CHAPTER THREE
Mills on Individuals, Intellectuals, and Interviewing
In one of his best-known passages in The Sociological Imagination, C. Wright Mills states, “What social science is properly about is the human variety, which consists of all the social worlds in which men have lived, are living, and might live.”1 These social worlds are all the social structures that have appeared in the course of human history. But to understand their essential characteristics, it is necessary that the sociologist undertake a comparative analysis: to observe social structures under a variety of circumstances and to examine them in contrast to other social structures, particularly those in other world areas and regions.
Just as importantly, the human variety also includes the array of men and women, as biographical entities, that have been known to exist and that currently do exist. For Mills, the sociologist must endeavor to understand these individuals by discerning the meaning that historical reality has for them—but always within the context of the political state. In sum, it was by studying the biographical experiences of the newly radicalized Cubans, Cuban national history, and the problems of their intersection within the political process of the Revolution, that Mills sought to understand what was really going on in Cuba in mid-1960. As Robert Taber put it, “the Revolution has been made not by parties or movements but by individual human beings, in all their living, breathing variety.”2
Individuals
On his two-week trek through the Caribbean nation Mills spoke with and observed a wide variety of Cubans, from all walks of life, engaged in a number of endeavors, most of which were devoted to the construction of a new society. Whether or not it was the case when he was making his way through the island, by the time of the Bay of Pigs, he had clearly developed a sentimental affinity with the Cuban people. Indeed, just a few days after the military invasion, he wrote a letter to his parents expressing that feeling. Knowing that his mother, who had grown up in a ranch in South Texas, had “as her image of the human being—the men and women of Mexico,” Mills explained to her that, “The Cubans are my Mexicans.”3
It is noteworthy that, despite being a “North American aboriginal,” as he referred to himself, Mills was remarkably free from national affections and ideological convictions, opposing, for example, U.S. participation in World War II and refusing to join any political party or association.4 Nevertheless, after all his wanderings, and late in his life, Mills finally found his “emotional home,” only 145 kilometers off the coast of Florida, in the Cuban Revolution.5 And the Cuban people, who were making the Revolution, provided him with his idealized image of the human being, of the social being. But what exactly was Mills’s view of individuals—both North Americans and Cubans?
Mills’s sociology begins with the premise that individuals, whether peasants or bureaucrats, are first and foremost social and historical actors. But for us to properly understand their motives and behaviors they must be considered with sensitive reference to the social structure that is their context.6
He saw individuals as possessing a nature that is volitional and active, one that gives them the potential to be free. For Mills, humans have the ability, if not always the desire, to awaken from their political apathy, shake loose their feelings of fatalistic resignation, and engage in social action that makes a historical difference. His conception of human nature is that few limits can be placed on the capacities of individuals. However, in the postwar United States, most people’s freedom, by which he means their “chance to formulate the available choices, to argue over them—and then the opportunity to choose,” is constrained by power relations.7 Simply put, those with the power to make the larger decisions for their society are freer than those without the power.
Mills draws two conclusions about individuals in their relation to the power structure of U.S. society. First, while all North Americans are free, some, by virtue of where they are placed within the social structure, are more powerful and free than others to shape human affairs. Second, and subsequently, history is made behind the backs of the majority of the U.S. populace.
Mills vehemently maintains that individuals in a mass society like the United States must refuse to remain “cheerful robots,” apathetic automatons who blindly and complacently accept their life chances as being determined by fate. A true democratic freedom, declares Mills, can be realized only when individuals, in order to secure their freedom, must have not only the power but also the desire to make decisions concerning their own lives and their place in history. The passive spectators, the cheerful robots of U.S. mass society, must be transformed into a “community of publics”—scattered little circles of face-to-face citizens discussing their public business in the spirit of direct participatory democracy.8 This explains why, in questioning the Cubans, Mills was particularly intrigued with how decisions were made and with the distinctly revolutionary notion of “direct democracy.”
Mills’s most penetrating characterization of North Americans, as individuals in the social-structural context of mid-twentieth-century mass society, is found in White Collar—his social-psychological study of the emerging new middle classes and their white-collar world. Here he reveals how the U.S. economy’s rationalization and bureaucratization affect the psychological character, the social biographies, and the social roles of North American white-collar workers. In the major U.S. cities in the 1950s, these structural factors made for the subsequent rise of a world of big organizations inhabited by the “new middle class,” or those propertyless white-collar workers involved primarily in sales and management and whose work situation was increasingly bureaucratized by the command hierarchies of business and government. The white-collar workers of the new middle class, mostly clerks, bookkeepers, and public relations specialists involved in sales and management, felt alienated because they lacked a sense of craftsmanship, of creating their own product. For the white-collar workers the enterprise had but one motive: to manipulate everyone and everything in order to make a profit. They had become bureaucrats, professionalized occupants of specified offices and specialized tasks, and were forced to accept the meaninglessness of their working life. In Marx’s terms, they were alienated from power, work, and self.
Mills contends that by examining middle-class, white-collar life, something can be learned about what was becoming more typically “American.” In this way, he states, we can “understand better the shape and meaning of modern society as a whole, as well as the simple hopes and complex anxieties that grip all the people who are sweating it out in the middle of the twentieth century.”9 This situation in U.S. society gave rise to what Mills calls the new little man, the product of these impersonal white-collar worlds, who “seems to have no firm roots, no sure loyalties to sustain his life and give it a center.… Perhaps because he does not know where he is going, he is in a frantic hurry; perhaps because he does not know what frightens him, he is paralyzed with fear.”10 It is instructive to compare the new little man of U.S. society with the Cuban revolutionary ideal: Ché Guevara’s “new man.”11
In stark contrast to North America’s white-collar new little man, who works alone in some impersonal office, never talking loud, never talking back, never taking a stand, Guevara’s famous conceptualization of Cuba’s new man is of a man actively and consciously engaged in building socialism for the greater benefit of society; he is, in fact, making history. In this sense the new man is, at once, a unique individual as well as a member of the community. What is important in this context, writes the Argentine guerrilla, “is that people become more aware every day of the need to incorporate themselves into society and of their own importance as motors of that society.”12 This allows the new man to achieve total awareness of his social being, which is equivalent to his full realization as a human being. Guevara’s new socialist man is not alienated; indeed, he “begins to see himself portrayed in his work and to understand its human magnitude through the created object, through the work carried out.”13 This new man, this new human being, is the “twenty-first-century man,” yet to be formed, in the process of being formed. Mills provides glimpses of the formation of the new man in Cuba when, in Listen, Yankee, he has the Cuban revolutionary say: “We are new men. That is why we are so original and so spontaneous and so unafraid to do what must be done in Cuba.”14 And again, “The only real and true consolidation, of course, is the creation of the revolution by itself of new kinds of men and women.”15
Guevara singles out the current crop of Cuban intellectuals, particularly, as not being new men; the reason—and it is a rather ambiguous one—is that they are not “authentically revolutionary,” by which he presumably means that they had not been able to shake the old bourgeois idealism and adopt new communistic values. For Mills, by contrast, the North American intellectual had the potential, if not always the willingness, to be an authentic revolutionary, or at least an agent of social change. Mills, however, understood that it would not be easy to realize this expectation for the intellectuals.
Intellectuals
Much like Karl Mannheim before him, Mills fashioned a public—and a political—role for intellectuals. Before his Cuban sojourn and even before Fidel teamed up with Ché, Mills had concluded that intellectuals were the most viable agents for changing the conditions of sociopolitical existence. In his first major work, released in 1948, The New Men of Power, he contends that labor leaders, together with the labor intellectuals (i.e., the union’s lawyers, editors of the union’s newspaper, economists, statisticians, research directors), should form an alliance to stop the United States from becoming a corporate militarized state.16 By the end of the book, however, Mills reveals his disenchantment with both the labor leaders and intellectuals because they had failed to raise the workers’ level of political awareness to arrest the trend toward a permanent war economy. Given that labor intellectuals were woefully ineffectual in influencing the conditions of their work setting, Mills saw them as having virtually no chance to contribute to progressive politics.
In Mills’s view, intellectuals must be motivated by a commitment to politics. Indeed, he frequently charges them to practice the “politics of responsibility” and act in a morally responsible manner. He sees it as the intellectuals’ obligation, their moral imperative, to critique contemporary overdeveloped society and set forth general and detailed programs on how to attain the properly developing society.17 An overdeveloped society like the United States, Mills explains, is an affluent industrial society where conspicuous production and consumption dominate and control the lifestyles of many individuals, but in particular those of the middle classes. Here the middle classes ignore their fundamental human needs as a result of being dazzled and distracted by technological gadgetry. Moreover, they are frequently preoccupied with competing for what is most important to them: status. As a consequence, the main features characterizing an overdeveloped society are emulatory consumption patterns, overproduction, and the deadening of human sensibility. In contrast, the properly developing society is a democratic order where troubles, issues, and problems are open to inquiry. It is a society that provides forums and other outlets through which all momentous decisions are made into public issues and openly debated by intellectuals before a community of free and knowledgeable publics.18
In White Collar Mills maintains that, like the labor intellectuals, middle-class intellectuals had also been rendered powerless due to three general trends of modern social and ideological organization. First, they had been transformed into bureaucrats, working in large organizations of state, business, and higher education. This meant that, as hired employees in the publishing and entertainment industries, they were no longer free to speak their minds in dissent. And in the large universities, the restraints on professors’ academic freedom stemmed from a self-censorship that they unconsciously imposed on their own teaching and research. Further, the new bureaucracies had an ideological demand for intellectuals to compose symbols, representing various interests and passions, which serve the vested interests of the bureaucracy. Lastly, rather than actively resisting the cooptation of their intellect, intellectuals had become mere technicians, selling their ideas to the large corporations, the state apparatus, and the military establishment.
In addition to intellectuals needing to be independent of established institutions, Mills also expects them to be critics of their own country’s political structures. He brought home this point in a March 1960 interview he had with the Mexican leftist intellectuals Carlos Fuentes, Víctor Flores Olea, Enrique González Pedrero, and Jamie García Terrés.19 He exhorts them not to consider as the major source of Latin America’s abject poverty the imperialistic and monopolistic machinations of the United States (though Mills insists that he was not an apologist for U.S. foreign policies), but rather the power elite in their own countries. He admonishes them for excusing their own political inactivity by reference to what the United States would and would not do. He chides them to conduct an honest sociological study that would, first, provide a penetrating account of the ruling groups in every Latin American country and, second, measure the extent to which these countries’ underdevelopment can realistically be imputed to the imperialist policies of the United States. When the results are obtained, Mills tells his interviewers, they will have no more excuses for their political inactivity and will stop attributing all of Latin America’s misfortunes to relations with the United States.
In The Causes of World War Three, Mills acquires a renewed faith that intellectuals could again be the agents of democratic renovation. And since a modern democracy necessitates an end to civic apathy and political indifference, it therefore requires a media of genuine communication open to the intellectual community. Mills believes that with the aid of this type of mass media, intellectuals could translate the private troubles of individuals into public issues, and public issues into their meanings for the private life. But until such time as genuine media becomes a reality, he instructs the intellectual community to “make the mass media the means of liberal—which is to say, liberating—education.”20 He acknowledges, however, that, in regard to Cuba’s Revolution, this was particularly difficult to do, given that American television programming, newspapers, and magazines—but in particular “that weekly journal of fiction,” Time magazine, for which Mills had particular contempt—were intentionally misrepresenting the truth about Cuba. Speaking through the Cuban revolutionary, Mills tells North Americans: “Everyone in the world who isn’t limited to Time Magazine and the Hearst papers, and listening to your networks and all the rest of it, is getting to know something of the truth about Cuba today. They’re getting to know that your press on Cuba is about as real as your quiz programs have been. They are both full of outrageous lies which may fool Yankees but don’t fool anyone else. They are frauds, and other people are beginning to realize it, even if you do not.”21
Mills holds an objective notion of truth, one that is politically informed. This was a politics of truth, by which he means that intellectuals have a moral and political obligation to tell the truth—to disclose the facts—about social reality; particularly since this reality was being distorted by the stultifying culture of mass society and the manipulation of the mass media. Thus, in Listen, Yankee Mills endeavors to explicitly present to the U.S. public—a public that largely had access only to information from the North American press—“the truth” about the Cuban Revolution. Indeed, one of the overriding political ideals is the value of truth, of fact. In a world of widely communicated nonsense, any statement of fact is of political and moral significance. But Mills is well aware that revolutionary truth is always volatile, mutable, and dangerous: “Like most Cubans, I too believe that this revolution is a moment of truth, and like some Cuban revolutionaries, I too believe that such truth, like all revolutionary truth, is perilous.” What is more, he understands that the Revolution is tenuous and fragile and that events can easily take a turn for the worse: “Any moment of such military and economic truth [as exists in Cuba today] might become an epoch of political and cultural lies.”22
And when it comes to truth, all intellectuals must be involved in the struggle between enlightenment and obscurantism. Mills’s task in Listen, Yankee is to enlighten his fellow citizens about the achievements, aspirations, and aims of the Cuban Revolution. By contrast, those intellectuals most responsible for leading the U.S. public into obscurantism about what was really going on in Cuba were the “liberal obfuscators” in the Kennedy administration—namely, Adolf A. Berle Jr., the president’s advisor on Latin America; Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., the president’s special assistant; and Adlai Stevenson, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations—who had actively sought to hide the facts about military intervention on the island.
But if Mills saw left-leaning thinkers as change agents, what role did they play in revolution? First and foremost, they were catalysts for revolution, particularly in the developing nations of the world. In fact, two conditions necessary for revolution in those countries were a continued, hopeless misery of the masses and “a disaffected intelligentsia with no place to go.”23 Indeed, in the case of Cuba, the ones who initiated the insurrection, Mills points out, were a handful of disaffected young intellectuals and students from the University of Havana.
There are a couple of characteristics of these young Cuban intellectuals that Mills particularly admires. First, they are pragmatic and thus original, fluid, and unafraid of what has to be done in Cuba. Mills describes their organization as a “do-it-yourself outfit,” not oriented to any particular ideological blueprint, except perhaps by a vague kind of socialism. Second, and related, they are bereft of any rigid political dogmatism, and being of the younger political generation, they have no experience with old-left Stalinism. They are a new left and, as such, lack any sense of cynicism and futility about what they are doing. This nonideological and spontaneous praxis, this rather naïve political approach, was made evident to Jean-Paul Sartre: “In Paris I questioned a certain number of Cubans, but was never able to understand why they refused to tell me if the objective of the Cuban Revolution was or was not to establish socialism. Now I understand why they could not tell me. That is, that the originality of this Revolution consists precisely in doing what needs to be done without attempting to define it by means of a previous ideology.”24 Indeed, in March 1960, Castro, referencing Sartre, declared that, “we [Cubans] are not a people of high theory … we are a people of deeds and Jean-Paul Sartre has said as much. This is not a revolution of the book.”25
Such improvisation was partly rooted in the fact that the leaders of the Cuban government were, on the eve of the Revolution, all in their thirties or younger: Enrique Oltuski, minister of communications, was twenty-nine; Armando Hart, minister of education, twenty-seven; Raúl Castro, twenty-eight; and Ché Guevara and Fidel Castro were barely past thirty. In a chapter titled “The Kids Take Over,” Sartre, in 1960, observed that youth was everywhere in Cuba, that the enfants terribles then in power were exactly the ones to rebel against a dictatorial regime: “Since a revolution was needed, circumstances willed that youth should accomplish it. Only the young had enough anger and anguish to accomplish it, enough integrity to succeed.”26
Though youth may have been an asset in bringing about the Revolution, it became a liability, or at least an impediment, in creating a government, given that the Fidelistas lacked the political competence and administrative skills, to say nothing of the business acumen, needed to solve the country’s many long-standing social problems, of poverty and destitution, illiteracy and disease. However, to provide a counterweight to that point, Huberman and Sweezy argue that one of the greatest advantages of the young revolutionaries is that they had no parliamentary experience, since it “takes no profound economic sophistication, no initiation into the secrets of government or administration, to understand what has to be done. What it does require is a sympathy for human beings, a passion for justice, and a vision unclouded by the fetishes and obfuscations of bourgeois ideology”—qualities that the young Cuban revolutionaries had in abundance.27
It was from these young Cuban intellectuals and revolutionaries that Mills took inspiration in writing his famous “Letter to the New Left,” which he had drafted a few weeks prior to his visit to Cuba and then revised—no doubt as a result of his Cuba experiences—shortly after returning from the island.28 It is to the rising generation of radicalized students, activists, and intellectuals that Mills addresses his letter, giving them hope for making a more democratic society. This was to be an international young intelligentsia—of students from Cuba, South Korea, Japan, Turkey, and even from the U.S. South—who would be the radical agents of social transformation. Mills’s letter, in turn, became the inspiration to young activists like Tom Hayden, Al Haber, Bob Ross, Dick Flacks, and other leaders of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and its manifesto—The Port Huron Statement.29 In encouraging this global leftist movement, made up of students and young people, Mills tells them reassuringly: “In Cuba, a genuinely left-wing revolution begins full-scale economic reorganization—without the domination of U.S. corporations. Average age of its leaders: about 30—and certainly a revolution without any Labor as Agency.”30
But in focusing on the current crop of youthful Cuban leaders, Mills neglects the influence of the older political cohort of intellectuals—particularly the “generation of the Thirties” that had opposed the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado and to which the 26th of July Movement directly traced its roots.31 Absent from Listen, Yankee is any mention of the intellectuals and students who took part in the revolution of 1933, such as Raúl Roa, Jorge Mañach, and Rafael Trejo.32 What is more, Mills did not augment his research on Cuba’s Revolution with any close examination of the island’s past intellectual tradition; there are, for example, no references in Listen, Yankee to the works of Ramiro Guerra or Fernando Ortiz, or, for that matter, any detailed analysis of the ideas of José Martí.33
In the end, as Stanley Aronowitz states, “one may read Listen, Yankee as vindication of Mills’s theory of intellectuals as social catalysts.”34 But before he could write about the revolutionary role of these intellectuals—and journalists, and soldiers, and workers—Mills had to first interview them.35
Interviewing
During the 1940s, Mills made extensive use of the interview technique in two major studies. In White Collar, he explained how certain structural and occupational changes taking place in mid-twentieth-century United States were affecting the psychological character, the social biographies, and the social roles of white-collar workers. For this project, Mills and his research team interviewed 128 white-collar workers on a number of occupational-related topics. What is more, Mills encouraged his interviewers to attempt to understand the respondents’ deepest thoughts and feelings. This required that they ask intensive, probing questions, which meant that the interviews often lasted several hours and were frequently conducted in two sittings.36 The other study, The Puerto Rican Journey, was one of the first social-scientific investigations on the adaptation and adjustment of Puerto Rican migrants in New York City. Mills designed the study and was in charge of its execution, which involved interviewing over 1,000 Puerto Ricans. The interviewers inquired about the respondents’ experiences in Puerto Rico and New York and asked such incisive question as, “Would you tell me in your own words why you left P.R. and came to NY?”; “What do you personally want most out of your own life?”; and “What occupation would you like your children to follow?”
In both White Collar and The Puerto Rican Journey, Mills employed the interview to effectively understand the external conduct and inner life of different populations. But by the late 1950s and early 1960s, during his period of “pamphleteering”—when he published The Causes of World War Three and Listen, Yankee—he had allegedly come to reject empirical studies, preferring instead to take a broad critical analysis on a subject. For Mills, “much ‘empirical research’ is bound to be thin and uninteresting. Much of it, in fact, is a formal exercise for beginning students, and sometimes a useful pursuit for those who are not able to handle the more difficult substantive problems of social science.”37 If Mills had in mind interviewing as part of empirical research, then he was being disingenuous in his comments, given that he carried out a series of interviews, not only during his two weeks in Cuba, but also during his brief research trips to Yugoslavia (1956) and Poland (1957), and later, Brazil (1959) and Mexico (1960).
Mills was a confident and skilled interviewer and, for his proposed book Contacting the Enemy, for which he had queried approximately 70 Soviet intellectuals, he assuredly informed his research assistant, Saul Landau, “I’ll show you how to conduct an interview, and how to put together the results.”38 To be sure, Mills was not opposed to interviewing as a social research tool, but rather to the philosophy—the abstracted empiricism—and the excessive focus on the interview protocol—“the fetishism of method and technique”—that prevented sociologists from seeing, much less studying, the major developments of the time.39 Indeed, shortly before undertaking his tour of the Cuban island, Mills laid down specific rules on carrying out a series of interviews “with a small and highly selected number of inhabitants,” specifically when on a short visit to a country:
As Mills states in Listen, Yankee, his major aim in the book “is to present the voice of the Cuban revolutionary, as clearly and as emphatically as I can.” This was a collective voice that he derived from the composite style of presentation, and so, in regard to the fifth rule above, it is certainly possible that he was merely parroting the Cuban government’s dogma. Indeed, one of the Revolution’s chief detractors, Theodore Draper, who had been on the island just a few months before Mills, contends that the revolutionary leaders “talked in much the way Mills recorded them. Sometimes the words in [Listen, Yankee] were so close to those that I had heard that I felt I knew the name of the source.” Draper may perhaps be correct in saying that Castro and his associates were promoting the party line and that, as a consequence, “Mills made himself the vehicle of the purest and most direct propaganda.”41 But this is not evident among the Cubans whose interviews are transcribed in Chapters 4 and 5 of this book. Though they all showed strong support for the revolutionary process, and the direction it was taking at that point, it is difficult to discern a pervasive official viewpoint among them. So the other possibility in reference to the fifth rule is that Mills truly did find uniformity among several points with his respondents; a uniformity that arose not from propaganda, but from the interviewees’ shared opinions and lived experiences. Still, that Mills did not find opinions at variance with the official party line not only engenders incredulity, it also raises the question of whether he was simply seeking confirmation of his a priori beliefs.
However all this may be, one thing is certain: Mills’s experience with the Cuba interviews wasn’t only a matter of adhering to research guidelines while briefly visiting a foreign country, whether Poland, Brazil, or another. In this case, Cuba was unlike any country Mills had ever been to: it was very much a society in revolutionary transition.
In any event, Mills sought “to ask a few of the fruitful questions, and then to seek out and to listen well to as full a variety of answers as I could find.”42 He explains that he formulated his queries by reading everything he could on the current situation in Cuba and then summarizing it in the form of questions to which he could find no answers in published sources. Some of these fruitful questions that Mills posed to the recorded respondents may be articulated as follows:
And as a sort of experiential question he would frequently ask the interviewees:
9. When did you first become aware of or come in contact with the Fidelistas?
Robert Taber states that Mills posed one key question to all the revolutionary officials whom he interviewed (but did not tape), and that was: “If you were to have your fondest dreams realized—and here we do not speak of probabilities or possibilities, but only of dreams—what would you like to have the United States do?” According to Taber, the consensus response was: “If the United States cannot come to negotiate its differences with us, honestly and on the basis of mutual respect and equality, then our wish must be: stop harassing us, stop haranguing us, stop trying to interfere with our affairs. In plain words: go away and let us alone.”43 But Mills had to have known, should have known, contrary to whatever hopes he may have harbored, that the Cubans’ appeal for a modus vivendi with the United States could never be realized; not given that North Americans had for too long regarded the island as a kind of extra state, an economic and political colony; more, as their personal playground.
Another theme about which Mills repeatedly questioned his interviewees concerned the influence that the Cuban Communist Party (officially, the Partido Socialista Popular or PSP), with almost 18,000 members, was having on the revolutionary process and government. Though in mid-1960 the Castro regime was not yet in the Soviet camp, Mills feared that it might be moving in that direction. Thus, his abiding interest—his concern—in the potential Communist influence in Cuba stemmed from two factors. First, Mills wanted, above all, to tell the truth about Cuba; not, “The Whole Truth about Cuba”—for he did not believe that anyone, Cuban or North American, could yet know the whole truth about its evolving Revolution—but the plain truth. This meant that he had to, as accurately as possible, describe for a North American public what was happening in Cuba. And he knew that U.S. readers would plainly want to know if the Soviets were establishing a political and military base a mere 145 kilometers from the U.S. shoreline. Second, Mills—who was at the time drafting the manuscript for what would become his posthumously published book, The Marxists—was much concerned with the uses of the distinct varieties of Marxism by Cuban intellectuals, such as Ché Guevara.44 Would the Cuban revolutionaries, as Mills no doubt hoped, become plain Marxists and emphasize the human being’s freedom in the making of history, and confront in Marx’s work the unresolved tensions of humanism and determinism, of human freedom and historical necessity? Would they instead become sophisticated Marxists, displaying greater flexibility and being mainly concerned with Marxism as a model of society and with the theories developed with the aid of this model? Or would the revolutionary leaders, as Mills feared they might, turn to vulgar Marxism, becoming apologists for the Soviet Union, exhibiting a strong party allegiance, and operating within the strict confines of Marxism as a dogmatic ideological system? To be sure, the communist question was of the upmost concern to Mills, and he broached it in detail with no fewer than four of his interlocutors.
In addition to the aforementioned questions of wide scope, Mills would at times ask his interviewees for biographical information—name, education, occupation, age—usually prefacing these with the request, “May I ask you a few personal questions?” He inquired about the marital status of all of his female interviewees (a not uncommon practice for the time). He continuously queried his respondents about the specific time—the year, the month—when events occurred. He always endeavored to get an accurate chronology of events and frequently asked, “And then what happened next?”
Equipped with a wire recorder and two Nikon cameras, he had discussions and intensive interviews with many Cubans, both government officials and private citizens. He also took careful notes when speaking with everyone. Apparently at every conversation, Mills would automatically and unobtrusively slip his notepad out of his jacket pocket and write down everything people were saying. About these jottings, “no one seemed to notice,” remarked Saul Landau, who saw Mills take notes in a restaurant setting. “It didn’t isolate him from the group or conversation.”45
According to Mills, he was given complete access to information and experience by “Cubans close to events,” who gave him their trust “because of their acquaintance with previous books of mine,” but in particular The Power Elite.46 Indeed, one of the recorded respondents, Franz Stettmeier, makes oblique reference to The Power Elite (see chapter 5, interview 6).
It is significant that Mills did not speak Spanish, nor did he have any adequate understanding of the language. For all communications—from spontaneous conversations to formal interviews—involving Spanish (which were the majority of them), he relied on the interpretation skills of Juan Arcocha, primarily, but also at times those of René C. Vallejo, head of INRA in Oriente. Mills’s Texas drawl, mixed with a mid-Atlantic accent, produced a marked Yankee enunciation of his Spanish, in those few occasions when he did attempt speaking it. He employed the long “I,” and thus said “Fīdel” and “Fīdelistas,” as well as the long “e,” and, for example, pronounced the province in Cuba as “Orientē.” As the conversations progressed, he began to change his pronunciation of these words to more closely conform to the actual Spanish. He also seems to have grown bolder in attempting a few Spanish words—señora, ranchera, casa—that he likely picked up while growing up in Texas.47 Though quite good at remembering proper names, the pronunciation of the Spanish digraph “ll” was lost on him. Thus, when he verbally referred to Vallejo, with whom he was apparently well acquainted, he either mangled the name or simply called him “V.”
While Mills was generally patient and courteous with his interlocutors, he did not hesitate to interrupt if he sought clarification, wanted to pursue in more detail a thread in the conservation, or if he felt that the issue had been exhausted and wanted to shift the conversation’s direction. In those interviews that required translation, he would frequently speak to his interpreter directly and refer to the interviewee in the third person.
At times Mills would probe, tactfully but firmly, as he did, for example, during an interview when he felt that he was again hearing the same “line” about the insignificance of the Cuban Community Party: “You must realize that I need, the kind of information you give me now, the truth about the communist thing because I write for a Yankee audience.” Only in one instance was Mills somewhat impertinent with an interviewee, Stettmeier, when he facetiously inquired about his competence as a clinical psychologist for social analysis:
MILLS: Do you consider your position as a clinical psychologist a very good one for the study of counterrevolutionary activities? [Chuckling]
STETTMEIER: I think, yes. You know why?
MILLS: No sir, I don’t. Why? [Chuckling] I was joking, but you take me seriously!
Generally, however, Mills was tactful and respectful, and at times even courtly, with his interviewees, particularly the female ones. On wanting to end one interview, he instructs his interpreter to relay the following to the interviewee:
Tell the Captain that one thing I have found is that all Cubans will talk about the Revolution almost forever but that I must save some of my tape for Fidel Castro because I understand he speaks ten or fifteen minutes at a time. That is why I have a four-hour machine here ready and so I must save it for him!
At another interview, as he was ending the conversation, Mills realizes that he had not properly introduced himself to his female interviewee, Isabel Rielo, who had recently married: “I have been very rude. I have not asked the Captain’s name. Could she please give it to me? And spell it please.” He ends with, “Although we do not have the honor of knowing your husband may we congratulate him nonetheless.” In addition, he often used humor prudently to create rapport.
Mills spoke deliberately, with a strong sonorous voice, presumably to make himself understandable to his interviewees and interpreter, but also, no doubt, to produce a clear audio record of his conversations. He would often intersperse his replies to his interlocutor’s statements with, “Yes. I understand” or “Aha.” Many of the interviews were seemingly conducted near busy roadways and other public places with loud noises in the background (barking dogs, revving engines, honking horns, horse hoofs on pavement, planes flying overhead); the louder of these noises would sometimes interrupt the discussion or make it difficult to be heard.
Mills had obviously prepared questions in advance, which he read to the interviewees, but many, perhaps most, of his questions arose from the flow of the conversation. His queries were, at times, perhaps too long, too wordy. He tended to be formal with Spanish-speaking interviewees and more relaxed and easy with the English-speaking ones. Concerning the latter, of particular note is his repartee with Arcocha and Stettmeier, punctuated with laughter and joking. The English-speaking interviews tended to be twice as long (an average of thirty-three minutes) as the Spanish-speaking ones (an average of fourteen minutes).
It is not known how Mills arrived at the “small and highly selected number of inhabitants” he interviewed. It may have been Robert Taber who, while acting as his guide through Cuba, put him in contact with them. It is known, however, that Mills had discussions with most of the leaders of the Revolutionary government, including Prime Minister Fidel Castro and Comandante René Vallejo. He also met with Osvaldo Dorticós Torrado, the president of Cuba; Enrique Oltuski, director of organization of the industrialization of INRA; Ché Guevara, president of the Cuban National Bank; Raul Cepero Bonilla, minister of commerce; Armando Hart, minister of education; and Carlos Franqui, editor-in-chief of the daily Revolución. In addition, there are the seven interviewees Mills electronically recorded and that he mentions by name in the book’s foreword: Juan Arcocha, Franz Stettmeier, Isabel Rielo, Juan Escalona, Elvira Escobar, Elba Luisa Batista Benitez, and Lauro Fiallo Barrero. Other interview participants also taped, but not identified, are two “captains.” Through it all, Mills was extraordinarily busy, having to jam all of these discussions and interviews with these and countless others into about two weeks’ time. In the estimation of Arcocha, who accompanied Mills throughout his journey in Cuba, “Mills had a right to speak in the name of the Cuban people because he had made a superhuman effort to understand them, and he had earned it.”48 This same sentiment was expressed to North American Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, when he visited the offices of Revolución a few months later. Several of the newspaper’s writers—doubtless Arcocha being among them—told Ferlinghetti that even though Mills had seemed “pretty naïve” about the events of the Revolution to that point, they nonetheless respected him for his diligence, having “gone everywhere and talked to everyone.”49
Yet, for all his efforts—his firsthand observations and intensive interviews—there are several major criticisms that can legitimately be leveled against Mills. To begin with, he did not, as he put it in his rules on interviewing, “cover the range of opinion.” He spoke only with Cuban revolutionaries, not with Cuban counterrevolutionaries, whether in Havana or Miami. Also, and related, while he quite accurately captures the revolutionaries’ character structure, he appears to have a partisan view of revolutionary Cuba’s social structure. For example, he does not consider how the new regime’s suppression of freedom of expression—in effect at the time through the rigid control of information services, and even intellectual life—was impacting the arts and media, to say nothing of religious life, in Cuban society. On these two points Theodore Draper is quite correct to state, in reference to the Cuba interviews Mills conducted to write Listen, Yankee: “A reader has a right to expect that the author should do some work of his own beyond listening only to one side, and that a sociologist would be able at least to give a reasonably accurate report of the social structure of the country.”50 Finally, Mills seems not to have spoken with any campesinos, thus failing to get the story from the other half, the uneducated half of the population, that made the Revolution.
In the two chapters that follow, we hear from these Cubans who spoke with Mills and who were close to events; first from the public officials and then from the private citizens.