He said that because it was obvious that the USA would impose an embargo on the island and force most of the world to follow it, it was Castro's fault. He said that if Castro had his people's best interest in heart, he would have caved against american pressure.
Your friend vastly underestimates how bad life was under Batista, and how much the revolution has done to help people out of abject poverty. If he means "caved" as go back to pre-revolutionary times... something like <2% of the population owned the majority of arable land. US interests controlled most of the sugar mills. And the stats on poverty, hunger, literacy, mortality etc under Batista are appalling. So how would going back to that be better?