Communism

[Nentsia]

Castro was a Cuban nationalist first and foremost. His idol was Jose Marti, the Cuban independence fighter, and he resented the corrupting power of the Americans and the American Mafia on Cuba. Castro remained a committed Cuban nationalist until the invasion of 1961, and until that time outright rejected the label ''Communist''. It was the CIA and the Cold War that drove Castro into the arms of the Soviet Union, and the fact that his most able commander Che Guevara was a committed Marxist did help of course. Che Guevara himself became a committed anti-American Communist during his stay in Guatemala in 1954, when US forces helped to overthrow a democratically elected government with brutal violence.