keyboard_arrow_right Within six months of Castro’s overthrow of Fulgencio Batista’s dictatorship in Cuba (January 1959), relations between Castro’s government and the United States began to deteriorate. The new Cuban government confiscated private property (much of it owned by North American interests), sent agents to initiate revolutions in several Latin American countries, and established diplomatic and economic ties with leading socialist powers. Castro himself often and vociferously accused the United States of trying to undermine his government. Several U.S. congressmen and senators, from early 1960, denounced Castro; and by June the Congress had passed legislation enabling President Dwight D. Eisenhower to take retaliatory steps: the United States cut off sugar purchases from Cuba and soon thereafter placed an embargo on all exports to Cuba except food and medicine. In January 1961, Eisenhower, in one of the final acts of his administration, broke diplomatic ties with Cuba.