Fidel Castro's secret love affair with NYC

[Judi Lynn]

Castro waving to his adoring fans upon his arrival to New York City in 1959 (Credit: Credit: New York Daily News/Getty Images)

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Fidel Castro’s secret love affair with NYC
The unlikely story of how one of the world’s most committed Communists fell in love with the global epicentre of capitalism.

By Tony Perrottet
26 September 2019

On a recent sun-drenched afternoon, I was wandering the leafy blocks of West 82nd Street near Central Park, when I came to number 155, a stately Victorian brownstone with a carved stone stoop. Not so different from 1,000 other addresses on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, I thought – except that this is where the young Fidel Castro, a then-unknown 22-year-old Cuban law graduate, stayed on his honeymoon in 1948.

Castro had been a vocal student leader back in Havana, but there was nothing in 1948 to indicate that he would soon lead a revolution on his home island and become one of the most famous and divisive figures of the 20th Century, thrusting Cuba into a bitter Cold War feud with the United States that continues to this day.

It was Castro’s first visit to the US and he fell in love with New York immediately. He was fascinated by the subway, the skyscrapers, the size of the steaks, and the fact that, despite the rabid anti-Communism of the US during the Cold War, he could find Karl Marx’s anti-capitalist jeremiad, Das Kapital, in any bookstore. Castro and his alluring high-society first wife, Mirta Diaz-Balart, stayed for three months in this charming apartment building, which still stands opposite a Ukrainian Orthodox church and close to bars filled with Columbia University students. Nothing much has changed on the quiet block in seven decades – except, of course, the rent.



In 1948, a 22-year-old Castro stayed in this Upper West Side brownstone during his honeymoon (Credit: Rachel Mishael)

This Cuban love nest was a key first stop in my quest to piece together a series of forgotten visits Castro made to my adopted hometown before he became demonised by Americans in the 1960s. His left-wing reforms would soon bring him into the arms of the Soviet Union – an alliance that led to the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, the closest the world has ever come to nuclear annihilation. But my excitement at finding Castro’s long lost tryst pad paled in comparison to what I was about to discover only a short walk away on Amsterdam Avenue: his revolutionary office.

More:
http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20190924-fidel-castros-secret-love-affair-with-nyc