Ronald Hilton (July 31, 1911, Torquay, England – February 20, 2007, Palo Alto, California) was a British-American academic, reporter and think-tank specialist, specializing in Latin America and, in particular, Fidel Castro's Cuba.
The United States had just entered the war, and I became conscious of the existence of that distant land, never dreaming that I would make my home there.
At the same time I saw young English soldiers going off to fight the Hun; I recall how one kindly helped me across a busy street.
Then, at the railway station, I would see Red Cross trains arrive, full of young English soldiers with all kinds of ugly wounds.
My family moved to Winchester, where I haunted the great cathedral where Philip II of Spain, the Devil of the South, married bloody Mary Tudor.
He saw the complex character of Catalan nationalism where the revolutionary spirit was expressed in the repeated playing of “Els Segadors” (“The Harvesters”), the song of the anti-Spanish country people, just as in Madrid he heard constantly the music of the Hymn of Riego.
The refrain of “The harvesters” was “Bom colp de fals,” a good blow with a scythe to cut the Spaniards’ heads off.
Hilton graduated from Oxford in 1933 deeply dissatisfied with the idea of exclusive study of old book he began a cycling through Europe with his first stop at Strasbourg where he encountered Nazi government for the first time.
From this moment on there would be no peace in Spain'[5] He was an academic expert on Latin America who helped to uncover the CIA's clandestine preparations for the Bay of Pigs Invasion of Cuba in April 1961.
During a research trip to Guatemala in 1960, he learned that a group of Cuban exiles were training at a secret camp (which everybody there seemed to know about) for their ill-fated attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro's regime.
The invasion went ahead anyway a few months later, after the Kennedy administration succeeded in persuading the New York Times (NYT), that had decided to follow up the Nation story, to delay publishing its own investigations.
Hilton continued in his post as the Professor of Romanic Languages at the Stanford University until he retired at the mandatory age of 65.