CHAPTER SIX
Fellow-Traveling with Fidel
In the foreword to Listen, Yankee Mills states that he spent three and a half days traveling with Fidel Castro and five or six days with René C. Vallejo. Though he had never met either of these two men prior to his visit to Cuba on August 8–24, 1960, nor any of the other top government officials with whom he spoke, most of them were already familiar with Mills’s reputation, or at least with The Power Elite, the most controversial book he had written to date.
The Power Elite is a social-psychological study of stratification focusing on a tripartite ruling stratum in the United States. Its central theme is that, as the institutional means of decision, information, and power became more centralized, and as the public became more politically uninformed, there had arisen a national group made up of a governing triumvirate—a power elite—with tiers and ranges of wealth and power of which the North American people knew very little. According to Mills, the power elite was constituted of “those political, economic, and military circles which as an intricate set of overlapping cliques share decisions having at least national consequences. In so far as national events are decided, the power elite are those who decide them.”1
In November of 1958, while still in the Sierra Maestra, Castro had read and discussed Mills’s book with his band of guerilla fighters. According to Jules Dubois, Chicago Tribune reporter and major critic of Mills and Castro, while in the mountains Castro had read and carefully annotated his personal copy of The Power Elite and presumably showed it to a friend (whom Dubois does not identify) and remarked: “If the American consul should visit me here I hide this book under the bed, no?” Again, according to Dubois, writing in late 1960, many of the book’s “opinions have been used, without attribution, by Castro time and again in his speeches and in his controlled press.”2
However all this may be, the Cubans clearly had grave concerns about what the Washington administration, the U.S. corporations, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff had in store for their country. But could they have identified the specific actors, those particular members of the power elite, which they feared had and could have intervened, militarily and economically, in their national affairs? If we take Mills at his word, that he was accurately relaying the thoughts and sentiments of the informed revolutionary, then the answer is largely no. As concerns the political directorate, Mills’s hypothetical Cuban protagonist does indeed single out President Eisenhower, presidential candidate Kennedy, vice president Richard Nixon, diplomat A. A. Berle, and U.S. ambassadors to Cuba Arthur Gardner (who was a vigorous admirer and close, personal friend of Batista) and Earl E. T. Smith (who was the dictator’s guest at cocktail parties and receptions) as among those responsible for Cuba’s woes. But regarding the other circles of power—the chieftains of the major corporations and the warlords of the Pentagon—Listen, Yankee does not provide names.3
On the Isle of Pines
As an accomplished author and a tenured Ivy League professor, Mills possessed the intellectual solidity to provide North American readers of Listen, Yankee with a credible and authentic voice, one that would perhaps not be immediately dismissed as mere communist propaganda. Indeed, Mills was associated with the independent Left—the “New Left” as he would come to popularize the term—with no ties whatsoever to the Stalinists of the “God That Failed” camp. Furthermore, as Tom Hayden has pointed out, “In those days Mills was the intellectual parallel to Bob Dylan. Their every page and every lyric were explored like tea leaves.”4
However, Mills was indeed fortunate to have spent time with Castro and, even luckier still, to actually have had at least two extended conversations with him: one while both men were trekking through the Viñales Valley and staying at a hotel in Pinar del Río province, another while riding in Castro’s car on the remote and desolate Isle of Pines.5
The two transcriptions in this chapter are from separate recordings made by Mills when touring with Castro in the Isle of Pines. Shaped like a swollen comma, the 2,000-square-kilometer island is located 80 kilometers off the southwest coast of mainland Cuba. During Mills’s visit a number of U.S. citizens were living there, descendants of North American families who had settled on the island after the Spanish-American War in 1898, most of whom were citrus farmers. Much of the land was wilderness, and aside from the forests of conifers that covered the island and gave it its name, there were also grapefruit groves, cucumber fields, and cattle farms. The isle had several banks, department stores, and hotels, mostly in the capital city of Nueva Gerona. But perhaps most significant for Mills, because it was thought to be a likely invasion target, the isle was being transformed into a virtual armed fortress when he was there.
The Isle of Pines was most famous for its model penitentiary, the Presidio Modelo, where Fidel Castro, his brother, Raúl, and the other rebels who had survived the failed Moncada attack were imprisoned, from 1953 to 1955. Indeed, at the time that Mills was there, prisoners made up about one-half of the resident population on the isle. Erected by the dictator Gerardo Machado, the Presidio Modelo was built as a military prison in accordance with the Panopticon architectural design—consisting of circular blocks, with cells constructed in tiers around central observation posts—first proposed by Jeremy Bentham, and whose major effect was “to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it.”6 Despite the constant prison surveillance, Castro managed to recreate from memory his History Will Absolve Me defense speech, write it in invisible lemon juice, and smuggle it out for publication. Twenty-thousand copies were clandestinely distributed.
In the first transcription, Mills is talking into the recorder and describing what is happening, in real time, at a cattle ranch that Castro is visiting. Mills is with a group consisting of Castro, Vallejo, and several military men, including an unknown “Captain” with whom Castro has an ongoing conversation about what to do with the pine trees in the forest. As it is the wet season, it begins to rain heavily. Castro, who is wearing an ankle-length rain cape and looking vaguely like a Roman centurion, leads the men through the muddy countryside. Later, the men take shelter from the downpour under a porch with a corrugated tin roof—most stand while Castro and a few of the officers sit in rocking chairs. The conversation turns from agricultural matters to military preparedness, with each man making a report. At one point, Castro shoots pigeons, positioning his rifle on the slats of a corral.
While these activities are transpiring, Mills frequently asks Juan Arcocha to tell him what Castro and his men are discussing, with Mills alternately speaking into the recorder and taking photographs.
MILLS [TALKING INTO THE RECORDER]: I am standing with Juan [Arcocha] behind a group of military men—1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, or 8—with Fidel Castro in a new cattle ranch which INRA has taken over. These fierce-looking barbudos are discussing the number of eucalyptus trees that have been planted and will be planted in the near future.7
MILLS: Juan, what is the content of their animation? Why are they so excited?
ARCOCHA: Well, because Fidel is feeling very optimistic about the results of all these agricultural plans they are starting. So he is encouraging. It’s nothing very curious because he speaks with enthusiasm that all the men who are speaking with him get like an injection of that enthusiasm. And so everything is going to be alright and they are going to plant many hundreds of thousands of trees, and so on and so on.
MILLS: Do they also speak about the cattle that are going to be run here?
ARCOCHA: Well, not yet.
MILLS: They’ll get to that a little later, perhaps.
[Recorder is turned off and then turned on some time later.]
MILLS: Juan, would you get me a little bit of the running conversation between them, if you can do it?
ARCOCHA: Yes, it’s rather comic because during that conversation about trees Fidel has been asking several times about a number of pines. It seems that at the center of this territory there is a wood of pines and Fidel wants them out. He’s asking “What are we going to do with them?”
MILLS: Why does he want them out?
ARCOCHA: I don’t know. He wants to plant something else, more productive. And so the officer in charge of this territory says, “No. We will need those pines for later in order to build houses for our soldiers.” But then [Castro] doesn’t say anything and later he comes again, “Oh, those pines, I still feel like cutting them.”
MILLS: And he wants to plant eucalyptus trees and such things?
ARCOCHA: Probably. Well, eucalyptus grows very fast. In fact, here they are already productive.
MILLS: In ten years you can cut them, I’ve just noted.
ARCOCHA: Yes, yes.
[Recorder is turned off and then turned on some time later.]
MILLS [TALKING INTO THE RECORDER]: It is raining very hard, a kind of tropical rain which pours down.
MILLS: How often in the year does it rain like this?
ARCOCHA: Well, in the rainy season, about once a week, at least.
MILLS: That’s very good for growing, isn’t it?
ARCOCHA: Yes, very good.
MILLS: What is the Captain saying, Juan?
ARCOCHA: He’s still speaking about pines.
MILLS: Don’t you know they’re transforming the Isle of Pines to the Eucalyptus Island?8
ARCOCHA: I think so.
MILLS: What has Fidel just said?
ARCOCHA: Well, he was telling about once there was a fire in the pine woods and then he went up to the men to put the fire out. Now he’s describing the conditions for the neighbors, these people who live in a very uncomfortable way without any means of communication.
MILLS: What is the Captain now saying, Juan?
ARCOCHA: Well, he’s still arguing in favor of the pines. He thinks that there are many good carpenters here that can do many good furniture and houses and everything from the pines. I think he’s saying already his pines are in danger.
MILLS: So the real ideological conflict under discussion is pine trees versus eucalyptus, and carpenters as a labor force come into it.9
[Recorder is turned off and then turned on some time later.]
MILLS [TALKING INTO THE RECORDER]: Several more soldiers came up onto the porch where we’re standing to give some reports on some martyr installations. There have been rumors that the counterrevolution might occur on the Island of Pines. A soldier tells Castro that should he hear that the Isle of Pines has been taken, and if it is confirmed, he will then know that there is not one living soldier on this island.10
MILLS: What is he asking now, Juan, to the soldiers?
ARCOCHA: Well, they are reporting to him that they are instructors with different weapons, mortars and so on. And so he’s asking them just how many weapons they have, how are the ammunitions and everything. And just how is the work going on.
MILLS: He’s getting a detailed report, in other words.
ARCOCHA: Yes, very detailed.
MILLS: So first we had eucalyptus trees and now we have martyrs.
ARCOCHA: Exactly.
MILLS: What is the paper that Castro is now reading?
ARCOCHA: It’s a receipt for the weapons they have received.
MILLS [TALKING INTO THE RECORDER]: They are discussing the advantage of a pistol machine gun which Castro is examining with some care. And, may I say, abandonment.
MILLS: Do they like this particular gun, here?
ARCOCHA: Yes, it seems like they may like it very much and so all of them want to have it.
MILLS: Is he saying that they will get it?
ARCOCHA: No. He hasn’t said it.
[Recorder is turned off and then turned on some time later.]
MILLS [TALKING INTO THE RECORDER]: There are now about twenty men on the porch making a report. They are going over [replacement?] parts which they require. Fidel answers that this man acts as if he would like to go to Havana to get them. The soldier replies that he has just come back from Havana.
MILLS: What did Castro then say?
ARCOCHA: He laughed.
MILLS: I have been photographing. What have they been talking about, Juan?
ARCOCHA: Now they have been talking about men. Each man was making a report. They told him just how many men they have and those that they thought should be sent here. And then they have been discussing generally about the quantity of troops that should be or shouldn’t be here, all the time entering into particular details about that particular man … who has been acting very well, so on and so forth.
MILLS: Were they speaking of army personnel for military dispositions or for the agricultural work that the army is doing here?
ARCOCHA: Both of them.
MILLS [TALKING INTO THE RECORDER]: He [Castro] told them a moment ago that they did not need so many men for a given task. That this was the American way. The way of waste.
MILLS: What is he talking about now, Juan?
ARCOCHA: Well, in general, now he is giving them advice so that they learn how you can obtain the best from men.
MILLS: Morale problems, you mean?
ARCOCHA: No, no. How they can work best and how they can produce the most they can.
MILLS [TALKING INTO THE RECORDER]: I have been photographing again.
MILLS: What has he been talking about, Juan?
ARCOCHA: They have been long discussing military tactics and at the same time the process of the occasion to make advice to the men. They must have discipline and so on.
MILLS: Any other new themes in the conversation?
ARCOCHA: No, just the same. Weapons and military tactics.
MILLS: And eucalyptus trees?
ARCOCHA: No, not anymore.
MILLS: Not anymore.
A Drive in the Countryside with Fidel
Mills made another recording (transcribed below), likely on the evening of the same day. On returning to his hotel, Mills, who had taken detailed notes on a conversation he earlier had with Castro, dictated those notes into the recorder. The conversation with Castro took place in a car while driving in the countryside. In addition to talking with his hospitable host, Mills also took several photographs of him.
A conversation with Castro, the American journalist Lee Lockwood explains, is an extraordinary experience, and, he adds, “until you get used to it, a most unnerving one.” Mills does not provide an account of his experiences conversing with the Cuban leader, but his rules for conducting interviews (discussed in Chapter 3) were likely of little use, given Castro’s gift for overpowering oratory. According to Lockwood,
[U]nless you are very firm, it is not properly a conversation at all, but something more like an extended lecture, with occasional questions from the audience. This is not to say that Castro is rude, for he is not; in fact, socially he can be as courtly as a Castilian nobleman. Nor does it imply that he is not interested in what you have to say. It is simply that he is one of the most enthusiastic talkers of all time. A ten-word question can program him for an answer lasting fifteen or twenty minutes.…
For Castro, trained as a lawyer, and an orator and a politician since his university days, the primary use of speech is demagogic: that is, its purpose is not so much to exchange ideas with someone as to convince another of his own. This is true whether he is addressing half a million people in public or conversing privately with one man. It is not enough that you understand; you must, if at all possible, be convinced. To this end he bends his considerable energy and intellect with enormous concentration. As the carefully formed sentences flow out in cadence, every word has the ring of absolute conviction, the product of a mind never in doubt.
But what is even more compelling than Castro’s mind is his manner, the way he uses his voice and his body, especially his eyes, to reduce a listener to surrender. If he is effective in a public speech, where the listener is at a relatively safe “aesthetic distance,” in a private conversation, focusing the full force of his personality upon you at close quarters for hours at a time, he is formidable.11
And what was Mills’s general experience of traveling with Castro? Though he does not give an account, a good sense of it can be gotten from photographs taken by Mills of his excursion with Castro as well as from a record provided by Jean-Paul Sartre when he and Simone de Beauvoir accompanied Castro on a similar vuelta, a drive through the Cuban countryside, five months before Mills.12
To begin with, a drive with invited guests served at least three purposes. First, it routinely doubled as a tour of inspection for Castro. He would talk with campesinos, soldiers, farmers, teachers, anyone and everyone, about work in progress. This meant there were constant interruptions to conversations he had with guests accompanying him. Second, Castro would encourage and boost morale among those people with whom he came in contact. Third, it was an opportunity for him to propagandize and show his guests the most pleasing aspects of the Revolution.
On these vueltas, the cigar-puffing Castro would usually sit in the front seat of the car, which he would drive as often as not, and his guest would sit in the back, usually with an interpreter and, sometimes, his secretary, Celia Sánchez.13 This front seat–back seat arrangement makes sense, given that Castro and Mills were large men—both over six feet tall. In this case, Castro went in front with his chauffeur, with Mills and Arcocha in the back.
At every village, every cooperative, people would gather to greet Castro and converge around his car, wanting to touch him, talk with him, complain, make suggestions. The “Maximum Leader” would hold long conversations from the car window or else emerge to be surrounded by men, women, and children, always the center of attention. Huberman and Sweezy describe these encounters, which they experienced a few weeks after Mills, as follows:
Accompanying as he goes among his people, one not only sees [his charisma]; all of one’s sense are overwhelmed by it. To watch the faces light up as their owners suddenly recognized the driver of our car; to hear the delighted cries of “Fidel, Fidel”; to experience the rush of people, young and old alike, whenever the car stopped, even if only for a red light, people drawn like iron filings to a magnet, wanting to shake his hand, touch his sleeve, wish him well; to smell the sweaty bodies of hundreds of construction workers who swarmed around the car when it was halted by an obstruction in the road, …—these were indeed unforgettable experiences.14
At one point, Castro, his entourage, and Mills stopped at a private airfield that had been previously intervened. Here, Castro, in the company of about a dozen soldiers, fires a Belgium rifle from the roof of a small concrete building with a pole on which is attached a flaccid wind sock. It is a windless, sunless afternoon—perfect for target practice.
As K. S. Karol observed several years later after spending many hours in Castro’s company: “There is nothing like a dinner or a vuelta with Fidel to help explain the optimistic mood of his entourage, and the devotion he inspires wherever he appears.”15
Building and Defending the New Society
What follows below is a verbatim transcription of Mills’s dictation of the conversation he had with the garrulous Cuban leader while riding in his car earlier that day.16 I have set in quotation marks those passages that I surmise Mills wanted to attribute to Castro. I have also placed within parentheses those asides Mills makes to himself; indeed, several times he says “parenthesis” and “close paren” to indicate those places. As though he is writing while speaking, Mills also indicates which punctuation to use—comma, exclamation—and where to place it. He also tells where he wants to begin a new paragraph, which instructions I have followed in the transcription below. In short, Mills was dictating—indeed, composing—Listen, Yankee while still in Cuba.
One of the general themes that recurs in the colloquy is that of increasing and diversifying production and of engaging in productive work. This was obviously foremost on Castro’s mind—the building of the Revolution by constructing a new society. Indeed, Mills saw for himself that everywhere, in the cities and in the countryside, Cubans were working hard in making a new life for themselves.
Another pervasive theme is that of defending the nation against U.S. hostilities, expressed in the Caribbean island’s motto, ¡Patria or Muerte, Venceremos! Interesting in this respect is that Cuba had a well-armed population and at one point Mills tells of Castro firing a new kind of Belgium rifle that obviously existed in great numbers in the area. Arcocha describes the event as Mills “watching with inexhaustible interest for a long time Fidel Castro having shooting practice with a group of soldiers from the Rebel Army.”17 In the third edition of the Spanish translation of Listen, Yankee, Mills wanted North Americans to know that the Cuban people were well armed and possessed first-rate weapons. “And I implore you,” he tells his readers, “let’s not insult each other with sad lies about Cuban rifles not working properly, that they are not loaded, that they are snatched from their owners under cover of night, etc. I have seen with my own eyes how automatic weapons work in Cuba.”18
I am now back at the hotel. It’s 9:30. One question asked to Fidel was the largest economic problem that he saw in the immediate future. His answer was, “There is none. If the United States does not buy sugar, we will have, here in our hands, we will hold the world price of sugar. We are very efficient sugar producers now.19 We will also have on the sugar cooperatives a diversified agriculture. The sugar coops will be diversified, not simply sugar. They already now have enough cows in a few places. And soon we will take one man from each of these cooperatives, from each of them, to a central place where he will be taught artificial insemination so that there will be pure milk available at all sugar coops. Who can compete with Cuba in sugar?,” he asked. “We have in our hands the world price. And guilt for the fact that the world price will go up will be clearly laid at the door of the United States.”20
(Paragraph.) I asked him the rate of investment. He clearly does not know. I suggested to him that perhaps in order to calculate the rate of investment he would need journalists with daily reports rather than a statistical central board. He then told me, concerning the rate of investment, that, “In the first year of the Revolution, when we had just broken the chains, the economic situation was not too clear. Everybody wanted jobs if they didn’t have them and those who did have them wanted increased money, wages. Prices tended to be high and rent in particular was high. Where the wage workers were free, they now started a wage fight. The rights of the wage worker were established in Cuba by this Revolution, independent of economic matters. That was a matter of political science. So the increase in the consumption began. Everyone saw a magic formula to solve all questions, and that was to get more money. I got all the sugar people in the industry together and explained the economics of it to them. We raised the living standard, I said, only by increasing production. More money will not accomplish anything. Also there must be some limits to the wage workers’ standard for the time being. So I put the social and political consciousness as well as economic consciousness into the wage worker stratum. And they then, very soon, voluntarily, gave 4 percent of their wages for industrialization.” We were interrupted, while riding in the car, to talk with a worker standing alongside the road who had been a policeman in the jail [the Presidio Modelo] when Fidel Castro had been there [as a prisoner] on the island. He asked him how he was and how his condition was. This policeman apparently had been a fairly decent kind of man. We passed a coconut field. Coconuts seem to bear in some three years a fantastic tropic richness. (Compare notes on eucalyptus trees bearing in ten years). The discussion of the wage worker and his relation to the peasantry, and especially the problem of the rate of investment, continued as a thread with these interruptions. The point seems to be that immediately after the matter was explained properly, the wage workers began to give to the agricultural development, in particular a great number of tractors are involved in this. We then had a discussion concerning state ownership of certain enterprises versus the cooperative farm. Castro’s general criterion would seem to be that in situations in which there is a big investment in proportion to the number of wage workers involved, those wage workers had better remain wage workers, in short, to keep it a state-owned property. In cases where things are growing—vegetables, corn, sugar—and where there are many wage workers involved and the rate of investment is not great, the amount of investment is not great, then a cooperative farm makes more sense, as he sees it.
(Paragraph.) He continues that, “The big problem, of course, was to give everyone employment, and it is still a major problem. So there’s a need to invest in agriculture and in industry. So some public works had to be immediately put into operation. The big reason for the rate of investment being up is because here in Cuba we increase production immediately. Now about 100,000 people were put to work in reproductive capital. Private riches that existed in Cuba were also put to (Can’t make the damn thing out) … were put to consumers goods that were used in short to raise the standard to living as well as to invest. Tax was placed upon alcoholic beverages and the money gotten from this tax was used to invest in the expansion of the tourist industry. I also opened up all factories that had been closed as well as beginning to build some new ones. I also put soldiers into productive work. Five thousand teachers (No, kill that). In the budget there was money for 5,000 new teachers. But the matter was explained fully to them. Ten thousand teachers who were unemployed were put to work on the same budget that had been intended for 5,000. They were willing to do this for a while. And an arrangement has been made with them, an understanding has been come to with them, that in future years they will be compensated for the lack of full salary at this time. It used to be in Cuba that 35 million dollars a year was spent on the importation of automobiles and 5 million a year on agricultural machinery.” (Parenthesis, Check these figures with Oltuski, close paren).21 Castro remarks that, “We have reversed this proportion. In other words, mere distributing, or redistributing, what we already had in Cuba made for a rather large investment reserve. We don’t need to sacrifice the present generation for future generations. We are not in that big a hurry anyway. If certain things take fifteen years instead of ten years, and by taking fifteen years we can give two more houses that are needed in a given spot, well, we will take fifteen years. We do not know the rate of investment yet, but we are working on it in the statistical Central Planning Board of INRA. In all other revolutions the agricultural reform in them failed because they divided the land. But in the case of Cuba it was not politically necessary to do this as it was in those other places because the Cuban peasantry was already greatly scattered in rather huge concentrations. In short, he did not own land to begin with as was the case in other revolutionary situations.” Castro is quite well aware that this was a political chance in Cuba that does not exist in all places. “If we had had to divide the land for political reasons,” he said, “what would happen was that the people would, for example, eat the cattle, slaughter them and eat them. In the Sierra Maestra we had during the war a small experiment in such distribution schemes and that is what happened.22 We didn’t have to do this for political reasons in Cuba and so we have a big head start on all other revolutions.” We now arrived at a, it seemed to me, a prototype of fruit, an experimental farm for fruit production, citrus and other such fruits, and there were many discussions about the number of acres that should be planted in this and that kind of fruit. The idea is to make this particular region, as Castro put it to the workmen in charge, “a paradise of fruits.” When you listen to him talk, even if you do not know Spanish, three phrases tend to recur: How many? When? and Why? In appearing as he does in the middle of productive work as well as among soldiers at various posts where one stops, he is doing two things, at least, at once. He is sustaining and building morale and enthusiasm, and he is, secondly, actually getting reports on what is going on in order that he may be informed, and thirdly he is actually giving advice, suggestions, or at least getting ideas that may later be implemented. (Parenthesis: Expand list of functions of Castro personally in all areas of Cuban life, close paren.)
(Paragraph.) Whenever it becomes known that Castro is in some zone of Cuba, all varieties of responsible people converge, and the automobile train, of which the car he is riding in usually leads, becomes slightly longer as you proceed during the day or the evening. We went driving over a new airfield which had presumably been intervened recently—some small private outfit—and is now going to be greatly expanded. It reminds one of the fact that in the mountains a small group of men did it themselves and learned how the hard way. Now they do not fear any sort of task with which they may be confronted in any area: economic, military, or political. And they are, of course, teaching many others and fast. How we are learning (exclamation). So many things (comma), every day (comma), how we are learning (exclamation). And how easy it is, really, if someone only shows you how to begin, how to follow through.
(Paragraph. Set up a new page bit.) He does a quite thorough inspection examining a house on the edge of the airfield where presumably men who will guard or work in, or both, at the airport, are to live. At the airport, standing on top of the small concrete building, he tries out a new Belgium rifle, remarking that he has seen it abound and for two hours now he has wanted to shoot it. (Compare photographs of him with gun.) The first photographs with gun were pigeon shooting at the corral of the cattle ranch. The second, he wanted to try the range of the gun, presumably for its defensive value of the airport. They are laying out a great expansion of this intervened airfield and also the defense system for it in this area as well as the airport itself. We then went to an army post which he inspected and which was quite poor and in which the men are only going to be for a short time, presumably. Again, he shot the rifle and the people at the army post, the soldiers, told him that they almost shot at his plane this morning. At Castro’s plane. Because it circled the area two or three times and it was strange to them. He said to them that he was circling it in order to study the terrain around the army post and that the next time, if they see a strange plane, to shoot up at it as a warning.
(Paragraph.) Vallejo, that’s V-A-L-L-E-J-O, tells me that the Isle of Pines was a free zone and that people smuggled from this island to Cuba. Another source of their income, before the Revolution, was tourism, which was centered, like most tourism in Cuba at that time, around gambling. The land was not used much at all. Another source of income was the big prison because relatives of the prisoners came. That too is tourism of a sort. [Castro] asked at the army post for the teachers, and two men came up who were presumably high school students, and they need more seats and various little things like this were discussed. Apparently seven men in this troop or group are illiterate and the rest are first- and second-grade people. He asked a question then of a man who came up. Why did the prison on the island, which used to be quite large, according to Commander V., some 5,000 prisoners in the Batista period. He said, “Why did they sell 25 pigs to Havana? They should have a slaughter plant here and make ham .…” [garbled].
[End of recording]
Mills and Gerth aptly captured the sociological essence of the revolution-making enterprise—as experienced that day with Castro on the Isle of Pines—when they had written, seven years previously: “In interpreting contemporary social change, we have found ourselves more and more interested in those roles and technologies that involve violence and which involve economic production. Like many other observers we believe that revolutions in these [social] orders are now central to the course of world history. Tools and arms, industrial machines and military weapons, factories and armies, skill levels and practices of violence—how these interplay with each other seem to us most immediately relevant to the course of twentieth-century societies.”23
The Charismatic Leader
Mills cultivated close relationships with Castro and Vallejo. It seems that Mills and Castro first cemented their friendship shortly after Mills’s arrival in the Cuban republic. As the story goes, Mills, along with Juan Arcocha, Saul Landau, and a young intellectual, Manuel E. Yepe, drove from Havana to the town of Viñales in Pinar del Río, the island’s westernmost province. They arrived late at night at the La Ermita Hotel, and Mills went to his room. Early the following morning, Yepe brought Mills to Castro’s room, where they found him still in bed, holding a machine gun. Vallejo, who was fluent in English, came by to interpret. They shut the door and talked for the next eighteen hours. The following day they traveled around the province, where it is likely that Mills accompanied Castro, with Castro as guide, on an inspection tour of several “people’s farms” (granjas del pueblo), agricultural establishments that were breeding chickens, hogs, cattle, ducks, and goats. That night, Arcocha, Castro, and Mills had dinner at the hotel, and afterward the conversation continued for many hours; Fidel and Mills passionately discussed the Cuban Revolution. “A solid friendship,” Arcocha noted, “was forming between those two very different men.”24
Whatever differences Arcocha may have had in mind, it is clearly the case that Castro and Mills had in common several constitutional and biographical influences. At forty-four, Mills was almost exactly ten years older than Castro. But both possessed an indomitable dedication to everything they did and believed in, coupled by seemingly boundless energy. Both looked to youth, in the emerging New Left and in the Cuban leadership, respectively, to create a better society. Both inherited, and subsequently abandoned, the Roman Catholicism of their mothers. Both were considered outlanders: Mills because of his “backwoods” origins in Texas, Castro because he was from rural Oriente, the “Texas of Cuba.” Both had a penchant for firearms—pistols, rifles, shotguns—which they owned and delighted in shooting. Both men were fiercely ambitious, wanting—needing—to make a mark in their lives, which they believed would soon be cut short: Mills because of his worsening heart problems and the threats made on his life by Cuban exiles, Castro because of assassination attempts by exiles, defectors, mercenaries, the Mafia, and the CIA.
Commonalities and differences between the two men notwithstanding, Mills appears to have assiduously maintained his relationships with Castro and Vallejo long after departing the island. Indeed, he would again see Castro a few weeks later, this time in New York City, where the prime minister went to address the Fifteenth General Assembly of the United Nations and deliver a four-hour speech in which he inveighed against the imperialist policies of the United States toward the Cuban nation. A few days prior to that historical speech, Mills met Castro at the Hotel Theresa, a residential hotel in the heart of Harlem, where they discussed plans for Mills to conduct a six-to-eight-week seminar in Havana that would cover the ideological differences between China, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union. The seminar was to be attended by Castro and several other revolutionary leaders.25
A few months after that, and shortly after suffering a major heart attack, Mills wrote to Ralph Miliband, telling him that: “Fidel keeps cabling me to come on down and convalesce in Cuba, and my friend Vallejo … a medical man of real ability, as well as head of INRA in the Oriente, says that just one step on the island will cure me! And that he has some things to talk over anyway!”26 Vallejo was indeed a good friend to Mills. The leftist European journalist K. S. Karol tells of how, years after Mills’s death, whenever he and Vallejo met, they would exchange reminiscences about Mills.27
If Mills shared some characterological similarities with Castro, he could not have been more different from Vallejo, a diffident, almost frail-looking man and the one Cuban official with whom Mills had the closest association. The forty-year-old comandante, Vallejo, having been educated in the United States, spoke flawless English, an ability that doubtless served him well in connecting with the severely monolingual Mills. The ever-smiling and affable bearded physician, who seemed to have had his soldier’s cap perpetually glued to his skull, was, by all accounts, an outstanding pulmonary surgeon—and most important for Mills, he was Castro’s closest friend and confidant. Aside from perhaps Juan Arcocha, Vallejo was the traveling companion who accompanied Mills to the most locales he visited on the island; several of which were around the Manzanillo district.
Indeed, as Mills and Vallejo traveled southwest from the port city of Manzanillo, they toured the countryside near the town of Media Luna, where Mills encountered scores of the miserable Cuban bohíos—the ubiquitous one-room, dirt-floor, palm-thatched hovels—devoid of electricity, running water, and plumbing facilities of any kind. At one point he and Vallejo entered one of these and photographed two women and a young girl in their dirty print dresses along with their meager possessions—a few cooking utensils, two small beds, a hammock. These pictures are reminiscent of those that photographer Walker Evans took, in the 1930s, of Cubans under the Machado dictatorship (The Crime of Cuba), but are perhaps even more like Evans’s photos of tenant families in the U.S. South during the Great Depression (Let Us Now Praise Famous Men). With Vallejo as his guide, Mills then headed to Puerto de Belic, where he saw a huge new agricultural cooperative that was being established in the area—and also visited the historic spot on the seashore where the Granma expeditionaries coming from Mexico had disembarked four years earlier. As they drove through the countryside, Vallejo proudly pointed to vast fields that had previously been neglected but were now brimming with crops. He also told of the spectacular success INRA was having in rice cultivation, where Japanese methods of transplantation were being introduced.28
All these traveling experiences raise the obvious question: How well did Mills feel that he knew Fidel Castro, René Vallejo, and the other Fidelistas? In Listen, Yankee he had proclaimed emphatically of Castro and his regime that, “The Cuban Government, as of mid-1960, is not ‘Communist’ in any of the sense legitimately given to this word.… The leading men of Cuba’s Government are not ‘Communist,’ or even Communist-type as I have experienced communism in Latin America and in research work in the Soviet Union.”29 He wrote this, even after Manuel Urrutia and José Miró Cardona, the first president and the first prime minister, respectively, of the Revolutionary government, had resigned in early 1959, and after Comandante Huber Matos had been imprisoned—all because of their protests of Communist influence in the government. These events marked Castro’s open espousal of the policy of equating anticommunism with counterrevolution, and thus, with treason. Mills believed that Castro’s ideology was Marxist, though of a different type than the Soviet Union’s “vulgar” variety, and that U.S. policies were forcing the Cuban political regime to identify anticommunism with counterrevolution. For Mills, Cuba represented the possibility of a third way between U.S. liberalism and Soviet totalitarianism; the Revolution, in his eyes, provided for a humanistic socialism, a Marxism with heart.
It is always a difficult task to attempt a simple summing up of any personality, especially one as intricate as that of Fidel Castro. As Meyer and Szulc, who were both acquainted with the Cuban leader, put it in their understated way, “[Castro] presents an orchestration of dissonant themes.”30 But in reference to his personage, perhaps the question should really be: How much did Mills identify with Castro? Irving Louis Horowitz suggests that whatever esteem Mills had for the Cuban prime minister stemmed from Mills’s opposition to, first, Dwight D. Eisenhower and then John F. Kennedy.31 Indeed, Mills continuously dismissed Eisenhower as a silly, arrogant crackpot who was resolute in doing all he could to destroy the Revolution. As for Kennedy, he was nothing more than an impetuous young man whose ambition exceeded his intellectual capabilities and moral qualities. Castro and his revolution thus represented for Mills, and for that matter, for many Latin Americans, a sort of reaction formation to Yankee imperialism.
It is important to note, however, that Mills’s approbation of Castro and his revolution was not unbridled. Although Castro enjoyed the enthusiastic and affectionate support of a great majority of Cubans, Mills nonetheless had serious personal concerns that Castro could potentially subvert freedom and democracy in Cuba. “I do not like,” Mills wrote in his own voice in the afterword to Listen, Yankee, “such dependence upon one man as exists in Cuba today, nor the virtually absolute power that this one man possesses.”32 And it was precisely Castro’s charismatic authority—his cult of personality, in the messianic tradition—that Mills feared the most.33
In Character and Social Structure, Hans Gerth and Mills identify three psychological aspects experienced by the charismatic leader and his or her disciples following a revolution. Doubtless Mills had these in mind in expressing his unease about Castro’s absolute power.
First, charismatic leaders experience time as a crisis, a turning point. They see their time as the beginning of all time. Sartre captures this sense of a new time, different from the past, in revolutionary Cuba when he writes: “All that was said, written, done before the first day of the Year (1959) will remain a dead letter.”34
Second, Gerth and Mills contend that charismatics and their followers experience social life as a new reality, one that is optimistic and seemingly infinite. “With eyes fixed on the distant yet foreshortened goal, they move ahead with the certainty of the sleepwalker, often immunized against the costs of blood, self-sacrifice, and terror which the deliberate destruction of the old entails.”35 But as Franz Stettmeier noted, Cuba’s new optimistic reality was an uneasy one, tempered, as it was, by foreign military and economic aggression.
Third, the charismatic leader and followers feel that freedom has increased for all. This liberation produces an expanded generalized “other,” in the sense of the symbolic interactionists, which inspires the charismatic group’s mission. This sense of newfound freedom against tyranny was excitedly expressed by Elvira Escobar in her interview with Mills: “I feel so free for the first time in my entire life. And I see a lot of people who talk and say things and they forgive each other. I have never in my entire life seen so much freedom. True freedom.”36
Mills knew well that if left unchecked these aspects of revolutionary mentality could potentially subvert the Revolution. He also knew, from Max Weber, that charismatic authority was inherently fleeting and unstable and that the leader had to prove his charismatic quality by constantly performing deeds that contribute to “the welfare of the governed.”37 As Mills indecorously put it in his interview with Franz Stettmeier, “In other words, it could all go to hell”—particularly in light of the fact that Castro was living precariously. But also implied in that remark is the eminently reasonable inquiry concerning the succession of power. At the time, no clearly defined political structures had yet emerged through which the charismatic authority vested in Fidel Castro could be transmitted to others. But as Robert Taber made clear, such political structures—the “routinization of charisma,” in the sense of Weber—could not be artificially or arbitrarily imposed: “they must arise from the needs of the country and develop naturally in a manner consistent with their social and economic base.”38
Not only is charismatic authority unstable, disposition or personality can also be highly volatile, particularly in powerful public figures. Though Stettmeier, a psychiatrist, maintained of Castro that, “I think he is mentally a very healthy man,” Mills, at the end of that interview, inferred that power has a dialectical and mutable quality to it: it can corrupt as well as ennoble.
For all this, Mills had previously formulated a sociology of leadership around four sets of questions—in reference to social context, role, the person, and images—that he no doubt considered in his effort to understand the leader that was Fidel Castro.39
But a leader’s biography and character are difficult to pin down—especially in a person as protean as Fidel Castro. In his highly critical profile of the Cuban leader, published some thirteen years after interpreting for Mills in Cuba, Juan Arcocha maintains that Castro’s character is one of metamorphosis. He makes this assessment after having personally witnessed Castro’s long-term transition as a bourgeois youth, a supposed gangster in his university days, and then, successively, as a politician, a prisoner, a guerrilla fighter, and a political leader. “Once in power,” writes Arcocha of Castro, “he has recreated himself in the image of Jesus Christ, of Simon Bolivar, of Lenin—and as of the moment that I am writing these lines—of Stalin.”41
Yet another way of posing the question concerning Mills’s relationship with Castro is: Did Castro, given his extraordinary powers of persuasion, telegraph his own vision of the Revolution via Mills and Listen, Yankee?42 Cleary, Arcocha believed this had happened in the case of Jean-Paul Sartre: “Many intellectually responsible European journalists and writers, who have in all good faith written about Cuba … arrived in Cuba completely ignorant of the language and, as such, their main fount of information was … Fidel Castro. They literally drank up his words and when they returned to their countries, they wrote what he so convincingly expounded to them. Indeed, one of the most brilliant minds of this century was taken in by it. I’m referring to Jean-Paul Sartre, whom Fidel Castro charmed completely.”43 If Sartre had indeed succumbed to Castro’s blandishments, why not also Mills?
Arcocha further contends that having been “seduced” by Castro, Sartre also, in turn, seduced the French people by telling them that he had assisted in the “honeymoon” of a revolution and that in Cuba there existed what he called “direct democracy.”44 He was convinced that this was surely the Athenian-type of democracy that had sprouted in ancient Greece. Sartre, according to Arcocha, romanticized the Cuban Revolution and was captivated by the very concepts that he himself had invented for it. Could this have also been the case with Mills?
And yet neither the perspicacious philosopher nor the sapient sociologist were dupes who could be easily entranced. They were both keenly aware of the internal dangers that could threaten Cuban culture and its humanistic revolution—and that one of these internal threats could potentially be the Maximum Leader himself.
An Improbable Revolutionary
The same month that Mills submitted the manuscript of Listen, Yankee to the publisher, September 1960, Castro and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev publically embraced each other in a Russian bear hug on the floor of the UN General Assembly. This, however, did not change Mills’s opinion about Castro’s noncommunist stance, and in April 1961, just days before the Bay of Pigs invasion, he felt that he could confidently write: “Listen, Yankee is still right on the ball.… It does help now and then to have a little bit of historical reality on your side, doesn’t it now?”45 Three months later, even after the May Day festivities in Havana that included a visit by Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who made the first space flight in history, and depictions of Karl Marx in effigy, Mills would continue to flatly proclaim of Castro: “In principle, I do not believe that Fidel Castro has ‘adopted’ any system or series of ideas. Naturally, he has modified some of his ideas, or, let us say, history has taught him much in the last three years. Above all, it has taught him that Cuba’s enemy has been and is the government of the United States of America. Additionally, he has discovered—for now, at least—that the Soviet bloc is willing to help Cuba economically and militarily, without asking for anything in return.”46 He acknowledged, however, that the belligerent course of U.S. policy toward the Cuban island could indeed force Castro to align himself with Moscow and transform Cuba into a hardened police state.
By the end of the year, in a televised address to the Cuban people, Castro proclaimed being a Marxist-Leninist and that the Revolution was communist after all. Daniel Geary states that Mills felt personally betrayed by Castro after Castro’s famous self-declaration.47 Indeed, an FBI report indicated that, upon returning from Europe on January 1962, Mills appeared to be “disillusioned with the Castro regime because of the actions and statements of Prime Minister Fidel Castro of Cuba concerning his Communist sympathy and Communist Party membership.”48
If Listen Yankee contained errors of prediction (e.g., “It seems to us, the Russians want to carry on their great contest with [the United States] by non-military means”49), it also allowed for self-correction, giving, as Mills did, an apprehensive warning, in his own voice this time: “It is possible to entertain about Cuba several nightmare hypotheses.” But did Mills in the end believe that his friend and traveling companion, Fidel, created those nightmares?
When Mills died about a year and a half after visiting Cuba, Castro had a wreath sent to the funeral. The Cuban Youth Union of Writers and Artists sent a message of sympathy to his widow. The Cuban newspaper, El Mundo, called Mills “a mentor and distinguished representative.”50
But for all the support and his many friendships with the Cubans, including Fidel Castro, Mills was at bottom an ambivalent spokesman for the Revolution—and, in the end, an improbable revolutionary. Juan Arcocha gives the impression of Mills’s uncertainty in a story he tells of how, one evening around midnight, after a long and tiring day traveling and speaking with the Cuban leader, Mills, in a moment of self-doubt, confided to Arcocha: “What the hell am I doing here? I was very quietly writing a book in New York and thinking about the next one. All of a sudden I decided to leave everything and come here to write the truth about Cuba. Now I have to confront myself with a lot of problems I didn’t have before. Isn’t that foolish? What do you think? Can you explain to me why I came here?”
Arcocha told Mills that he, Mills, was stirred by the temptation to change himself into a man of action. “All your life,” Arcocha said to him as they were lying on their cots with the lights out, “you wrote books about revolutions and now you suddenly see yourself put right in the middle of a real revolution. You are a revolutionary who ignores yourself.” After a moment of silence, Mills asked in an insecure voice: “Do you really think so?”51