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“To what extent did Castro at this point conceal secret communist purposes? He later said that he hid radical views in order to hold the anti-Batista coalition together, and this was probably true. But, though a radical, there is no conclusive evidence that he was then a Communist or even a Marxist-Leninist. Whatever he later became, he began as a romantic, left-wing nationalist—in his own phrase, a “utopian Socialist.” He had tried to read Das Kapital at the University of Havana but, according to his own account, bogged down on page 370.”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House

“Cuba’s history as an independent republic had been a drama of acute and chronic political frustration. One crowd after another had come to power on promises of progress and regeneration only to go out in orgies of graft and plunder. Dr. Carlos Prío Socarrás, who had presided”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House

“The Nation observed, “If you steal $25, you’re a thief. If you steal $250,000, you’re an embezzler. If you steal $2,500,000, you’re a financier.”
― Oliver Stone, The Untold History of the United States

“Though Fidel came to boast of his Marxism-Leninism, he himself never joined the Communist Party. As the revolution careened along, the Communists may even at times have served as a restraining force, espedally in foreign affairs. Yet, despite the jostling for position between Communists and Fidelistas, the year 1959 saw the dear commitment of Castro’s revolution to the establishment of a Marxist dictatorship in Cuba and the service of Soviet foreign policy in the world—a commitment so incompatible with the expressed purposes of the revolution as surely to justify the word betrayal.”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House