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Richard E. Welch, Response to Revolution: The United States and the Cuban Revolution, 1959-1961, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985. An excerpt (pp. 10-14):
[A] widely held myth holds that Fidel Castro was a communist from the beginning of his career as a Cuban revolutionary. . . . Here is a myth that is not an exaggeration but a lie. Castro at twenty-one was a left-leaning student who disliked authority and had feelings of guilt and suspicion toward his own class, the Cuban bourgeoisie. He was a revolutionary in search of a revolution, but he was not a communist. By temperament a caudillo [military leader], and by the definitions of U.S. political history never a democrat, Castro only became a Marxist sometime between fall 1960 and fall 1961. Castro himself is partially responsible for the myths surrounding his conversion to Marxist ideology. During a long speech on 2 December 1961 he declared himself a Marxist-Leninist and in parts of that rambling oration seemed to imply that he had long been sympathetic to socialist doctrine. These portions were inaccurately translated in early press reports and subsequently taken out of context by his enemies in the United States. . . . Actually the chief theme of this confused and self-exculpatory address was that although he had always been a socialist intuitively, he was initially in thralldom to bourgeois values. Only by hard study and several stages had he come to a full appreciation of the superior wisdom of Marx and Lenin. . . .

Castro's initial program called for representative democracy as well as social reform and made no demands for the nationalization of land and industry. . . . The Cuban Revolution evolved from a variant of democratic reformism to a variant of communism, and its radicalization is best understood when its early years are divided into three separate periods. These periods cannot be given specific dates, but a logical three-part chronological division identifies as phase one, January-October 1959; phase two, November 1959-December 1960; and phase three, 1961 and spring 1962. Historians differ over the labels to be given these three phases. For the historian who sees Castro's adoption of communism as the main theme of the Cuban Revolution, phase one might be labeled "from anticommunism to anti-anticommunism"; phase two, "from anti-anticommunism to pro-communism"; and phase three, "from pro-communism to communist."

See also, William Appleman Williams, The United States, Cuba, and Castro: An Essay on the Dynamics of Revolution and the Dissolution of Empire, New York: Monthly Review, 1962, p. 112 ("Castro moved . . . to attack the Communist challenge to his leadership. He did so very bluntly and angrily on May 8 and 16 [1959], dissociating himself from the Communist Party and its ideas and programs. He subsequently acted in June to block Communist influence in the labor movement"); Wayne S. Smith, The Closest of Enemies: A Personal and Diplomatic Account of U.S.-Cuban Relations Since 1957, New York: Norton, 1987, p. 44 ("C.I.A. Deputy Director C.P. Cabell confirmed during testimony before a Senate subcommittee in November 1959 . . . 'Castro,' he said, 'is not a Communist . . . the Cuban Communists do not consider him a Communist party member or even a pro-Communist'"); Warren Hinckle and William W. Turner, The Fish Is Red: The Story of the Secret War Against Castro, New York: Harper and Row, 1981, p. 33 (the C.I.A.'s Latin America political action officer, Frank Bender, concluded: "Castro is not only not a Communist . . . he is a strong anti-Communist fighter").

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If we label Castro as "evil", what is Kim?

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Originally posted by Gorgo

I'm only saying that he did not call himself Communist until the U.S. shunned him, and the only place he had to turn was the Soviet Union. Only then did it become a Communist revolution. Before that, it was just nationalist.

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Originally posted by Ricky
But evil is a subjective word, and I would just as readily describe Castro or Kim as evil as I would a playground bully, because there are varying degrees. Starting at the least evil, we have:

Playground bully
Castro
Kil
Kim

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In all seriousness, your point seems rather flawed, marf. You seem to talk about evil as if it were some objective word, that one must meet certain qualifications to be considered evil. Or, that only the most evil person could be considered evil. The contradiction in that sentence was on purpose.

But evil is a subjective word, and I would just as readily describe Castro or Kim as evil as I would a playground bully, because there are varying degrees.

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