CHAPTER 10
I had been raised on Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood and the endless hero actor fighting against injustice and leading the people to victory over tyranny. The Cuban thing seemed a case of classic Hollywood proportions.
—LEROI JONES, The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, 1984
IN FEBRUARY 1968 a group of twenty young Americans arrived in Havana from Mexico City. The trip had been organized by the American SDS. In the group was a twenty-year-old Columbia University junior from New Jersey named Mark Rudd, who had raised money for his Cuban trip by selling hashish at the West End Bar, a student hangout in upper Manhattan.
The group met with the Vietnamese diplomatic delegation and were surprised by their extreme courtesy. The Vietnamese ambassador said that he understood there were important differences between the American government and the American people. Though the students accepted the ambassador’s gracious remark with relief, Rudd seized the occasion to point out that while he wished the ambassador’s comments had been correct, in reality, most Americans did support the war.
The Vietnamese diplomat smiled at the earnest young blond student. “This will be a very long war,” he said. “It has already lasted for us more than twenty years. We can hold out much longer. Eventually the American people will tire of the war, and will turn against it. Then the war will end.”
Rudd realized the ambassador was right. One of the diplomats said he had fought in South Vietnam for seven years, living in tunnels and emerging at night to attack the Americans. Everywhere in Cuba that winter, there was news from Vietnam. A large neon sign over a main Havana street, La Rampa, gave the current total of planes shot down. When the students went to the countryside, they found Cubans standing around transistor radios getting news of the Tet Offensive. Someone gave Rudd a ring that was said to have been made from the metal of a shot-down American plane.
The students met many Cubans who were their age, including Sylvio Rodriguez, who sang ballads in the style of Joan Baez. They spent time in the leafy tropical park with the famous ice-cream shop Coppelia. Rudd later remembered: “We hung out at Coppelia eating tomato ice cream and went to great parties with Afro-Cuban music, which I had never heard before and didn’t quite understand. I saw in Cuba what I wanted to see: factories, farms, and institutions that were owned by the state, socialized. I wanted to see a different way to organize society. But I didn’t see the obvious, that you can’t have a one-party state, that you have to have elections.”
Fidel Castro, bearded and in army fatigues, the surprising and slightly offbeat sensation of 1959, had become the New Left hero of 1968.
He had been neither bearded nor revolutionary in 1955 when he visited the United States looking for financing to overthrow the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, who had seized power three years earlier and had banned all political parties. Batista was corrupt and disliked, and Castro, Dr. Fidel Castro as he was known in the United States in deference to his law degree, was reasonable, earnest, clean-cut, and reassuringly middle class.
In December 1956 Castro landed a yacht in Oriente province with a fighting force of eighty-two. The Cuban government reported that almost all the rebels, including Castro, were killed. This was only a slight exaggeration; the casualties included all but a dozen survivors who made it into the Sierra Maestra mountains with Dr. Castro among them. This was not known for certain until a retired New York Times correspondent, Herbert L. Matthews, accomplished one of the most famous and controversial newspaper scoops of the twentieth century by finding Dr. Castro alive, bearded and talkative in his mountain hideaway along with eighteen colorful bearded rebels, including one who had been a pro baseball player in the United States.
The Times ran Matthews’s interview as a three-part series on February 24, 25, and 26, 1957. It has often been attacked by anti-Castro elements for presenting Fidel as a sympathetic freedom fighter similar to a World War II partisan. Of course, Americans conveniently forget that many World War II partisans had also been communists. The most remembered attack on the Matthews series was a 1960 cartoon in the conservative National Review showing an avaricious-looking Castro hunkering down on an island labeled “The Cuban Police State.” The caption read, “I got my job through the New York Times.”
But the Times was far from the only media outlet that ran favorable coverage of Dr. Castro at the time. A rabid anticommunist Hungarian exile named Andrew St. George wrote favorably of the Cuban rebels in Look; Jules Dubois gave sympathetic coverage in the Red-baiting, right-wing Chicago Tribune; photojournalist Dickey Chapelle spent three weeks with Castro for the extremely conservative Reader’s Digest. Time, another right-leaning publication, ran thirty-two articles on the Cuban rebels in the two years leading up to their victory, most of them favorable. In December 1956 Time called Fidel “Lawyer Castro” and said that he was a “well born, well-to-do daredevil of 29.”
American reporters always emphasized Castro’s middle-class character, origins, and education and invariably mentioned his pure Spanish blood. It was never said, but it was reassuring to know, that the Cuban rebellion was no dangerous “Negro uprising.” To the American press he was a good story, a colorful and uplifting tale of a struggle for freedom. But what was starting to become more important was that he made for great television. He looked dashing in fatigues, and his uncertainty in English showed a touchingly vulnerable, less assured side that in reality he never had. He was simply uncomfortable in English. Three months after Matthews’s scoop, a CBS News team traveled to the green, thickly overgrown tropical mountains of Cuba’s Oriente province and shot a prime-time news special that aired in May called Rebels of the Sierra Maestra: The Story of Cuba’s Jungle Fighters.
Television had come along too late for the Mexican revolution. It had missed the romance of the beautiful Emiliano Zapata, famous for his exquisite horsemanship, and the wild, mounted northern bandits of Pancho Villa, although they were captured in the fifties by Hollywood with romantic rebel stars including Marlon Brando as Zapata. But now television had a live revolution, with the large and rugged-looking Dr. Fidel Castro and his heartthrob Argentine sidekick Che. The Barbudos, the bearded band of rebels, cigars clenched in their teeth, dressed in green, toted huge guns more impressive for portraits than military tactics—but the weapons were reminiscent of the Mexican revolution, which was the very image of a fabled Latin revolution. In between climbing down green slopes to attack the evil dictatorship and its underpaid and undermotivated henchmen, Fidel could squat in the jungle just south of Miami with CBS correspondent Robert Taber and speak into a microphone. Not nearly as graphic as the live warfare from Vietnam of 1968, this coverage felt immediate but was appealing in its bloodlessness.
Students tried to go to Cuba and fight for Fidel, but the rebels did not encourage them. Frenchman Régis Debray managed to fight with Che only later, in Latin America. Bernard Kouchner, age twenty the year of Fidel’s triumph, was discouraged when he attempted to join up with Fidel and returned to France, where he went to medical school and formed Médecins Sans Frontières, Doctors Without Borders, a medical response to the ideals of third worldism. The New York Times reported that twenty-five Americans were fighting with Fidel and there may have been more, though only in a few cases do we know their names. Three sons of American sailors serving in Guantánamo joined up with the guerrilla forces, and unexplained gringos were occasionally referred to in rebel communications. In March 1957 a Berkeley undergraduate student, Hank di Suvero, wrote Herbert Matthews about the possibility of taking a group of friends with two jeeps to Oriente province after the spring semester to help Fidel. Mathews was kind enough not to dwell on the notion of Castro holding up the revolution until the spring semester was over, but he was discouraging, so instead di Suvero stayed at Berkeley that year and became one of the founders of the student political party SLATE, which was the beginning of activism on that campus.
It seemed everyone loved Fidel. Even Eisenhower negotiated secretly with Batista in 1958, trying to persuade him to step down and be replaced by a coalition that would include Castro. America and much of the world thrilled to the film footage of the bearded revolutionaries led by Fidel and Che, as photogenic as anyone Hollywood might have cast, triumphantly taking Havana on New Year’s Day 1959. Everyone wanted Fidel on television. Both Ed Sullivan and Jack Parr flew down to do Fidel shows. But this euphoric state where television, journalists, the student Left, and the political establishment were all in love with Castro would not last for long.
Once in power, Fidel began executing hundreds of Batista supporters. Suddenly the political establishment, the same people who would defend capital punishment in the Chessman case the following year, were appalled by state executions. And the Left, the Abbie Hoffmans and Marlon Brandos, the activists and celebrities who would stand vigil by the California prison, protesting the Chessman execution, had not a word to say for Fidel’s victims. But even within Cuba, revolutionary justice was being called into question. In March 1959 forty-four Batista airmen were tried for war crimes. Evidence that they had refused to bomb populations and had dumped their ordnance on fields led to their acquittal, whereupon the judge was replaced by a more loyal revolutionary and the forty-four were retried and all sentenced to prison terms. The minister of health, Elena Mederos, asked to resign, saying, “I am a different generation to you and your friends. We are quite opposed to each other in spirit. I must resign.” But Castro was able to charm her into staying.
Executions and revolutionary justice were talked about and criticized in the United States, too, but the fundamental issue was revolution. Down from the mountains and secure in the capital, Dr. Castro and his middle-class white rebels were not shaving off their beards! This was the sixties, when extra hair was synonymous with rebellion. In 1961 Matthews came out with a book that put it succinctly: This was “a real revolution, not a changing of the guard, not a shuffling of leaders, not just the outs getting in but a social revolution on the direct line of the French Revolution of 1789.”
As this reality became understood, in other countries the people of the establishment, with their fear and distrust of revolution, became vehemently anti-Castro. Many people could not decide. But a radical minority around the world, people who longed for revolution, believing it was the only hope for social change, the only way to move toward a more just society, were prepared to salute Fidel, whatever his faults, because he had not just taken power, he was really doing it—was really making a revolution. Fidel was in their pantheon, along with Ho Chi Minh and Mao. But Ho was a curious and stoic character, not hip like Fidel, and though Mao’s revolution fascinated, they would never completely understand his vast and complex China. For many radical students, middle-class people who dreamed of revolution, Dr. Castro, the middle-class lawyer-turned-revolutionary, and his partner, Dr. Che Guevara, the middle-class doctor-turned-revolutionary, were their ideal radicals.
In November 1960 C. Wright Mills published Listen, Yankee, the first of a number of leftist essays to reach the bestseller list in the 1960s. Most of the others, such as Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, did not come until 1968. C. Wright Mills, a sociologist well respected in academic circles who died at the height of his popularity in the early 1960s, had been widely read since his 1950s book, The Power Elite, which told of the military-industrial complex before Eisenhower had coined the phrase in his 1960 farewell address. Mills had articulated a view of society’s power structure that was felt by many of the New Left youth. According to Mills, the ruling class was made up of a new clique of politicians, corporate executives, and military commanders who maintained their hold on power by perpetuating the cold war. In Listen, Yankee, Mills broke all the rules of academic writing and as a result sold four hundred thousand copies. The book is written in the first-person voice of a fictitious Cuban revolutionary who speaks rapidly, his commentary richly woven with asides—a fair approximation of what Castro sounded like in Spanish. The Cuban talks not only of his own revolution, but of the need for revolution in America. In 1960, unlike 1968, talk of revolution in America was rarely heard.
While Cuba was thrilling the Left, it was alienating most of its U.S. admirers. In early 1959, Camilo Cienfuegos, the head of the rebel army, visited the United States to garner support, and the trip was disastrous. These Barbudos were no longer picturesque guerrilla fighters, they were unshaven and uncouth radicals. But two months later, in April, Fidel himself came to America, and for a brief moment the country succumbed to his seemingly irresistible charm. A toy manufacturer produced one hundred thousand olive drab caps that said “El Libertador” and had the 26th of July logo of Fidel’s movement. Each cap came with a chin strap to which a black beard was attached. Fidel was particularly well received in New York at a huge Central Park rally. New York mayor Robert F. Wagner, Jr., gave him keys to the city. But in what proved to be an omen for the future, his most successful stops were at Columbia and other universities. By springtime, polls in the United States showed an almost even split between those opposed to Castro and those who either supported him or hadn’t made up their minds. With a third to a fifth of the population solidly behind him, he had lost a great deal of support in the first six months of 1959.
The American press, once accused of coddling the bearded heroes, had turned so vehemently against the revolution, once they understood that it was a revolution, that Robert Taber, the CBS correspondent who had met with Castro in the mountains, decided to form an organization called Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Unfortunately, the short-lived organization is most remembered by the odd and unexplained evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald, John Kennedy’s assassin, participated in it. But there was something more interesting about the group. Taber, by most accounts, was fairly apolitical and simply believed that the Cuban revolution was initiating interesting social and economic changes that were being ignored by the press. Among those he attracted to the organization were Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, theater critic Kenneth Tynan, and Truman Capote. The group placed high-profile ads explaining the Cuban revolution. With very little political affiliation except for the French couple who were connected to the French Communist Party, they were still able to attract thousands of people to write-in campaigns and demonstrations. It was one of the first indications that the United States had a large body of left-leaning people who were not part of any leftist establishment—the people who came to be known as the New Left.
During the first two years of Castro’s rule, the rift between Washington and Havana widened steadily. In early 1959 there were already hints of a U.S. invasion, and Castro made his famous remark about “two hundred thousand dead gringos” if they tried. On June 3, 1959, Cuba’s Agrarian Reform Law limited the size of holdings and required owners to be Cuban. Sugar company stocks on Wall Street immediately crashed, while the U.S. government angrily and futilely protested. In October, Major Huber Matos and a group of his officers were arrested for their anticommunist political stances, stances that had matched Castro’s own a year earlier, and tried for “uncertain, anti-patriotic, and anti-revolutionary conduct.” By November 1959 the Eisenhower government had decided on the forcible removal of Castro and began working with Florida exiles toward that goal. Two months later the Fair Play for Cuba Committee began its activities. In February 1960 Cuba signed a five-year accord with the Soviet Union to trade Cuban sugar for Soviet industrial goods. Only a few weeks later a French ship, Le Coubre, carrying rifles and grenades, blew up in Havana harbor owing to causes still unknown today, killing seventy-five and injuring two hundred Cuban dockworkers. Castro declared a day of mourning, accusing the United States of sabotage, though he admitted that he had no proof, and in one of his more famous speeches said, “You will reduce us neither by war nor famine.” Sartre, visiting Cuba, wrote that in the speech he found “the hidden face of all revolutions, their shaded face: the foreign menace felt in anguish.”
The United States called back its ambassador, and Congress gave Eisenhower the power to cut the Cuban sugar quota, which Eisenhower insisted he would do not to punish the Cubans, but only if necessary for regulating U.S. sugar supplies.
On May 7 Cuba and the Soviet Union established diplomatic ties, and during the summer U.S.-owned refineries that refused to take Soviet oil were nationalized. When the Soviet Union pledged to defend Cuba from foreign aggression, Eisenhower dramatically cut the Cuban sugar quota. It appears that Cuba’s drift toward the Soviet Union was fueling U.S. hostility, but in fact it is now known that back in mid-March, before the ties with Moscow were established, Eisenhower had already approved a plan for an exile invasion of the island. Throughout the 1960 summer election campaign, John Kennedy repeatedly accused the Republicans of “being soft” on Cuba.
On October 13, 1960, Cuba nationalized all large companies, and the following week, while Kennedy accused Nixon and the Eisenhower administration of “losing” Cuba, Eisenhower responded with a trade embargo, which Castro answered by nationalizing the last 166 American-owned enterprises on the island. By the time Kennedy was inaugurated in January, the U.S.-Cuban relationship appeared to have already reached the point of no return. Kennedy cut diplomatic relations with Cuba, banned travel to the island, and demanded that the Fair Play for Cuba Committee register as a foreign agent, which it refused to do. But Kennedy boasted, “We can be proud that the United States is not using its muscle against a very small country.” Kennedy was different, a liberal with “a new frontier.”
Then he did exactly what he had been proud of not doing, authorizing the invasion of Cuba by Cuban exiles. The so-called Brigade 2506, on April 17, was an extraordinary disaster. The exiles had convinced the United States that the Cubans would rise up against Castro and join them. But they didn’t. Instead they rose up with impressive determination to defend their island against a foreign invader. The Cuban exiles also thought that if they got into trouble, the U.S. military would step in, which Kennedy was not willing to do. In three days, what came to be known as the Bay of Pigs invasion was over. Fidel had saved Cuba. As Dean Acheson so succinctly put it, “It was not necessary to call on Price Waterhouse to know that 1,500 Cubans wasn’t as good as 250,000 Cubans.”
The Bay of Pigs was an enormously significant moment in postwar history. It was America’s first defeat in the third world. But it also marked a shift that had been taking place since the end of World War II. The United States had been founded on anticolonialism and had been lecturing Europe on its colonialist policies even as recently as Franklin Roosevelt. All the while, it had been developing an imperialism of its own—ruthlessly manipulating the Caribbean, Latin America, and even parts of Asia for its own benefit with indifference to the plight of the local inhabitants—while the Europeans, against their will, had been losing their colonies. America was becoming the leading imperialist.
At the time of the Bay of Pigs, France had lost a colonial war with Vietnam and was mired in one with Algeria. The year before, the British had given up fighting the Mau Mau and were now planning for Kenyan independence. The Belgian Congo was in a bloody civil war over its independence. The Dutch were fighting an independence movement in Indonesia and New Guinea. These were European problems, and a New Left in Europe was organizing over the issue of anticolonialism and the struggles of newly emerging nations. The Bay of Pigs brought the United States solidly into this debate, making writers such as Frantz Fanon, not to mention Ho Chi Minh, relevant to Americans and shaping the way the young Left in the United States and around the world would see Vietnam. To them the Bay of Pigs made Cuba a symbol of anticolonialism. The issue was no longer the quality of the Cuban revolution, but just the fact of it and that it had stood up to a huge imperialist nation and survived.
The Bay of Pigs invasion also drove a wedge between the liberals and the Left, who had united for a moment in the promise of a Kennedy presidency. Norman Mailer, a prominent Kennedy supporter and chronicler, wrote in an open letter, “Wasn’t there anyone around to give you the lecture on Cuba? Don’t you sense the enormity of your mistake—you invade a country without understanding its music.” But it is significant that in the numerous protests against the invasion that took place around the country, a great many of the protesters were college students who had not been particularly political up until then. By his fourth month in office, it had become clear that the Kennedy administration was not just about the New Frontier, the Peace Corps, and the race to the moon. Exactly like his predecessor, this president wanted to use military power to back up cold war obsessions and would have no tolerance for small, impoverished countries that did not step into line. Young Kennedy enthusiasts such as Tom Hayden would soon start reappraising their support of him. Even the Peace Corps looked different. Was it really an organization by which people with ideals could help the newly emerging nations? Or was it a wing of U.S. government policy, which was colonialist and not, as it had always claimed, anticolonial?
The Bay of Pigs was one of the defining moments in a new generation’s cynicism about liberals. By 1968 “liberal” had become almost synonymous with “sellout,” and singer Phil Ochs amused young people at demonstrations with his song “Love Me, I’m a Liberal.” The song’s message was that liberals said the right things but could not be trusted to do them.
Fidel Castro is a seducer. He has always had an enormous ability to charm, convince, and enlist. He was so completely confident and self-assured that he was almost an irresistible force. He could just walk into a room or even a wide-open space and everyone present could feel, even in spite of themselves, a sense of excitement—a sense that something interesting was about to happen. He understood very well how to use this talent, made more important because he, and everyone else, had started to view the revolution as an extension of himself. Cuba too had a long history of seducing visitors, with its beauty and the richness of its culture, the grandeur of its capital like no other Caribbean city. And Fidel, who had been cheered on American college campuses, knew that Cuba still had a wealth of young supporters in the United States.
Cuban government poster, 1968
(Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture)
For all these reasons it became Cuban policy to bring over as many sympathetic Americans as possible to show them the revolution firsthand. Travel restrictions and economic embargoes could be circumvented by Cuban government–sponsored trips. Most of the visitors understood that the Cubans were out to seduce them. Some resisted and others didn’t care to go. In either case, the result was usually the same. Most left deeply impressed with the Cuban revolution: the elimination of illiteracy, the construction of new schools across the island, the development of an extensive and effective health care system. The Cubans even experimented with feminism—increased roles for women, an antimachismo campaign, marriage vows in which the man pledged to help clean the house. These social experiments to build “a new man” were striking. And while it was a young revolution, it had a contagious excitement.
Most saw things that were wrong—too many police, too many arrests, no free press. But they also saw so much that was extraordinarily bold and experimental and inspiring. They were well aware that Cuba’s enemies, chiefly the U.S. government and Cuban exiles, were opposed to the revolution not for the things that were wrong, but for the things that were right, and this made them focus on these important transformations.
Susan Sontag spent three months in Cuba in 1960 and found the country “astonishingly free of repression.” While noting a lack of press freedom, she applauded the revolution for not turning against its own, as did so many revolutions. This would have been inspiring news to Huber Matos, serving his twenty-five-year term, or the fifteen thousand “counterrevolutionaries,” many of them former revolutionaries, who were in Cuban prisons in the mid-1960s. But because leftists believed Cuba was being treated so unfairly by the same U.S. government that was brutalizing Vietnam, and because they were both infuriated by the United States and impressed by the genuine accomplishment of Castro, they had a tendency to overstate the case for Cuba. Some felt that they were only compensating for the obvious lies and misstatements of Cuba’s enemies.
Cuba transformed LeRoi Jones. Born in 1934, he spent the fifties as a beat poet, focused on neither race nor revolution. In fact, he was less political than his colleague Allen Ginsberg, with whom he founded a poetry magazine in 1958. In 1960 he went on one of the Cuban-sponsored trips, this one for black writers. Like many other writers on such Fidel-sponsored junkets, he worried about being “taken” the way it was always said Herbert Matthews had been. “I felt immediately sure that the make was on,” he wrote. It was hard not to feel that way as a guest of the government, shuttled from one accomplishment to the next by the Casa de las Americas, a government organization of earnest, well-educated young people who could talk about Latin American art and literature. The Casa was run by Haydée Santamaria, who had been a member of Castro’s inner group since the beginning. Santamaria, later infamous for the persecution of insufficiently revolutionary Cuban writers, believed that it was impossible to be an apolitical writer, since being apolitical was in itself a political stance. Jones had been initially disappointed by the caliber of black writers on the trip. He was the most distinguished. But he was struck by his contact with Latin American writers, some of whom attacked him for his lack of political commitment. The final step appeared to be on July 26, the anniversary of Castro’s 1953 quixotically unsuccessful attack on an army fortress that had kicked off the revolution. After touring the Sierra Maestras with a group of Cubans celebrating the anniversary, he returned and described the scene in an essay, “Cuba Libre.”
At one point in the speech the crowd interrupted for about twenty minutes, crying, “Venceremos, venceremos, venceremos, venceremos, venceremos, venceremos, venceremos, venceremos.” The entire crowd, 60 or 70,000 people, all chanting in unison. Fidel stepped away from the lectern, grinning, talking to his aides. He quieted the crowd with a wave of his arms and began again. At first softly, with the syllables drawn out and enunciated, then tightening his voice and going into almost a musical rearrangement of his speech. He condemned Eisenhower, Nixon, the South, the Platt Amendment, and Fulgencio Batista in one long, unbelievable sentence. The crowd interrupted again, “Fidel, Fidel, Fidel, Fidel, Fidel, Fidel, Fidel, Fidel, Fidel, Fidel, Fidel, Fidel.” He leaned away from the lectern, grinning at the Chief of the Army. The speech lasted almost two and a half hours, being interrupted time and again by the exultant crowd and once by five minutes of rain. When it began to rain, Almeida draped a rain jacket around Fidel’s shoulders, and he relit his cigar. When the speech ended, the crowd went out of its head, roaring for almost forty-five minutes.
“Cuba Libre” is an essay that attacked Jones himself and the beat-bohemian lifestyle and held up the Cuban revolution as a model. Jones wrote, “The rebels among us have become merely people like myself who grow beards and will not participate in politics.” The new black American, the black man as revolutionary, in part had his intellectual beginnings with “Cuba Libre.”
The trip to Cuba became a kind of hajj, an obligatory journey that all leftists had to make at least once in their life. Writers went to discuss culture, activists to see the revolution, youth to cut cane and “do their share.”
One of the less successful visits was by Allen Ginsberg, though even he was favorably impressed with what he found. He wrote of his arrival in early 1965, “Marxist Historical Revolutionary/futility with Wagnerian overtones/lifted my heart.” He was put up, as all the American guests were in those days, at the Havana Riviera, which had a state-of-the-architecture fifties facade. A little footbridge crossed a pond to enter the not very high high-rise hotel with vistas of Havana harbor over the curved shoreline drive, the Malecón, where wild waves broke away and splashed over the wall onto the pavement. From his luxury room he thought, as many had before, that “being treated as a guest is a subtle form of brainwashing.” His first night there, he met three young gay poets who told him of police persecution of homosexuals, beats, and bearded longhairs—unless, of course, they were bearded Fidelistas. They asked Ginsberg to complain to the government, which he did, only to be reassured by officials that it was an incident from the past. Ginsberg, having been persecuted by numerous secret police, including the FBI, remained skeptical.
He quickly developed a following among young poets, who would show up at his readings and be prevented from entering until Ginsberg insisted. Interviewed by a Cuban reporter, he was asked what he would say to Castro if they could meet. Ginsberg had three points: He would ask him about the police persecution of homosexuals, then he would ask him why marijuana was not legal in Cuba, and last he would propose that opponents of the regime, rather than being executed, be fed hallucinogenic mushrooms and then be given jobs operating the elevators at the Havana Riviera.
“I just shot my mouth off,” the poet later said. “I just continued talking there as I would here in terms of being anti-authoritarian. But my basic feeling there was sympathetic to the revolution.”
The revolution quickly tired of his mouth. Haydée Santamaría told him that he could discuss drugs and homosexuality with high officials, but they could not have him spreading these ideas to the general population. “We have work to do and cannot afford these extra luxuries that impede the senses,” she said of his ideas about free drugs. Like other visitors, Ginsberg remained impressed with the Cuban experiment in building a new society. But the Cubans were not impressed with Ginsberg. The knock on the door finally came at 8:00 A.M. on a morning after he had been out at parties most of the night. A government official with three uniformed guards told him to pack and put him on the next outbound plane, which happened to be going to Czechoslovakia, another country from which he would soon be expelled.
The early months of 1968 were a revolutionary high point for Cuba. The trials of pro-Soviet officials at the beginning of the year appeared to represent a distancing from the Soviet Union, though it was not to last long. Castro seemed more interested in China than in Russia, which, from the point of view of the New Left, was the correct choice.
In 1968 China was in the middle of a wrenching process known officially as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. It had been launched by Communist Party chairman Mao Zedong in 1966 to force out elements that he felt were undermining both his authority and the ideology of the revolution. It quickly turned into a power struggle between the Party chairman and the more moderate leaders in government. China too had its 1968 generation, the first Chinese born and raised in the revolution, and as in the rest of the world, they leaned to the Left. In the Cultural Revolution they were Mao’s defenders, released from their schools to be vanguard “Red Guards,” as they were labeled in May 1966 by student radicals at Qinghua University. Mao’s stated purpose was to combat the creeping bourgeoisie mentality. In August he released his sixteen points “to struggle against and overthrow those persons in authority who are taking the capitalist road” and to bring education, art, and literature into line with socialist doctrine. For leftist ideologues around the world, the Cultural Revolution was a fascinating effort to purge, recommit, and purify their revolution. The Chinese appeared determined not to let their revolution descend into the venality and hypocrisy of the Soviets.
But in practice, the Cultural Revolution was both brutal and disastrous. Teenagers walked up to adults and ordered them to replace their shoes because they had been made in Hong Kong. Girls forcibly cut the long hair off women. The army protected libraries and museums from the Red Guard, who wanted to destroy everything that wasn’t ideologically pure. Scholars were assaulted and publicly humiliated for knowledge of foreign languages. Given the extreme reverence for elders in the Chinese population, this behavior was even more shocking than it would have been in a Western country. Gradually society was becoming paralyzed by an almost universal fear. Even the Red Guard itself was split between students whose families were workers, peasants, soldiers, cadres, or martyrs of the revolution—“the five kinds of Red” singled out for special treatment—and the students from bourgeois backgrounds.
Many of the world’s governments were less interested in the issue of Chinese revolutionary purity than that of Chinese political and economic stability. By 1968, for the first time in years there were signs of food shortages, caused by the Cultural Revolution. Western governments were even more interested in the impact the Cultural Revolution was having on the Chinese nuclear weapons program. China had become a nuclear power in 1964 and in 1966, the same year as the launching of the Cultural Revolution, had demonstrated the ability to deliver a warhead by missile to a target five hundred miles away. The program had not shown much progress since. This may have been one of the reasons that the Pentagon was not particularly alarmed by it, but others feared the Pentagon was too optimistic. Even with the instability of the Cultural Revolution, physicist Ralph E. Lapp warned in 1968 that by 1973 the Chinese would be capable of hitting Los Angeles and Seattle and they seemed on the verge of a hydrogen bomb, which in fact they did explode by the end of 1968.
1968 poster from China of the Cultural Revolution showing a Red Guard with a book of Mao’s teachings in hand. The caption says, “Establish a new standard of merit for the people: Just as the heroic 4th Platoon and Comrade Li Wen’chung worked to defeat selfishness and promote the common good, we should convert Chairman Mao’s most recent directive into action.”
(Library of Congress)
Cuba’s leaders were intrigued by the Chinese effort to purify their revolution. Revolutionary purity had been a favorite topic of the martyred Che, who had vehemently opposed all financial incentives because he feared they would corrupt the revolution. Castro was more pragmatic, and this disagreement, along with the fact that the actual revolution was over, led to Che’s decision to resign from government and move on to another revolution.
Castro had declared 1968 to be “the year of the heroic guerrillero.” It was to be a yearlong tribute to Che. As though obeying its own propaganda—the ubiquitous signs urging everyone to be like Che—the government itself actually became more like Che. Che, like the New Left, was scornful and distrustful of the Soviet Union, which he felt had compromised away all revolutionary principles. Castro began the year in an anti-Soviet spirit. He said that he expected to expand exports to the point where in two years he would no longer be dependent on the Soviets. Then, on March 14, he announced “the revolutionary offensive.” The new offensive ended the remaining traces of privately owned business, closing without compensation fifty-five thousand small businesses, including fruit stands, laundries, garages, clubs, and restaurants. Many of Havana’s famous restaurants were closed. In his four-and-a-half-hour speech—not exceptionally long for Fidel—he announced that in Havana alone, 950 bars were to be closed. He said that it was unfair for such people to earn $50 a day in a shop while others earned far less cutting cane. Like Che, he stated his opposition to financial incentives for work.
Cuba was trying to create people who worked for the good of society. Private entrepreneurs, he explained, were in opposition to the sort of “new man” they were trying to create. “Are we going to construct socialism, or are we going to construct vending stands?” Fidel demanded, and the crowd laughed and cheered. “We did not make a revolution here to establish the right to trade! Such a revolution took place in 1789—that was the age of the bourgeois revolution, the revolution of merchants, of the bourgeois. When will they finally understand that this is a revolution of socialists, that this is a revolution of Communists . . . that nobody shed his blood here fighting against the tyranny, against the mercenaries, against bandits, in order to establish the right for someone to make 200 pesos selling rum, or fifty pesos selling fried eggs or omelettes. . . . Clearly and definitely we must say that we propose to eliminate all manifestation of private trade!” The crowd shouted and applauded its approval.
In a March 16 speech announcing the closing of the national lottery, Castro said that such institutions only perpetuated “the mystique of money” that he was trying to end. He was seeking a more pure communism and said that he hoped eventually to completely abolish money. 1968 was the year of the “new man” concept. Che had sought to build the new man, the socialist who worked for the common good, was dedicated to the revolution, and was without selfishness and greed. Now the new man was sometimes referred to as “a man like Che.” Castro first spoke of the new man in a speech in May 1967, but 1968, with the “revolutionary offensive” under way, was the year of the new man.
In the middle of his speech about the new offensive, Castro referred to another new phenomenon. “There almost exists an air route for those who take over planes.” The week of Fidel’s speech, National Airlines flight 28 took off from Tampa bound for Miami. After five minutes in the air, two Cuban exiles took out pistols, forced the flight attendant to open the cockpit, and shouted, “Havana! Havana!” It was the seventh recent hijacking to Cuba, the third that month. This one was by Cubans who had slipped out by boat but found they were homesick for their island home. Most of the hijackers, though, were Americans being pursued by U.S. law enforcement. Increasingly, hijacking became the exit for hunted black militants. Soon Cuba would be arranging entire houses for black American hijackers who remained as political refugees. Some are still there.
In 1968 the Cuban government treated the sudden influx of unwilling visitors with the hospitality the revolution showed to most visitors. The Cubans photographed all the passengers and then escorted them through the airport shops, where, like all visitors, they were encouraged to buy excellent Cuban rum and incomparable cigars. Then they were given a meal that usually included luxury items that were becoming scarce to Cubans, such as roast beef. The plane was refueled and the airline charged for fuel and landing rights—a weighty $1,000 bill for National flight 28. Then, many hours later, the flight returned to the United States, where customs, enforcing the embargo, would usually confiscate the rum and cigars. These reasonably comfortable encounters led to a long-lasting policy among pilots, crews, and passengers of remaining passive when confronted by hijackers. This was even the Federal Aviation Administration’s recommendation.
Castro warned in his March speech that he might not continue his hospitality, pointing out that while he allowed the planes to return, planes and vessels stolen to flee to the United States were never returned to Cuba.
The regime’s enemies in the United States had grown further entrenched. Alabama governor George Wallace, in his 1968 independent run for president, once again vilified Herbert Matthews for his interview with Fidel. Although the defeat at the Bay of Pigs appeared to demonstrate in irrefutable fashion that popular support in Cuba was on the side of the revolution and not with them, this did not silence the more extreme factions of the anti-Castro exiles, Cubans from the old dictatorship who were not particularly interested in the majority point of view. In the years since the failed invasion, they had become even more violent. In the spring of 1968, a group of Cuban exiles began attacking nations that maintained relations with Cuba, which in fact included the majority of nations in the world. The French tourism office in Manhattan, the Mexican consulate in Newark, travel agencies in Los Angeles, a Polish ship in Miami, and a British ship in New Orleans were among the targets of simple homemade bombs. An officer in a New York City bomb squad said, “It’s lucky there aren’t more of this particular kind of nut around because there is nothing tougher than trying to stop them.” But in fact, many were caught through obvious slipups, such as leaving fingerprints. In December, U.S. district judge William O. Mehrtensin, sentencing nine Cubans—including a ten-year term for Orlando Bosch, a pediatrician and father of five—said, “These acts of terrorism are stupid. I cannot reasonably see any way to fight communism in this manner.”
Fidel’s admirers loved him as much as his enemies hated him. To the youth of the New Left in 1968—Americans, Western Europeans, Latin Americans—Cuba was the most exciting country in the world. Castro seemed to share their reservations about the Soviets. While the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe confronted their economic crisis by experimenting with free enterprise, Cuba, in the purist tradition of Mao, was going in the opposite direction. Todd Gitlin of the American SDS wrote, “Here apparently was the model of a revolution led by students, not by a Communist Party—indeed, in many ways against it.” The world’s youth wanted to see Cuba, and the Cubans wanted to show them their showcase of socialism. Such a bold experiment, so close to the United States, for all its faults, even with its milk shortage and executions, was impressive. Ginsberg, too, even after being deported, was impressed. The fierce opposition from the United States always gave the little sugarcane island a heroic aspect.
American SDS’s official position on Cuba and other third world revolutions was called “critical support.” When Todd Gitlin joined an SDS trip to Cuba in the beginning of 1968, like LeRoi Jones and Allen Ginsberg before him, he was determined not to be seduced by the excitement. He wrote, “I knew all about the terrible and laughable history of Westerners (Lincoln Steffens, George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Sidney and Beatrice Webb) making their pilgrimages to the East and trapping themselves in apologies; it wasn’t going to happen to me.” And so he steeled himself against the revolution’s many charms with a list of questions about civil liberties, democracy, and the right of dissent.
Che images at the Cultural Congress in Havana in January 1968.
(Photo by Fred Mayer/Magnum Photos)
The trip began, as many of them did, traveling by way of Mexico City to circumvent U.S. travel restrictions. The Mexican government openly differed with the United States on Cuba and refused to cut off relations with its historically close Spanish Caribbean neighbor. But unbeknownst to the young Americans who traveled through Mexico City, the Mexican president, Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, had a paranoid fear of the Cuban revolution and carefully noted passenger lists on Havana-bound flights to record the Mexicans on board. When there were Americans, he would pass the list on to U.S. intelligence.
The SDS trip was timed to coincide with a weeklong international cultural congress. British historian Eric Hobsbawm reported on the week for the Times Literary Supplement: “Cuba was, of course, an ideal setting for such a Congress. It is not only an embattled and heroic country, though as Castro himself observed, a long way second to Vietnam, but a remarkably attractive one, if only because it is visibly one of the rare states in the world whose population actually likes and trusts its government.” Among the luminaries at the conference were novelist Julio Cortázar and muralist David Siqueiros. A rumor circulated that Siqueiros had been recognized as one of the plotters in the Trotsky assassination by an angry Trotskyist who kicked him in the shin.
The SDS group was put up in the Havana Libre, the former Havana Hilton, completed just before the revolution. This sterile, modern hotel was one of the first and last true high-rises built in Havana. The young radicals were comfortable there, eating crab and shrimp cocktails with Cuba libres. They visited factories, which admittedly they rarely did in the United States, and training programs, and a farm where field hands actually sang on their way to work. Gitlin tried to stay skeptical but said, “Mostly I saw energy, amazing commitment. Ordinary people seemed both mobilized and relaxed.” It was an extraordinary combination to see a people energized by a young revolution, inspired by a charismatic leader, and yet with the calm, the music, the sensuality, the good humor, and the accessibility of Caribbean culture. Gitlin, Tom Hayden, other SDS leaders, and David Dellinger were there analyzing the revolution in between conversations about what to do in Chicago during the Democratic convention coming up in the summer.
Gitlin returned to the United States still full of reservations but impressed enough with his experience that he began to arrange other Cuban trips for SDS members. SDS was growing rapidly on college campuses and by 1968 had nearly one hundred thousand members.
Mark Rudd was in the first group to go on one of Gitlin’s SDS-organized trips to Cuba. They were put up at the Riviera, the not quite high-rise over the footbridge by the bay. But they objected to the luxury and arranged to be moved to student housing in the abandoned mansions of the neighborhood. Everywhere they went in this year of the heroic guerrillero, they saw Che’s portrait—on walls, in stores, in homes. Traveling by bus in the countryside, they looked down into a valley and saw Che’s portrait, several acres large, fashioned in white rock and red earth. Rudd knew the teachings of Che: “The duty of every revolutionary is to make a revolution.” He longed to be a revolutionary, to be “a man like Che.” Soon he would be back on his Ivy League campus. He was eager to get back.