Fidel Castro
05/1960 AD met
According to wife Mary Hemmingway:
Hemingway and Castro had only met once, for a few minutes in May 1960, and all they did then was chat about fishing. That was all there was to their relationship. “Period,” she concluded.
Mary Hemingway
Furthermore, Nicholas Reynolds says:
Hemingway proved more than willing to make excuses for the revolution, even when the Castro brothers started to execute their opponents after raucous show trials in the national stadium. Hemingway went so far as to offer detailed advice to Castro on how to deal with the American press when the latter was on the point of traveling to the US in April 1959, for what turned into something of a victory lap, with welcoming crowds at almost every stop—so different from the confrontational tone of his second visit to the US a year and a half later, when he literally embraced Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev at the UN in New York.
Even after US-Cuban relations soured, with Castro’s heated denunciations of the evil empire to the north, and Eisenhower’s relatively low-key responses, Hemingway held out hope for the future. He agreed with his old friend, the New York Times reporter Herbert L. Matthews, that there was still something “precious” about the Cuban revolution, and that that something needed to be preserved. The man who had witnessed other revolutions told friends that he was taking the long view, confident that the revolutionary excesses would taper off and that the new regime would care for the average worker who had been neglected by the ruling class for centuries.
What Did Hemingway Really Think of Castro?
