Bill Keller

Whatever else he was — liberator, totalitarian despot, bombastic blowhard — Fidel Castro was a showman, and Americans, as we know, can be suckers for a showman.

His visit to New York in April 1959, four months after the overthrow of authoritarian Fulgencio Batista, was managed by a public relations firm that had him cuddling babies, licking an ice cream cone and feeding peanuts to elephants at the Bronx Zoo. He even posed with a group of schoolchildren sporting fake beards.

The following year — after he had nationalized U.S. businesses in Cuba and joined Moscow on the other side of the Cold War — Castro would visit again, and the reception would be bitterly divided. But in 1959 he was still something of a mystery man, coy about his ideology and allegiances, a voluble populist in fatigues. He encountered mostly adoring crowds and bedazzled press coverage.

I was a fourth-grader in California when Castro first took Manhattan, but 36 years later, as foreign editor of The New York Times, I was his designated greeter when he visited the newspaper’s old home on 43rd Street. By then, of course, there were few illusions about El Comandante. He had helped bring the world to the edge of nuclear war, he was a relic of a discredited creed, and his regime’s response to independent journalists and other dissenters was rigorous censorship and incarceration. He had been the target of punishing sanctions and assassination plots.

Still, celebrity is its own credential. He didn’t feed the elephants in 1995, but he still managed to draw cheering crowds in Harlem and the South Bronx. He was feted in the homes of trade-hungry business executives. At the U.N., his speech was more heartily applauded than President Bill Clinton’s.

Castro was at The Times to be interviewed by the publisher and senior editors in the 14th-floor board room, but after that he insisted on encountering “the workers.” As he cut a swath through the third-floor newsroom, joking about the squalid working conditions, I cringed a little at the starstruck reception of a dictator whose country was consistently ranked as the least free in the Americas. The swirl of excitement reminded me of the adulation that greeted Mikhail Gorbachev when he first visited New York in 1988 — but Gorbachev was at least striving to be on the right side of history.

Castro, on the contrary, was proud of his repressive regime, as he made clear in the Times board room. “Replying to a question about Cuba’s longstanding policy of imprisoning dissidents,” Lizette Alvarez reported in The Times, “Mr. Castro agreed with estimates by Amnesty International that some 600 Cubans are in prison for political reasons. But he quickly defended the policy, saying he was not alone in jailing those who fight against the state.”

Castro proudly boasted of how he had duped Herbert L. Matthews, a Times correspondent who visited a rebel encampment in the Sierra Maestra mountains in 1957 and was smitten by the rebel leader. Castro said he had his men parade repeatedly through the camp to give the impression of a more formidable army. The ensuing article, he said, had been “very helpful.” So, add to the Castro resume: pioneer of fake news.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/31/nyregion/castro-new-york-visit-photos.html" id="b968023e-b075-31de-a066-e968e356f001">The New York Times</a>.

Castro Takes Manhattan: Vintage Pictures of the Cuban Conqueror as Tourist

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Bill Keller

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Castro Takes Manhattan: Vintage Pictures of the Cuban Conqueror as Tourist