What else were they supposed to do when their next-door superpower blocked all trade, and brought substantial resources to bear on trying to undermine/destroy them? Invasion plots, assassination plots, every kind of wacky propaganda plot you can imagine (fake radio stations, leaflets dropped from planes), financial support for dissident groups, etc. etc.

My point was just that regular Cubans actually did alright, much better than US propaganda would have you believe, and better than most of the other states in the region, including those which were heavily subsidized by the US.

They could have easily ended up with a fascist police state or a civil war.

American policymakers obviously had legitimate reasons to fear anything that seemed like it might further Soviet interests, given the overall climate of the Cold War, and so as someone born in the mid 1980s I find it hard to judge their intentions and actions, after the fact. However, I tend to think that things would have turned out much better overall for everyone involved if we had kept up diplomatic and economic relations with the Castro regime right from the start, instead of basically forcing them into Soviet arms.