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Today in History: Fidel Castro Arrived in New York City on September 18, 1960 to Address the United Nations

On September 18, 1960, Fidel Castro stepped off a Cuban Airlines plane at Idlewild Airport, now known as JFK, to lead the Cuban delegation to the 15th session of the United Nations General Assembly, the largest gathering of heads of state and government in world history up to that point.

What followed over the next ten days became one of the most iconic episodes of the Cold War: the leader of a small Caribbean island, barely twenty months into a revolution that had overthrown the US backed Fulgencio Batista dictatorship, turned a diplomatic snub into a global spectacle of anti imperialist solidarity.

To understand why Castro's New York visit mattered so much, we have to recall what the Cuban Revolution represented in 1960 and what the United States was already doing to destroy it. In January 1959, the guerrillas of the 26th of July Movement, led by Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Camilo Cienfuegos and others, marched triumphantly into Havana.

The revolution they carried with them was not, at the outset, explicitly socialist. But it was deeply nationalist and widely popular, promising land reform, an end to the corrupt Batista regime, the nationalisation of foreign owned utilities and oil refineries, a literacy campaign, healthcare reform and racial equality. Washington's response was swift and hostile.

As early as April 1959, Castro had visited the United States and been snubbed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who instead went golfing in Georgia. Vice President Richard Nixon met Castro privately and concluded he was either naive about communism or a communist himself. By early 1960, the CIA was already training Cuban exiles for what would become the Bay of Pigs invasion.

In June 1960, US oil companies refused to refine Soviet crude oil, and Cuba nationalised them in response. In July, Eisenhower slashed the Cuban sugar quota, an economic declaration of war. In August, the CIA began actively plotting Castro's assassination.

So when Castro arrived in New York in September 1960, he was not arriving as a supplicant. He was arriving as the head of a sovereign state under siege by the world's most powerful empire, and he intended to use the UN podium to indict that empire before the whole world.

The Cuban delegation had booked rooms in advance at the Shelburne Hotel on Lexington Avenue in New York City, New York. But the Shelburne's management, pressured by the State Department and anti Castro Cuban exiles, demanded an outrageous ten thousand dollar cash deposit and imposed humiliating conditions. Castro was furious and refused.

The delegation briefly considered sleeping in tents in the UN gardens, a story Castro enjoyed telling. But Malcolm X, the Nation of Islam minister and Harlem's most prominent Black nationalist, extended an invitation through a mutual contact, and Castro accepted it. Malcolm X had been following the Cuban Revolution with keen interest. He understood it as a Black and colonised people's revolution against the white Western imperialist empire.

He reportedly told a reporter that the Cubans were the only people who had had the nerve to stand up to the United States. He suggested the Hotel Theresa, at 125th Street and Adam Clayton Powell Jr Boulevard, the heart of Black Harlem. On September 19, Castro and his delegation moved to the Hotel Theresa.

The hotel, which had once hosted Josephine Baker, the celebrated dancer and civil rights activist, Louis Armstrong, the legendary jazz trumpeter, and Joe Louis, the heavyweight boxing champion, but had barred Black guests in earlier decades, became the temporary capital of the Cuban Revolution. Castro took a modest suite on the seventh floor. The world's press descended on Harlem.

What happened over the next several days was extraordinary. Castro met with Langston Hughes, the poet of the Harlem Renaissance, who described the encounter warmly and noted Castro's interest in Black American culture and literature. He met with Malcolm X, who brought his family and spent hours in conversation.

He met with A Philip Randolph, the dean of the Black labour movement and organiser of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. He met with Adam Clayton Powell Jr, the Harlem congressman. He met with Roy Wilkins of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He met with Black students, writers and activists.

The symbolism was electric. Here was a Latin American revolutionary leader, white by Cuban racial standards, but leading a movement that had declared racism a social evil and had integrated Black Cubans into the leadership of the revolution, choosing to align himself with the most oppressed section of American society. He chose solidarity with the oppressed Black community of Harlem over the prestige and approval of the white American establishment, symbolised by the Waldorf Astoria (a famous luxury hotel in New York City).

Castro understood that the Black freedom struggle in the United States and the anti colonial struggle in the Global South were linked. He said as much in his UN speech, and he said it more intimately in Harlem. He argued that the US government could not claim to lead the free world while Jim Crow laws ruled the South of the United States and while it bombed and starved Cuba.

On September 26, 1960, Castro addressed the UN General Assembly. His speech lasted four hours and twenty nine minutes, still one of the longest in UN history. He spoke in Spanish, and the translation was reportedly difficult for some delegates, but the content was unmistakable. He denounced US aggression against Cuba.

He exposed the planned invasion and condemned the economic blockade on Cuba. He attacked the hypocrisy of American democracy, which denied rights to Black people at home while claiming to defend freedom abroad. He defended the Cuban Revolution's land reform, its nationalisations and its alliance with the Soviet Union, arguing that US hostility had forced it into that alliance. He called for decolonisation, for Puerto Rican independence and for an end to the exploitation of the Global South.

The speech was not just a defence of Cuba. It was a manifesto of Third Worldist anti imperialism, the idea that the newly independent nations of Asia, Africa and Latin America, together with oppressed peoples inside the imperialist countries, could form a common front against colonialism and neo colonialism.

For Cuba, the visit solidified the revolution's turn toward the socialist camp. Within months, Cuba would formally declare itself socialist, and in April 1961, it would defeat the CIA backed Bay of Pigs invasion. The Harlem episode became a founding myth of the revolution and proof that Cuba stood with the world's oppressed rather than with the powerful.

For the Black freedom struggle, Castro's visit electrified Black radicals. It showed that a revolution could be made, that a small country could defy the empire, and that Black liberation was part of a global struggle. Malcolm X's role in hosting Castro deepened his internationalism, which would later lead him to Mecca, to Africa and to the Organization of Afro American Unity.

The visit also exposed tensions within the Black freedom struggle: while Malcolm X and Langston Hughes embraced Castro, some NAACP leaders were more cautious, reflecting the Cold War pressures that forced many Black organisations to distance themselves from communism and anti imperialism.

For US imperialism, the visit was a humiliation for the Eisenhower administration. It revealed that the US could not control the narrative of the Cold War in its own backyard, or in its own most famous Black neighbourhood. The State Department tried to restrict the Cuban delegation to Manhattan, a petty move that only amplified the symbolism of Castro's stay in Harlem.

For the Global South, Castro's UN speech and his Harlem stay became a template for other anti colonial leaders. The following year, the Non Aligned Movement would formally take shape, and Cuba would become a leading voice of the Global South, sending doctors, teachers and soldiers to Angola, Mozambique, Guinea Bissau and elsewhere.

The Hotel Theresa episode is not nostalgia. It is a living lesson in how revolutionary internationalism works. Castro did not beg for recognition from the powerful. He went to the people.

He understood that the Cuban Revolution's survival depended not on winning over the US ruling class, which would never accept it, but on building solidarity with the oppressed and exploited everywhere. He went to Harlem because Harlem was part of the same world system that had colonised Cuba.

He met with Malcolm X and Langston Hughes because the Black freedom struggle and the Cuban Revolution were, in their essence, the same struggle: the struggle against a system that profits from the labour and suffering of the many for the enrichment of the few.

The US government tried to isolate Cuba. Castro responded by internationalising the struggle. The empire tried to humiliate him. He turned the humiliation into a triumph of solidarity.

Today, when the US blockade of Cuba continues, condemned by the UN General Assembly nearly unanimously every year, and when the Black freedom struggle continues against police violence, mass incarceration and economic exploitation, the memory of September 18 to 26, 1960, remains vital. It reminds us that another world is possible, and that the struggle for it is international.

At the World Cup on Tuesday — a man in a red suit stood completely still for 90 minutes in the stands. Then he covered his mouth and used two fingers to simulate pointing a gun to his head.

FIFA’s cameras cut away immediately.

His name is Michel Kuka Mboladinga — known as “Lumumba Vea,” which means “Lumumba Lives.” For more than a decade he has stood motionless at every DR Congo match — suit and tie, arm raised — as a living tribute to Patrice Lumumba, the first Prime Minister of an independent Congo.

Patrice Lumumba gave a stunning Independence Day speech on June 30, 1960 — standing before King Baudouin of Belgium — excoriating Belgian colonialism. Malcolm X called him “the greatest Black man who ever walked the African continent.”

Six months after independence, Belgian officers and soldiers captured Lumumba, tortured him, and executed him by firing squad. His body was dismembered and dissolved in acid. The only known remnant was a gold tooth kept by the Belgian officer responsible for 39 years until his death.

That is what Lumumba Vea stands in tribute to. Every single match. In a suit. Motionless. For 90 minutes.

On Tuesday against Colombia — he added something new. He covered his mouth and mimicked a gun to his head. A silent, devastating protest against the world’s silence over eastern DR Congo — one of the globe’s most severe yet least-covered humanitarian crises, which has displaced millions and claimed countless lives through violence and massacres.

Lumumba Vea went viral this week — covered by USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, ESPN, Sports Illustrated, CNN and the BBC. Every outlet explained the Patrice Lumumba connection. Not one mentioned the link between Lumumba’s CIA-backed assassination, the Western strategy to destabilize an independent Congo, and the current humanitarian catastrophe in eastern DRC today.

That connection is not a footnote. It is the entire story.

The same Western powers that assassinated Lumumba in 1961 — because he wanted Congo’s mineral wealth to benefit Congolese people — have spent 65 years ensuring the DRC remains destabilized, its cobalt and coltan flowing to Western technology companies while its people are massacred in the east.

FIFA cut the cameras. The mainstream media covered the gesture without the history. And a man in a red suit stood in the stands and said — without words — what the world refuses to hear.

Lumumba Lives.

📌 Source: CNN / CBS Sports / Fox Sports / Friday Things / GiveMeSport

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