I was watching the documentary Castro: The Lost Tapes that other day, and was completely floored when it casually mentioned that the American public embraced Castro as a freedom fighter and liberator when he first visited New York in 1959, even as their political leaders continued to connive of means to re-establish a puppet government in Cuba. As someone who isn't American, all along in history classes I had just assumed that the American public had tacitly supported their government's hypocritical policy of beating back Communist governments by installing bloody pro-American authoritarian regimes, in an infuriating betrayal of their most cherished value of freedom.
What then was the American public's opinion of their government's derailment of the emergence of democracy in the development of , such as the overthrow of the democratically elected Mohammad Mossadegh and the installation of the despotic Shah Reza Pahlavi in Iran, or the toppling of the progressive government of Jacobo Arbenz in favour of the military dictator Castillo Armas? Was the American public's desire to promote democracy, too, betrayed by their own leaders? Thanks!
Possibly relevant: Fidel Castro and his American Admirers- http://mashable.com/2014/12/17/fidel-castro-admirers/
I just want to point out Castro was not openly Communist when he visited NYC. And he was telling everyone Cuba would have free elections and free press. He also installed a president as a puppet after getting power and was not the official leader. The open shift to communism happened a year or 2 later.
I take exception to your characterization of Operation Ajax as "installing" Muhammad Reza Shah as Shah of Iran. He had been on the throne for over a decade as a fairly powerful monarch in a semi-constitutional monarchy, and his father had ruled for the quarter-century before that. Operation Ajax did help Muhammad Reza convert his state from a constitutional monarchy back to an absolutist one, but he didn't come out of nowhere like you're implying.
There was certainly a great deal of popular American support of Fidel Castro when he first came to power.
As others in the thread have already noted, Fidel had yet to become officially Communist, whatever his private thoughts on that matter were. As such, he was seen through the lens of 'popular guerrilla unseats bloody tyrant', not the Cold War lens of Capitalism-Communism.
There was already a consciousness, particularly among the American Left, of how US policy in the region often backed dictators. Trujillo in the Dominican Republic was one such case. Batista, until he was overthrown by the Cuban Revolution, was another. The US had overthrown democracy in Guatemala in 1954 by arming, training, financing, and giving the orders to a military faction which ousted the government of Jacobo Arbenz. We backed the Somoza dynasty in Nicaragua. The list goes on.
The counter-culture of the 1960s was focused less on Fidel Castro in and of himself than the tendency of the US to intervene abroad and prop up dictatorships. This is why the slogan wasn't 'Castro is good' but rather 'hands off Cuba'.
Castro had also yet to do many of the worst things he would end up doing. The massive trials and numerous executions via firing squad that occurred at the very beginning of the Revolution were explainable, to a degree. The Cuban government wasn't shooting people randomly; they were trying and executing the worst offenders from the Batista dictatorship, including those involved in murdering and torturing Cuban civilians. Doing so satiated a desire for swift justice, among the populace, and (in a politically expedient sense) cemented the legitimacy of the Revolution. They were showing Cubans that they weren't all talk. Edit: This should also be understood in the context of the aftermath of the 1933 Revolution, where mobs appeared in front of people's homes and individuals accused of complicity with the regime were dragged out and murdered in the streets. The 1959 trials were summary, but at least they were organized.
I haven't investigated the summary trials to the degree that I can tell you how many were shot based on real evidence and how many innocent people were shot due to a rush to justice, or some other reason.
The forced labor camps known as the UMAP, meant to reeducate political opponents, the religious, and homosexuals, didn't come about until 1965 and persecution of gay Cubans in the early years of the Revolution was dismissed as isolated incidents instead of State policy.
Thus it is no surprise that between 1959, when the Revolution took power, and 1961, when Fidel declared the "socialist nature of the Revolution", there was a ton of support for him.
Once he became an outright Communist, support continued and tried to minimize the 'mistakes' of the Revolution. It wasn't until the late 1960s and early 1970s when much of the international Left started slowly backing away as even limited free speech started to be shut down, persecution of LGBT people ramped up, political prisoners became more common, and enough evidence was piled up that those on the international Left could no longer dismiss it as 'right wing propaganda'.
There are a couple of places to read up on these issues.
One interesting book is The Brilliant Disaster: JFK, Castro, and America's Doomed Invasion of Cuba's Bay of Pigs by Jim Rasenberger is a recent take on the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961 and the period leading up to it. It deals with American popular perception of Castro during this early period, among other things, and I highly recommend it.
Aviva Chomsky's A History of the Cuban Revolution is also a good summary of the history of the Cuban Revolution which, while on the apologetic side, at least touches on and summarizes the more disturbing parts of Fidel's rule, including the forced work camps. If it were pure apologetic garbage I wouldn't recommend it. While softer than is warranted, in my view, she tries to confront the issues head on.
For a broader view of US-Cuba relations during the period, I strongly recommend Lars Schoultz' That Infernal Little Cuban Republic: The United States and the Cuban Revolution.