General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: It's not as simple as "Castro was an evil dictator". [View all]Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)if the US had left Cuba alone.
But the US never would have done that.
Castro's party would have pretty much won any free election anyway. There was no large-scale desire to go back to the Batista era.
(And if you're going to bring up the "Popular Socialist Party"-for the record, they were the pre-Castro communist party in Cuba, their tiny handful of elderly members are still unreconstructed Stalinists, and they once joined a coalition government with Batista).
The best thing we can to have Cuba get less repressive is to leave the place the hell alone.
If we had agreed to do that in 1959, rather than starting our efforts to overthrow the Cuban government from the moment Fidel came to power, you'd have seen a very different society there.
But our leaders couldn't accept the loss of their colony.