The week in January 1959 Fidel Castro and his comrades descended from the mountains to enter Havana amid delirious cheer from the crowd milling the streets, John Foster Dulles was still the secretary of state of the United States of America. In fact, he was then at the height of his power and repute. He had earlier advised George Marshall to set up the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. On formally taking charge of Foggy Bottom in 1953, he post haste completed the grand plan for global encirclement of the beastly communists. First on the list was the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, soon to be followed by a similar network of US-friendly countries in West Asia, Turkey being in the forefront. The Cold War was being pursued in dead earnest, Dulles was its high priest-cum-executor. The Central Intelligence Agency was pumping money and sneaking agents for subversive work in order to do in from within communist regimes in east Europe; fence-sitting nations such as India too had their share of attention.

Dulles had nary a thought about the backyard. The huge landmass stretching from Tijuana in Mexico all the way down to Tierra del Fuego in Argentina was assumed to belong, inalienably, to the ‘free world’. The Latin American states were either in the capable custody of military dictators doing the bidding of the US administration or, while formally a democracy, ruled by a hegemony of corrupt politicians on the payroll of the CIA. The Munro Doctrine, proclaimed more than a century ago with the intention of warning European nations to keep away from the Western hemisphere, was supposed to take care of any residual worries. Besides, the memory of Teddy Roosevelt’s gunboat diplomacy was assumed to have not yet worn off; Latin America, it was held as axiomatic, was a rotten borough for ever for the great US.

Dulles had made a mistake. He took care of the superstructure, but had not a clue to what was happening at the base. He could only be thunderstruck when, his very own bailiwick, Cuba, in the charge of the trusted General Batista, was taken over by the young revolutionaries smoothly, silently, efficiently.

The revolutionaries were not smuggled in from the Soviet Union or China. They were idealistic youngsters from different social strata and from different parts of Latin America. They had anger; they had dreams; they had grit too. Country after country in Latin America were victims of two-tier exploitation; first by the local feudal oligarch and then by unfair trade and economic arrangements vis-à-vis the US enforced by comprador regimes. The young visionaries were realists; they knew it was impossible to mobilize at one go the entire lot of the dispossessed, poverty-stricken millions dispersed all over Latin America. While they did not have that kind of strength, they still were in a position to make a beginning somewhere in the hemisphere. They chose Cuba. Happenstance or not, it helped that Fidel Castro had the charisma to draw both sophisticated acolytes like Ernesto Che Guevara and honest, simple-minded countryfolk who, more than anything else, wanted to get back the dignity of existence they had been robbed of.

For the US administration, shock was followed by hurt amour propre. It could never ever forgive Castro for his cardinal sin: making a fool of the world’s mightiest power. Dulles soon died of cancer, the Republicans gave way to John F. Kennedy’s Democratic regime, but the imperial ego united the two parties: Cuba had to be won back. The Bay of Pigs was a fiasco. The Americans, however, never quite gave up their efforts to liquidate Castro: hundreds of hired killers engaged by the CIA were constantly at work. To no avail. Castro survived.

Castro survived because, contrary to what establishment Americans thought, he was the answer to the prayer of the Cuban people. Land reforms became a reality, giving a new significance to life and living to the overwhelming majority in the countryside. Castro’s revolutionaries also did away with the ethnic divide; Cuba is an integrated nation where the Latins, the Africans, and the indigenous strains have undergone a natural fusion. There is, alongside, the phenomenon of economic equality.

Cuba has been under the shadow of the trade and economic embargo imposed by the US. Its exclusive dependence on export earnings from sugar, only partly supplemented by the export of nickel and tobacco products, has continued to be a challenge.

Assistance from the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China helped in the earlier years, but has gradually petered out. For the past quarter of a century, it has been a regime of near total self-reliance, mostly based on agriculture organized along cooperative lines and small- and middle-scale industrial activity. Not surprisingly, Cuba is not a rich country; its gross domestic product does not explode from year to year. It hardly matters though. The Cubans have about the highest health and nutritional standards in the world; they are also on top of the table in childcare, and their social security system takes full charge of the old and the infirm. The casinos are gone, but so too have exploitation and thieving.

Cuba has thus emerged as a great puzzle for the US administration. The vast and supposedly formidable Soviet Union disintegrated on its own, like a house of cards. At the other end, despite countless conspiracies and other forms of skulduggery, the Americans have been unable to get rid of the red pests in Cuba, the little speck of dust hardly ninety miles away from the coast of Florida. Perhaps the Americans will gradually learn where the key to the puzzle lies. In the Soviet Union, beginning with the tenure of Leonid Brezhnev, orders hurtled down from the top to the bottom; communications, however, ceased to flow in the reverse direction. The mechanism became dysfunctional. Those at the top switched off their listening device, urgings and entreaties from the bottom turned futile. The inevitable happened. Once the time of reckoning arrived, the base could not care less what fate overtook the occupants at the top.

The Soviet Union collapsed. Cuba did not, because the equilibrium the revolution had ushered in obliterated the distinction between the top and the bottom. Cuba is not a rich country but one where men and women are so closely integrated, socially as well as economically, that tension has gone out of the system; particularly tension between the leadership and the led, who are on level ground.

Is there a streak of narrowness in some minds? After almost half-a-century’s stewardship, Fidel Castro, ailing for months, has chosen to step down from both party and governmental positions. He is stepping down voluntarily, he could not be liquidated by CIA agents. This dismal failure evidently continues to rankle important politicians in the US. One of them has gone on record: he would love to see Fidel Castro drop dead soon. Maybe this absence of civilization has its roots not just in frustrated anger. For consider what other havoc Fidel Castro has rendered. One or two generations ago, that conclave of Latin American nations, the Organization of Inter-American States, was putty in the hands of the US department of state. Now it is full of Castro admirers. Brazil, Venezuela, Chile, Ecuador, Colombia, all now have radical-minded heads of state; even Mexico is tottering. Castro restored to the Cubans their most precious asset, pride; taking the cue, Latin America, as a whole, is currently on the same quest. Castro is ill, and has been forced to give up his cigar. He is, nonetheless, enjoying himself hugely.