Fidel Castro charmed and fooled many during his lifetime. But he admitted he couldn’t trick Richard Nixon.
Nixon’s son-in-law Ed Cox visited Cuba in May 1987 with a group of European business executives, and El Comandante — who died Friday at the age of 90 — agreed to a mano-a-mano chat with Cox.
Cox pulled out his old notes for the first time and revealed to The Post what he and Castro discussed during a wide-ranging four-hour meeting that ran into the wee hours.
“How did [Nixon] know I was a communist?” queried Castro. “My father-in-law was a very perceptive person,” Cox diplomatically told the dictator.
Castro met then-Vice President Nixon in 1959, when many believed the revolutionary would steer Cuba toward democratic government. Nixon, in a declassified White House memo, concluded otherwise and predicted his hostility to criticism would “lead him to take some rather drastic steps toward curtailing freedom of the press in the future.”
Cox also said Castro surprised him with some stereotypical views of Cuban workers, calling them “lazy and undisciplined” and told Cox that “they came to work to find gold.”
Largely isolated, Castro hungered for information, and wondered which White House cabinet members were disloyal, inquiring about, among others, Henry Kissinger and Alexander Haig. “This was a very intelligent person who was interested in what was going on in the world,” Cox said.