Cuba Celebrates, But Why?

The year that I graduated from the University of Miami, 1959, Fidel Castro and his guerrilla, revolutionary forces swept into Havana to replace the dictator Fulgencio Batista with a new dictator, Fidel. The New York Times hailed it as a new birth of freedom in Cuba because their reporter in Cuba never had a clue that Fidel was a communist. He was a “freedom fighter” and his target was the regime backed by the U.S. Even then, anything that bodes ill for the U.S. was considered by The Times as a good thing. Two years later, the U.S. slapped an embargo on Cuba that remains today with the exception of some agricultural products which, not surprisingly, must be paid for in advance.