The Fateful Decision

...Here the chief myth-making has been over the point long advanced by Draper—namely, that the Cuban decision to ally itself with the Soviet bloc was an independent decision not brought about by any ineradicable hostility on the part of the United States but by what can only be considered an immense error of judgment on the part of Fidel Castro...

...But the fact that a statement in an article by my eminent colleague Theodore Draper ("Fulbright and Cuba," NL, April 13) could cause such controversy and have the U.S...

...The choice he then made—and made at a time when alternatives still existed that would have changed the history of Latin America and brought about reforms throughout the Continent far more radical than any at present considered—was to play the most dangerous and least successful of roles, that of the man caught between three camps of varying mutual hostilities: the United States, the Soviet Union and China...

...History will doubtless go on being written for a long time to come, and the central problem of that history will continue to be why Castro followed his particular course of action...

...attitudes toward it...

...The Fateful Decision By Keith Botsford Important historical events, as doubtless the Cuban Revolution has been both for this Continent and the so-called tiers monde, produce an awesome documentation in which speculations about intentions, motives and personalities mix with matters of record and the events themselves to keep history, and the issues of which history is a dramatization, alive...

...His ambitions were first limited to being the President of a democratic Cuba and to freeing the Antilles from the pestilential dictatorships of Trujillo and Somoza...

...Because of that role, from which withdrawal is now all but impossible, Castro has been unable to carry out even at home those promises and hopes that once could have extended to a whole Continent...

...State Department twice deny, before the cock had truly crowed, an undeniable fact registered in its own files, indicates the still polemical nature of the Revolution and of U.S...

...He then saw himself hailed as the "leader of the Americas" and the "new Bolivar," and after a year in power still entertained the possibility of becoming the Tito or Nasser of the Continent...

...Amoedo recounts above the last...

...He was chosen as a mediator by the United States for those personal relations, which included his being invited by Castro to join him on his triumphal tour of Latin America, and for the fact that his Embassy had sheltered many of the revolutionaries themselves— as it was later to shelter their successors...

...Amoedo's testimony is that of a man whose intimacy with and sympathy for the Cuban leader's aspirations at that time are undisputed...

...Nor were, apparently, the negotiations which Dr...

...The most interesting fact that emerges from long conversations with the Argentine ex-Ambassador to Cuba, Dr...

...Undoubtedly, Castro's personality and ambitions, the pressures exercised on him by his brother and Ernesto Guevara, the balance of forces within the Revolution, and a hundred other factors all weighed importantly in this fateful decision which, whatever its causes, the peoples of Cuba and the Americas as a whole will long rue...

...It seems that as late as April 1960 contacts, mediations and explorations of possibilities on both sides continued...

...It should be obvious to all that, whatever the fate of the Cuban Revolution, Castroism in one form or another is here to stay...

...Julio Amoedo—besides, that is, the glimpse they afford of the atmosphere of indecision and erratic human behavior that have permeated the Cuban regime—is precisely the effort made not only by the United States but by all governments in the Hemisphere to prevail upon Castro at the time of that decision...