CHAPTER ONE

The Cuban Summer of C. Wright Mills

On encountering the numerous writings and communications by C. Wright Mills on the Cuban Revolution, the unwary reader could be forgiven for thinking that Mills had spent many long years immersed in its study. Quite the contrary; from the time Cuba first came to Mills’s political awareness—when he began clipping newspaper articles about the situation on the island—until his death—by which time he had published Listen, Yankee and delivered many talks on the subject—was only a two-year period. Shortly after the victory of the Revolution, Mills had frequently been questioned in Latin America about his and his country’s stand on the new government of Fidel Castro: “Until the summer of 1960, I had never been in Cuba, or even thought about it much. In fact, the previous fall, when I was in Brazil, and in the spring of 1960, when I was in Mexico for several months, I was embarrassed not to have any firm attitude towards the Cuban revolution. For in both Rio de Janeiro and Mexico City, Cuba was of course a major topic of discussion. But I did not know what was happening there, much less what I might think about it, and I was then busy with other studies.”1

The impassioned interest of Latin American intellectuals and journalists on the subject, which seemed fundamental in Latin American life, kindled Mills’s desire to go to the Caribbean island and write about its revolution in the making. Indeed, of the three Western revolutions of the twentieth century, the Mexican (1910), the Russian (1917), and the Cuban (1959), only the latter was temporally accessible to Mills. And while Mills was not a political journalist in the manner of John Reed, he nonetheless wanted to report on—wanted to understand—the social forces that had produced the Cuban Revolution, and that were still in operation. And so after intensive preparation, he journeyed to the Caribbean that summer of 1960 to be an authentic witness to the incipient Cuban experiment.

Preparing for Cuba

Prior to his Cuban sojourn, Mills’s two principal Latin American concerns had been Mexico, where he had spent several months in early 1960 teaching a seminar in Marxism at the National University of Mexico, and before that, Puerto Rico, where he had visited in the late 1940s when researching his study on Puerto Rican migrants.2 Indeed, according to historian Rafael Rojas, the central referent of Spanish and U.S. colonialism in Listen, Yankee had its origins, in large part, in the Puerto Rican project.3 But, in truth, Mills’s first foray into the Latino/Latin American cultural scene was not with Puerto Ricans but with Mexican Americans. Mills, whose parents had lived in South Texas during the 1930s, believed he had a grasp on the character structure of Mexican American youth and based this understanding on three or four years of experience he had with the nightlife of Mexican Americans in San Antonio, Texas.4

In any event, Mills now read deliberately all he could on one small island in Latin America—Cuba—and began to discover that something very interesting was happening there. Because, at the time, there were only a few books he could consult for information on the Cuban revolutionary project and to guide his investigations, it is worth briefly considering the three volumes that Mills read in preparation for his trip.

The first of these, Castro, Cuba, and Justice, by the renowned Chicago Sun-Times correspondent Ray Brennan, who devoted four months to researching the book, is a journalistic account sympathetic to the 26th of July Movement’s insurgence against Batista. Brennan spent many weeks with Castro in Havana, in Santiago, in the Sierra Maestra, and later in New York. Highly adulatory of the rebel leader, Brennan praises his “courage, deep loyalty to friends, almost limitless endurance of hardships and sacrifices, his love of freedom, and his revolutionary spirit.” Written somewhat like a factual novel, with liberal use of contemporaneous American colloquialisms, Brennan creates dialogue that very likely happened, but probably not in the exact words in which he presents it. The book gives highly readable accounts of various participants in the armed struggle—both Fidelistas and Batistianos—with whom Brennan spoke. A graphic, lurid chapter on the various tortures and atrocities perpetrated by the Batista regime against insurgents and ordinary citizens was likely included to justify the relentless firing-squad shootings of Batista war criminals that followed the victory of the Revolution and to underscore the notion of “justice” in the book’s title—a notion that was quickly beginning to take on an ominous overtone to many North Americans as the summary trials and mass executions continued. Perhaps of most help to Mills were those questions of immediate relevance that Brennan posed about the bourgeoning revolution: What kind of man is Castro, really? Is there a danger of his becoming another Batista? How much communistic influence, if any, is he up against? How much did the Communists contribute to winning the war? What is going to happen to American business interests in Cuba? Will it ever be possible to build a stable Cuban economy on the foundation of ruination left by the Batista administration?

Another book that Mills consulted was Fidel Castro: Rebel-Liberator or Dictator? Written by Latin America correspondent Jules Dubois, who covered the civil war for the Chicago Tribune, it chronicles the insurrection and revolutionary events on the Cuban island up to March 1959. Perhaps more than any other journalist writing about the Revolution, Dubois (who may have been an asset for the Central Intelligence Agency) had the most impeccable credentials, coupled with a fearlessness that allowed him access to central actors and events denied other correspondents. For example, in 1957 he interviewed, in their hideouts, first, Armando Hart, the most hunted urban guerrilla in Havana at the time, and later, Vilma Espín, organizer of the women’s underground resistance movement. Dubois had spoken with many of the top guerrilla fighters, including several times with Raúl Castro, and was the reporter to be granted the first exclusive postvictory interview with Fidel Castro. He also interviewed Fulgencio Batista, was eyewitness to many of the historical events in the making of the Revolution, and was presumably well acquainted with Ché Guevara’s father in Argentina. Dubois’s book, which may be regarded as a sort of biography of Fidel Castro, reads much like a war correspondent’s dispatches from the front. It was assembled fast, in twenty days, and published fast, a few days thereafter. Though the book was largely sympathetic to Castro and the early Revolution, shortly after its publication Dubois became fiercely anti-Castro, and by November 1960 he was writing editorials highly disparaging of Mills and Listen, Yankee.

But the volume that Mills judged to the best of the lot, and that provided him with the most recent account of events (it reports on developments up to May 1960), was Leo Huberman and Paul M. Sweezy’s Cuba: The Anatomy of a Revolution. In a preliminary draft of Listen, Yankee Mills wrote of the Huberman and Sweezy work: “It is a good book, and I have drawn upon it for details as well as for more general viewpoints.”5

Contrary to Brennan and Dubois—who as journalists embedded with the insurrectionists and rebels reported on the actions of individuals—Huberman and Sweezy, as economic analysts, scrutinized more closely the nascent revolutionary society. By further contrast, Mills, as sociologist, considered both the character structure (the conduct patterns, self-images, and aspirations) of the individuals with whom he had discussions, as well as the social structure (the norms, values, and institutions) of the new Cuban society.

In any event, Huberman and Sweezy, coeditors of the important socialist magazine Monthly Review, which they cofounded in 1949, were both acclaimed socialists and readily admit that “we ourselves, as veterans of the left-wing movement, felt thoroughly at home in the intellectual and moral atmosphere of the Cuban Revolution, much more so than we do in that of the ‘affluent society.’ ”6 Moreover, they characterize the new regime as socialist and speculate that it would remain so, given the government’s increasing nationalization of various industries.

Of particular relevance to Mills’s pre-arrival preparation is that Huberman and Sweezy raise several questions that he may have been inspired to further pursue with his interviewees: Are the Communists working themselves into a position from which they can take over control of the revolutionary regime? As the momentum of the Revolution dies down, will there be a need for a cohesive political apparatus as an intermediary between leadership and masses? Will the 26th of July Movement become a genuine political party? In addition, the authors also provided an agenda of sorts that could have inspired Mills in his research: interviewing top government officials such as Armando Hart, Enrique Oltuski, and Ché Guevara, and visiting the Camilo Cienfuegos School City.

Huberman and Sweezy had previously met the Cuban Ambassador to the UN, Raúl Roa Kourí, at the Monthly Review bookshop in New York City. Impressed by their sincere interest in the Revolution’s progress, Roa Kourí urged Ché Guevara to invite the economists to Cuba.7 The pair spent several weeks on the island during the spring of 1960 researching their book. Later, in the autumn, they returned to the Caribbean nation for several weeks in order to prepare a second edition that included an updated epilogue. Thus, they were in Cuba just shortly before and then shortly after Mills’s arrival in the summer. They were compelled to return to the island, given that the stages and phases of the revolutionary process were morphing quickly, too quickly, to properly do justice to any attempt at characterizing it: “In fact, hardly anything about it is the same—its personnel, its organization, its aims, even the personality of its leaders have all undergone more or less radical changes. Fidel Castro has learned much and changed accordingly in the brief period of less than a year and a half.”8 This situation of social events moving at astonishing speed was one that Mills, qua sociologist, could hardly resist: he needed to analyze the Revolution’s dynamic course of syncopated evolution, to comprehend the improvisational qualities of a going revolution.9

Revolutionary Transformations and Cold War Events

Irving Louis Horowitz is correct in stating that “Mills was reacting to the first years of a revolution whose structure had not yet crystallized.”10 But what exactly were those major transformations, those pivotal social and economic reforms in the revolutionary process that were taking place at the time Mills was on the island that would solidify Cuba’s social structure? Working from Huberman and Sweezy’s before-and-after comparative impressions, two interrelated developments are salient.

The first is that the process of nationalization—of expropriating foreign and domestic enterprises and putting them in the hands of the Revolutionary government—was speeding up, entering its advanced stages. Indeed, just a few days before Mills arrived in the country, the new regime had suddenly seized a large part of U.S. corporate holdings on the island, notably, the electric power company, the telephone company, the oil refineries, and all of the sugar mills. The great nationalization wave crested in late October, when Castro expropriated all foreign enterprises operating in Cuba, including 166 U.S.-owned companies. All this was in reprisal against U.S. economic aggression intended to cripple the island’s economy; first by having U.S.-owned Cuban oil companies—namely, Esso, Texaco, and Shell—refuse to refine oil imported into Cuba and then by drastically reducing the sugar quota, the amount of sugar the United States would import from Cuba. In an escalating series of moves and countermoves between Havana and Washington, the Eisenhower administration had placed an embargo on exports to the Cuban island except for medicines, medical supplies, and foodstuffs. The following year the petulant tug-of-war that led to the severing of all relations between the two countries could be assessed as follows: “If the United States is now alarmed by the ‘radicalization’ of the Cuban Revolution, it has itself to thank; for most of the radical measures of the Castro regime have been taken in direct reaction to threats from Washington.”11

The other defining change, stemming in no small measure from the process of nationalization, was the formation of a significant and identifiable counterrevolutionary sentiment expressed by the landlords whose income had been cut, the landowners whose estates had been expropriated, the bankers and business owners whose profits had been curtailed, and the professional and civic leaders who had lost their political clout. They amounted to a considerable and growing number of dissidents and defectors. Inside Cuba, this counterrevolutionary drift was not a coordinated movement and therefore of no real threat to the regime. Outside the country, however, it was a different matter; indeed, the Cuban exile community in Miami was already plotting a comeback. They were being incited and abetted by the U.S. government to attack and encroach on the island. Thus, at least as indicated by the audiotapes, Mills spent more time discussing counterrevolutionary plots with his interviewees—of an impending invasion of Cuba by the United States—than he did the expropriation of U.S.-owned properties. But he and his interviewees had justifiable cause for concern, and apparently so did Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, who, only a few weeks before, in a speech made in Moscow, had warned the United States that “Soviet artillerymen can support the Cuban people with their rocket fire, should the aggressive forces in the Pentagon dare to start intervention against Cuba.” What is more, Mills well understood the dynamics of counterrevolution, which he and Hans Gerth had defined as “the organized and successful endeavor of previous ruling groups to re-establish themselves in power in the name of the old or newly wrought legitimations.”12 The Cubans who had defected and who had taken the path of exile were indeed being organized in Florida—politically and militarily by the Central Intelligence Agency—but their endeavors to regain power in Cuba would ultimately be wholly unsuccessful and, indeed, nothing short of humiliating.

Other significant developments during the summer of 1960 of pertinence to Castro’s Cuba include the following: On May 17 the CIA established Radio Swan, a radio station broadcasting to Cuba that was a part of the Eisenhower-approved plan for covert operations to undermine the Revolutionary regime. In June the Frente Revolucionario Democrático was formed by Cuban exiles in the United States intending to establish an invasion force to overthrow Castro. Also that month, U.S. embassy legal attachés Edwin L. Sweet and William G. Friedman were arrested at a meeting of counterrevolutionary conspirators and charged with encouraging terrorist acts, granting asylum, financing subversive publications, and smuggling weapons. They were immediately expelled from Cuba. On July 8 the Soviet Union announced that it would purchase 700,000 tons of sugar—Cuba’s biggest export crop—to cover the deficit created by the U.S. quota system. And in what is doubtless one of the most bizarre and harebrained schemes perpetrated by the CIA, around the time Mills was making his trek through Cuba, the CIA’s Office of Security initiated a plot to hire mafiosi, who had had their syndicate interests driven out of their Havana gambling casinos by the Castro government, to “eliminate” the Cuban leader.

Global events of that summer—of secondary significance to the situation in Cuba but of supreme importance in the context of Cold War tensions—included the shooting down, over Soviet airspace, of a U-2 spy plane flown by CIA pilot Francis Gary Powers; the Congo declaring its independence from Belgium and aligning itself with Moscow; and tens of thousands of leftist Japanese students holding massive street demonstrations in Tokyo in protest of U.S. military bases in that country.

In broader view, the Cold War period between 1953 and 1961 was largely defined by the looming threat of nuclear war: the annihilation of the two world superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, and, for that matter, of most of the planet. Eisenhower’s main foreign policy in this regard was the “containment” of Soviet expansion through “brinksmanship.” This meant that, given its superior nuclear arsenal, the United States would push the Soviet Union to the threshold of war in order to exact concessions. In addition, there was the idea—or more accurately, the hope—that the USSR’s inefficient economy would collapse in its attempt to keep up with the “arms race.” Thus, during this period the Eisenhower administration increased the number of nuclear warheads from 1,000 to 18,000, and in 1961 deployed fifteen Jupiter ballistic missiles in Turkey, aimed at the USSR’s cities, including Moscow. For all this, Eisenhower, in his January 17, 1961, farewell presidential address to the nation, warned against the bourgeoning “military-industrial complex”—the insidious power of the economic military alliance, the power-profit relationship between the U.S. munitions makers and the Pentagon—which Mills had been decrying for years.13 Indeed, Mills, and many other American and European intellectuals, called for a politics of responsibility in order to avoid a total and absurd nuclear war. In The Causes of World War Three, Mills urgently informs his readers that the United States and the Soviet Union shared too closely the “military metaphysic,” a view through which all global issues are seen in terms of national security and defense.14 As such, he calls upon the clergy, scientists, and the intellectual community to take a responsible and moral stand on the issue of peace and nuclear disarmament. Mills endeavors to persuade American and Soviet intellectuals to prevail over the high immorality and crackpot realism of their respective countries’ power elites—in Washington and in the Kremlin—and to, by their own efforts, sue for a separate peace. Only in this way, Mills argued, could the drift toward mass destruction be reversed. Mills’s clarion call had a significant impact in galvanizing the antinuclear peace movement in the United States and abroad. But a mere four years after the publication of the Causes and two years after the appearance of Listen, Yankee, the two superpowers, and the world, came closest to the brink of nuclear Armageddon than at any other moment in history. It was over the installation of nuclear-armed Soviet missiles on the island of Cuba.

Witnessing the New Cuba

These events and potentialities notwithstanding, Mills’s objective in going to Cuba, as he declares it in Listen, Yankee, was a relatively simple one: to find out the truth about what is really happening in Cuba and tell it to the North American people. He traveled through the island during the sixteen days of August 8–24, 1960, on a tour organized by Robert Taber, who was a founding member of a group of intellectuals and activists in solidarity with Cuba, the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC), and by Raúl Roa Kourí, who was the high-raking Cuban official in charge of relations with the FPCC. Taber, a CBS journalist, had achieved some notoriety for having interviewed, in 1957, Fidel Castro in his hideout, deep in the mountains of the Sierra Maestra. Roa Kourí, a diplomat, was attached to Cuba’s permanent mission at the United Nations, where he served as representative of the Economic and Finance Committee. In July 1960, Roa Kourí, through the good offices of Taber, contacted Mills. Over lunch in Manhattan, the three men discussed the possibility of Mills making a tour of Cuba similar to the one previously made by Huberman and Sweezy, which had been arranged by Roa Kourí. Mills became enthused with the notion and agreed to again meet with Taber and Roa Kourí after he had a better sense of when he could travel. After putting in order matters pertaining to his classes at Columbia University, Mills contacted Roa Kourí, who then arranged his trip and contacts in Havana.15

But Mills was far from unique in traveling to the “Pearl of the Antilles.” Indeed, shortly after the success of the Revolution, thousands of young people from around the globe flocked to the island, wanting to become directly involved in revolutionary work,16 and Taber, under the auspices of the FPCC, was organizing many of these trips. Indeed, Cuba, at the time, offered what Rafael Rojas calls “a spectacle of ideas” and, as such, became a place of pilgrimage for students and intellectuals of various types of socialist thought.17 But these trips were not mere junkets for hedonistic undergraduates on spring break seeking bacchanalian pleasure, nor for holidaymakers wanting to sun themselves on Varadero Beach. In fact, when in September 1960 a Columbia University student asked Fidel Castro whether Cuba intended to establish a student-exchange program, the prime minister replied: “Yes, we are setting up a special institute to handle student visitors, an institute to promote friendship between peoples. Special prices and facilities are already available to visiting students. We welcome all visitors, especially students who are interested in studying our social problems, and have not come to Cuba just to have a good time.”18

In addition to Mills, a host of renowned, politically progressive artists, writers, and thinkers made the pilgrimage to the Caribbean nation over the course of the first five or so years of its Revolution. These included Leroi Jones (later Amiri Baraka), Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, Mario Vargas Llosa, Allen Ginsberg, Oscar Lewis, Gabriel García Márquez, Graham Greene, Carlos Fuentes, and no less a personage than Jean-Paul Sartre, who was personally invited to visit the new Cuba by the editor of the newspaper Revolución, Carlos Franqui. The desire to have Sartre, and also Mills, come to the Cuban island was rooted in the realization that it was necessary to invite famous intellectuals with the goal that they would experience the Revolution, appraise it, and be influenced by it, and refer to it with greater legitimacy than could other observers. Sartre, who was received as an intellectual superstar in Cuba, was invited there not only because of his fame and his prominence as a man of the Left, but, most significantly, because he had publically declared in France his solidarity with the Revolution.19 In any event, these and other literary lights “came not to peer at Cuba from behind their hotel curtains,” as scores of journalists before them had done, “but rather to make their observation an active participation.”20 It was, however, Sartre and Mills, both of whom visited the island in 1960—during the Revolution’s afterglow—who were largely responsible for the initial excitement among Europeans and North Americans concerning Cuba.21

In 1960 this excitement—this exuberant mass enthusiasm—which the early stage of a successful revolution always generates, captivated and drew scores of revolutionary tourists who came to the island armed, not with guns and revolvers, but with cameras and audio recorders. What, we may ask, was the character of this transfiguring emotional experience that the Cuban people sensed deeply, that confronted visitors immediately upon arriving in Havana, and that the U.S. government was wholly incapable of comprehending? “It was the release of pent-up feelings of frustration, it was an overwhelming welling up of pride, it was a dizzying sense of participation in building a new nation and a new epoch. It was zeal, dedication, excitement. And it was a raw-nerve feeling of sensitivity about the whole undertaking.”22

Three and a half decades later, Juan Arcocha could still recall vividly those sensations of exultation and hope that permeated the island during that intoxicating time: “How distant those days in mid-1960 now seem! In Cuba we lived in moments of constant frenzy. The revolutionary fervor was at its peak and in it participated the great majority of the population.”23 Carlos Franqui lyrically describes the revolutionary ferment at the time that Jean-Paul Sartre, accompanied by Simone de Beauvoir, was in Cuba in the spring of 1960 as follows: “There was a party atmosphere throughout the island, a collective joy that manifested itself in singing and playing bongo drums. It was a Cuban way of changing life: voluntary labor, militia duty, rumba, all at the same time.”24 During these early halcyon days, large crowds of habaneros (residents of Havana) could be found—on the streets, plazas, and other public places—animatedly discussing the Revolution into the wee hours of the morning.25

Upon arriving in Havana, Mills met, quite by accident, another FPCC member, Saul Landau, who shared with the sociologist his experiences of life on the island. Landau, who would later become Mills’s research assistant, tells of Mills’s awkwardness on first meeting with Armando Hart, who was then minister of education, and his wife, Haydée Santamaría, who was directing the cultural center, Casa de las Américas, which she had founded in Havana. One evening, they, along with interpreter Juan Arcocha, were preparing to go to dinner with Mills, who was looking a bit like Hemingway—bearded, puffing on his pipe, and wearing a sweat-stained bush jacket. Hart was in his most conservative blue suit, Haydée in an evening dress, and Arcocha in expensive Havana evening clothes. “I should’ve worn a tie,” the unconventional Mills ruefully confided to Landau. Hart, in particular, was shy and embarrassed, and the formal introductions were painful.26

While Mills was still in Havana, Fidel Castro paid him a personal visit at the relatively new Hotel Riviera, located on the Malecón oceanfront boulevard, where Mills was lodged.27 Even before setting out on his islandwide expedition, Mills saw, in the hotel’s vast lobby, about 400 volunteers in their weather-stained uniforms who had just arrived from the Sierra Maestra, where they had been working alongside and teaching literacy—but also basic hygiene—to children and adults among the guajiro (peasant) families. Tilting his camera lens down from his room, Mills photographed a platoon of militiamen who were also employees of the hotel, drilling—marching back-and-forth across the parking lot beyond the hexagon-shaped swimming pool, as they enthusiastically shouted in military cadence, “Uno, dos, tres, cuatro!” Within a few months, in preparation for a military invasion by the United States, those same militiamen would begin digging trenches outside the Riviera where 340 North American members of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee would be sojourning.

This then was Mills’s introduction to Cuba. And it is doubtless the case that, at the very start of his journey, Mills had, as his friend K. S. Karol put it, “breathed fresh air” in Havana; “he had met revolutionaries of a new type, imbued with all the best ideas of the Left. He had been profoundly moved.”28

Clearly Fidel Castro wanted the Columbia University sociologist to see, up close, as much of the new Cuba as possible, and so he provided Mills with a guide and a motor vehicle to tour freely, view the economic situation, and witness the improvements that the Revolutionary government was making.29 Mills and Taber drove southwest on the two-lane Carretera Central, the Central Highway, from Havana to the province of Oriente at the eastern tip of the island, where Mills interviewed Franz Stettmeier and his wife, Elvira Escobar. About one-third of the way on their approximately 1,000-kilometer trip, they picked up a hitchhiking rebel soldier in Las Villas who had been building houses for the campesinos (peasant farmers). Mills and Taber then got off the Central Highway at Bayamo and headed west to Manzanillo.30

In addition to Taber, throughout much of his time in Cuba, Mills was accompanied by René C. Vallejo, who was Castro’s aide-de-camp and personal physician. Mills spent several days with Vallejo, who spoke fluent English, and at least on one occasion traveled with him on a small aircraft. He also spent many hours with Fidel Castro, first in the province of Pinar del Río, initially having dinner with him in the lush Viñales Valley, and then accompanying him, as part of his official entourage, on a rain-soaked excursion of the Isle of Pines (these events are chronicled in Chapter 6).

At one point, along with the Cuban Revolution’s two most visible leaders, Castro and Ché Guevara, Mills reviewed troops in drill. But he also spoke with many other Cubans who were not part of the revolutionary inner circle. Most of those interviews were conducted in Oriente, primarily in and around the Spanish-colonial city of Santiago de Cuba. The interview with the highest-ranking military official that he recorded, Comandante Dermidio Escalona, was likely held at the opposite end of the island, in Pinar del Río.

Everywhere Mills went he witnessed the Cuban people rehabilitating and transforming—they were constructing—a new society. On billboards everywhere was the slogan, “Revolution is to Build.” In the Manzanillo district he saw a newly constructed road stretching for thirty kilometers along a shore where previously even horses had been unable to travel during the rainy season. Mills visited what had been a private ranch of 30,000 acres that had been converted into a dairy center where he interviewed Elba Luisa Batista Benitez and her husband, Lauro Fiallo Barrero. Nearby, Mills visited a chicken hatchery that was producing 75,000 chicks every three weeks. South of Manzanillo along the coastal plain, in Media Luna, he observed workmen outfitting recently constructed concrete block houses with new refrigerators, ceramic toilets and sinks, and gas stoves.31 Mills, Taber, and Arcocha then proceeded to the tiny fishing village of Puerto de Belic in Oriente’s southern shore, near the mangrove swamp where Fidel Castro and his expeditionary force made their historic landing in the most famous boat in Cuba, the Granma, in 1956.

Continuing on to the Sierra Maestra, Mills hiked the physically demanding trail up to the Pico Turquino, at almost 7,000 feet, the highest peak in Cuba, to La Plata where Castro had based his command headquarters during the insurrection. On the way, he snapped pictures of a crudely lettered sign that read, Aquí Nació La Liberta de Cuba (Here was born Cuba’s freedom). He, Taber, and Arcocha spent time at the Camilo Cienfuegos School City, where they saw children at work and play and attending classes. At the School City, Mills interviewed Captain Isabel Rielo, who had been a soldier in the Rebel Army’s female platoon at the time of the rebellion.

It must have been a grueling and exhausting sixteen days for the middle-aged Mills as he traversed the length and breadth of the Pennsylvania-sized country and spoke with countless of people of all ages and social stations. But all that Mills saw and heard during that summer in 1960 was part of his “Cuba-present”—a time of revolutionary transition that can only be properly understood in relation to “Cuba-past” and “Cuba-future.” In this case, Cuba-past had its beginning point on July 26, 1953, the start of the insurrection against the Batista tyranny. Cuba-future, in terms relevant and relative to Mills’s arrival in the Caribbean nation, is set on April 17, 1961, the first day of the U.S.-sponsored invasion at the Bay of Pigs.