Pushed Into the Soviet Orbit

The Cold War rewrote what the revolution meant. Castro did not call himself a communist at first. But Washington's hostility pushed him east. In 1961 a CIA-backed force of Cuban exiles landed at the Bay of Pigs and was crushed in three days, handing Castro a propaganda gift.

With the United States now an open enemy, Cuba leaned hard on the Soviet Union. That alliance carried the world to the edge of nuclear war in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.