In 1961, the Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro talked to the BBC about his land reform – passed this week in 1959 – and how he wanted peace. But it was the start of a spiralling situation between the US and Cuba that would push the world to the brink of catastrophe.

On 26 June 1961 in a farm outside Havana, BBC Panorama's Robin Day sat down with the 34-year-old Fidel Castro to talk about the changes that had taken place on the island since he had led the revolution to overthrow Cuba's dictator Fulgencio Batista.

Castro made for an affable, if at times evasive, interviewee, keen to impress on the BBC journalist how the Agrarian Reform policy – that he had signed a little over two years previously – was improving lives for Cubans, and also his desire for a peaceful relationship with the US.

Little in the seemingly genial interview indicated just how fraught and dangerous the situation between Cuba and the US was becoming.

Day had been one of a number of reporters invited, and the revolutionary leader was in an upbeat mood as they toured through the villages of Cuba.

"He's a natural orator with an endless flow of words," Day reported, confessing Castro had created quite an impression as he energetically told the group about his vision for the country.

"He should not be dismissed as a crackpot or a clown. He impressed even the New York Times reporter as being witty, erudite and skilful. He's an object of fascination everywhere he goes," Day said.

Castro wanted to show them his support among the Cuban people, and had earlier taken them to a new state farm, where plantation workers had crowded around to talk to him and he had encouraged the journalists to question them.

For the Cuban leader, empowering the island's poor and improving their living conditions was a key aim of the revolution. This ambition had been epitomised in the Agrarian Reform Act that Castro signed into law in May 1959, overturning Cuba's centuries-old patterns of exploitation.

Prior to the revolution, huge swathes of Cuban lands lay in the hands of a few wealthy families and foreign multinational companies, like Coca-Cola and United Fruit.

Most rural Cubans worked as labourers for them, often under oppressive conditions, or struggled to survive as peasant farmers on meagre plots of land, subject to illegal evictions.

This stark inequality had entrenched poverty on the island, and had provided fertile ground for the ideals behind Castro's revolution to take root. The Agrarian Reform law banned all foreign ownership of land and holdings of over 1,000 acres were confiscated.

These lands had been redistributed, some turned into state-run communes, others given to some 200,000 rural workers who received titles to land. Castro had apparently even enraged his own mother by confiscating some of his family's estate at Finca Las Manacas.

Castro wanted to show the press trip how that law, which remains today the basis of Cuba’s agricultural model, was changing ordinary Cubans' lives for the better.

"You have been travelling across Cuba, what have you seen during [your] travelling? Everybody working, everybody happy. Have you seen economical difficulties?" he said to Day.

But beneath the surface amiability of the tour, the situation could not have been........

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