And so ends nearly 60 years of very personal, bilateral miscalculations, although I tend to believe that in their genesis, the U.S. bore a bit more responsibility.
This is nonetheless a legitimate debate without end.
As George Herring notes in his splendid history of U.S. foreign relations, "There is no persuasive evidence that Castro entered Havana in January 1959 committed
to a Marxist revolution." Indisputably, however, there were decades of U.S. domination over Cuban affairs (indeed statutory domination, for nearly 35 years, in the form of the Platt Amendment). And Castro was hellbent on ending it. The Wilsonian concept of national self-determination tended to go down easier in American power circles when others' determination comported with Washington's.
Castro's did not, as was soon apparent in his expropriation of American industries and cozying up to the Soviet Union for economic aid. Would the latter have come had the United States not imposed an embargo on Cuban sugar and, as Herring notes, "launched full-scale economic warfare" against Castro's regime? Had Washington been less paranoid in 1959 about the "Communist menace," would Castro have been less paranoid about Washington?
However balanced the paranoia might have been in 1959-1960, it suffered one helluva lopsided upheaval in 1961, courtesy the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, whose mentality leading to militarism was so accurately described by Hollywood's Stanley Kubrick three years hence: "[We] can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion, and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids."
On a personal note, my precious bodily fluids are already sapped — but with Castro's death, surely not because of the Communist conspiracy. I know not what virulent plague has visited me, but I must now return to bed; full of confidence, however, that with the glory of Trumpism upon us, I'll soon be shrieking in Strangelovian recovery, Mein Führer, I can walk!