Fidel Castro with Lee Lockwood Like Russia after the success of the Bolshevik Revolution, Cuba under Castro worked diligently to build up its industrial base. Within a few years, however, Castro realized that Cuba's future did not lie with rapid industrialization (which under Joseph Stalin in the USSR had wreaked societal havoc among the Soviet people). Rather, the island's climate and soil, coupled with a growing world demand for food and a growing world glut of manufactured goods, dictated that Cuba should develop economically by applying modern science and technology to agriculture.

Lee Lockwood was an American photojournalist who first met Castro in 1959, just a few days after Fulgencio Batista had fled Cuba. Over the next six years, Lockwood made three more extended visits to Cuba, each time conversing at length with Castro. In this excerpt, taken from...