I first visited Cuba in early June 1960, about a year after the First Agrarian Reform Law (May 1959) called for the confiscation of the island’s largest farms and estates. On June 6, 1960, just after I arrived, the Cuban government demanded that the managers of U.S.-owned oil refineries (Texaco and Esso) and the British-owned Shell refine Soviet crude oil. The U.S. government instructed the refinery owners to refuse the demand. On June 28, Cuba nationalized the refineries. On the street, worried middle class members predicted such disobedience would induce the empire to act with force. The exodus to the United States accelerated. On July 6, President Dwight D. Eisenhower retaliated by cutting off Cuba’s sugar quota. “Sin cuota pero sin amo,” read one sign (No quota, but no boss.) “No quota, but no asshole,” chided Guillermo Cabrera Infante. (He directed Lunes de Revolucion, a weekly cultural supplement. He served as cultural attaché in Belgium before defecting in 1965). A raucous demonstration of telephone workers dumped a coffin marked AT&T into the sea. Students and workers of both sexes held frequent demonstrations to show support for their revolution which began to resemble a metaphorical snowball plummeting down the mountain, gaining speed and depth. Each day, I would read of new factories being “intervened,” the step preceding nationalization. A worker would report illegal procedures. The state would send an “interventor,” who would “discover” evidence of illegality. The firm would become nationalized. By summer 1960, a joke dramatized the speed of Cuba’s socialist transformation -- although the word was still officially taboo. A man calls a factory, asks to speak to the interventor. The receptionist says: “But this factory hasn’t been intervened.” “OK,” the caller replies, “I’ll call back in five minutes.” On August 6, Revolucion reported all U.S. commercial properties on the island had been nationalized. A friend phoned me at my cheap hotel. His father had owned a string of supermarkets and his plush Havana apartment was no longer of use to him. Did I want to stay there? You bet. The Jamaican maids -- “they come with the apartment,” my friend informed me -- reported the daily gossip. Both hated communism, which “gave power to the worthless poor” and identified with the “nice people with money” who thought Batista had imposed the kind of order they “could respect.” “Socialism means you can’t buy shrimp at the store.” one quipped, referring to the shortage of consumer goods as the U.S. stopped its trade and merchants had their stores nationalized. (By 1962, that apartment became part of a complex for housing thousands of Soviet advisers.) In mid September, Fidel went to New York to address the UN General Assembly. Before he left, Cuba nationalized U.S.-owned banks including First National City Bank of New York and Chase Manhattan. The revolutionary government had already nationalized big hotels, renaming the Havana Hilton “Habana Libre.” Cuba had earlier seized United Fruit and King Ranch holdings as well as large Cuban-owned property, like the Bacardi Rum factories. Heady stuff for a young socialist like myself! In October 1960, 47 years ago, I left Cuba on the last scheduled ferry from Havana to Key West -- just as the government passed the 1960 Urban Reform Law that nationalized commercially owned real estate and eliminated landlords. During the eight hour ride, I chatted with middle class Cubans who decided to abandon their homes and leave the island after losing their businesses. “The Communists have taken over,” Jorge, a middle aged doctor and clinic owner told me. “We thought Fidel was reasonable, but he only wants to communize the island, take everything I worked so hard for and give it to lazy people. This is not patriotism. It’s Marxist-Leninism like he spouted at the UN. The Russians will soon be here with their armies.” He referred to Fidel’s September UN General Assembly address in which he documented U.S.-based terrorist attacks that cost Cuban lives and destroyed property. How would the UN preserve the rights of small countries to choose their destinies “when their rights have been denied and aggressive forces are marshaled against them?” Martha, Jorge’s wife, a chemist, who worked in a laboratory they also owned, dismissed as “exaggeration” the revolution’s “accomplishments.” Fidel had boasted of building 10,000 new schools and 5,000 new houses and sending tens of thousands of students leaving home to go to the countryside to teach peasants to read and write. She and Jorge talked bitterly of their teenage son -- age 17 -- who had stayed behind to “fight for the revolution.” In tears, Martha almost screeched: “They stole him from me.” Indeed, I had spoken to a rebellious teenage girl whose parents refused to let her go to the campo to “alphabetize” the illiterate. She and her parents understood that this meant loss of control -- of her virginity -- to the revolution. At the UN, Castro had reported on a major loss as well, some $500 million dollars stolen by “the politicians who had enriched themselves during the tyranny of Batista.” “We hated Batista but we never imagined Fidel would turn on his own class and confiscate our property, the basis of civilization. The United States will not allow this.” Fidel had questioned the U.S. “right to promote and encourage subversion in our country.” Fidel, the lawyer, asked: “Does the Government of the United States feel it has the right to promote subversion on our country, violating all international treaties?” The answer? For empire, might makes right. Cuban workers, mobilized by their government, had thrown down the gauntlet. They seized U.S. property and then defied the “imperialists” to do something about it. A revolution began as anti-Batista. It turned quickly into a class and anti-imperialist struggle in which the propertied opposition lost their political parties, mass media and other public outlets. By summer of 1960, members of the propertied classes, who had assumed their social prerogatives as axioms, saw the collapse of their culture. Instead, “the masses” as Fidel referred to the workers and peasants of Cuba in his speeches, had taken the initiative and usurped the status and honorific deference previously enjoyed by those of wealth. In his UN speech as in his long discourses in Cuba, Fidel cast his lot with the downtrodden. The words of his UN speech were dwarfed in U.S. headlines to the spectacle of Fidel and the Cuban delegation kicked out of the Shelburne Hotel in mid town and moving to the Hotel Theresa in Harlem. The pretext was that Cubans had plucked their own chicken before cooking them in the hotel room, a silly fib repeated endlessly by the U.S. press. But his stay in Harlem, with a well-publicized visit from a friendly Malcolm X, accurately reflected the sharp leftward direction of the Cuban government. On the grim ferry ride, those I spoke to felt confident the United States would react to “communism” on the island it virtually owned until 1959. Then, they would return and resume their middle class lives. Indeed, the rumor had become deafening that the CIA was training exiled Cubans to invade. By the time I returned to Cuba in December 1960, every Cuban awaited the U.S. invasion. The covert CIA training of thousands of Cuban exile men in Guatemala had become the world’s worst kept secret. The only questions that remained were: when and where would the invasion come and how much U.S. military involvement would support it? On January 2, 1961, I watched an impassioned and determined Fidel from about forty feet away. He denounced the U.S. Embassy as a nest of spies and demanded that Washington reduce its staff from 87 Americans and 120 Cubans to 11, the number of Cubans working at its Embassy in Washington. The million people assembled in Revolution Plaza exploded in applause and chants. “Fidel seguro, a los Yankis, dales duro.” (“Right on Fidel, Give the Yankees hell.”) Eisenhower responded. “There is a limit to what the United States in self-respect can endure. That limit has now been reached.” On January 3, he broke diplomatic relations with Cuba. New York Times columnist James Reston complemented Ike, who “told off his tormentors and slammed the door on his way out. It was a grand exit which made the pictures dance on the wall and rattled old Fidel's back teeth, and this country obviously loved it.” (January 5, 1961) In my mail box at the Hotel Riviera I discovered a note from a U.S. Embassy staffer advising me to leave Cuba. The Embassy could “no longer protect” me. From my window, I saw the U.S. Embassy staff pack and leave. I walked to get a closer view on that chilly winter day (55 degrees?). The departing personnel looked grin. They knew an invasion was imminent. I drove west into Pinar del Rio. Cuban militia teams planted explosives under bridges. Teenagers in militia uniforms hoisted Czech-made anti aircraft guns onto the mezzanine roof of the Riviera. I returned to Miami two months before Kennedy authorized the CIA to send Cuban exiles to destroy the Cuban Revolution.