Ronald Hilton
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Not to be confused with Ronald W. Hilton, Professor of Accounting at Cornell University.
Ronald Hilton (b. July 31, 1911, Torquay, Devon - d. 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.
Ronald Hilton was educated at Oxford University and at the University of California at Berkeley and became a US citizen in 1946. 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 1961. He spent most of his long working life at Stanford University.
During a research trip to Guatemala in 1960, he learnt 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 Castro’s regime. Hilton was the main source when the left-wing weekly The Nation broke the story in November 1960.
But the invasion went ahead anyway a few months later, after the Kennedy Administration succeeded in persuading the New York Times (NYT), which had decided to follow up the Nation story, to delay publishing its own investigations.
Hilton later published a series of articles about Castro’s revolution in the Hispanic American Report which were written by Herbert Matthews and which the NYT had declined to publish because it felt that Matthews had grown too close to the Cuban leader.
He founded the World Association of International Studies after resigning from his Stanford post in 1964. In 1970 he launched the World Affairs Report, which continued publication until 1990. He became a Visiting Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford in 1987.
[edit] Family
In 1939, he married a fellow student, Mary Bowie, while both were enrolled in graduate studies at Berkeley; his wife and a daughter survive him.
