 30 September 1960, 8.
10. ‘The US Whimsically Interprets Diplomatic Immunity’ (‘Caprichosamente Interpreta
E.U. la Inmunidad Diplomática’) and cartoon, Revolución, 29 September 1960, 3; Kessler
and Lee, ‘Cuban Plane Seized, Reds Fly Fidel Home’, New York Daily News, 29
September 1960, 3; ‘Cubana Plane Released’, NYT, 30 September 1960, 8.
11. Frankel, ‘Castro Flies Home With Praise for Khrushchev and U.S. People’, NYT, 29
September 1960, 15; ‘Theresa Hotel Owner Doesn’t Want Castro Back’, Associated
Negro Press, 10 October 1960, Claude Barnett Papers; Quirk, Fidel Castro, 343.
12. Frankel, ‘Castro Flies Home With Praise for Khrushchev and U.S. People’, NYT, 29
September 1960, 15; Quirk, Fidel Castro, 343.
13. ‘Record of Conversation Between the Prime Minister and Mr. Khrushchev on September
29, 1960, in the Building of the Soviet Mission to the United Nations’, in Executive
 Secretariat Conference Files, 1949–1963, CF1767-1773, College Park.
14. Macmillan, Pointing the Way, 280.
15. https://www.state.gov/t/isn/5191.htm.
16. Sir Patrick Dean, ‘Reflections on Mr. Khrushchev’s attendance at 15th General
Assembly’, UN22912/153, 12 November 1960, FO371/153638; Iandolo, ‘Beyond the
Shoe’, 128–54 (Nehru quoted on p. 140). See also ‘Memorandum of a Conversation,
Waldorf Towers, New York, September 26, 1960, 3 PM’, FRUS, 1958–1960, Volume II,
359.
17. ‘Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples’,
Adopted by General Assembly resolution 1514 (XV) of 14 December 1960,
https://www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=A/RES/1514(XV). On Resolution
1514 see also Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire, 90–2, 100–6.
18. Mazower quoted in Iandolo, ‘Beyond the Shoe’, 148.
19. ‘Speech on Return to Moscow’, 20 October 1960, in Khrushchev in New York, 244.
20. ‘Fidel, Glorious Guide of Cuba’ (‘Fidel, Glorioso Guía de Cuba’) and photo caption (top
right), Revolución, 29 September 1960, 4; ‘Thousands Welcome Fidel’ (‘Millares Dieron
la Bienvenida a Fidel’), Revolución, 3 October, 14.
21. ‘Fidel’s Delirious Reception – Each Cuban is Worth More Than a Thousand Imperialists’
(‘Delirante Recibimiento a Fidel – Cada Cubano Vale Mas Que Mil Imperialistas’),
Revolución, 29 September 1960, 4; ‘Speech of Fidel Castro on his return to Cuba’, 29
September 1960, FO371/148183, AK1015/73; 737.00(W)/10-360 – despatch 3 October
1960 – Joint WEEKA No. 39, Confidential State Department Files, Decimal 737, reel 23;
Bonsal to State, 28 September (telegram 1518), Confidential State Department Files,
Decimal 737, reel 23; Interview with G. Harvey Summ, Frontline Diplomacy, RIAS. On
Bonsal’s confinement see Revolución, 17 September 1960. For a discussion of the
importance of mass rallies in establishing, sustaining and displaying the popularity, and
the authority, of the revolutionary government – as well as their highly organized
qualities, see Guerra, Visions of Power in Cuba, 37–8 and 75–6.
22. Bonsal to State, 28 September (telegram 1518), Confidential State Department Files,
Decimal 737, reel 23; Dorticós speech in Revolución, 29 September 1960, 4.
23. ‘Speech of Fidel Castro on his return to Cuba’, 29 September 1960, FO371/148183,
AK1015/73; Bonsal to State, 28 September (telegrams 1518 and 1519), Confidential State
Department Files, Decimal 737, reel 23; ‘150,000 Greet Castro’, NYT, 29 September
1960, 15.
24. ‘Castro Again Warns U.S. on Guantánamo’, Havana, FIEL Network, in Spanish to Cuba,
29 September 1960, Foreign Broadcast Information Service, Daily Report, Foreign Radio
Broadcasts, No. 190 (29 September 1960), g2–g3; ‘150,000 Greet Castro’, NYT, 29
September 1960, 15.
25. Bonsal to State, 28 September 1960, Telegram 1521, 737/13/9-2860, Confidential State
Department Files, Decimal 737, reel 23; ‘Castro Again Warns U.S. on Guantánamo’, g5;
Quirk, Fidel Castro, 344–5.
26. ‘Castro Again Warns U.S. on Guantánamo’, g6–g7.
27. ‘Castro Again Warns U.S. on Guantánamo’, g11.
28. ‘Castro Speaks on “Meet the Press” Program’, Havana, CMP Television Network, 30
September 1960, Foreign Broadcast Information Service, Daily Report, Foreign Radio
Broadcasts, No. 191 (30 September 1960), g1.
29. 737.00(W)/10-360 – despatch 3 October 1960 – Joint WEEKA No. 39, Confidential
State Department Files, Decimal 737, reel 23.
30. ‘Speech of Fidel Castro on his return to Cuba’, 29 September 1960, FO371/148183,
AK1015/73.
 13

‘¡VIVA LA REVOLUCIÓN!’

Dr. Castro … and the senior members of his government … act and speak like men
confident that they have a future – and I do not think that they are whistling in the dark.
BRITISH AMBASSADOR, HAVANA, 12 OCTOBER 1960

We cannot have the present government there go on.

PRESIDENT EISENHOWER TO PRESIDENT-ELECT KENNEDY, 19 JANUARY 1961

Two weeks after Fidel’s departure, another famous politician with bags of
charisma and a winning smile headed to the Hotel Theresa, eager to win
over the locals. Towards the end of a hectic day of campaigning in New
York, John F. Kennedy – the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee –
addressed an enthusiastic crowd of more than 5,000 African Americans
on the boulevard outside the hotel. Standing close to the spot where Fidel
and Khrushchev had shared their historic embrace, the Junior Senator
from Massachusetts declared, to loud applause, that he was ‘happy to
come to this hotel’ and ‘delighted to come to Harlem’. ‘I think the whole
world should come here’, Kennedy explained, ‘the whole world should
recognize that we all live right next to each other, whether here in Harlem
or on the other side of the globe.’
Turning directly to recent events, Kennedy claimed that ‘behind the
fact of Castro coming to this hotel, Khrushchev coming to Castro, there
is another great traveler in the world, and that is the travel of a world
revolution, a world in turmoil’. He continued:
We should not fear the twentieth century, for this worldwide revolution which we see all
around us is part of the original American Revolution. When the Indonesians revolted
after the end of World War II, they scrawled on the walls, ‘Give me liberty or give me
death.’ They scrawled on the walls ‘All men are created equal.’ Not Russian slogans but
American slogans.

‘There are’, Kennedy claimed, ‘children in Africa called George

Washington. There are children in Africa called Thomas Jefferson. There
are none called Lenin or Trotsky or Stalin in the Congo, or,’ he quipped,
‘Nixon.’
This last remark – a dig at his Republican opponent – drew laughter.
But Kennedy had a serious message. If America was to seize back the
initiative in the Cold War, she had to live up to the ideals embodied in the
Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. ‘We have to prove that
we mean it,’ he declared, ‘not last year, not 10 years ago … but today,
1960, the years after …’ By moving forward ‘until the United States
achieves this great goal of practicing what it preaches’ and ‘associat[ing]
ourselves with the great fight for equality’, Americans, Kennedy argued,
would be able to demonstrate before the world that they truly believed in
freedom and independence, fire the imagination of the peoples of the
newly independent nations of Africa and Asia, and show that it was the
United States, rather than Nikita Khrushchev’s Soviet Union – or, for that
matter, Fidel Castro’s Cuba – that truly embodied a ‘great revolutionary’
tradition.1
Kennedy was far from unsympathetic when it came to Third World
nationalism. In July 1957, during a speech on the Algerian crisis, he had
proclaimed that ‘the most powerful single force in the world today’ was
‘man’s eternal desire to be free and independent’. If the United States
wished to ‘secure the friendship of the Arab, the African, and the Asian’,
Kennedy explained, then it could not rely solely on ‘billion-dollar foreign
aid programs’, military alliances and warnings about the ‘perils of
communism’. ‘No’, he declared, ‘the strength of our appeal to these key
populations – and it is rightfully our appeal, and not that of the
Communists – lies in our traditional and deeply felt philosophy of
freedom and independence for all peoples everywhere.’2 The following
year, as chairman of the African Affairs Subcommittee of the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee, Kennedy – motivated both by idealism
and a fear of ceding the initiative to the Soviet Union – repeatedly urged
the Eisenhower administration to work constructively with anticolonial
nationalists. The idea that ‘it is no longer necessary to remain in
bondage’ was, he noted, ‘spreading like wildfire in nearly a thousand
dialects and languages’ right across the African continent, and it was
high time for the United States to give its support to those who sought
freedom from the old colonial powers.3 He also warned against the
illusion that ‘the voice of Moscow’ was, inevitably, behind every anti-
American voice in Latin America.4 When it came to Cuba, Kennedy had
acknowledged both the strength and the legitimacy of anti-Batista
feeling: the United States, he observed, had too often given the
impression that it had been more ‘interested in the money we took out of
Cuba than … in seeing Cuba raise its standard of living for its people’.5
When Fidel took power in January 1959, JFK advocated patience. But, as
the Cuban government moved to nationalize property, postponed
elections and bore down on opponents and the free press, he soon came
to talk of a revolution that had been betrayed.6
While he had been appalled by Castro’s antics in New York in
September 1960, Kennedy had sensed an opportunity to gain an
advantage against his Republican opponent, Richard Nixon. On 15
September, just days before Castro’s arrival in New York, he had noted
acerbically that ‘in 1952 the Republicans ran on a program of rolling
back the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe. Today the Iron Curtain is 90
miles off the coast of the United States.’7 Now, with some senior party
activists urging that he ‘blast away on the administration’s record here in
the western hemisphere’, he decided to raise the stakes even further.8
On 20 October, the eve of the fourth – and final – presidential debate,
the Kennedy campaign trashed the Eisenhower administration’s record
on Cuba as an ‘incredible history of blunder, inaction, retreat and failure’.
JFK also declared that the incoming administration should ‘strengthen
the non-Batista democratic anti-Castro forces in exile, and in Cuba itself,
who offer eventual hope of overthrowing Castro’. ‘Thus far’, Kennedy
noted, ‘these fighters for freedom have had virtually no support from our
Government.’9
The statement (which JFK’s speech-writer Richard Goodwin later
claimed was the only campaign statement that Kennedy had not seen
prior to its release) bordered on the reckless: the Washington Post
accused Kennedy of ‘shooting from the hip’, while a British Foreign
Office official noted, with characteristic understatement, that JFK had
‘stuck his neck remarkably far out, even if one makes allowances for the
customary gap between pre-election expressions of intent and post-
victory actions’.10 Nixon, meanwhile, was incandescent. ‘For the first
and only time in the campaign’, he explained, ‘I got mad at Kennedy –
personally.’ And ‘my rage was greater because I could do nothing about
it.’ Nixon knew – or, at least, very strongly suspected – that Kennedy had
been briefed by Allen Dulles on the Eisenhower administration’s covert
programme against Cuba. He therefore viewed Kennedy’s statement as
‘jeopardizing the security of a United States foreign policy operation’.
Nixon, though, could hardly now come out in support of the policy (let
alone explain that such a course of action was already being pursued);
even hinting that Washington might be prepared to support rebel forces
inside, and outside, of Cuba risked exposing the operation. The vice
president decided, then, to ‘go to the other extreme’: Kennedy’s
proposals were, he declared publicly, ‘probably the most dangerously
irresponsible recommendations that he’s made during the course of this
campaign’. Were the United States to follow this course of action, Nixon
explained, ‘we would lose all our friends in Latin America’ and provide
Khrushchev with ‘an open invitation’ to come into the region.11
On 8 November, Kennedy won the White House in one of the closest
elections in American history, defeating Nixon by just 49.72 to 49.55 per
cent in the popular vote, and with narrow wins in Illinois, New Jersey
and Texas proving decisive when it came to the electoral college (which
he took by 303 to 219). He had been helped over the winning line by a
late surge in African American support. Along with his high-profile
pledge to outlaw discrimination in federally subsidized housing, and his
rhetorical support for African independence, Kennedy’s appeal among
black voters owed much to his deft response to the arrest of Martin
Luther King, Jr, during an Atlanta sit-in at the end of October. While
Nixon, who in fact had a fairly strong civil rights record, dithered,
Kennedy telephoned King’s pregnant wife, Coretta, to offer his support,
while his brother and campaign manager Robert worked behind the
scenes to secure King’s release.12
The charm, sophistication, idealism and energy that – on the surface at
least – characterized Kennedy’s short presidency would help to make
him, like Fidel, an icon of the 1960s.13 And, like Castro, JFK would
inspire (if only briefly) a generation of student activists. In his speech
outside the Hotel Theresa, Kennedy had offered assurances that the
United States sought to ‘hold out our hand in friendship’ and be a ‘good
neighbor to Latin America’.14 But, when it came to Cuba, the die had
already been cast.
 *

In the weeks following Fidel’s sojourn in Harlem, the CIA’s ‘Program of

Covert Action Against the Castro Regime’, which Eisenhower had
approved back in March, underwent a dramatic metamorphosis. As
Richard M. Bissell, Jr, the Agency’s Deputy Director for Plans,
explained, the early efforts to establish an effective guerrilla force in
Cuba had failed – undermined by Fidel’s increasingly sophisticated
intelligence operation and his militia’s effectiveness in rooting out and
destroying local resistance groups. Meanwhile, hopes of marshalling the
opposition forces in Miami into a ‘unified, cooperative coalition’ had
foundered amid factional rivalry, ideological conflict and competing
egos. Faced with these problems, the emphasis now shifted instead onto
the invasion force that was being assembled and trained in Guatemala.
Troubled by Fidel’s tightening grip on Cuba, his growing closeness to the
Soviet Union and his enthusiasm for exporting revolution, Eisenhower
pushed the CIA to move more forcefully, telling Bissell and Dulles,
‘Boys, if you don’t intend to go through with this, let’s stop talking about
it.’ At the end of November, during a top-secret meeting at the White
House, the president asked his senior advisers, ‘Are we being sufficiently
imaginative and bold, subject to not letting our hand appear?’ ‘We
should’, he said, ‘be prepared to take more chances.’ Soon, Bissell was
talking of an invasion force that would number not a few hundred, but
1,500.15
When JFK assumed the presidency, on 20 January 1961, he inherited
a burgeoning crisis over Cuba. Three months earlier, in response to the
nationalization of oil refineries, the US had placed a trade embargo on
exports to the island (food and medicine were exempt). Then, on 3
January, after Fidel ordered Washington to cut its embassy staff to just
eleven, the US had severed diplomatic relations with Havana. Cuba had
been at the top of the agenda when Kennedy met with Eisenhower on 6
December for an informal one-on-one to discuss the presidential
transition. They met for a second time, on the morning of 19 January, for
talks that lasted almost three hours. When JFK asked whether the United
States should ‘support guerrilla operations in Cuba’, Ike replied yes, ‘to
the utmost’, emphasizing that it would soon fall to Kennedy to ‘do
whatever is necessary’. ‘We cannot’, Eisenhower declared, ‘have the
present government there go on.’16
Early on the morning of 17 April 1961 a brigade of 1,400 Cuban
exiles landed at the Bahía de Cochinos (Bay of Pigs), on Cuba’s southern
shore. Less than forty-eight hours before, eight American B-52 bombers,
painted in Cuban colours and piloted by CIA-trained Cubans, had carried
out a preliminary (and ineffective) air strike on Cuban air bases. (A
second strike was cancelled when journalists started to ask awkward
questions about the real identity of the B-52s.) Throughout the final
planning for what would become ‘Operation Bumpy Road’, President
Kennedy had been insistent that there could be no overt American
support. Dulles had believed that, in the end, ‘any request required for
success would be authorized’ if the alternative was to ‘permit the
enterprise to fail’. He was wrong. Despite coming under intense pressure
from both the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff to authorize air or naval
support, Kennedy remained firm, declaring, ‘I don’t want the United
States involved in this.’ In the event, the invasion – which was intended
to establish a beach-head, spark a popular uprising and lead to the
installation of an alternative government – was a disaster. With its ships
picked off by the Cuban Air Force and the rebel forces soon surrounded
by 20,000 heavily armed Cuban soldiers, artillery and Soviet-built T-34
tanks (under the personal command of Fidel Castro), the invading army,
despite putting up stout resistance, was routed. By the evening of 19
April, it was all over: 140 exiles were killed and almost 1,200 captured.
As for the hoped-for popular uprising, it never stood a chance, killed off
by a combination of genuine support for Fidel, poor coordination with
opposition groups on the island, and the Cuban government’s quick
decision to round up as many as 100,000 known or suspected dissidents,
just in case.17
Although Fidel revelled in his victory it soon became clear that, far
from being chastened by the defeat, JFK remained determined to do
away with his regime. Convinced that ‘there can be no long-term living
with Castro as a neighbor’, the Kennedy administration launched what
one historian has characterized as ‘a multi-track program of covert,
economic, diplomatic, and propagandistic elements’.18 The economic
blockade was tightened; the CIA built a large facility in Miami for the
recruitment and training of Cuban exiles and launched ‘Operation
Mongoose’, with its myriad hit-and-run raids, sabotage operations and
ever more outrageous plots to assassinate Fidel; and the president
warned, gravely, that ‘our restraint is not inexhaustible.’19 Fearing an
American invasion, it is little wonder that the government in Havana
turned to the Soviet Union for additional military assistance. And
Khrushchev proved all too willing to provide it. In the spring of 1962, the
Soviet leader decided to send thirty-six medium-range rockets, armed
with nuclear warheads with a destructive power of 200–700 kilotons (ten
to thirty-five times the power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima), and
twenty-four intermediate-range ballistic missiles, with warheads of 200–
800 kilotons, together with launchers, mobile support bases, IL-28
bombers, tanks, helicopters and around 40,000 Soviet military personnel,
to Cuba. It was an extraordinarily reckless decision, which Khrushchev
later claimed had been intended to ‘restrain the United States from
precipitous military action against Castro’s government’. (He understood
that, even if Washington knocked out most of the missiles, ‘we could still
hit New York, and there wouldn’t be much of New York left.’) The move
would also, Khrushchev hoped, strengthen the Soviet Union’s wider
strategic position in the Cold War, and demonstrate – to the Chinese in
particular – that Moscow had not ‘gone soft’ when it came to supporting
communists in the Global South.20 In the event, of course, the discovery
of medium-range ballistic missiles by a U-2 overflight, on 14 October
1962, sparked a crisis that took the world to the very brink of nuclear
annihilation.21
If the public embrace outside the Hotel Theresa, in September 1960,
signalled the start of the Cuban honeymoon with the Soviet Union, then
the missiles of October – which did so much to crystallize wider public
fears about the threat of nuclear war – marked the moment it turned sour.
Fidel was livid with the Soviets not only for failing to consult with him
throughout the thirteen-day standoff, but for keeping Havana in the dark
when it came to the major decisions. At the height of the crisis, the
Cuban leader had written to Khrushchev stating that if, as he feared, the
Americans invaded, Moscow should under no circumstances allow the
imperialists to launch the first strike. No matter how ‘harsh and terrible’ a
solution this might be, Fidel insisted that there was no other option.
Khrushchev – who was shocked by what he read as a call to launch an
immediate first strike against the United States – eventually agreed to
withdraw the missiles in exchange for a public pledge by the Americans
not to invade Cuba, and a private undertaking that the US would remove
its own Jupiter missiles from Turkey.22
Fidel, who did not learn about this second concession until the spring
of 1963, was further incensed when, under pressure from Washington, at
the end of November 1962, Moscow agreed to withdraw its Ilyushin Il-
28 bombers from Cuba, too. Berating Khrushchev in private as a ‘son of
a bitch … bastard … asshole’, a ‘maricón’ (a ‘fag’) who lacked cojones,
Fidel ensured that Anastas Mikoyan, who had been despatched to Havana
to soothe relations, received a frosty welcome.23 As Fidel later put it, ‘we
were irritated for a long time […] This incident, in a certain way,
damaged the existing relations between Cubans and Soviets for a number
of years.’24
For a time, the streets of Havana buzzed with rumours that ‘Fidel’s
head is with Moscow but his heart is with Beijing’. But although China’s
enthusiasm for guerrilla warfare and the ‘export’ of revolution offered
ideological sustenance, the Soviet Union’s continued willingness to act as
a powerful industrial and economic patron won out. Fidel travelled to the
Soviet Union, at Khrushchev’s invitation, in the spring of 1963, spending
more than a month ‘roaming from far northern Murmansk to Central
Asia’. There was an official welcome in Red Square, a mammoth rally in
a sports stadium (where Fidel was presented with the Gold Star of Lenin
and the medal of Hero of the Soviet Union), endless banquets and
receptions, a wild boar hunt, and new promises of economic and military
assistance.25
While the tour was a triumph, the Cuban–Soviet romance had
definitely cooled. In the USSR, the official excitement surrounding Cuba
waned, and – as the historian Anne E. Gorsuch has pointed out – the
language of ‘passionate enthusiasm was downgraded to the cooler, safer,
and more familiar relationship of “friendship”’. As for Cuba, US
intelligence experts noted that Fidel had ‘no intention of subordinating
himself to Soviet discipline and direction’; in March 1965, the Cuban
leader declared, ‘We’re no one’s satellite and never will be.’ Throughout
the 1960s, in fact, Fidel was willing to challenge Moscow publicly: he
rejected the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, attacked the USSR for trading
with Latin American countries that opposed his regime, and criticized
Moscow’s stinginess when it came to aid for Third World countries and
support for liberation movements. Moscow, for its part, viewed Havana’s
adventurism in Latin America as a serious irritant when it came to its
own relations with Washington, and other governments in the
hemisphere.26 Despite the public criticisms, disagreements over policy
and higher-than-anticipated economic costs, Moscow’s support for Cuba
nevertheless held firm. After all, the cost of breaking with this beacon of
socialism in the New World would have been too high, delivering a
grievous blow to the Soviet Union’s international standing and
reputation.27

Assessing the significance of Fidel’s trip to the United Nations at the end
of September 1960, Ambassador Philip Bonsal noted the Cuban
premier’s ‘conviction that Cuban revolution is [a] historic example and
he [a] historic leader of peoples not only of L[atin] A[merica] but of all
underdeveloped countries toward their liberation’. Fidel’s recent
experiences at the UN General Assembly had, Bonsal declared,
‘undoubtedly strengthened that conviction, and whetted his appetite to
indulge in world politics’.28
It was an astute observation. Fidel had returned from New York with
his reputation as a hero for the oppressed peoples of the world
strengthened immeasurably.29 In the coming years, Havana would host a
series of international conferences, designed, as one historian has put it
(referring to the 1955 conference of the Afro-Asian bloc), to position
Cuba ‘as the torch bearer of the post-Bandung world’. Perhaps the most
famous of these gatherings was the First Solidarity Conference of the
Peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America, more commonly known as
the Tricontinental Conference. Convened in January 1966, it saw almost
500 delegates representing some eighty nations, including Salvador
Allende (Chile), Amílcar Cabral (Guinea–Bissau), Carlos Marighella
(Brazil), Nguyen Van Tien (of South Vietnam’s NLF) and the French
philosopher-cum-guerrilla fighter Régis Debray, gather in the Cuban
capital to coordinate support for national liberation struggles, advance the
cause of Third World solidarity, affirm ‘the right of the peoples to meet
imperialist violence with revolutionary violence’, and denounce US
imperialism (which, it was claimed, underpinned a ‘worldwide system of
exploitation’).30
In the decade that followed Fidel’s trip to New York, Havana –
motivated by both self-interest (if ‘all of Latin America is in flames’,
Fidel declared, then the United States would ‘not be able to hurt us’) and
a genuine sense of revolutionary mission and anti-imperialist sentiment –
offered both ideological and practical support to a host of liberation
movements across Latin America and Africa. It provided ‘political
indoctrination’ and ‘guerrilla warfare training’ to at least 2,000 Latin
Americans between 1961 and 1964; encouraged leftist revolution in
Bolivia, Colombia, Guatemala, Venezuela and elsewhere; funnelled
weapons to the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) in Algeria; sent
soldiers to support rebels in Zaire (formerly Congo-Léopoldville) and
military instructors to Angola and Guinea–Bissau; and despatched a
column of troops to the Republic of the Congo (Congo-Brazzaville) to
support the leftist government of Alphonse Massamba-Débat. 31
Cuba enjoyed some success; for instance, Fidel’s soldiers thwarted the
1966 coup in Congo-Brazzaville, and Cuban military instructors and
medics remained in Guinea–Bissau until independence from the
Portuguese was secured in 1974. But Havana’s ‘revolutionary offensive’
in Latin America failed – coming to a symbolic end in the rainforests of
Bolivia in October 1967, with the capture and subsequent squalid
execution of Che Guevara.32
As Havana retreated from the politics of revolution in Latin America
and grappled with serious economic difficulties at home, it drew closer to
the Soviet Union – accepting Moscow’s leadership of the socialist camp
and refraining from public criticism. During the Prague Spring of August
1968, Fidel even delivered a televised speech to the Cuban people in
which, while acknowledging that ‘some of the things we are about to say
are in some cases in conflict with the emotions of many’, he accepted the
‘bitter necessity’ of sending Warsaw Pact forces into Czechoslovakia; an
invasion that crushed Alexander Dubček’s efforts to promote ‘Socialism
with a human face’.33

*
Fidel’s support for the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia came as a
disappointment to a generation of Sixties radicals.34 They had been
attracted by the Cuban leader’s charisma, machismo and audacity; by the
‘hip’ and ‘beatnik’ style of the Fidelistas; and by Havana’s
uncompromising support for anticolonialism and anti-racism. And they
had been inspired by what they saw as Fidel’s attempt to ‘direct human
history, to take hold of one’s environment and shape it, to institutionalize
better human values’.35 Todd Gitlin, who served as president of the
American Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1963–4, recalled
seeing:
the black-and-white footage of bearded Cubans wearing fatigues, smoking big cigars,
grinning big grins to the cheers of throngs deliriously happy at the news that Batista had
fled; and we cheered too. The overthrow of a brutal dictator, yes. But more, on the face of
the striding barbudos surrounded by adoring crowds we read redemption – a revolt of
young people, underdogs, who might just cleanse one scrap of earth of the bloodletting
and misery we had heard about all our lives. From a living room in the Bronx we saluted
our unruly champions.36

In the Cuba of Fidel Castro, young leftists like Gitlin saw an

alternative to capitalism, imperialism and racism; one that was neither
constrained by the rigid doctrinal disputes of the ‘Old Left’, nor tainted
by the mass murders, human rights violations and other terrible crimes
that had been committed under Soviet communism.37
That the reality on the ground in Cuba might not always live up to the
ideals was something that the black freedom fighter Robert F. Williams
had learned some years earlier. Williams, along with his wife, Mabel, and
their two children, had fled to Cuba in the autumn of 1961, to escape
trumped-up kidnapping charges that had been levelled after they had
taken a white couple into their home to protect them from an angry
crowd of black protesters during civil rights disturbances in Monroe,
North Carolina. From exile in Havana, he continued to support the black
freedom struggle in the United States, publishing his Crusader
newsletter, and broadcasting ‘Radio Free Dixie’ – a mix of music
(including jazz, soul and rock ’n’ roll), news about the civil rights
struggle, and Williams’s own powerful political commentary – to the
South. But, despite his personal friendship with Fidel, he soon ran into
difficulties (money failed to arrive, promised support never materialized
and he was pressured to alter the content of his broadcasts). Williams’s
forceful personality did not help. On touring the Foreign Ministry and
noticing its all-white staff, Mabel recalled how ‘Rob told them it looks
like Mississippi in here’. (‘I thought’, she said, ‘they would shoot him for
sure.’) But there were serious political disagreements too: following the
official communist line, the Cubans insisted that class trumped race.
Black nationalism, it was said, would alienate the white working class –
who were the ‘primary revolutionary force’. Unwilling to become what
he termed a ‘socialist Uncle Tom’, Williams left Cuba for Beijing in
1965. Writing to Fidel the following year, Williams declared that he
would ‘always be a friend of the Cuban Revolution’, but he deplored the
fact that ‘while in Cuba all of my work for the Afro-American struggle
was sabotaged.’38
Such disillusionment would not, though, significantly diminish
Cuba’s hold over American and Western European radicals. A new
generation of French leftists, for instance, developed a deep sympathy for
the Cuban Revolution over their shared support for Algeria’s FLN, to
whom Fidel sent arms, troops and, later, medical support.39 The Cuban
government’s steadfast support for the Vietnamese struggle for national
liberation (Fidel declared 1967 to be the ‘Year of Heroic Vietnam’),
meanwhile, earned the approval of much of the global anti-war
movement.40 In February 1968, at the height of Sixties activism, it was
the German student leader Rudi Dutschke who ensured that Che
Guevara’s famous slogan, ‘The Duty of a Revolutionary is to Make the
Revolution’ (‘Die Pflicht des Revolutionärs ist es, Revolution zu
machen’), appeared on a giant banner that stretched around the lecture
hall at West Berlin’s Free University during the International Vietnam
Congress.41
In the United States, both Stokely Carmichael and Angela Davis were
profoundly affected by the trips that they made to Cuba in the late 1960s.
Carmichael, the former leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee (which was at the sharp edge of civil rights activism during
the first half of the 1960s) and popularizer of the ‘Black Power’ slogan,
visited Havana in August 1967. He was there for the First Conference of
the Latin American Organization of Solidarity – the latest in a series of
gatherings that sought to generate a united front against US-led
imperialism and foment revolution across the Global South.42 He
described the experience as ‘mind blowing. I mean, here were brothers
and sisters from around the whole world, Jack, especially the “third
world”, who were struggling to liberate humanity from colonialism [and]
economic exploitation.’43 It was in Cuba that, for Carmichael, ‘the
international struggle became tangible, a human reality, names, faces,
stories, no longer an abstraction, and our struggle in Mississippi or
Harlem was part and parcel of this great international and historical
motion’.44
Addressing the conference, Carmichael declared that ‘we share with
you a common struggle’ and face ‘a common enemy’ – ‘white Western
imperialist society’. ‘Our struggle’, he proclaimed, ‘is to overthrow the
system that feeds itself and expands itself through the economic and
cultural exploitation of non-white, non-Western peoples – of the Third
World.’ Arguing that ‘black communities in America are the victims of
white imperialism and colonial exploitation’, Carmichael told the Latin
American representatives that ‘we are moving to control our African-
American communities as you are moving to wrest control of your
countries … from the hands of foreign imperialist powers.’ And, in this
struggle, he declared, ‘we look upon Cuba as a shining example of hope
in our hemisphere.’45 Fidel, for his part, lauded Carmichael as a friend
for whom Cuba ‘will always be his home’ and called on revolutionaries
across the world to offer him their support and protection.46 Carmichael,
whose status as an ‘observer’ had been upgraded to ‘delegate of honor’,
met with Fidel, who gave him a brief tour of the Sierra Maestra, pointing
out the battle sites and explaining how the rebels had won their unlikely
victory. The African American firebrand, who had moved to Harlem
from his native Trinidad in 1952, aged eleven, took the opportunity to ask
him about a rumour that was still doing the rounds. During a meeting
with black nationalists at the Theresa, it was said, ‘the brothers’ had
talked at length about their ambitious plans to ‘wage armed struggle in
the belly of the beast’, right there in New York. After listening patiently
Fidel had apparently stood up, walked over to the window and peered
out. Finally, after several minutes of silence, they had asked the Cuban
leader what he was looking for. In a subtle dismissal of their somewhat
naïve plans for armed insurrection, Fidel is supposed to have replied: ‘the
Sierra Maestra, the mountains. I don’t see any mountains out there.’
Rather than confirming or denying the truth of the story, the Cuban prime
minister simply roared with laughter. ‘Verdad,’ he said, ‘there were no
mountains to be seen.’47
Angela Davis, the UCLA philosophy professor, political activist and
Black Power icon, visited Cuba in the summer of 1969 as part of a
delegation from the Communist Party of the United States of America.
Joining a nationwide effort to gather in the sugar and coffee harvest, she
described ‘buses, vans, trucks and automobiles’ packed with ‘young and
old, proudly dressed in work clothes, singing as they made their way to
the country’. ‘It seemed’, she said, ‘as if every able-bodied resident of
Havana was rushing to the fields as though in a joyous carnival.’
Watching the people cutting the sugar cane, and intoxicated by the
‘palpable’ sense of ‘human dignity’ that she encountered everywhere on
the island, Davis reflected on how the Cubans were ‘finished with the
politics of class and race, done with the acid bile of outdoing one’s
neighbor for the sake of materially rising above them’. This was a
socialist society made thrillingly real.48 The trip, she later said, marked ‘a
great climax in my life. Politically I felt infinitely more mature, and it
seemed like the Cubans’ limitless revolutionary enthusiasm had left a
permanent mark on my existence.’49
Carmichael and Davis were not alone. Black Panthers, members of
SDS, opponents of the Vietnam War, and activists in the women’s
liberation, Puerto Rican and Chicano movements were among those who,
inspired by the Cuban Revolution’s achievements in education,
healthcare and housing, its championing of liberation struggles (including
its support for the Vietnamese) and its willingness to face down the
superpower to the north, continued to look to Havana during the 1960s
and beyond.50

The Cubans’ sojourn at the Theresa produced a series of iconic images –

a smiling Fidel and Malcolm, perched on the edge of the bed in the prime
minister’s suite; a beaming Khrushchev, enveloped in an enthusiastic
hug; Foreign Minister Raúl Roa eating a hot dog at the nearby Chock
Full o’Nuts lunch counter – and folk tales (the chicken feathers, the visits
by ‘women of the night’) that have lived long in popular memory. The
beatnik-revolutionary aesthetic of their stay in Harlem also came to the
silver screen, thanks to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1969 spy thriller, Topaz.51 Set
on the eve of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the movie, which was based on
the best-selling novel by Leon Uris, sees a Western intelligence agent
infiltrate the Cuban delegation to the United Nations (which, in a show of
solidarity with the black community, is staying at the Hotel Theresa). The
film was released by Universal Pictures at the end of the year to mixed
reviews. Writing in the New York Times, Vincent Canby praised this
‘quirky, episodic espionage tale’, with its ‘beautifully composed
sequences, full of surface tensions, ironies [and] absurdities’, as a ‘huge
success’. Indeed, he was so impressed that he selected it as one of his ten
best films of the year, placing it in such august company as Arthur Penn’s
Alice’s Restaurant, John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy, François
Truffaut’s Stolen Kisses and Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch.52 But
others, disappointed by the movie’s lack of ‘star power’, were less
convinced.53
Whether they rated it or not, the critics were agreed that one of the
best things in the movie was the ‘superb’ sequence set in Harlem (the Los
Angeles Times’ Kevin Thomas claimed it was among the best work that
the legendary English director had ever produced).54 Filmed on location
at the Theresa, the sequence included hotel corridors crammed with
nervous police and security personnel, journalists desperate for a scoop,
and swaggering, bearded revolutionaries (some with slightly dishevelled
women on their arm). At one point, a top-secret document, now stained
by grease underneath a half-eaten hamburger, is discovered on top of a
desk, and the overall atmosphere is one of barely controlled anarchy.55
Later in the movie, the French agent André Devereaux (played by
Frederick Stafford) is questioned by Rico Parra (John Vernon) – the
leader of the Cuban delegation to the UN, and a figure clearly inspired by
Fidel Castro. While Devereaux denies any involvement in espionage, he
does admit to having been outside the Hotel Theresa on the night when a
secret Russian–Cuban aide-mémoire was photographed. ‘I did go up to
Harlem to see the show you were putting on,’ explains Devereaux. ‘And
… it was a very good show.’56

*
Compelling, unpredictable, at times scarcely believable, and riotously
entertaining, the week and a half that Fidel spent in New York constituted
a story that, the New Yorker declared, ‘no sensible playwright would dare
to compose’ and which ‘even the most dogged critic would have a hard
time recapitulating’.57 Reflecting on the trip from a distance of some
thirty years, Fidel appeared to agree: ‘those days … were rough. It was
madness … we were a little younger then. In fact, we didn’t know much
about politics.’ But, while the Cuban leader and his fellow barbudos may
have lacked experience, they ‘had a rebel spirit, a spirit of struggle’. ‘We
were’, Fidel explained, ‘convinced of our cause.’58
Fidel’s visit to New York in September of 1960 was, in the words of
one historian, a ‘Cold War watershed’.59 The trip put the Cuban leader
firmly on the world stage, confirming his international standing and
strengthening his own commitment to lead the global struggle against
imperialism. For the Americans, his antics, as well as the contents of his
speech before the General Assembly, confirmed their belief that he had to
go: a week or so after Fidel’s departure, Time magazine predicted
(correctly) that a ‘showdown’ with the United States was now ‘much
closer’.60 The excellent personal chemistry with Nikita Khrushchev
served to cement a critically important alliance with the Soviet Union
and, in the process, offered a powerful illustration of how the Cold War’s
focus was shifting, inexorably, from Europe to the Global South.
Meanwhile, Fidel’s move to Harlem placed a global spotlight on
America’s ‘race problem’, inspired adulation from an emergent New Left
and helped to usher in a new decade of political, social and cultural
tumult in an appropriately irreverent, rebellious and anarchic manner.
They were ten days, then, that launched the Sixties, and changed the
world.

Notes
1. ‘Excerpts of Remarks of Senator John F. Kennedy, Public Rally, Hotel Theresa, New
York, NY’, 12 October 1960, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, at
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/excerpts-remarks-senator-john-f-kennedy-
public-rally-hotel-theresa-new-york-ny; Peter Kihss, ‘Kennedy Charges Nixon Risks
War’, NYT, 13 October 1960, 1, 25; Steve Duncan, ‘Kennedy Vows Action for Rights’,
Baltimore Afro-American, 22 October 1960, 6.
 2. Meriwether, ‘“Worth a Lot of Negro Votes”’, 743–4; ‘Remarks of Senator John F.
Kennedy in the Senate, Washington, D.C., July 2, 1957’ at
https://www.jfklibrary.org/archives/other-resources/john-f-kennedy-speeches/united-
states-senate-imperialism-19570702.
3. Muehlenbeck, Betting on the Africans, 34–7.
4. Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars, 32.
5. Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars, 123.
6. Thomas G. Paterson, ‘Fixation with Cuba: The Bay of Pigs, Missile Crisis, and Covert
War Against Castro’ in Paterson, ed., Kennedy’s Quest for Victory: American Foreign
Policy, 1961–1963 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 125.
7. ‘Remarks of Senator John F. Kennedy, Paterson, NJ, City Hall’, 15 September 1960,
PPUS at https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-senator-john-f-kennedy-
paterson-nj-city-hall.
8. Harold Jinks to Robert Kennedy, ‘Comment on Cuba’, Democratic National Committee
Inter-Office Memorandum, 16 October 1960, Robert F. Kennedy Pre-Administration
Papers, Political Files, Box 34, Folder 14, ‘Cuba as a Campaign Issue, October 6–27,
1960’, JFK Library.
9. ‘Statement on Cuba by Senator John F. Kennedy’, 20 October 1960, PPUS at
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/statement-cuba-senator-john-f-kennedy.
10. AK10345/174, AK10345/165 – 21 October 1960, FO371/148220; Herbert Parmet, JFK:
The Presidency of John F. Kennedy (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984), 46–9.
11. Nixon, Six Crises, 354–5.
12. For the importance of Africa to Kennedy’s 1960 campaign see Meriwether, ‘“Worth a
Lot of Negro Votes”’, 737–63; G. Scott Thomas, A New World To Be Won: John Kennedy,
Richard Nixon, and the Tumultuous Year of 1960 (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2011), 227–30,
256; Edmund F. Kallina, Jr, Kennedy v. Nixon: The Presidential Election of 1960
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010), 155.
13. See, for example, Theodore H. White, ‘For President Kennedy: An Epilogue’, Life, 6
December 1963, 158–9 and Arthur M. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy
in the White House (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965).
14. ‘Excerpts of Remarks of Senator John F. Kennedy, Public Rally, Hotel Theresa, New
York, NY’, 12 October 1960, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/excerpts-
remarks-senator-john-f-kennedy-public-rally-hotel-theresa-new-york-ny.
15. Bissell, Reflections of a Cold Warrior, 153–62; Rabe, Eisenhower and Latin America,
168–72.
16. Rasenberger, The Brilliant Disaster, 104–5, 108–9.
17. Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars, 139–46; Szulc, Fidel, 607–21; Rasenberger, The Brilliant
Disaster, 189–313; Paterson, ‘Fixation with Cuba’, 131–2. See also Kornbluh, ed., Bay of
Pigs Declassified and Howard Jones, The Bay of Pigs.
18. Paterson, ‘Fixation with Cuba’, 137.
19. Paterson, ‘Fixation with Cuba’, 136–40.
20. Taubman, Khrushchev, 535, 541–7; James G. Hershberg, ‘The Cuban Missile Crisis’ in
Leffler and Westad, eds, Cambridge History of the Cold War, Volume II, 67–70.
21. Paterson, ‘Fixation with Cuba’, 136–42. On the Kennedy administration’s use of covert
operations against Cuba see Bohning, The Castro Obsession; on the Soviet decision to
deploy the missiles to Cuba see Taubman, Khrushchev, 541–53.
22. Paterson, ‘Fixation with Cuba’, 147–8; Taubman, Khrushchev, 572–3. For a history of
the Cuban Missile Crisis see Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars, 161–224; Aleksandr Fursenko
and Timothy Naftali, ‘One Hell of a Gamble’: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958–
1964 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997) and Hershberg, ‘The Cuban Missile Crisis’, 65–
87.
23. Taubman, Khrushchev, 579–81; Szulc, Fidel, 652.
24. Szulc, Fidel, 649.
25. Brown, Cuba’s Revolutionary World, 90–1; Taubman, Khrushchev, 597–8; Quirk, Fidel
Castro, 456–69; Szulc, Fidel, 653–5.
26. Gorsuch, ‘“Cuba, My Love”’, 520–3; Piero Gleijeses, The Cuban Drumbeat: Castro’s
Worldview: Cuban Foreign Policy in a Hostile World (London: Seagull Books, 2009),
13–15; Jorge I. Domínguez, To Make a World Safe for Revolution: Cuba’s Foreign Policy
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 63–76.
27. Gleijeses, ‘Cuba and the Cold War’, 329, 334–5; Gleijeses, The Cuban Drumbeat, 12.
28. Bonsal to State Department, 29 September 1960, 737.13/9-2960, Confidential State
Department Files, Decimal 737, reel 25.
29. Besenia Rodriguez, ‘“De la Esclavitud Yanqui a la Libertad Cubana”’, 62.
30. John A. Gronbeck-Tedesco, ‘The Left in Transition: The Cuban Revolution in US Third
World Politics’, Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 40, no. 4 (November 2008), 659–
60; Manuel Barcia, ‘Locking Horns with the Northern Empire: Anti-American
Imperialism at the Conference of 1966 in Havana’, The Journal of Transatlantic Studies
7, no. 3 (2009), 208–17; Brown, Cuba’s Revolutionary World, 97–8; Robert Buzzanco,
‘Fidel Castro (1926–2016) and Global Solidarity’, The Sixties: A Journal of History,
Politics and Culture, vol. 10, no. 2, 275; ‘Resolutions Adopted by the Conference’ at
http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/tricon/tricon5.htm. See also Ali Raza, ‘Despatches
from Havana: The Cold War, Afro-Asian Solidarities, and Culture Wars in Pakistan’,
Journal of World History, vol. 30, no. 1–2 (June 2019), 223–46.
31. Gleijeses, ‘Cuba and the Cold War’, 330–3, 340–1; Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions, 21;
Domínguez, To Make a World Safe for Revolution, 119–26; Chomsky, A History of the
Cuban Revolution, 100–5. For a detailed history of Cuba’s promotion and support of
liberation movements, and socialist revolution, overseas, see Gleijeses, Conflicting
Missions and Brown, Cuba’s Revolutionary World. On Havana’s attempts to fashion a
global anti-imperialist movement see, for example, Barcia, ‘Locking Horns with the
Northern Empire’, 208–17.
32. Gleijeses, ‘Cuba and the Cold War’, 335.
33. Gleijeses, ‘Cuba and the Cold War’, 335; Domínguez, To Make a World Safe for
Revolution, 76; Chomsky, A History of the Cuban Revolution, 55–8.
34. Teishan A. Latner, Cuban Revolution in America: Havana and the Making of a United
States Left, 1968–1992 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 5.
35. Gosse, Where the Boys Are, 162–3.
36. Quoted in Latner, Cuban Revolution in America, 17.
37. Latner, Cuban Revolution in America, 12.
38. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie, 285, 292–4; letter, Robert F. Williams to Fidel Castro, 28
August 1966, Richard T. Gibson Papers, Box 13, Folder 5, GWU.
39. Kepa Artaraz and Karen Luyckx, ‘The French New Left and the Cuban Revolution
1959–1971: Parallel Histories?’, Modern and Contemporary France, vol. 17, no. 1
(2009), 71.
40. Deutschmann and Shnookal, eds, Fidel Castro Reader, 12, 285.
41. Mark Kurlansky, 1968: The Year that Rocked the World (London: Jonathan Cape, 2004),
149; Timothy Scott Brown, West Germany and the Global Sixties: The Anti-Authoritarian
Revolt, 1962-1978 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 234.
42. See Sarah Seidman, ‘Tricontinental Routes of Solidarity: Stokely Carmichael in Cuba’,
Journal of Transnational American Studies, vol. 4, no. 2 (2012).
43. Gronbeck-Tedesco, ‘The Left in Transition’, 665.
44. Latner, Cuban Revolution in America, 47-48.
45. ‘Solidarity with Latin America’ in Stokely Carmichael, Stokely Speaks (Chicago:
Chicago Review Press, 2007), 101, 104–5.
46. Seidman, ‘Tricontinental Routes of Solidarity’.
47. Stokely Carmichael with Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, Ready for Revolution: The Life
and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) (New York: Scribner, 2003), 587–8.
48. Angela Davis, Angela Davis: An Autobiography (London: Arrow Books, 1976), 202–10.
49. Davis, Autobiography, 216.
50. Latner, Cuban Revolution in America, 4–9. See also Gronbeck-Tedesco, ‘The Left in
Transition’, 651–73; Ann Garland Mahler, ‘The Global South in the Belly of the Beast:
Viewing African American Civil Rights through a Tricontinental Lens’, Latin American
Research Review, vol. 50, no. 1 (2015), 95–116; and Young, Soul Power, passim.
51. For a discussion of Topaz and the cultural history of Fidel’s stay in Harlem see Quiroga,
Cuban Palimpsests, 33–47. See also Gosse, Where the Boys Are, 150.
52. Vincent Canby, ‘Alfred Hitchcock at His Best’, NYT, 20 December 1969, 36; Vincent
Canby, ‘The Ten Best of 1969’, NYT, 28 December 1969, D1, 13.
53. Pauline Kael, ‘The Current Cinema’, The New Yorker, 27 December 1969, 49; Penelope
Mortimer, ‘Hitch in a Heavy Mood’, Observer, 9 November 1969, 32.
54. Mortimer, ‘Hitch in a Heavy Mood’, Observer, 9 November 1969, 32; Andrew Sarrris,
‘Films in Focus’, Village Voice, 25 December 1969, 26; Kevin Thomas, ‘“Topaz”: A Spy
Adventure by Hitchcock’, LA Times, 19 December 1969, section IV, 1, 15.
55. Quiroga, Cuban Palimpsests, 43.
56. Topaz (Alfred Hitchcock, Universal Pictures, 1969).
57. ‘The Talk of the Town’, The New Yorker, 8 October 1960, 33.
58. Mealy, Fidel and Malcolm X, 61.
59. Brenda Gayle Plummer, ‘Castro in Harlem: A Cold War Watershed’, in Allen Hunter,
ed., Rethinking the Cold War (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 133.
60. ‘Red All the Way’, Time, 10 October 1960.
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book was initially conceived, and a good portion of the research for
it undertaken, while I was Head of the School of History at the
University of Leeds. It is fitting, then, that I begin by thanking colleagues
there, particularly Rachel Utley and Andrea Major, who, as (successive)
Deputy Heads of School, offered sage advice as well as invaluable
support, and held the fort when I was away; Frank Finlay, Dean of the
Faculty, for his backing and friendship; my fellow Heads of School for
their camaraderie; and Sarah Foster, Esther Burton and Addi
Manolopoulou for their administrative skill and (almost) endless reserves
of patience. I am also grateful to Simon Ball, Manuel Barcia (several
times over), Adam Cathcart, Ingo Cornils, Gina Denton, Kate Dossett,
Claire Eldridge, William Gould, Rafe Hallett, Rob Hornsby and Andy
Stafford, for pointing me in the direction of useful materials or otherwise
offering encouragement.
Daniel Geary, Todd Gitlin, Piero Gleijeses, Van Gosse, Lillian Guerra,
Rosemari Mealy, Roger Lipsey, Dan Matlin, Besenia Rodriguez, Tim
Tyson, Javier Trevino and James West all responded helpfully to various
queries, while Benjamin Young generously sent me a copy of his terrific
PhD dissertation on North Korea’s relations with the Third World.
Lauren Mottle copied materials for me while undertaking her own
research at the Wisconsin Historical Society, and Nat Andrews translated
Cuban newspaper reports with skill and efficiency. Say Burgin, Sean
Fear, Nick Grant and Elisabeth Leake deserve a big shout out for taking
the trouble to read drafts of the manuscript, and for offering incisive and
thoughtful suggestions for how I might improve it.
I am pleased to acknowledge the financial support offered by the
Roosevelt Institute for American Studies in Middelburg, Netherlands
(who awarded me a Marilyn Blatt Young Research Grant), the
Eisenhower Foundation in Abilene, Kansas, and my own department.
Leeds also granted me a full year of sabbatical leave in 2018–19 for
which I am enormously grateful.
 Over the past few years I have benefited greatly from the expertise,
patience and generosity of administrators, academics, archivists and
librarians at numerous institutions, including the National Archives at
Kew; RIAS (Leontien Joosse, Ceese Herre, Dario Fazzi, Damian Pargas
and Giles Scott-Smith offered a warm welcome); the Dwight David
Eisenhower Presidential Library (Mary Burtzloff fielded numerous
enquiries and went out of her way to ensure that my visit ran smoothly);
the Library of Congress; the National Archives at College Park (I owe a
particular debt to David Langbart); the New York Public Library (both
the main branch on Fifth Avenue and the Schomburg Center for Research
in Black Culture); the Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia
University; the Gelman Library, George Washington University; the
Tamiment Library, New York University; the John F. Kennedy
Presidential Library in Boston; and the Brotherton Library at the
University of Leeds (where Tim Wright was especially helpful when it
came to tracking down materials via inter-library loan).
I would also like to pay tribute to the brilliant Sally Holloway, at
Felicity Bryan Associates, for all her support and hard work in making
this project fly, and to thank George Lucas at Inkwell Management in
New York, for his advice and enthusiasm. It is my tremendous good
fortune to be published by Faber, and so it gives me particular pleasure to
thank Julian Loose, who offered vital early encouragement, Laura
Hassan, who gave the project the thumbs up and then brought it to a
successful conclusion, and Rowan Cope, who offered helpful editorial
interventions and advice along the way. Meanwhile, Eleanor Rees copy-
edited the manuscript with her customary care and skill, and Josephine
Salverda guided the book expertly through to production.
I count myself lucky indeed to have had Patrick Michelson as a friend
these past twenty years. As well as furnishing me with relevant portions
of the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, Daily Report, Foreign
Radio Broadcasts, and other materials, he – along with Martha and Peter
– offered generous hospitality, in their modest mountain home, during a
much-needed vacation in Fraser, Colorado in the summer of 2018.
Similarly, Jordi Getman and Frances Mejia went above and beyond in
putting us up in New York a few months later, during a week that saw
time spent in the NYPL nicely offset by visits to RuPaul’s Drag Con and
the Flaming Saddles Saloon. In Baltimore and Amsterdam, respectively,
François Furstenberg and Moritz Föllmer offered a welcome respite from
boxes of documents and microfilm reels. Back home, the friendship of
Thomas Booth, Dean Clayton, Shane Doyle, Stuart Lewis, Stephan
Petzold, Matthew Treherne and Richard Watts – among others – has been
greatly appreciated.
Finally, I would like to acknowledge the love and support of my
family, particularly my parents, Brian and Marilyn, as well as Emma, Ian,
Matilda and Barney (who arrived just in time to make it into the
acknowledgements). When it comes to János, words are – as ever –
simply not up to the job. But I dedicate this book to him, anyway: igaz
szeretettel.
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Bill Morgan, ed., An Accidental Autobiography: The Selected Letters of
Gregory Corso (New York: New Directions Publishing, 2003)
Richard M. Nixon, Six Crises (Garden City, New York: Doubleday &
Company, Inc., 1962)
Antonio Núñez Jiménez, En Marcha con Fidel 1960 (Havana: Editorial
de Ciencas Sociales, 2003)
Kathleen Tynan, Kenneth Tynan Letters (London: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, 1994)
Kenneth Tynan, Tynan Right & Left (London: Longmans, 1967)

Full details of all secondary works cited can be found in the endnotes.
 INDEX

Numbers in italics show pages with illustrations.

Abendpost, 1
Adenauer, Konrad, 1
Afro-Asian Congress, 1
Alekseyev, Alexandr Ivanovich, 1
Algeria: Castro’s speech, 1;
Cuban support for FLN, 1, 2;
Kennedy’s speech, 1;
Khrushchev’s speech, 1;
Nasser’s speech, 1;
Nkrumah’s speech, 1;
struggle against the French, 1, 2
Ali, John, 1
Allende, Salvador, 1
Allott, Gordon, 1
Almeida, Juan, 1, 2, 3
Angelou, Maya, 1, 2
Árbenz, Jacobo, 1, 2
Arcocha, Juan, 1

Baldwin, James, 1, 2
Baltimore Afro-American, 1, 2, 3
Baraka, Amiri, see Jones
Batista, Fulgencio: Kennedy’s views, 1, 2;
overthrow and exile, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;
regime, 1, 2, 3;
Soviet relations, 1;
supporters, 1, 2;
US support for, 1, 2
Beach, Sarah, 1
Beals, Carleton, 1
Bearden, Romare, 1
Berlin, 1, 2
Bissell, Richard M. Jr, 1
Black Panthers, 1, 2
Black Power, 1, 2, 3
Bohemia, 1, 2, 3, 4
Boland, Frederick, 1, 2
Bonsal, Philip, 1, 2, 3, 4
Booker, Jimmy, 1
Boti, Regino, 1
Bourdet, Claude, 1, 2, 3
Bradley, Lillie M., 1
Brezhnev, Leonid, 1
Britain, see United Kingdom
Bulganin, Nikolai, 1
Burgess, Marion L., 1
Burke, Arleigh, 1

Cabral, Amílcar, 1
Carmichael, Stokely, 1, 2
Carrera, José Moleón, 1
Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 1, 2, 3, 4
Casals, Violeta, 1, 2
Castro, Fidel: appearance, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7;
background, 1, 2;
character, 1;
Cuban opponents, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;
decision to attend UN General Assembly, ix–x, 1;
departure from New York, 1;
family, 1, 2, 3;
Fidelistas, 1, 2;
honeymoon in New York (1948), 1;
at Hotel Theresa, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14;
imprisonment, 1, 2;
international tour (1959), 1, 2;
journey to New York, 1, 2, 3;
leaving Shelburne Hotel, 1, 2;
long speeches, 1, 2;
meeting Hammarskjöld, 1, 2;
meeting Khrushchev, 1, 2, 3;
meeting Malcolm X, 1, 2, 3;
meeting Nasser, 1, 2, 3, 4;
meeting Nehru, 1, 2, 3;
meeting Nixon, 1;
meeting Nkrumah, 1, 2, 3;
meeting Sartre and de Beauvoir, 1, 2;
Moncada Barracks assault, 1;
move to Harlem, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;
New York visits, 1, 2, 3, 4;
nicknames, 1 (n), 2;
opposition to, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7;
overthrow of Batista, 1, 2, 3, 4;
press conference outside Hotel Theresa, 1;
purchases in New York, 1;
relationship with Ginsberg, 1, 2;
return to Cuba, 1, 2;
 revolutionary government, 1, 2;
in Sierra Maestra, 1;
Skyline Room reception, 1, 2;
snubbed by Eisenhower, 1, 2;
socialist stance, 1n, 2;
Soviet Union visit (1963), 1;
speech in Havana’s Civic Plaza, 1;
speech to National Congress of Cuban Women, 1;
speech at Presidential Palace, 1;
speech at UN, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7;
stay in New York (18–28 September 1960), 1, 2
Castro, Raúl: appearance, 1;
brother’s journey to New York, 1;
meeting Mikoyan, 1;
political stance, 1;
relationship with brother, 1;
brother’s return to Cuba, 1;
rumours about, 1;
in Sierra Maestra, 1;
speech in Egypt, 1;
speech in Havana, 1
Casuso, Teresa ‘Teté’, 1
Caviglione, Carmela, 1
Chicago Defender, 1
China, People’s Republic: Castro’s call for UN admission, 1;
Cuba relations, 1, 2, 3, 4;
Nasser’s call for UN admission, 1;
Soviet relations, 1
China, UN membership, 1, 2
Churchill, Winston, 1
CIA (Central Intelligence Agency): anti-Castro strategies, 1, 2;
Bay of Pigs invasion, 1;
Castro’s view of, 1;
Congo strategy, 1;
director, 1, 2;
report on Khrushchev, 1;
sponsoring regime change, 1;
U-2 spy plane incident, 1
Cienfuegos, Camilo, 1
Civil rights movement, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
Clarke, John Henrik, 1, 2, 3, 4
Cleveland Plain Dealer, 1
Coleman, Ornette, 1
Communist Party, Cuban (PSP), 1, 2
Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 1, 2, 3, 4
Communist Party of the United States of America, 1, 2, 3
Conant, Michael, 1
Congo: black Harlemites’ interest in, 1;
 British policy, 1;
Castro’s UN speech, 1;
crisis, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7;
Cuba interventions, 1, 2;
independence, 1;
Katanga, 1;
Khrushchev’s UN speech, 1;
Mobutu’s coup against Lumumba, 1, 2, 3n;
Nasser’s UN speech, 1;
Nkrumah’s speech, 1;
Soviet intervention, 1;
UN forces, 1, 2;
UN membership, 1n, 2;
UN mission, 1;
US intervention, 1, 2n;
US policy, 1
Congo-Brazzaville, 1n, 2
Congo-Léopoldville (later Zaire), 1n, 2, 3
Congress of Racial Equality, 1
Cordero, Ana Livia, 1
Cordier, Andrew, 1
Corso, Gregory, 1
La Coubre incident, 1
The Crisis, 1
The Crusader, 1, 2
Cuba: 26 July Movement, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7;
agrarian reform programme, 1, 2, 3;
baseball, 1;
Batista regime overthrown, 1, 2;
Bay of Pigs invasion, 1;
broadcast of Castro’s UN speech, 1;
China relations, 1;
Communist missions to, 1;
Congo policy, 1;
Declaration of Havana, 1, 2;
declared a socialist nation, 1n;
Egypt relations, 1;
executions, 1, 2;
flag, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;
Guantánamo Bay, 1, 2, 3, 4;
history, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;
international conferences in Havana, 1, 2;
Korea relations, 1, 2;
media, 1;
missile crisis, 1;
nationalization programme, 1, 2, 3;
Non-Aligned Movement, 1;
opponents of Castro, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;
 racial policies, 1, 2;
radio and television sets, 1n;
radio and television stations, 1;
Soviet Union relations, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10;
support for liberation movements, 1, 2;
UK relations, 1;
UN membership, 1, 2;
US relations, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12;
Zaire expedition (1965), 1
Cuban Democratic Revolutionary Front, 1
Current, Gloster, 1
Czechoslovakia, invasion (1968), 1

Daily News, New York, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Daily Record, 1
Davis, Angela, 1, 2
de Beauvoir, Simone, 1, 2
de Noue, Jehan, 1, 2, 3
Dean, Sir Patrick, 1, 2
Debray, Régis, 1
Dejain, Fonmin, 1
Diario de la Marina, 1
Diefenbaker, John, 1, 2, 3
Dominican Republic, 1, 2
Dorticós, Osvaldo, 1, 2, 3, 4
Dubček, Alexander, 1
Duckett, Alfred, 1, 2, 3
Dudziak, Mary, 1
Dulles, Allen, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Dulles, John Foster, 1
Dunn, Cyril, 1
Dutschke, Rudi, 1

Eaton, Cyrus, 1, 2, 3, 4
Echandi, Mario, 1
Eden, Anthony, 1, 2
Egypt, see United Arab Republic
Eisenhower, Dwight D. (Ike): Africa policies, 1, 2, 3, 4;
arrival in New York, 1;
Congo policy, 1;
Cuba policy, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8;
decision to attend UN General Assembly, 1, 2;
disarmament issues, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;
final year of presidency, 1, 2, 3;
Guatemala intervention, 1;
health, 1;
meeting Nasser, 1;
meeting Nkrumah, 1;
 Nasser’s UN speech, 1;
race policy, 1, 2, 3, 4;
reception for Latin American leaders, 1, 2;
relationship with Castro, 1, 2, 3, 4;
relationship with Khrushchev, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;
relationship with Macmillan, 1, 2, 3;
speech at UN (1960), 1, 2, 3;
Suez crisis, 1;
UN reorganization issue, 1;
view of neutrality, 1
Elizabeth II, Queen, 1, 2

Fair Play for Cuba Committee: Hotel Theresa suggestion, 1;

leaders and activists, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;
reception at Hotel Theresa, 1;
statement in support of Cuban revolution, 1, 2;
view of Castro’s UN speech, 1
Farrakhan, Louis, 1
Fisher, Mary Ann, 1
France-Observateur, 1, 2
France-Soir, 1
Frank, Waldo, 1
Frankel, Max, 1
Franqui, Carlos: on Castro’s relationship with Russians, 1;
on Castro’s speeches, 1;
journey to New York, 1;
meeting Khrushchev, 1;
relationship with Castro, 1;
on Sartre in Cuba, 1;
at Soviet mission dinner, 1

Gálvez, William, 1, 2
Gandhi, Indira, 1
Garvey, Marcus, 1, 2, 3
Getachew, Adom, 1
Ghana: independence, 1, 2, 3;
mission in New York, 1, 2, 3, 4;
Nkrumah’s leadership, 1, 2, 3, 4;
Nkrumah’s UN speech, 1;
Soviet Union relations, 1;
UN delegation, 1;
UN membership, 1;
US relations, 1
Ghanaian Times, 1
Gheorghiu-Dej, Gheorghe, 1
Gibson, Richard T., 1, 2, 3
Ginsberg, Allen, 1, 2, 3
Girona, Julio, 1
Gitlin, Todd, 1
La Giustizia, 1
Glen Cove, Long Island, 1
Gómez Wangüemert, Luis, 1
Al Gomhuria (The Republic), 1
Gomułka, Władysław, 1
Goodpaster, Andrew, 1
Gorsuch, Anne E., 1
Gromyko, Andrei, 1
Grouba, Ivan, 1
Guardian, 1, 2, 3
Guantánamo Bay, 1, 2, 3, 4
Guevara, Che: death, 1;
Fidel’s return to Cuba, 1;
Ginsberg’s opinion of, 1;
influence, 1;
international tours, 1, 2;
meeting Mikoyan, 1;
meeting Nasser, 1;
meeting Sartre and de Beauvoir, 1, 2;
in Sierra Maestra, 1
Guinea-Bissau, 1, 2

Hagerty, James, 1
Hailey, Foster, 1
Hammarskjöld, Dag: character, 1, 2;
concern for smaller nations, 1;
Congo crisis, 1, 2, 3;
Khrushchev calls for his replacement, 1, 2, 3;
Macmillan’s UN speech, 1;
meetings with Castro, 1, 2;
‘preventive diplomacy’, 1;
Secretary General of UN, 1, 2
Hanes, John W. Jr, 1
Harlem: black nationalism, 1;
Cubans move to, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;
cultural richness, 1, 2;
health issues, 1; history, 2;
Hotel Theresa, see Hotel Theresa;
housing, 1;
jazz, 1, 2, 3;
Kennedy’s visit, 1, 2;
Khrushchev’s visit, 1, 2;
Nasser’s visit, 1, 2;
Nehru’s visit, 1;
Nkrumah’s return to, 1;
neighbourhood diversity, 1;
police issues, 1, 2;
 political vitality, 1;
racial issues, 1;
radical scene, 1
Harlem Writers Guild, 1, 2
Harper’s Magazine, 1
Heikal, Mohamed, 1
Hemingway, Ernest, 1
Herter, Christian: absent for Castro’s speech, 1;
absent from Nehru’s party, 1n;
criticism of Nkrumah’s speech, 1;
Cuba relations, 1, 2;
on diplomatic expenditure, 1;
Nixon’s memorandum on Castro, 1;
reporting on Hammarskjöld’s views, 1;
security restrictions on Castro, 1;
security restrictions on Khrushchev, 1;
view of Khrushchev’s speech, 1;
welcoming Eisenhower, 1
Hicks, James, 1, 2
Hitchcock, Alfred, 1
Hobsbawm, Eric, 1
Home, Lord, 1, 2, 3
Hotel Theresa, Harlem: building, 1, 2, 3;
Castro at, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12;
Castro’s departure, 1;
chef, 1;
crowds outside, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;
Cuban delegation staying at, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7;
Cuban demonstration with flag, 1;
Eaton’s visit, 1;
interior, 1, 2, 3, 4;
Kennedy’s speech outside, 1, 2;
Khrushchev’s visit, 1, 2, 3;
Malcolm X’s visit, 1, 2, 3, 4;
Nasser’s visit, 1, 2, 3;
Nehru’s visit, 1, 2;
Nkrumah’s speech outside, 1;
owner, 1, 2;
police presence, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;
Skyline Room reception, 1, 2;
Topaz film, 1
Hussein, King of Jordan, 1

INRA (National Agrarian Reform Institute), 1, 2, 3, 4

Izvestia, 1, 2

Jones, LeRoi (Amiri Baraka), 1, 2, 3

Joseph, Captain, 1
Karev, Nikolai, 1
Karol, K. S., 1, 2
Katanga, 1
Kaunda, Kenneth, 1
Kennedy, John F.: background and career, 1;
Cuba policy, 1, 2;
presidency, 1;
presidential campaign, 1, 2, 3;
presidential election, 1;
speech on anticolonial nationalism, 1;
speech outside Hotel Theresa, 1, 2
Kennedy, Robert, 1
Kennedy, Stephen P., 1, 2, 3
Khrushchev, Nikita: appearance, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;
arrival in New York (1960), 1, 2, 3;
background and career, 1;
Berlin crisis, 1;
‘boorish’ behaviour, 1, 2;
building anti-imperialist alliances, 1;
‘charm offensive’ in New York, 1;
CIA personality report, 1;
Congo aid, 1;
Cuban missile crisis, 1;
Cuba relations, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7;
demand for Hammarskjöld’s resignation, 1, 2, 3;
departure from New York, 1;
disarmament issues, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10;
favourite food, 1;
Glen Cove stay, 1;
granddaughter, 1;
Hungarian uprising, 1;
lunch with Eaton, 1, 2;
meeting Castro, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7;
meeting Macmillan, 1;
meeting Nasser, 1;
military aid to Cuba, 1;
at Nehru’s dinner, 1;
New York visit (1959), 1, 2n;
press conference at Glen Cove, 1, 2;
relationship with Castro, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10;
relationship with Eisenhower, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;
response to Castro’s speech, 1;
response to Eisenhower’s speech, 1, 2;
response to Macmillan’s speech, 1;
response to Nasser’s speech, 1;
response to Nkrumah’s speech, 1;
‘secret speech’ on Stalin, 1, 2, 3;
speech at UN, 1, 2, 3, 4;
 Suez crisis, 1;
U-2 spy plane incident, 1, 2, 3;
UN General Assembly attendance, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Killens, John Oliver, 1, 2
Kim Il Sung, 1
King, Coretta, 1
King, Martin Luther, 1
Korda, Alberto, 1
Korea, 1;
North (Democratic People’s Republic), 1, 2;
South, 1;
War, 1, 2
Kuchilan, Mario, 1

Lafer, Horacio, 1
Lansky, Meyer, 1
Latin American Organization of Solidarity, 1
Leggett, James B., 1
Lewis, Norman, 1
Lie, Trygve, 1
Lincoln, Abbey, 1
Lincoln, Abraham, 1, 2, 3
Lippmann, Walter, 1
Lipsey, Roger, 1
Los Angeles Times, 1
Louis, Joe, 1
Lumumba, Patrice: appeal to UN, 1;
British policy towards, 1;
Castro’s UN speech, 1;
death, 1n;
election victory, 1;
independence day speech, 1;
Khrushchev’s UN speech, 1;
Mobutu coup, 1, 2;
Nkrumah’s UN speech, 1;
Soviet aid, 1;
US intervention, 1;
US press coverage, 1

McCain, Franklin, 1
MacDonald, Malcolm, 1
McGrory, Mary, 1
Macmillan, Harold: arrival in New York, 1;
Cuba policy, 1;
disarmament issues, 1, 2;
meeting Khrushchev, 1;
relationship with Eisenhower, 1, 2, 3;
relationship with Nasser, 1;
 speech at UN, 1;
UN Resolution 1514, 1
Malcolm X, 1, 2, 3, 4
Mallory, Mae, 1, 2
Mann, Thomas C., 1
Mao Zedong, 1, 2, 3
Marable, Manning, 1
March 13 Revolutionary Directory, 1
Marchant, Sir Herbert, 1
Marighella, Carlos, 1
Marinello, Juan, 1
Marshall, George C., 1n, 2
Martí, José, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Massamba-Débat, Alphonse, 1
Matthews, Herbert L., 1
Matthews, Ralph D. Jr, 1
Matthews, Ralph Sr, 1
Mayfield, Julian, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Mazower, Mark, 1, 2, 3
Menzies, Robert, 1
Merchant, Livingston T., 1, 2
Michaux, Lewis H., 1, 2
Mikoyan, Anastas, 1, 2, 3, 4
Mikoyan, Sergo, 1
Millar, Sir Frederick Hoyer, 1
Mills, C. Wright, 1, 2
Mobutu, Joseph-Désiré, 1, 2
Mollet, Guy, 1
Moore, Carlos, 1, 2
Morris, James, 1, 2, 3
Muhammad, Elijah, 1, 2
El Mundo, 1

NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People): black nationalist
contempt for, 1;
Harlem activity, 1, 2;
leadership, 1, 2, 3;
magazine, 1;
response to Castro, 1;
response to racial discrimination towards UN delegations, 1;
support for student protest, 1;
Williams’s Cuba visit, 1
Nasser, Gamal Abdel: appearance, 1, 2;
character, 1, 2;
Cuba relations, 1, 2, 3, 4;
meeting Castro, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;
meeting Eisenhower, 1;
meeting Guevara, 1;
 meeting Khrushchev, 1;
meeting Nkrumah, 1, 2;
reasons for attending General Assembly, 1;
speech at UN, 1;
Suez crisis, 1, 2, 3, 4;
UN General Assembly attendance, 1, 2
Nation of Islam (NoI), 1, 2, 3, 4,
Nehru, Jawaharlal: meeting Castro, 1, 2, 3;
meeting Eisenhower, 1;
response to Castro’s speech, 1;
UN General Assembly attendance, 1, 2;
UN reorganization suggestions, 1;
UN role, 1;
view of Congo crisis, 1;
view of Herter’s remarks on Nkrumah, 1
Nesfield, Carl, 1
New Left, 1, 2, 3, 4
New York Amsterdam News, 1, 2, 3
New York Citizen-Call, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
New York Herald Tribune, 1
New York Times, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19
New Yorker, 1, 2
News Leader, 1
Nguyen Van Tien, 1
Nigeria, 1n, 2, 3, 4
Nixon, Richard: civil rights record, 1;
meeting Castro, 1, 2;
presidential campaign, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;
view of Castro, 1;
view of Khrushchev, 1
Nkrumah, Kwame: appearance, 1;
background and career, 1, 2;
Harlem visit, 1;
Herter’s outburst on his UN speech, 1;
journey to New York, 1;
meeting Castro, 1, 2, 3, 4;
meeting Eisenhower, 1;
meeting Nasser, 1, 2;
speech at UN, 1;
UN General Assembly attendance, 1, 2
Non-Aligned Movement, 1
Nosek, Jiri, 1
Novotný, Antonín, 1, 2
Núñez Jiménez, Antonio, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Nyerere, Julius, 1

Observer, 1
Olympio, Sylvanus, 1, 2
Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), 1
Organization of American States, 1
Orihuela, Jorge, 1
Overton, L. Joseph, 1, 2
Owl, 1

Pardo Llada, José, 1

Pearson, Drew, 1
Pederson, Richard F., 1
Peñalver, Reinaldo, 1
Pinto, Seymour, 1
Pittsburgh Courier, 1
Platt Amendment, 1
Polyanov, Nikolai, 1
Powell, Adam Clayton Jr, 1, 2
Powers, Gary, 1
Prensa Latina, 1
Prensa Libre, 1

Radio Free Dixie, 1

Radio Mambi, 1
Radio Rebelde, 1
Randall, Margaret, 1
Reinhardt, G. Frederick, 1
Reston, James, 1, 2
Revolución, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11
Ringgold, Faith, 1
Roa, Raúl: arrival in New York, 1;
Castro’s UN speech, 1;
in Harlem, 1;
meeting Mikoyan, 1;
problems for Cubans leaving New York, 1;
relationship with Herter, 1, 2
Robertson, John, 1
Robeson, Eslanda and Paul, 1
Robinson, Jackie, 1, 2
Robinson, Sugar Ray, 1
Rodong Sinmun, 1
Rodriguez, Luis, 1
Roosevelt, Franklin D., 1
Rubottom, Roy, 1
Rybka, Maria, 1

Sabri, Hussein Zulficar, 1

Salam, Saeb, 1
Samuel, Charles, 1
Sánchez, Celia, 1, 2, 3
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 1
Schlesinger, Arthur Jr, 1
Shehu, Mehmet, 1
Shelburne Hotel, Lexington Avenue, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Sihanouk, Prince, 1
Slavin, Joseph, 1
Smith, Paul, 1
Sorrentino, Gilbert, 1
Soviet Union (USSR): Berlin crisis, 1;
Castro’s visit (1963), 1;
Cuban missile crisis, 1;
Cuba relations, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11;
Eastern Europe policies, 1, 2;
Glen Cove retreat, 1, 2;
Hungarian uprising, 1;
invasion of Czechoslovakia, 1;
mission in New York, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7;
support for Egypt, 1;
Third World policies, 1, 2, 3, 4;
U-2 spy plane incident, 1;
UN role, 1;
US relations, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Spatz, Edward, 1, 2
Stalin, Joseph, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Stone, I. F., 1, 2, 3
Suez crisis, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Sukarno, 1, 2
Summ, G. H., 1
Suozzi, Joseph A., 1
Szulc, Tad, 1

Taber, Bob, 1
Terry, Wallace, 1
Theresa, Hotel, see Hotel Theresa
Thompson, Llewellyn E. ‘Tommy’, 1
Time magazine, 1, 2, 3
The Times of London, 1
Tito (Josip Broz), 1, 2
Topaz (film), 1
Tricontinental Conference (1966), 1
Tshombe, Moïse, 1, 2n
Tynan, Kenneth, 1, 2

U-2 spy plane incident, 1, 2, 3

United Arab Republic (UAR): Cuba relations, 1;
delegation, 1, 2;
influence, 1;
leadership, 1, 2;
mission in New York, 1;
 name, 1n;
Nasser’s UN speech, 1;
representation at UN General Assembly, 1, 2
United Fruit, 1, 2, 3, 4
United Kingdom (UK, Britain): Cuba relations, 1;
Resolution 1514, 1, 2;
‘special relationship’ with US, 1, 2;
Suez crisis, 1, 2;
UN status, 1
United Nations (UN): Afro-Asian bloc, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;
Charter, 1, 2;
delegates affected by racial discrimination, 1;
Fifteenth General Assembly, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8;
foundation, 1, 2;
General Assembly, 1, 2, 3;
General Assembly Building, 1;
location of headquarters, 1n;
membership, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;
non-aligned nations, 1, 2;
reorganization proposals, 1, 2;
Resolution 1514, 1, 2, 3;
role, 1;
Secretary General, 1;
Security Council, 1, 2
United States (US): Bay of Pigs intervention, 1;
civil rights movement, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8;
Congo intervention, 1, 2, 3n;
covert action policy against Castro’s Cuba, 1, 2, 3;
Cuban missile crisis, 1;
Cuba relations, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10;
disarmament policy, 1, 2;
foreign policy, 1, 2, 3;
Guantánamo Bay base, 1, 2, 3, 4;
Guatemala intervention, 1;
House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), 1;
Monroe Doctrine, 1n;
presidential election, 1, 2, 3, 4;
racial discrimination, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9;
racial policies, 1, 2;
security restrictions on delegates, 1, 2;
Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, 1;
Soviet Union relations, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;
student protests, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;
Vietnam intervention, 1
Urdaneta, Magdalena, 1

Valdés, Ramiro, 1
Vietnam, 1, 2;
 South, 1, 2, 3

Wachuku, Jaja Anucha, 1

Wagner, Robert F. Jr, 1, 2, 3
Wallace, Michele, 1
Washington Post, 1, 2, 3, 4
Washington Star, 1
White, Thomas D., 1
Whitman, Ann C., 1, 2
Wilkins, Roy, 1
Williams, Robert F., 1, 2, 3
Williams, William Appleman, 1
Winn, Maria, 1
Wolfe, Tom, 1
Woods, Love B., 1, 2, 3, 4
Worthy, William, 1, 2
Wright, Sarah Elizabeth, 1

Young, Benjamin R., 1

Zaire (formerly Congo-Léopoldville), 1, 2

Zhou Enlai, 1
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 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Simon Hall studied history at Sheffield and Cambridge and held a Fox
International Fellowship at Yale before moving to the University of
Leeds in 2003, where he is currently Professor of Modern History. His
previous book, 1956: The World in Revolt, was published by Faber in
2016.
By the Same Author

1956: THE WORLD IN REVOLT

 COPYRIGHT

First published in the UK and the USA in 2020

by Faber & Faber Ltd
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This ebook edition first published in 2020
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ISBN 978–0–571–35309–5