...the Cuban one, not the Red. I asked him if the US "drove" Castro into the Soviet Union's arms by its policy of containment. This was pretty much liberal dogma in the 60s, and even today, but my cousin disagreed. He said the socialization of the economy and the political takeover was too smoothly handled to have just evolved naturally from the grass roots Party committees.. It had to have been carefully planned before the Revolution, probably by Guevara, and maybe Cienfuegos, and it was very deftly implemented. It went down by the numbers.

It wasn't necessarily Soviet, though. One of the first things Castro did when he won was throw all the existing Cuban Communist Party into jail, because they were in cahoots with Batista. The CPP took its orders from Moscow and it kept the unions in line, so Batista left them alone. Castro also persecuted other leftist groups, like the Socialists and the Anarchists. Castro wasn't just a Communist, he was determined to be the ONLY Communist.

Cousin did say that everything America did almost guaranteed Castro's success, for many of the reasons you mention, but that in all fairness, it couldn't have been obvious at the time, it just happened to work out that way. The gusano community in Miami (it means "worm" in Spanish, but the exiles have adopted the Castro insult with pride) committed themselves to promoting the embargo, and when it was clear it wasn't working, simply failed to try a different strategy out of pure ideological bullheadedness (and also to maintain their leadership position in the Community). For a while there, to question the efficacy of the embargo was to risk getting yourself tagged as a Communist.