What if Castro's ascent to power begins earlier, perhaps when the Eisenhower administration is in a more tense, "take-no-chances" mood. Perhaps Castro's risky, but not impossible, July 1953 assault on Moncada Barracks succeeds in embarrassing the Batista government, making Fidel famous, rallying popular support, starting in eastern Cuba, and puts his insurgency on a role, while the Batista government fumbles in trying to put his rebellion down over the next year?
The Batista is already an embarrassing and repressive dictator, who recently took power by a coup, and cancelled the 1952 elections, so the embarrassment is there. Castro isn't declaring himself a Communist. But the USA of 1953 and 1954 may be more tightly wound than the USA of '57, '58, and '59. McCarthyism is in full flower and he's going after everybody in summer '53. He wouldn't be confronted with Joe Welch's deflating "Have you no decency Sir" retorts on TV until summer 1954. The US is just coming off the Korean War armistice. The US was about to go ahead with the overthrow of Mossadegh of Iran, who it acknowledged the whole time was not a Communist, simply because he was seen as vaguely creating an environment conducive to Communist takeover, compared to the alternative of the Shah. And in 1954 the US would overthrow the not Communist but land-reforming and Communist tolerant Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala. Fidel Castro once opined that it was a good thing to have failed at Moncada and had the "break" of imprisonment and a later, longer insurgency, because an earlier revolutionary success would "certainly have been crushed" by a more eager USA against a then weaker Socialist bloc and Soviet Union.
