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Even before the Port Huron Statement, however, the Cuban Revolution captured the imagination of many radicals and liberals in American political life.
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The Anti-Imperial Frontier: Cuba and the Imagination of the 1960s Radical Left By Austen Walsh Spring, 2011
Professor Kimberly Sims, Advisor
A thesis submitted to the American University Honors Department in fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors in the major of History.
privatization of foreign (generally American) assets and companies. In short order, as historian Van Gosse writes, the Cuban Revolution’s “exoticism took on a demonic cast in stateside eyes.”^4 What had once been a widely-hailed achievement in the American mind quickly became a cause célèbre for liberals and the proto “New Left” in the United States. Out of the ashes of growing disapproval, many liberals and radicals sought to resuscitate Cuba’s image in the United States. 5 This effort led to the creation of the short-lived Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) in 1960, which sought to combat the growing perception that Cuba was going “Red” and to show “what is really going on in revolutionary Cuba.”^6 The Fair Play for Cuba Committee would eventually wield an active membership of over 5,000 in dozens of branches across the country, but folded shortly after Fidel Castro’s declaration of Cuba as a Marxist state. Despite the Fair Play Committee’s quick demise, Cuba’s place within Leftist dialogue was cemented. Even after the chaotic end of the FPCC, Cuba would continue throughout the 1960s to be a source of inspiration and motivation to the New Left. This study will examine the place that revolutionary Cuba occupied in the mindset of the 1960s New Left radicals. By the middle to late 1960s, and the tumult of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which marked the United States mainstream’s permanent turn from Cuba, revolutionary Cuba remained important for the individuals and organizations of the emergent New Left. In the minds of the New Left, a loose collection of Civil Rights, black power, socialist and anti-war student groups, Cuba represented a very different model. Instead of a looming Communist threat
(^4) Van E. Gosse, “History Missing: Cuba, The New Left and the Origins of the Latin American Solidarity in the United States, 1955-1963,” Rutgers University, 1992. 248. (^5) In this paper, I will use the term “radical” as a means of describing various New Left figures, groups and ideas. As it is used in the literature describing the New Left, “radical” does not imply any positive or negative valuejudgments. Instead, the term merely indicates beliefs or ideas that are outside of the conventional mainstream of United States political thought (such as liberals in the Democratic party). As with the term “New Left” itself,“radical” is not a catch-all term but used in reference to a wide range of Marxists, leftists and anti-war figures. (^6) The Fair Play For Cuba Committee, “What is Really Happening in Cuba” advertisement, The New York Times, April 6, 1960.
or an affront to America’s hemispheric hegemony that the mainstream of United States society perceived the upstart island as, Cuba became tabula rasa for the New Left. In the minds of the 1960s radical left, Cuba offered a discursive framework within which the disparate ends of 1960s Left could project their own ideals, beliefs and hopes- regardless of whether the island actually embodied these caricatures. Oftentimes, these beliefs were manifested in depictions of Cuba as an economically egalitarian, racially peaceful, anti-imperialistic bastion that served as a foil to the perceived injustices of United States society. Through studying Revolutionary Cuba’s importance to the New Left, I hope to add context to the current understanding of the New Left, a short-lived movement that has nevertheless had a tremendous impact on later radical movements. As New Left scholar Tom Gitlin argues, the ideological and strategic descendents of the 1960s New Left can be seen today in the anti-globalization protestors at the 1999 Seattle World Trade Organization summit as well as the mass protests arising out of the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.^7 In understanding how the idea of revolutionary Cuba impacted the New Left, we can get a better sense of the ideological underpinnings of groups and individuals that are still very active in our own day and age. In order to demonstrate the importance of Cuba in the mindset of 1960s radicals, this study will make use of a variety of primary sources including personal writings and correspondence of individual figures from this period as well as various underground, left wing periodicals that were published largely between the years 1967 and 1970- the apex of the New Left’s size and influence. At times I will utilize articles from the New York Times and Chicago Tribune , both mainstream publications, as a means of comparison with radical viewpoints. I will
(^7) Todd Gitlin, The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media in the making and unmaking of the New Left, with a New Preface (Berkley: The University of California Press, 2003), xviii.
C. Wright Mills and even Cuban revolutionary figure “Che” Guevara.^10 Importantly, the New Left eschewed the traditional “orthodoxies of both liberals and communists” and instead followed a model in which they sought meaning through collective and individual “action in defiance of the order of things”^11 , which would, in turn, hopefully create a more equitable society. As the New Left began to construct its own identity, it forged a path that was increasingly distinct from traditional liberals in the United States. While New Left groups such as the SDS and the Black Panthers attached themselves to socialist and revolutionary ideals,^12 most liberals remained committed to the basic capitalist framework of U.S. society. Importantly, liberals remained true to the legacy of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and the principle that the federal government should serve as “an active participant in shaping the capitalist economy.”^13 One of the largest differences between liberals and the New Left came in the area of Cold War foreign policy. Throughout the 1960s, “establishment liberals” such as Arthur Schlesinger and President John Kennedy made the defeat of communism and its worldwide spread a top priority.^14 This was particularly evident in President Kennedy’s hard-line approach towards Castro’s Cuba that included authorizing the botched Bay of Pigs invasion and hardening the economic embargo against the island.^15 Throughout the 1960s, Cuba served as an important means for New Left activists to continually distinguish themselves from the vast majority of
(^1011) Ibid., 130. (Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2007), 11.Michael W. Flamm and David Steigerwald,^ Debating the 1960s: Liberal, Conservative, and Radical Perspectives (^12) Such ideals often varied by group and person. Just as the New Left was not a monolithic front but a term denoting a loose collection of Black Power, anti-war and economic justice groups, the ideals of each group werenot the same. Oftentimes, groups such as the Black Panthers and SDS shared only a loose distrust of authority. (^1314) Ibid., 5. 15 Ibid., 5.Robert Taber, M-26:Biography of a Revolution (New York: L. Stuart, 1961), 235.
mainstream viewpoints. Indeed, the fact that Cuba would become a source of differentiation between the dueling liberal and radical left ideologies is remarkable in its own right. From the beginning of President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration, United States policy towards Latin America was characterized by a shared adherence between liberals and left radicals to “promoting good neighborism,” President Roosevelt’s non-interventionist policy towards Latin America.^16 These ties were also deepened by a shared pre-Cold War commitment to supporting Roosevelt’s New Deal and World War II war effort. As a significant part of the dialogue and mindset of 1960s left wing radicals, the Cuban Revolution has been mentioned many times in secondary literature that explores this period. However, much of this analysis only mentions the Cuban Revolution in passing; it is all too often seen as part of the background noise of factors and influences within the 1960s New Left movements. Indeed, the largest body surrounding the United States’ reaction to the Cuban Revolution focuses on the reaction of the United States government itself. Secondary works focusing on the creation of the economic embargo, the Bay of Pigs invasion and President Kennedy’s actions during the 1963 Cuban Missile Crisis are common. Thomas Patterson’s work, Contesting Castro: the United States and the Triumph of the Cuban Revolution , is a common example of this type of scholarship. In this book, Patterson seeks to find the motivation behind “the sources of the bitter anti-Americanism of Castroism and the acrid anti-Castrosim that have coursed through the U.S.-Cuba relations from the 1950’s-1990’s.”^17 While Paterson provides a coherent picture of the place the Cuban Revolution occupied in the North American psyche, and in government policies, he does so from the majority perspective. In his quest to
(^1617) Gosse, Where the Boys Are, 13. Oxford University Press. 1994), 1.Thomas G. Paterson,^ Contesting Castro: The United States and the Triumph of the Cuban Revolution^ (New York:
exhibited a certain amount of skepticism due to supposed “Red” infiltration,^21 the New Left “saw Cuba… as a happening of unprecedented significance.”^22 In addition, Welch alludes to the fact that the Cuban Revolution may have been a source of inspiration for 1960s radicals because they could identify with the relative youth of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and other revolutionary figures.^23 In the end, however, Welch’s focus on the importance of Revolutionary Cuba to the New Left is limited in both scope and timeframe. Welch almost exclusively focuses on Cuba’s importance to the New Left’s formation in the early 1960s and avoids discussion of the Revolution’s continued importance to New Left individuals throughout the entire 1960s period.^24 One author who has given extensive attention to Cuba’s role for the New Left is Franklin and Marshall Professor Van E. Gosse. In his PhD dissertation for Rutgers University, Van Gosse explores how Cuba was perceived during the early years of the New Left.^25 In order to advance his analysis Gosse places a special emphasis on the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, the factors that led to its 1960 formation and some of the individuals and groups that contributed to its extensive but fleeting success. Gosse extends this analysis with his book Rethinking the New Left , in which he argues that the FPCC was radical “almost by accident” and that its most important contribution in forming the New Left was in terms of its structure, which prefigured the “typical ad hoc organization of the 1960s, set up to deal with a particular crisis.”^26
(^2122) Welch, 130. 23 Ibid., 117.Ibid., 130. (^2425) Ibid., 129. 26 Gosse, “History Missing.”Van E. Gosse, Rethinking the New Left: An Interpretive History (New York: Palgrave Books, 2005), 60.
Gosse’s most complete contribution to this area occurs in Where the Boys Are: Cuba, Cold War America and the Making of the New Left.^27 In this book, Gosse again argues that the ideal of revolutionary Cuba, and the United States’ stiff reaction to it, served as a “decisive moment” in which “one could discern the first outlines of how a radicalized liberalism and the reshaped, decentered ‘old’ left would combine, when thrown together by circumstance and a common enemy, to become a ‘new left.^28 ’” Once again, however, Gosse concludes his analysis in 1961 and the Bay of Pigs invasion.^29 However, one of the important subtexts of this book is Gosse’s contention that the Cuban rebels’ raw virility and bad boy pretenses helped draw many Americans to the cause of the Cuban Revolution.^30 As Gosse elaborates on this theme: “The bad boys… portrayed variants on an outlaw sensibility keyed only to the recovery of pleasure, and a rejection of the fierce will to repression with which American men in the postwar period had become identified.”^31 Attaching such an explanation for the New Left’s continued infatuation with Cuba would be overly-simplistic. As I will demonstrate, the causes of the New Left’s identification certainly stemmed from the metaphoric potential of wild revolutionaries, but it also came from the growing idealization of Cuba as an economic, political and racial foil for New Left dreamers. Throughout his research Gosse is thorough in his attempts to connect the Cuban Revolution with the formation of the New Left in the United States. Gosse’s research is especially useful in explaining the organizational influence of the Fair Play Committee on later groups and how this group, and the Cuba itself, presaged the creation of the New Left. Just as in
(^27) Van E. Gosse, Where the Boys Are: Cuba, Cold War America and the Making of the New Left (New York: Verso.
One of the earliest indications of Cuba’s encompassing appeal to New Left radicals occurred with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Founded before the New Left erupted onto the American scene, the FPCC had a surprisingly diverse membership that reflected what would later become the face of the New Left. Indeed, while the FPCC was certainly a harbinger of the later New Left, many of the group’s initial members were not, at the time, particularly radical. Robert Taber, the first president of Fair Play, was a well-respected, politically liberal journalist who worked for CBS.^32 The organization’s co-founder was Alan Sagner, a prosperous New Jersey businessman who was concerned about the United States’ foreign policy towards Cuba but would later cut his teeth as an activist within the Democratic Party.^33 In fact, in its official periodical, the FPCC attempted to position itself as a moderate group that simply hoped “to combat the blatantly distorted reporting which we believe to constitute not merely a grave injustice to the Cuban people… but a serious threat, as well, to the free traditions of our own people.”^34 Beneath the initial veneer of moderation in the FPCC, there existed a strong current of left wing radicals who would later become active in New Left circles. These individuals were attracted by the allure of the Cuban Revolution’s example. Among the thirty individuals who signed the New York Times ad that marked the group’s founding, there were many radical figures of all stripes, including: Black self-defense proponent Robert F. Williams, intellectual James Baldwin and Jean-Paul Sartre and Norman Mailer, two authors who would have a great influence on the later New Left.^35 As the group gained publicity and name recognition, the radicalization of the FPCC only increased. By 1961, a substantial portion of the Fair Play for (^3233) Randy Martin, “Cuba and the Rest,” Social Text 48 (Autumn, 1996), 135.
the Corporation for Public Broadcasting during the Clinton Administration.Sagner would eventually become so deeply engrained in moderate liberal politics that he was made the head of (^3435) “Who is the Fair Play Committee?” Fair Play, February 29, 1960. “What is Really Happening in Cuba?,” New York Times.
Cuba Committee was even comprised of members of the Socialist Workers Party, a Trotskyist Communist organization.^36 This radicalization of the Fair Play Committee was likely enhanced by the rising sentiments of suspicion and hostility towards Cuba among mainstream liberals, who became more and more “suspicious of Castro… due to his lack of a political platform.”^37 In the end, the FPCC’s membership itself was possibly the most important factor linking Fair Play with the New Left. This phenomenon is evident in the participation of C. Wright Mills, who helped popularize the term “New Left” in his seminal essay, “Letter to the New Left.” Almost concurrent with his work in shaping the underpinnings of the New Left, Mills also found ideological nourishment in the example of the Cuban Revolution. Mills was given the opportunity to travel to Cuba by the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and eventually penned one of the most widely read depictions of Cuba, Listen, Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba.^38 Throughout this book, which he writes from the semi-fictional perspective of four average Cubans affected by the Revolution, Mills subtly hints at Cuba’s role in forming the anti-imperialist rhetoric that would become an important part of New Left discourse. At various times, Mills asserts that the Cuban Revolution was a reaction to simple imperialism on the part of the United States: “is it any wonder, then, that in the minds of many intelligent Latin Americans, the United States of America more often than not stands for tyranny, economic exploitation, continued impoverishment, and military domination?”^39 Jean-Paul Sartre, one of the Fair Play Committee’s original thirty founders and another prominent intellectual voice for the later New Left movement also wrote extensively and
(^36) Rodriguez, 65. The presence of the SWP, more akin to the “old left” was not without controversy within the FPCC. Taber and other New Left activists in the FPCC stringently objected to their presence as they hoped to avoidbeing labeled a “red” front themselves. (^3738) Gosse, “History Missing,” 270. 39 C. Wright Mills,Ibid., 177.^ Listen, Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba^ (New York: Ballantine Books, January 1961).
was one of the first non racial justice oriented activist organizations to include a substantially integrated membership; nearly one-third of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee’s founding members were African Americans. This group not only included Williams and James Baldwin, but also Black professor John Henrik Clarke, actor and writer Julian Mayfield and Richard Gibson, one of CBS’ first African American correspondents.^45 In reality, Gibson’s respect was so great within the group that he was made Robert Taber’s successor when the latter fled the United States.^46 Unlike Mailer, Sartre and others who saw Cuba as a growing thorn in the side of United States imperialism, this wave of African American activists joined out of a sense of solidarity: these men and women were among the first “to see the linkages between themselves and revolutionary Cuba.”^47 In furtherance of this theme, Fair Play , the FPCC’s membership publication was often quick to display the differences between the United States and Cuba on issues of racial discrimination. Such reports often relied on fantastical accounts of how the Cuban Revolution ostensibly eliminated racial injustices and created a racially harmonious paradise almost overnight. In accordance with this sentiment, Julian Mayfield described the island’s allure: “The important lesson in the Cuban experience is that social change need not wait on the patient education of white supremacists. A government that is sincere can show it means business by imaginatively using its moral weight to destroy racial injustice….”^48 The perceived dichotomy between Cuba and the United States was also artfully depicted in FPCC member Robert F. Williams’ newspaper, The Crusader , which he published as President of the Monroe, North Carolina branch of the NAACP. On the front page of the June
(^4546) “What is Really Happening in Cuba?” New York Times. 47 Martin, 135.Rodriguez, 63. (^48) Julian Mayfield, “Author says Cuba has Solution to Race Problem,” Fair Play, October 25, 1960.
25, 1960, the headline proclaimed “Negro Leader Calls Cuba’s Schools an Example to the U.S.A.” and was accompanied by two drawings: one depicted “the American way” in which a group of white students walked from a large school building labeled “white” while an African American boy and girl walked, lunch-pales in hand, from a smaller building labeled “colored.” In the second drawing, “the Cuban way”, an inter-racial group walks from a building simply labeled “school.”^49 The message conveyed in this drawing was simple: the Cuban Revolution had created a system of education that worked for all races while the United States, seven years after the Brown v. Board decision, lagged far behind. Although the Fair Play Committee marked the first stirrings of the Radical Left’s relationship with Cuba, it was also a tremendously short-lived organization. After the Bay of Pigs invasion provided the FPCC’s high water mark for protests and mobilizations, the group rapidly declined. First came Fidel Castro’s 1961 declaration that the Revolutionary Cuba was indeed “Marxist Leninist” in character, which inevitably inhibited the FPCC’s contention that the Cuban Revolution was not, in fact, “Red.” Along with this declaration from Castro came scrutiny from the FBI and subpoenas from the House Un-American Activities Commission.^50 The final blow to the organization, and the residual good will towards Cuba in the minds of mainstream citizens, arrived with the thirteen intense days of the Cuban Missile Crisis when the United States and the Soviet Union stood on the brink of nuclear war due to a stand-off sparked by the presence of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba. By the end of 1962, the Fair Play Committee had ceased to be a viable, national organization and closed its doors for good. The downfall of Fair
(^4950) “Negro Leader Calls Cuba’s Schools and Example to the U.S.A.,”The Crusader. June 25, 1960. the Internal Security Act,Van E. Gosse, “Rething the New Left.” And Senate Judiciary Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of Castro’s Network in the United States (Fair Play for Cuba Committee), 88th^ cong., 1st^ sess.,
himself by the national climate that had turned many away from Cuba: “after being subjected to more than three years of false reports, invented facts, and devastating attacks by ex-Cubans… I half expected to be disappointed and disillusioned.”^55 Instead, Dellinger found solace in contrasting the “integrity” of Fidel Castro with the “cynical maneuverings of an administration which sends mercenaries to their almost certain death in coastal landings.”^56 Through his writings as well as the experience of traveling to the island which will be discussed later, Dellinger continues the narrative of Cuba as an anti-imperialist antagonist to the United States even at the height of the radical left’s relative silence on Cuba. By 1966, a new generation of students and activists began to emerge and mix with the existing base of the New Left. Combined with the growing temporal distance from the Missile Crisis and the emergence of the Vietnam War as a political issue, the Cuban Revolution began to re-emerge as a major strain within New Left dialogue. Along with this re-emergence came the newfound relevance of anti-war groups such as the Students for a Democratic Society and the Student Mobilization. As the groups strived against the perceived “imperialism” of the Vietnam intervention, increasing importance was projected upon Cuba. One of the first references to such renewed significance occurred in the July 29, 1966 edition of New Left Notes , the weekly periodical of the SDS. In an article decrying the expansion of U.S. power abroad, Cuban leader Fidel Castro is lauded, along with Egyptian President Gamal Nasser and Guinean independence leader Ahmed Toure, as being among the remaining members of the “first generation of nationalist leaders” to resist “military coups” and maintain “an independent foreign policy” from the United States.^57
(^55) Dave Dellinger, “Cuba: Seven Thousand Miles From Home,” in Seeds of Liberation, ed. Paul Goodman (New York: George Braziller, 1964), 206. (^56) Ibid., 220. (^57) “Crisis in Cold War Ideology,” New Left Notes, July 29, 1966.
As the decade progressed, references to Cuba and Cuban Revolutionary figures made in New Left Notes and other New Left periodicals only grew in number. Often references occurred as small sentences placed in larger stories, but Cuba and the Cuban Revolution itself were the subject of intense analysis in their own right.^58 For example, a book review of Socialist author Regis Debray’s Historical Truths and Historical Aberrations examined Debray’s use of Cuba as a model for the expansion of Marxist revolution in Latin America. In this instance the author concludes the article by lamenting that fact that Cuba is, in fact, not “prototypical for Latin America” because the United States would not allow further Cubas in its backyard.^59 In acknowledging Cuba as an anti-imperialist inspiration for the United States, the author of this article nevertheless departs from much of the New Left conventional wisdom by seemingly indicating that change in the same vein as Cuba is not truly likely in Latin America and is probably unthinkable for the United States.^60 While the New Left protest movements gained further momentum, Cuba was also seen as a sort of link between left wing radicals and the emergent “Third World.”^61 In 1968, the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam’s paper, The Student Mobilizer , touted the coverage that a rally had received in the Cuban press, bragging that the rally “was felt as a call from the first world to the third world.”^62 From Cuba, the column elaborated, radio transmissions would be made and accounts would be “read all over the continent.”^63 In addition to being seen as a revolutionary example when compared to the United States, this article also indicates that (^5859) Article “imperialism” from same issue is of New Left Notes is a decent example. 60 “Regis Debray: Historical Truths and Historical Aberrations,”Ibid.^ New Left Notes, 11 November 1967. (^61) The notion of a “third world” also grew during this time. Unlike the way we perceive the term “Third World” today, the term in the 1960s was used to refer to nations that were unaligned with either the United States or theUSSR in the ongoing Cold War. Cuba was seen as a leader in this movement, despite its ties to the USSR. For further analysis on this topic see A.W. Singham’s1986). Non-Alignment in an Age of Alignments (Third World Books, (^6263) “Latin America” section article, Student Mobilizer, April 15 1968. Ibid.
