Cuba / France: Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir on a boat trip with Fidel Castro during their visit to Cuba in 1960

In 1960, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir visited Cuba during, as Sartre wrote, the 'honeymoon of the revolution'. Military strongman Fulgencio Batista’s regime had fallen to Fidel Castro’s guerilla army and the whole country was alight with revolutionary zeal.

When the couple returned to Paris, Sartre wrote numerous articles extolling the revolution. De Beauvoir, who was equally impressed, wrote, 'For the first time in our lives, we were witnessing happiness that had been attained by violence'.

De Beauvoir and Sartre would ultimately denounce Castro in an open letter that criticized him for the arrest of Cuban poet Herberto Padillo.

Copyright:

Supplier: CPA Media Co. Ltd.

Photographer:

Alberto Korda

Credit:

Pictures From History