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 wi
th 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.”
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