Before Night Falls

In 1952 Fulgencio Batista led a US-backed military coup d’état after it became clear that he would not win the presidential election. The US government provided Batista with military, financial, and logistical support because of his anticommunism and favorable attitude toward American companies in Cuba. After he took power, Batista outlawed the Communist Party, severely restricted civil liberties, and allied himself with the wealthy owners of sugar plantations.

Over the following years, Batista’s policies widened wealth inequality and fomented unrest among the middle and lower classes. Arenas’s peasant family became even poorer under Batista and were forced to sell their farm to survive. As Batista became increasingly unpopular, numerous guerrilla revolutionary groups formed against him. Fidel Castro’s July 26 Movement (named after the date of its 1953 attempt to overthrow Batista) became the leading revolutionary movement.

The leaders of the revolution, Castro and Che Guevara, and their guerrillas captivated an international audience who watched on TV as the bearded guerrillas fought Batista. The revolution seemed made for the new age of TV and the budding countercultural movement in the US As historians Nancy Stout and Tony Perrottet argue,

Cuba’s was “the perfect revolution” for the visual media age that kicked off in the 1950s: it was short; it was successful; it unfolded in neat stages—“like an operetta”—and yet with the narrative arc of a paperback thriller. It was also full of larger-than-life characters. Coinciding with the birth of network television and the golden age of magazines, it became history’s most photogenic revolt (Perrottet, Tony. “When Fidel Castro Charmed the United States.” Smithsonian.com, 2019).

Batista both effected and represented tyranny; Castro embodied the nascent rebellious spirit of American youth and channeled the discontent of all those Cubans who suffered under Batista’s reign of terror. The teenaged Arenas—who originally joined Castro’s guerrillas for food, not ideological reasons—was also swept up in the idealistic spirit of Castro’s Revolution, seeing it as a way to escape poverty. Sensing a popular tide shift, the US government commended Castro and his revolution. When he assumed power in 1959, Castro proclaimed that he was not a communist.

It quickly became clear that Castro wanted to make Cuba a communist country but for years his authoritarianism remained relatively muted. He legalized the Communist Party, enacted a law to expropriate farmland from owners (some of whom were American), and began executing hundreds of people accused of supporting Batista. These executions, some of which Arenas witnessed, disillusioned him. In response to Castro’s policies, the US upped its 1958 embargo on arms to a total ban on trade with Cuba. Castro subsequently entered a trade agreement with the Soviet Union.

US President Dwight Eisenhower commissioned the CIA to train and arm a group of Cuban exiles in an attempt to overthrow Castro. This attempted coup in 1961, known as the Bay of Pigs Invasion, inflamed relations between the countries. After thwarting the invasion, Castro declared himself a socialist and established himself as the leader of a new coalition of Cuba’s socialist and communist parties called the ORI (Integrated Revolutionary Organizations).

In the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, Cuba became a flashpoint in the Cold War between the US and the USSR (Soviet Union). After the US established ballistic nuclear missile sites in Italy and Turkey against the USSR, the USSR agreed to Castro’s request to establish nuclear missile sites in Cuba to deter another US-backed coup or invasion. This ignited a tense crisis between the two superpowers with Cuba in the middle; it was deescalated by a mutual agreement to dismantle the Cuban and Turkish missile installations.

Through the rest of the ‘60s Castro shaped Cuba in the model of the Soviet Union. He also increasingly aligned himself with the Soviet Union, relying on them as a deterrent to US invasion and as a trade partner as the US continued its embargo. In 1970 Castro declared full allegiance to the Soviet Union, dashing Arenas’s remaining hopes that Cuba would abandon its authoritarian track in favor of democracy.