A New Era

Abstract

On 3 January 1957 Fidel Castro and his small group of guerrillas reached the Tatequieto heights in the Sierra Maestra. To the east, five miles away, he could see the triple Caracas peaks: ‘If we can get there, neither Batista nor anybody else can defeat us in this war.’ Now peasants had begun joining the rebel force, though their commitment was sometimes uncertain: on 11 January, five of perhaps two dozen new recruits decided to return home and Castro made no effort to stop them. Two days later, government troops, suspecting that the local peasants were aiding Castro, arrested eleven local people and murdered them all. On 14 January, having decided to attack La Plata barracks at the river estuary of that name, Castro reached the banks of the river Magdalena.

We refused to help Cuba meet its desperate need for economic progress…. We used the influence of our government to advance the interests and increase the profits of the private American companies which dominated the island’s economy…. Administration spokesmen publicly hailed Batista, hailing him as a staunch ally and a good friend at a time when Batista was murdering thousands, destroying the last vestiges of freedom and stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from the Cuban people…. Thus it was our own policies, not those of Castro, that first began to turn our former neighbour against us.

John F. Kennedy¹