Fighting over Fidel

The New York Intellectuals and the Cuban Revolution

Rafael Rojas, Carl Good

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781400880027
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

How New York intellectuals interpreted and wrote about Castro's revolution in the 1960s New York in the 1960s was a hotbed for progressive causes of every stripe, including women's liberation, civil rights, opposition to the Vietnam War—and the Cuban Revolution. Fighting over Fidel brings this turbulent cultural moment to life by telling the story of the New York intellectuals who championed and opposed Castro's revolution.Setting his narrative against the backdrop of the ideological confrontation of the Cold War and the breakdown of relations between Washington and Havana, Rafael Rojas examines the lives and writings of such figures as Waldo Frank, Carleton Beals, C. Wright Mills, Allen Ginsberg, Susan Sontag, Norman Mailer, Eldridge Cleaver, Stokely Carmichael, and Jose Yglesias. He describes how Castro's Cuba was hotly debated in publications such as the New York Times, Village Voice, Monthly Review, and Dissent, and how Cuban socialism became a rallying cry for groups such as the Beats, the Black Panthers, and the Hispanic Left. Fighting over Fidel shows how intellectuals in New York interpreted and wrote about the Cuban experience, and how the Left's enthusiastic embrace of Castro's revolution ended in bitter disappointment by the close of the explosive decade of the 1960s.

1

HIPSTERS AND APPARATCHIKS

★

ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER JR. DEVOTED MUCH OF HIS MEMOIR on the Kennedy administration, A Thousand Days (1965), to reconstructing the dilemma that Castro’s socialist Cuba posed for Washington in 1961. Starting in the early pages of the book’s chapter “The Hour of Euphoria,” Schlesinger endorsed a certain historical narrative of the communist radicalization of the Cuban Revolution, one based mainly on a reading of the work of historians such as Theodore Draper and Hugh Thomas, who argued that the young Cuban leadership had rationally and deliberately chosen to reformulate its ideology, transforming the nationalist democratic ideal that had led it to power in January 1959 into a communist socialism allied with the Soviet bloc.¹

Schlesinger incorporates into the “euphoria” unleashed by Kennedy’s arrival in the White House the enthusiasm that the Cuban Revolution had awakened in national public opinion. Since 1957, when the New York Times began to publish Herbert L. Matthews’s series on the guerrilla movement in the Sierra Maestra, Castro had come to be perceived in the United States as the young leader of a new Latin American Left, one that was nationalist and even socialist but also liberal and democratic. In Washington, this leftism was associated with Latin American political leaders who had promoted the Alliance for Progress, such as Lázaro Cárdenas in Mexico, Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre in Peru, Rómulo Betancourt in Venezuela, and José Figueres in Costa Rica.

At the end of the 1950s, opinion in both popular and political classes in the United States had come to reject the Batista regime. As Schlesinger recalls, Kennedy himself christened Castro as a member of “Bolívar’s legacy” in the President’s own account of his campaign, The Strategy of Peace (1960).² Schlesinger testifies that he met Castro in person at the Harvard Faculty Club in Cambridge during the latter’s triumphal visit to the United States in April 1959. Attempting to account for the bearded young revolutionary’s popularity among American university students, Schlesinger observes, “They saw in him, I think, the hipster who in the era of the Organization Man had joyfully defied the system, summoned a dozen friends and overturned a government of wicked old men.”³

As Schlesinger writes, Cuba’s shift toward communism produced an adverse reaction in the United States. Within a year, Castro ceased to be exalted as a hero and instead came to be viewed as an enemy of the United States. When Kennedy authorized the plan for the Bay of Pigs invasion that had been drawn up under the Eisenhower administration, the event would become the primary stumbling block of his presidential term. In his exhaustive account of this episode, Schlesinger blames the CIA and the leaders of the Cuban exile community for the disaster and naturally exculpates his own boss, President Kennedy.⁴ But he goes still further, also reproaching intellectuals and groups that had expressed solidarity with Havana in the spring of 1961, such as C. Wright Mills, Jean Paul Sartre, Norman Mailer, and the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, the last of which had organized prorevolutionary marches in San Francisco and Union Square on April 21 and 22.⁵

The present chapter of this book could in fact be read as a counterpoint between the vision of the Cuban Revolution held by Thomas Draper, to which Schlesinger subscribes, and that of Mills and Sartre, whom Schlesinger erroneously characterizes as favoring the establishment of communism in Cuba. The ideological confrontations of the period and the criticisms levied by Mills, Mailer, and others against the Kennedy administration’s Cuba policies caused Schlesinger to lose sight of the fact that the New York intellectuals, from the outset, were not defenders of the Cuban Revolution’s shift toward communism but objectors to Washington’s Cold War policies. This misunderstanding was common to liberals and Democrats of the period, but among anticommunists of the Republican Right, it assumed the form of a rigid stereotype.

Between 1959 and 1962, public opinion in New York was a key scenario for the ideological radicalization of the Cuban Revolution and for the design of a new and audacious geopolitical strategy on the part of its young leaders. Not only was New York the headquarters of major national print, television, and radio organizations, such as the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, CBS, and NBC, but the United Nations headquarters in Manhattan was also the site of frequent gatherings of international heads of state, including the Cuban leaders. Castro and Guevara became central figures in the New York spectacle of world politics during the 1960s.

In the pages that follow, I will seek to reconstruct the process by which the image of the Cuban Revolution shifted in New York public opinion. Robert A. Rutland, a historian of American journalism, refers to this shift when he writes that “Cuba, under Fidel Castro, turned from friend to enemy, with shocking suddenness.”⁶ Rutland rigidly situates the shift in the fall of 1962, a moment when, in his view, the city’s liberal press, which had earlier celebrated Castro’s 1959 triumph and questioned Kennedy over the Bay of Pigs episode, began to portray the Cuban leadership as a threat to peace and US national security.

Subsequently, I will seek to account for a change within radical opinion as well, particularly in publications such as Dissent and the Village Voice, which resulted in a critique of the totalitarian elements of Cuban socialism, the anointing of Guevara as an icon of the New Left, and a double rejection of both US intervention in Vietnam and the Soviet Union’s intervention in Czechoslovakia. Between 1963 and 1968, a period of discrete distancing between Cuba and the Soviet Union, the relation between American radicalism and the Cuban government was a complex one. While Dissent did not hesitate to qualify the Cuban regime as a dictatorship, the Village Voice identified with Guevarism as a current of the Latin American Left that both expanded and exceeded the ideas of the Cuban Revolution.

ROBIN HOOD IN THE CARIBBEAN

The triumph of the Cuban Revolution coincided with a restructuring of the American public sphere, as the newspapers of the postwar era were forced to adapt to the rise of large television and radio consortiums, which were heavily marked by the interests and languages of McCarthyism and anticommunism.⁷ The arrival in the White House of a young Democratic leadership led by John F. Kennedy produced what Christopher B. Daly refers to as a “rocking [of] the establishment.”⁸ In this context, frictions grew between the formation of a “liberal arc” that supported the new administration and a powerful rightist sector that pressured the White House and threatened Democratic-leaning publications such as the New York Times.⁹

Cuba, its revolution, and its leaders were precipitated into the center of this conflict. The New York Times reported sympathetically on the insurrection against Batista’s dictatorship in the Sierra Maestra and in the island’s main urban centers at the end of the 1950s. Three of the paper’s Cuba correspondents, Herbert L. Matthews, Tad Szulc, and Ruby Hart Phillips (the paper’s Havana bureau chief and dean of the foreign correspondents on the island), wrote converging—and later diverging—articles on the Cuban Revolution between 1957 and 1962. During this five-year period the New York Times was indisputably the US newspaper featuring the most extensive coverage of the island’s political process.

In her first book on the Cuban Revolution, Phillips provided a detailed account of the Times’ early relationship with the new regime. After the paper printed a story from United Press correspondent Francis L. McCarthy reporting that Castro and his men had perished in combat in December 1956 after navigating by boat from Veracruz, Mexico, and landing on Cuba’s eastern coast, the rebel leadership decided to refute the news through the New York Times. Castro and the leaders of the 26th of July Movement would henceforth choose the Times as their medium for transmitting messages to the world.¹⁰

Phillips was the widow of James Doyle Phillips, the New York Times’ correspondent in Havana during the 1930s. Ruby had authored a book on the 1933 Revolution, Cuban Sideshow (1935), which argued for a repeal of the Platt Amendment and for US recognition of the revolutionary government. After her husband’s death in 1937, she assumed his role as Times correspondent on the island. In February 1957, Phillips was contacted by Castro sympathizer Felipe Pazos, president of the National Bank of Cuba and then head of the Bacardí Company, who sought to arrange a meeting between Phillips, NBC correspondent Ted Scott, and Faustino Pérez, leader of the urban guerrilla offensive.¹¹ As a result of this meeting, the decision was made to send Herbert L. Matthews to the Sierra Maestra to interview Castro for the Times.¹²

Matthews’s mountain trip produced a series of three front-page articles that were published on February 24, 25, and 26, 1957.¹³ The first of these articles was accompanied by a photo of Castro, depicted from the front holding a rifle with a telescopic sight, and the second article featured a photo of mothers in Santiago, Cuba, protesting the repression that was resulting in the massacre of young anti-Batista youth. Matthews’s articles served as more than mere confirmation that Castro was alive and fighting in the Sierra Maestra: they constituted the Cuban Revolution’s ideological letter of presentation to US public opinion.

Matthews reported that the Cuban revolutionaries called themselves “socialists,” a term the paper interpreted as a mixture of “nationalist”—in the anti-Yankee sense this adjective had acquired in Latin America—“radical,” “democratic,” and “anticommunist.”¹⁴ In the final section of the interview, Castro emphatically declared that the revolutionaries held no animosity toward the United States and that their struggle was against a dictatorship and in support of democracy. The Times highlighted these concepts when, in the third of the three articles, it defined the Fulgencio Batista regime as a “dictatorship” and referred to it as a “traditionally corrupt system.”¹⁵ The third of Matthews’s articles was accompanied by a piece by Phillips that condemned the censorship the Times had been subjected to in Cuba since the most recent suspension of constitutional guarantees in January 1957.¹⁶

Over the two following years, Matthews’s and Phillips’s Cuba coverage was decidedly favorable to the revolutionaries, although Phillips also made some effort to save face with sectors of the Batista government. In a second visit to Cuba in June 1957, Matthews interviewed Batista and other government figures, who were already speaking of a “transfer of power,” but at the same time his articles emphasized the rebels’ early military triumphs, and he conversed in Santiago with insurrection leaders such as Frank País and Manuel Urrutia, a lawyer who would become the first president of the revolutionary government.¹⁷ Thanks to Matthews’s prorevolutionary sympathies, and particularly due to his description of Castro as a modern Robin Hood of the Caribbean, the Times correspondent came under strong attack from the anticommunist press in the United States, both before and after the socialist character of the revolution was openly declared in April 1961. Together with Assistant Secretary of State Roy Rubottom and William Wieland, the State Department’s director of the Caribbean Division and Mexico, Matthews was mentioned in hearings called by the Senate’s Eastland-Dodd Subcommittee at the end of August 1960, which inquired into communist penetration into the United States.¹⁸

In those hearings, Matthews, Wieland, and Rubottom were accused by Arthur Gardner and Earl Smith, former ambassadors to Cuba, of having encouraged communism on the island with their tolerant and friendly treatment of the Cuban Revolution.¹⁹ This interrogation, which also investigated the New York Times’ editorial line, was picked up again starting in April 1961, this time by the paper’s own collaborators, including Ruby Hart Phillips, and by much of the anticommunist right in the United States, the latter of which perceived the Times as a liberal and procommunist paper.²⁰ Ironically, during this same period, the New York Times was portrayed in Cuba as a pro-imperialist enemy of the revolution, and some of the Times’ collaborators who showed the greatest sympathy toward the Cuban process, such as Matthews himself, were never publically annointed as friends in Havana.

The Cuban Revolution was on the front page of the New York Times throughout the first week of 1959.

Objectively speaking, it was hardly unusual for a journalist like Matthews and a paper like the New York Times to have supported a nationalist and socialist movement such as the Cuban Revolution. In March 1917, the Times had published an enthusiastic assessment of the onset of the Russian Revolution; Matthews himself had reported on the Spanish Civil War with evident sympathy for the Republican cause; and Times correspondents and reporters such as Bertram D. Hullen, Anita Brenner, and Bruce Rae had defended Mexican president Lázaro Cárdenas and his right to assert control over his country’s oil industry. Matthews and other Times reporters had been consistently critical of US military intervention i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Hipsters and Apparatchiks
• 2 Naming the Hurricane
• 3 Socialists in Manhattan
• 4 The Cultural Apparatus of the Empire
• 5 Moons of the Revolution
• 6 Negroes with Guns
• 7 The League of Militant Poets
• 8 The Skin of Socialism
• Epilogue
• Notes
• References
• Index