On the brink of nuclear war: Fidel Castro's BBC interview
Getty ImagesIn 1961, the Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro talked to the BBC about his land reform – passed this week in 1959 – and how he wanted peace. But it was the start of a spiralling situation between the US and Cuba that would push the world to the brink of catastrophe.
On 26 June 1961 in a farm outside Havana, BBC Panorama's Robin Day sat down with the 34-year-old Fidel Castro to talk about the changes that had taken place on the island since he had led the revolution to overthrow Cuba's dictator Fulgencio Batista.
Castro made for an affable, if at times evasive, interviewee, keen to impress on the BBC journalist how the Agrarian Reform policy – that he had signed a little over two years previously – was improving lives for Cubans, and also his desire for a peaceful relationship with the US.
Little in the seemingly genial interview indicated just how fraught and dangerous the situation between Cuba and the US was becoming.
Day had been one of a number of reporters invited, and the revolutionary leader was in an upbeat mood as they toured through the villages of Cuba.
"He's a natural orator with an endless flow of words," Day reported, confessing Castro had created quite an impression as he energetically told the group about his vision for the country.
"He should not be dismissed as a crackpot or a clown. He impressed even the New York Times reporter as being witty, erudite and skilful. He's an object of fascination everywhere he goes," Day said.
Castro wanted to show them his support among the Cuban people, and had earlier taken them to a new state farm, where plantation workers had crowded around to talk to him and he had encouraged the journalists to question them.
For the Cuban leader, empowering the island's poor and improving their living conditions was a key aim of the revolution. This ambition had been epitomised in the Agrarian Reform Act that Castro signed into law in May 1959, overturning Cuba's centuries-old patterns of exploitation.
Prior to the revolution, huge swathes of Cuban lands lay in the hands of a few wealthy families and foreign multinational companies, like Coca-Cola and United Fruit.
Most rural Cubans worked as labourers for them, often under oppressive conditions, or struggled to survive as peasant farmers on meagre plots of land, subject to illegal evictions.
This stark inequality had entrenched poverty on the island, and had provided fertile ground for the ideals behind Castro's revolution to take root. The Agrarian Reform law banned all foreign ownership of land and holdings of over 1,000 acres were confiscated.
These lands had been redistributed, some turned into state-run communes, others given to some 200,000 rural workers who received titles to land. Castro had apparently even enraged his own mother by confiscating some of his family's estate at Finca Las Manacas.
Castro wanted to show the press trip how that law, which remains today the basis of Cuba’s agricultural model, was changing ordinary Cubans' lives for the better.
"You have been travelling across Cuba, what have you seen during [your] travelling? Everybody working, everybody happy. Have you seen economical difficulties?" he said to Day.
A time of tension
But beneath the surface amiability of the tour, the situation could not have been more tense.
The law had put Castro's government at loggerheads with Washington and the press trip had been organised as part of a charm offensive to try to reverse the rapidly deteriorating situation between the two nations.
Castro's sudden rise to power had triggered profound repercussions internationally for the small Caribbean Island. The US government, in particular, was strongly opposed to Cuba's burgeoning socialist experiment. Batista's military dictatorship, while being corrupt, oppressive and deeply unpopular with Cubans, had been distinctly pro-US and the regime was seen as an ally with the US businesses that owned much of the country's industry.
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"Batista was considered the US's best man in Cuba, who really enforced the law for the benefit of US companies," Cuban diplomat and scholar Carlos Alzugaray told BBC Witness History in 2016.
"For example, he and his cabinet received $2,000 each a month from the Mafia to let them do whatever they wanted to do in Cuba, about casinos, prostitution."
When the new revolutionary government took power, it had nationalised these US businesses without compensation, removing their stranglehold on the economy. In response, in 1960, the US had imposed a trade embargo – one which still remains in effect today – hoping that shortages and hunger would destabilise the new regime.
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But as the US closed down its trade with Cuba, Castro's government compensated by turning to a new trading partner, the US's rival superpower, the Soviet Union. Then at the beginning of 1961, six months before the BBC interview, the US severed all diplomatic relations with Havana.
When these measures failed to topple the new socialist government, the CIA put into effect a plan that they had been working on since early 1960.
Approved by President Eisenhower, the CIA had been covertly training and funding some 1,400 Cubans who had fled their homes when Castro had taken over. They planned to land this invasion force at the Bay of Pigs, 100 miles (161km) south-east of Havana, believing it would kick-start a popular uprising against Castro. The new US President, John F Kennedy, cautiously gave the project the go-ahead.
This proved to be a dramatic miscalculation, the assault was an abject failure, and the invaders surrendered after less than 72 hours; more than 1,000 of them were taken prisoner.
A little over two months later, Castro was sitting talking to a group of journalists that included Americans, clearly aware that their government was actively trying to overthrow him.
And it had not all been plain sailing for those US journalists. Castro had subjected them to a midnight press conference that had lasted until 3:15am, before starting the tour at 6am. The tour purposely included scenes of the disastrous Bay of Pigs attack – including the wreckage of a shot-down B26 plane supplied by the US to the invaders, and a ruined house destroyed by a bomb from the attacking force, that Castro pledged to preserve as a memorial.
But Castro was eager in the interview to de-escalate the increasingly volatile situation with the US and establish more normal relations. When asked if he was neutral in the Cold War or if he was aligned with the Communist powers, he replied: "Why are you thinking war? I think the best thing for peace is thinking peace. I am with the peace."
He became more non-committal when Day asked him about when Cuba would have democratic elections, saying: "We have asked to the people and the people say we don't want politics now because we are working."
He had previously told BBC News, in an interview in January 1959, that he thought elections would happen "in 18 months, about, we will have free elections – less than one year".
Now he reframed the notion of democracy away from just the right to vote in government elections, towards workers having actual control over their day-to-day lives and work.
"Do you believe there is not democracy here? I assure you there is more democracy than in the US," he said. "Because here, what was a labourer, what was a peasant, were opposed by the authority by owners of the lands. Now they organise their work, they organise their co-operative. The most free man you can find in all Americas is the Cuban man."
But despite Castro's promises, free and fair elections would never materialise for Cuba.
At the time, Castro had already imposed a one-party system, sending hundreds of people to jail as political prisoners. During the 1960s, he became increasingly repressive and intolerant of any perceived criticism, with the elimination of a free press, and with thousands of homosexuals, dissidents and others regarded as "undesirables" being sent to forced labour camps.
The progress Castro made bringing in free education and health care for all Cubans was tempered at the same time by a systemic repression of their basic freedoms.
"Access to public services such as health and education for Cubans were substantially improved by the Cuban revolution, and for this, his leadership must be applauded. However, despite these achievements in areas of social policy, Fidel Castro's 49-year reign was characterised by a ruthless suppression of freedom of expression," said Erika Guevara-Rosas, Americas Director at Amnesty International in 2016, following Castro's death.
AlamyUltimately, the press trip would do little to change the trajectory that the two countries were seemingly locked into.
After the failure of the Bay of Pigs, five months after the BBC interview, President Kennedy approved Operation Mongoose, a covert campaign where CIA operatives and Cuban exiles carried out a series of sabotages on the island's industry and farmland as well as assassination attempts on Castro and government officials.
This convinced the Cuban leader that he needed Soviet support, and believing that the US would attempt another US invasion, he agreed to allow the Soviet Union to deploy nuclear missiles on the island – just 90 miles (145km) from Florida.
That decision would serve to trigger a stand-off over Cuba between the two superpowers that would lead to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, and, as BBC's former Moscow correspondent Allan Little put it in 2002, "within days bring the world closer to nuclear war than it has been before or since".
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