1968

by Mark Kurlansky

  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 finan
cial 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 Unite
d 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.