"Fidelismo without Fidel"? The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Cuban Revolution

Initially hailed as a restoration of democracy, the turn to taken by the Cuban Revolution of 1959 would transform the dynamics of the Cold War in Latin America, forcing one of the main pro-American cultural organizations in the region to reposition itself: the Congress for Cultural Freedom (Berlin, 1950). This article explains the analyses which that organization made of the nature of the Cuban regime, its internal debates about forming an ideological strategy to oppose the Fidel Castro movement and the limitations on its actions, situating it in a conflict characteristic of the left and showing the way it was controlled by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), its main sponsor.