CHAPTER SEVEN

The Book That Sold Half a Million Copies

The historian Van Gosse has stated that “Listen, Yankee exists only as a passing reference to a dying man’s folly, cloaked in mystery or embarrassment.”1 Irving Louis Horowitz places the book’s misfortunes more directly at Mills’s doorstep, contending that the book “ended up as his poorest effort in social analysis, a tract placed at the disposal of political forces he knew little of but cared much for.”2 Half a century after its publication, both assessments are shown to be untrue. First, Mills was certainly not aware that he was dying when he wrote Listen, Yankee; his first major heart attack would not occur until four months after he left Cuba. Thus, whatever folly, mystery, or embarrassment may or may not characterize the book, it clearly did not stem from existential issues related to Mills’s health or mortality. Second, Mills never intended for Listen, Yankee to be a work of social analysis, rather it was meant as a message, a pamphlet, more along the lines of a journalistic exposé. Thus, a deeper and more expansive consideration of this 60,000-word provocation requires judging it against the backdrop of Cold War national security concerns.

Listen, Yankee was Mills’s tenth book, the last one published during his lifetime, and the one that sold more than any of his other books. The impetus for writing it likely came from Robert Taber, who had arranged for Mills to visit Cuba. And even before leaving for the island, Mills had produced a first draft based on what he regarded as the best recent material on Latin America, the Cuban Revolution, and the history of U.S.–Cuba relations.3 Upon returning to New York he rewrote the manuscript completely and in a frenzy. Working sixteen-hour days, from notes and the taped interviews, he had, by mid-September, completed a preliminary draft that was reviewed by Carleton Beals, who praised it “as a magnificent book and a very necessary one.”4 Advance copies were dispatched to Ernest Hemingway, who had lived in Cuba for many years and had a personal interest in the Revolution, and K. S. Karol, a friend of Mills who wrote a two-page review of Listen, Yankee in the French newsmagazine L’Express. Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson was forwarded a mimeographed copy of the manuscript to request an endorsement. The book was also sent to the newly elected U.S. president, “Jack Kennedy, not for a quote but for his edification, with a polite note” from the publisher.5

Listen, Yankee was released for mass distribution, both in hardcover and paperback, on November 28. It was rushed into print so quickly, there was no time to make it available to many booksellers and librarians when it first appeared. Thus, it is hardly surprising that, given the haste in which it was produced, the book does have an urgently imperative quality to it, sounding rather like a cross between a newsreel voiceover and one of Fidel Castro’s marathon disquisitions—but this may just have been the effect that Mills intended.

Peter Hulme regards Listen, Yankee as “the most significant piece of travel writing” on early Revolutionary Cuba and identifies three characteristics typical of such travel writing—characteristics that fittingly describe Mills’s “Cubalogue” method of exposition.6 The first is that political travel writing at the outset of the Revolution was based on firsthand knowledge of what was happening on the island and, as such, possessed the authority of eyewitness testimony. Here, the writer was on the scene to convey what was actually happening on the ground. Additionally, the predominant tone of this travel writing was a mixture of euphoria and urgency. It had a “breaking news” quality to it. “The overwhelming impression,” writes Hulme, “is of a reality that is changing so rapidly that writing struggles to keep up: it needs to become journalistic because tomorrow’s Cuba will be different from today’s.”7 Finally, political travel writers in Cuba endeavored to describe what Revolutionary Cuba was like by comparing it to other places and events about which they were knowledgeable, whether that was pre-Revolutionary Cuba, the Spanish Civil War, the colonial struggles of Algeria, the 1830 Revolution in France, or the U.S. South. For Mills, the contrasting social and cultural structure was the overdeveloped society, based as it was on the postwar United States, marked by hypercapitalism, excessive consumerism, and overconformity. In any event, Mills’s juxtapositioning of overdeveloped U.S. society against Cuba’s developing society rendered a momentary—but most perceptive—social view of its unfolding Revolution.

Travel texts offer not eternal truths about other cultures but rather snapshots that bring together—as it were—camera and subject for a single moment before both metamorphose into something completely different. However, though change is constant, rate of change varies. This was obviously Revolutionary Cuba, at a moment of dramatic change; but it was also—less obviously—U.S. culture at a moment of transition toward the 1960s and the New Left. The forms of writing—the journals and the notes—capture the essential ephemerality of the moment. Perhaps only C. Wright Mills developed a new form of travel writing for this moment, but so far he has had little or no recognition for his achievement.8

Cuba’s Revolutionary Voice

Written in a sardonic, accusatory tone, Listen, Yankee consists of eight “letters” in which Mills uses direct speech, the first-person plural, in addressing the U.S. citizenry.9 This epistolary account is meant to convey a synoptic viewpoint of how the Cuban revolutionaries see their Revolution as well as how they define their aspirations and relationship to the United States. It is instructive to note Mills’s social-psychological use of several literary devices in communicating his anonymous composite revolutionary’s point of view.

To begin with, there is the ostensibly depersonalized “we” that he employs as part of his ongoing effort to reach a wide U.S. readership, and which is really a generalized “I.”10 Mills’s disclaimer notwithstanding—“insofar as I have been able, I have refrained from expressing a personal opinion”—he does seem to be speaking for his partisan self.11 And Listen, Yankee does have the feel of having been written by someone who has internalized and converted to the idea of Cuba’s Revolution; indeed, as Mills well knew, for the propagandist, absolute belief justifies and motivates his actions in converting others and thus spreading his faith.12 However, K. S. Karol, who was well acquainted with Mills during this period, contends that, “above all, Mills had nothing of the hidebound propagandist about him, was not given to letting his enthusiasm run away with him, to seeing everything through rose-tinted glasses.”13

Moreover, speaking to U.S. readers specifically, Mills doggedly addresses them by the moniker, “Yankee.” This appellation presents Americans with the idea that others hold views of them. Thus, in employing this politically charged epithet, Mills intends to dislodge North Americans from their provincialism and civic apathy and make them conscious and self-aware of the fact that a hatred had been building up of what the U.S. government and American corporations were doing in the hungry nations: “What is done and what is not done In Your Name about Cuba, is being watched by people all over the world. In it, these peoples see ‘the Yankee’ revealing himself; when they read about Cuba and about the United States, they are reading about what ‘Yankee’ means today.… Nobody ever sees himself as others see him, and we’ve tried to explain … why you and we have not really known each other.”14

In the final letter, Mills tells his North American readers that “Yankee” has practically meant one thing to Cubans: insane hurtfulness. The appellation Yankee, being synonymous with arrogant imperialism, is not a favorable one, and Mills presses its significance to great advantage by peppering the book with the revolutionary cry of defiance, Cuba sí, Yanqui no. Furthermore, the designation Yankee—as a symbol—confronts North Americans with an image of their national character, an image dramatically different from that which they hold of Latin Americans. Accordingly, Mills not only makes it clear that Yankees are not Cubans and Cubans are not Yankees, but that there are “two Americas,” a rich northern half and an impoverished southern half. Speaking in the voice of the Cuban revolutionary, Mills exhorts that “perhaps we Latin Americans had better realize that the people of whom we are a part is not part of whatever civilization you North Americans belong to. Once and for all, let us get it straight: we belong to the peoples of the hungry nations.”15

But why, one might ask, didn’t Mills utilize the Spanish designation, Yanqui, instead? Perhaps because it would sound too unfamiliar and confusing to U.S. readers who would likely have pronounced it as Yan-kwē and not understood its significance in the way Mills intended.16 Yankee, to be sure, is a complicated word, and it has different meanings to different people. Civil rights activist Stokely Carmichael tells of when he went south to participate in the Freedom Rides in 1961 and was jailed in Mississippi, where he read Listen, Yankee: “You know how dumb them crackers are? In jail they took away all my books—stuff by DuBois, King, Camus. But they let me keep Mills’s book about Castro, Listen, Yankee, because they thought it was against Northern agitators.”17 Sartre states that in Cuba, U.S. citizens were either called Americans or Yankees.18 Theodore Draper disagrees (“No one ever said, ‘Listen, Yankee!’ or ‘Yankee this’ and ‘Yankee that’ to me”)19 and considers Mills’s use of the word merely a touch of artistic license. And specifically in reference to the people that Mills met in Cuba, Robert Taber explains that what they referred to as Yankee was not the citizens of the United States, but rather “Yanqui imperialismo.”20

However all this may be, the fact is that Mills uses the term “Yankee” as a vocative expression no less than forty-five times—eight times alone in the book’s climax: the last two pages of the last section of the last letter titled “What Does ‘Yankee’ Mean?” Correlatively, he employs, with intonation, the word “listen”—as in “listen to us” and “listen, Yankee”—and more frequently, the entreaty “please”—imploringly, but also sarcastically—as in “please remember,” “please note,” and “please understand.” Mills adroitly uses please … listen … Yankee to convey a sense of imperativeness and urgency about the situation in Cuba.21

But perhaps the most effective rhetorical technique that Mills utilizes is that of speaking in the vernacular of an imaginary and anonymous Cuban revolutionary. This “voice” is a synthesis of the various comments his Cuban informants communicated to him. In attempting to make the Cuban voice sound authentic, Mills endeavors to imitate the idiomatic inflection of translated everyday Spanish: “[Your U.S. officials] would have really to ‘associate’ with us, even if our skins were dark, and—Mother of God!—that would never do!”22

However, in order to give legitimacy to this collective voice, Mills positions himself not as an observer, but as an actor in the revolutionary process; in effect, he internalizes the role of the Cuban revolutionary. The upshot is that he introduces North Americans to the vocabulary of motive of the generalized other that was emerging in revolutionary Cuba. What is more, Mills considers Cuba’s voice as the voice of the hungry-nation bloc, and the archetypal revolutionary, he believes, was speaking (mainly through Mills’s book) in the name of many people in that bloc. For him it was imperative that Cuba’s voice be heard in the United States because this country was too powerful, its responsibilities to the world and to itself too great, for its citizens not to listen to every entreaty from the hungry world. Up to that point the U.S. public had largely ignored the Cuban island, and Mills pleads with them to hear well the message of its Revolution. For only by dealing with the perils of ignorance could the perils of disastrous mistakes be avoided.

It is, however, one thing to construe Cuba’s voice through composite interviews with Cuban revolutionaries, but quite a different matter to claim that it also represents a chorus emanating from all the impoverished areas of the developing world—from all the exploited peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America—particularly since Mills does not seem to have spoken with many campesinos. Just as Ché’s strategy to spread revolution was not practically exportable to the Congo and Bolivia, so too Mills’s rendition of Cuba’s voice was not practically extrapolatable to, say, Burundi and Haiti. However, symbolically at least, the Cuban Revolution did and does continue to represent the archetypical case of defiance against monopoly capitalism and, more specifically, against the manipulations and machinations of U.S. imperialism, in much the same way that Korda’s iconic image of Ché became a political and (ironically) commercial “global brand,” a potent symbol of resistance.23 And it is the symbol, the message, and the image of Cuba’s Revolution as exemplar to underdeveloped agricultural nations, especially those in Latin America, that both Mills and Sartre understood well. Indeed, in an interview Sartre had with a group of Cuban writers during his visit to the island in 1960, he told them that the Revolution had become of the utmost importance to the developing countries of Latin America—and it was this that basically accounted for the tenor of the conflict between their country and the United States. Further, perilous conditions were arising from a dialectical choice between danger and benefit. On the one hand, the United States could not possibly allow Cuba to become an exemplary light to the mass of people in Latin America—particularly since they could follow the Castro pattern of nationalizing all U.S.-owned property. On the other hand, given the transnational character of corporations, Latin American countries were compelled to take an increasingly favorable attitude toward the Cuban republic. It was between this danger and this benefit, Sartre told his audience, that U.S. policy toward Latin America would be played out.24

The question of the universality of Cuba’s voice aside, Mills does, on the whole, depict quite accurately the thoughts and actions of the Cuban revolutionary (an endeavor at which, as Appendix 1 in this volume demonstrates, he succeeded quite admirably). But does he correctly express their sentiments: their joy and confusion, their frustrations, their ranting, their worries? In the foreword to Listen, Yankee, Mills describes the voice of the Cubans he met as being tinged primarily by two powerful emotions: euphoria and anger.

In letter six, titled “Revolutionary Euphoria,” the voice conveys the great enthusiasm that typically accompanies the creation of something original and different—of building a completely new and better society, from top to bottom, in all spheres of life, for everyone. That national élan that was sweeping over Cuba was clearly expressed by several interviewees, for example, in Isabel Rielo’s excitement of and devotion to the school cities project: “I love the cause so much. I believe I’m being useful enough in that sense. If they are going to build ten more school cities I’d like to have the privilege of being in all of them—helping the children of the campesinos.” It is also evident in the commitment of Elvira Escobar’s son, who was serving as a physician to the peasants in the Sierra Maestra: “Don’t you understand? I love Cuba.”

But the optimistic atmosphere that Mills encountered and that many Cubans still experienced in the summer of 1960 was not only a product of constructing a new society, it also stemmed from the existential need to defend it from its enemies. The clinical psychologist Franz Stettmeier described it as an uneasy optimism, one that compelled the Cuban revolutionary to sacrifice his life if need be: “They mean it as the Russian soldier might on the front. ‘Here I am, you have to kill me.’ ” That sentiment was echoed by Elvira Escobar: “If someone imposes himself on us we will fight. Even if I’m in a wheelchair.”

The Revolution’s civic spirit and patriotic fervor was thus coupled with what Juan Arcocha described as “a palpable and pervasive sense of danger.” In mid-1960 Havana, with the La Coubre explosion still fresh in the minds of most habaneros, “one could almost feel, in the very air that was breathed, the threat that would materialize a few months later, on April 1961, with the invasion at Playa Girón,” the Bay of Pigs.25

To be sure, the revolutionary euphoria was correlated with “the only real worry, the real fear we have,” the counterrevolutionary threat to all their efforts. That worry and fear, particularly of direct, armed intervention by the “Colossus of the North”—a country with almost literally infinitely greater firepower—was articulated time and again by Mills’s respondents. It was expressed by Juan Arcocha, who wondered how long Russia’s missiles would keep the U.S. Marines in Florida; by Captain 2, concerning the recent bombings of Cuba and his expectations of future aggressions by mercenaries; and by the Cuban soldier stationed on the Isle of Pines, that Mills recorded telling Castro that should the Isle of Pines be taken, he, Castro, should know that all the soldiers there had sacrificed their lives. This then was a euphoria mixed with worry, an enthusiasm mingled with fear. Indeed, Mills predicted that the revolutionary enthusiasm would run high and continue for some time, precisely because of the U.S. threat.

But was the Cuban revolutionary’s voice the angry voice that Mills depicts in Listen, Yankee? The fact is that neither the interviewees’ words nor their tone in the recordings convey much anger. And when anger or a similar emotion is expressed, it is directed at more immediate and tangible matters and events rather than at the Yankees—and certainly never toward Mills, himself the epitome of a Yankee. So we hear of Elba Luisa Batista Benitez’s fury at Batista’s soldiers, who were “idiots”: “Remember, because of them I had such a terrific fall at the airport that I had a buttock like this!” They were intolerable, rude, and disagreeable to her directly. Arcocha expresses acrimony toward the venerable North American institution Time magazine and sees it as horrible, dangerous, and distorting the truth. But if the term Yankee meant “insane hurtfulness” to the Cuban revolutionaries Mills interviewed, they did not respond to it through enmity.

Where, then, does the popular moral indignation depicted in Listen, Yankee come from? Perhaps it was conveyed by the Cubans Mills spoke with but did not audiotape—notably, the top leaders in the Revolutionary government like Castro, Guevara, Vallejo, and others. Perhaps Mills experienced it as a collective representation, in the sense of Durkheim, which derived from the numerous interactions and discussions he had with many people during the two or so weeks he spent on the island. Perhaps there was the fury that, five months after the explosion of the munitions ship La Coubre, lingered when Mills was in Havana.26 Or perhaps it stemmed from Mills himself. At various points in the book there is an overlapping of voices between the Cuban leaders and Mills that makes it difficult to distinguish between them as speakers. Draper contends that, with Mills’s Cubans, “one never knows where they end and he begins.”27 Indeed, the major points of acrimonious attack in Listen, Yankee, specifically those directed at the military and economic power elites, are the very same that Mills makes in his other books.28 However all that may be, Mills did write Listen, Yankee in an angry voice; but it is a voice delivered in a modulated tone of mockery and sarcasm, not of spit-flying rage. And as that voice became louder and shriller, it would compel, not only Yankees, but hundreds of thousands of readers throughout the world, to do what he wanted them to do: listen.

A Book Intended to Be Heard

Sometime between late May and early August 1960, before Mills left for Cuba, he met with Ian Ballantine, cofounder, along with his wife, Betty, of Ballantine Books. Ballantine and Mills had known each other for many years. They had first met at Columbia University while Mills was at work on White Collar, perhaps in the late 1940s. Some ten years later, when Mills attempted to get a book about the drive and thrust toward nuclear war to a broad audience, he approached Ballantine, and out of that partnership came the highly influential The Causes of World War Three.

For some reason Mills audio-recorded the meeting with Ballantine, which likely took place at Mills’s home in West Nyack, New York. Several people were present.29 At this point Mills was in the early stages of writing Listen, Yankee—a title he had already settled on—but was still working out its style and structure. He proposes to Ballantine a couple of ideas he has about the book.

To begin with, Mills pressed to have Listen, Yankee printed in an unusually short time. He was writing specifically to North Americans and needed to tell them what their government was doing and failing to do in their name. He wanted them to know that the U.S. government had an urgent duty to act responsibly and avoid “the perils of disastrous mistakes” in its relations toward Cuba, toward Latin America, and indeed toward all of the countries of the hungry-nation bloc; even if this duty amounted to ensuring that their government did not use violence, directly or indirectly, in any form, against Cuba’s Revolution. In essence, the critical message from the Cuban revolutionary to U.S. readers was, “Hands off Cuba!” No doubt the book’s publication took on a greater sense of urgency after Franz Stettmeier told Mills that, “In two months all you think and tell about the Cuban Revolution can be terribly antiquated,” much as Stettmeier had found that Sartre’s articles on Cuba had been quickly outrun by events.

Listen, Yankee required immediate release; Mills did not expect it to be, like White Collar, a book that would “stand a long time.”30 He was under pressure to get out the message of “what it’s really like in Cuba now,” as soon as possible. He thus treated Listen, Yankee rather like a journalistic piece that he was writing under deadline—events were unfolding rapidly and it needed to be released immediately, because “perhaps it is not too late for us to listen—and to act.”31

Most surprising of all, and seemingly in contradiction to a quick publication, is that Mills intended Listen, Yankee to be heavily illustrated with photographs to be taken by himself. Indeed, he was something of an accomplished photographer, as demonstrated by the extraordinary snapshot that he took and subsequently used in the black-and-white dust jacket to White Collar. In this photo, there is, toward the bottom, a solitary white-collar man in his long overcoat and fedora, dwarfed by the big city landscape as he scurries past the National City Bank on Wall Street. The image is arguably one of the most iconic in all of sociology.32

Mills tells Ballantine that he wants to include a number of photos, likely the ones he was expecting to take in Cuba, giving the book a layout reminiscent of James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Mills had long admired the Agee/Evans volume and regarded it as a true feat of “sociological poetry,” one that allowed readers to “hear” the voice of the voiceless. This sociological poetry is a type of style-as-orientation that was needed for writing about the human condition; it is “a style of experience and expression that reports social facts and at the same time reveals their human meanings.” Particularly significant for Mills was Agee’s imaginative writing and painstaking reporting on his observations and experiences with southern sharecroppers. But for him the book’s greatest appeal came from Agee’s capacity for great moral indignation: “This fury is what makes him take it big.”33 There is, however, one major problem in Agee’s prose, as Mills saw it: Agee inserted too much of himself into the experience and thus obscured the very subjects and scenes he wanted to communicate to his readers. Mills would avoid Agee’s tendency for self-indulgence by writing Listen, Yankee, not in his own words, not from his own perspective, but from that of the composite Cuban revolutionary. But at this point he informs Ballantine that he is writing Listen, Yankee in a different style, as a script; one written, as he puts it, “by ear, for ear” and that includes voice tone. It is a book intended to be heard.

Additionally, Mills believed that providing full-page photos—as many as one hundred—similar to those taken by Walker Evans, would allow readers to also see the daily lives of Cubans. Contrary to Agee’s writing, Evan’s photographs never intrude in the slightest upon the scene being shown. For Mills, the people depicted in those photographs “are just there, in a completely barefaced manner, in all their dignity of being, and with their very nature shining through.”34

So, at this stage, prior to his experience in Cuba, Mills imagined Listen, Yankee as a hardbound album-like volume—an odd admixture that was to be part investigation, part pictorial, part script—but clearly not yet as an inexpensive trade book written as a series of letters from the knowledgeable Cuban revolutionary’s point of view. However all that may be, it is doubtless the case that Listen, Yankee would have been much different had Mills included his Cuba photographs. In this respect it may have perhaps turned out more like Castro’s Cuba, Cuba’s Fidel, the volume produced by photojournalist Lee Lockwood, which contains over one hundred black-and-white pictures depicting everyday life on the island and various images of the bearded Cuban prime minister circulating among the common people.

Mills also expressed to Ballantine that he was strategically looking for the right publishing house and considering Oxford University Press, publisher of White Collar, The Power Elite, and The Sociological Imagination.

The transcribed conversation between Mills and Ballantine follows (unidentified male and female voices are also on the recording):

MILLS: … I don’t know how. But I know I can do it like this. And that’s the way Agee and Evans did it in on this Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Do you remember how that book was set up by Little, Brown? You just opened it and there were photographs.

BALLANTINE: Uh-huh, yeah.

MILLS: Nothing messed around with. No captions. Then in the back, little notes and acknowledgments where you would credit purposes and also you will give what they were and where they were taken and things like that. But that’s three-fourths done, you know.

BALLANTINE: Wonderful.

MILLS: I’ve done everything I can in terms of the research here. Now I’ve got to go down and, you know, …35

BALLANTINE: What’s your comfort-zone position on that?

MILLS: I’ve got a wonderful title here, if you like: Listen, Yankee.

BALLANTINE: [Laughter] Fine. That’s fine.

MALE VOICE: It’s spelled Y-A-N-Q-U-I?

MILLS: No. I’m not sure about that yet.

[Several people speaking at the same time]

MILLS: One can, of course, in the body of the letters, I guess.

FEMALE VOICE: Yeah.

MALE VOICE: Oye, Yanqui.

MILLS: The thing has terrific radio possibilities, my God. And I’m writing it as a script.36

BALLANTINE: Uh-huh.

MILLS: That is to say, I’m actually putting in before certain things the voice tone and, you know. It’s the first thing I’ve ever written Ian, by ear, for ear, you know? Actually it’s in force when I get through. So it’s a different style then I’ve ever had.

BALLANTINE: This is happening all over the world.

MILLS: Is it? You mean guys are starting to write dramas?

BALLANTINE: Herb Gardner just completed a play called A Thousand Clowns.37

MILLS: That’s a good title.

BALLANTINE: … and, ah.… He still draws The Nebbishes, you know.…

[Several people speaking at the same time]

MILLS: Who are the thousand clowns?

BALLANTINE: I know nothing about what’s in the play. We’re having dinner with him tomorrow night and I’ll hear all about it. He didn’t make a single Nebbish for the last three months. He’s kept this comic strip going because it would be just a crime to let this …

MILLS: Who is this guy?

BALLANTINE: A guy named Herb Gardner.

[Several people speaking at the same time]

MILLS: Oh, that’s a marvelous thing. Yeah, sure. I didn’t mean to dodge your question.

BALLANTINE: No, no.

MILLS: The publishing position? It’d probably be Oxford [University Press]. And I’ve been fooling around, quite frankly. Confidentially, I’ve kinda been shopping around because of all of these things coming up. But Brown,38 whom I simply must trust on some of this stuff, thinks that, particularly for this book, because of its really quite daring content, given the stuff that’s been appearing, well it would be foolish not to have the authority and the stooginess …

BALLANTINE: Of Oxford.

MILLS: Precisely, the stooginess of Oxford. So I put it to Oxford and I said, “I’m not going to crap around. If you do it, I want it published by November 17th. Don’t tell me you can’t, because I know it can be done.”

BALLANTINE: Good.

MALE VOICE: This year?

BALLANTINE: Let me give you a little information there. Mockery’s gone. A book called The Political Zoo, which is a piece of pictures of animals.39

MILLS: Wasn’t that a very long time ago?

BALLANTINE: No, no, you’re thinking of Office Zoo.40

MILLS: Oh, yeah, yeah.

BALLANTINE: This is a book that was done really for the Democrats. And they wanted to have it for the convention.41 I produced the book in fifteen days. Flew it out to the convention and published it nationally in another fifteen days. So you can do it if you wanna to do it.

MILLS: Sure. Well, you pay a bit for it but not terribly much more so.

[Several people speaking at the same time]

BALLANTINE: Cash projects? Well, .…

MILLS: … You still have about 100 full-page photographs and about 150 …

MALE VOICE: A hundred pages of photographs?

MILLS: Yeah.

[Several people speaking at the same time]

BALLANTINE: … a scintillating production process which is expensive. But rather it is that there is an economical selling technique for a hardbound book. It divides the year into two seasons and you find that you can list a number of books in Read and Publisher’s Weekly and you’ve got the catalogue. And the salesmen have all been out and they’ve already been to some of the places and they’re not going back. So that if you throw a fall book into the schedule now, you’ve got to write everybody …

[The recording ends here.]

Mills realized that a short publication time was not likely with Oxford University Press. As he had previously told Oxford’s trade editor, in regard to The Causes of World War Three that Ballantine Books had issued in 1958, “Oxford, as far as I know, is not set up to do this quickie sort of thing, which is rather like the old ‘Penguin specials,’ with which Ian [Ballantine] has had experience. He has got the kind of distribution apparatus that makes it feasible, and he is interested in it.”42 Mills could have said the same about Listen, Yankee, which Oxford did not publish. Ballantine Books released it in paperback in late November 1960, within weeks of receiving the final manuscript, doing a first printing of 160,000 copies at fifty cents each. At the same time, McGraw-Hill put out the hardcover at $3.95. It appears that Ian Ballantine was confident that it was “destined to be a bestseller.”43 As with The Causes of World War Three, Mills wanted the same for Listen, Yankee: “to get it out fast, to distribute the hell out of it all at once, and so maybe raise a little impolite hell.”44

A Reception at the Theresa Hotel

According to Juan Arcocha, Mills arrived in Cuba pondering a moral problem and thought about writing Listen, Yankee in the first person. He wanted to speak through the mouth of a fictitious Cuban who would expound before the world his arguments and grievances—the reasons for his fight—and the ideals that inspired him. As Arcocha dramatically put it, “The Cuban Revolution had been placed in the defendant’s seat, and Mills wanted to change that by being its defense attorney.”45 But by writing Listen, Yankee in the first person, by positioning himself as the Revolution’s champion and advocate, had Mills undermined his own arguments before the court of public opinion? Even a staunch supporter of the Revolution and trusted friend of Mills, such as E. P. Thompson, was led to inquire:

If what is under consideration is an ideological phenomenon, arising from multiple convergent experiences of imperialism, national struggle, and hunger (in situations where agrarian problems are primary), then should we not distinguish between the roles of interpreter and analyst, and that of apologists? I was uneasy at the confusion between the two in Mills’s Listen, Yankee. It is one thing to respond with deep sympathy to the writings of Fanon, Touré, Sengher, or Ché Guevara.… It is another thing to ape these views, or to propagate them uncritically because they are moving and authentic in their own context.46

Several weeks after Mills’s return from the Caribbean island, on the evening of Thursday, September 22, a reception, sponsored by the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC), was held in honor of Castro at Harlem’s Theresa Hotel, where the Cuban prime minister had been staying during his visit to the UN General Assembly. Among the 250 guests in attendance were such luminaries of the North American Left as the poets Langston Hughes and Allen Ginsberg; FPCC cofounder Robert Taber, who was working in Havana for Revolución; the journalist I. F. Stone, who had frequently criticized U.S. policy toward Cuba—and, of course, C. Wright Mills, who told everyone there that he was writing a book on Cuba.47 The atmosphere in the Theresa’s ballroom was fraternal and free-and-easy as “the proletarian staff of the hotel, the olive-green uniforms of the guerrilleros, the general lack of formality, all helped to emphasize the gaiety and the stimulating, if not revolutionary, character of the meeting.”48

At the reception Mills was interviewed by Michael B. Conant, managing editor of the Columbia Owl (one of Columbia University’s student newspapers), who had himself just recently spent a month in Havana. Conant queried Mills about his own Cuba trip and about his forthcoming book, Listen, Yankee. Mills explained that the book was already partially printed but that he was giving the typesetters “a hell of a time.” He told Conant that the book dealt with the “stupidity” of U.S. foreign policy in relation to Latin America, with Cuba as a typical example; that he had interviewed Cuban revolutionaries and written the book from their point of view; that the Revolutionary regime was not communist and that its pattern of economic development was a non-Stalinist pattern; and, finally, that North American journalistic reporting on the Revolution had been a combination of deliberate vilification and fear and thus provided a distorted picture of what was really happening on the island. Asked if he thought that a Democrat would have handled the Cuban situation differently from a Republican, Mills replied—just weeks before JFK’s election—that “the administration does not make that much difference. The present campaign is an advertisement to the world of U.S. silliness.”49 Mills’s mission was to counteract that campaign by telling North American readers the truth about Cuba.

Criticism

The initial run of 170,000 copies of Listen, Yankee was quickly bought up, with Ballantine reporting “lots of rush telephone orders.” A few weeks later, another 100,000 were printed. By the spring of 1961, well over 450,000 paperback copies had been sold.50 Curiously, Herbert J. Gans does not include it (or any of Mills’s other books) in his list of book sales of bestsellers written by North American sociologists. But if we assume that Listen, Yankee sold about half a million copies, then only three books on Gans’s list—David Riesman et al., The Lonely Crowd; Elliot Liebow, Tally’s Corner; and Philip Slater, The Pursuit of Loneliness—with much longer print runs, have outsold it.51

But the success of any book can’t be captured by bibliometric surveys—or by the number of printings, or even by sales figures. It is, instead, a matter of impact, and Listen, Yankee was nothing less than a worldwide literary sensation. Van Gosse considers it one of the key radicalizing texts of the Sixties generation, along with Allen Ginsberg’s Howl!, Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” and The Port Huron Statement.52 Richard E. Welch Jr. states quite accurately that “with a single exception, one cannot point to a speech, article, book, or open letter by an American academic and say with confidence that it influenced either public opinion or government policy. The exception was C. Wright Mills and his book, Listen, Yankee,” which had a significant influence on the origins and credo of the New Left, and on countless readers throughout the world.53 Indeed, the book was eventually translated into Greek, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, and Spanish—and read in such far-flung places as Angola, Ethiopia, Haiti, and Laos.54 However, its message was addressed directly to a North American audience, and that’s where its real impact was intended to be felt. In his assessment of Listen, Yankee over half a century after it was published, Raúl Roa Kourí has this to say: “On reading it, it seemed to me the best of what had been written on Cuba after Huberman and Sweezy’s book [Cuba: Anatomy of a Revolution]. Moreover, Mills’s work had an additional importance: it was directed at the middle-of-the-road American, who, in general, did not know much about the history and culture of our people. It was a direct appeal, much like The Ugly American had been, to confront the disagreeable truths not previously published in the mainstream press.”55

A lengthy extract from the book, reprinted with slight modifications under the title “Listen Yankee: The Cuban Case against the United States,” appeared as the cover story in the December 1960 issue of Harper’s Magazine, which had a circulation at that time of close to half a million.56 Both the magazine’s 5,000-word excerpt and the book were extensively reviewed in various newspapers and periodicals, and Mills received more than his share of criticism. And while both positive and negative reviews of Listen, Yankee quickly poured in, on balance the negative ones seem to have prevailed in quantity—or perhaps just in their viciousness.57

The rural sociologist Lowry Nelson undercuts Mills’s claim concerning the lack of adequate and unbiased news about Cuba in the U.S. press, writing that “this irritating book,” Listen, Yankee, covered “nothing particularly new to any reader of the most reliable newspapers in the United States.”58 Another review, this one favorable, partly counteracted Nelson’s assertion: “The reader who does not read Spanish, or cannot obtain the Cuban material, can form a good idea of the Cuban position from this valuable book.”59 Latin Americanist Fredrick B. Pike praised Mills for giving the best available insight into the attitudes of the Cuban revolutionaries—and, for that matter, of a growing number of people throughout Latin America. As for North Americans: “If enough Yankees listen,” writes Pike, “the Mills book could represent the most substantial contribution to hemisphere relations that has been published in the last twenty years.”60

One of the harshest and most relentless critics of Mills, Listen, Yankee, and Castro’s revolution was the Latin America correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, Jules Dubois, who only the previous year had written a book largely sympathetic of Castro and his populist insurrection. In an apparent about-face, Dubois was now writing poison-pen reviews of Listen, Yankee and the Cuban Revolution. In his syndicated newspaper column, “Report from Latin America,” he casts Mills as a “left wing professor of sociology” and predicts that Listen, Yankee will “be hailed in Havana, Moscow, and Peking as an accurate portrayal of the Cuban situation.” Dubois offers that the book “reads like translated tape recordings of Castro’s interminable and repetitious tirades against the United States—and it is just as tiring and tedious.” In an apparent non sequitur, perhaps as an attempt to shut Mills down, Dubois concludes: “In 1951 the Russian censor banned an article by Mills from the magazine Amerika, a Russian language publication circulated in the Soviet Union by the state department.”61

Dubois’s criticisms became more strident a few weeks later in another stinging invective against Listen, Yankee that appeared in the Saturday Review. Now Castro’s tirades were not just “interminable and repetitious,” they had become, for Dubois, “interminable and paranoiac brainwashing” outbursts. Whereas in Dubois’s syndicated column Mills’s book had been “replete with errors of fact,” in this new review it now “bulged with half-truths, complete distortions, and outright untruths.” The agrarian reform of which Mills approved is for Dubois “a dismal failure”; Mills’s insistence that it was U.S. policy that was pushing Castro into the Soviet bloc “is utterly false”; Mills’s claim that Castro enjoyed overwhelming support from the Cuban people “avoids reality and distorts the facts.” In closing the piece, rather than evoking Russian censorship as he had in the previous review, this time Dubois chooses to go in the opposite direction and anticipates Russian mass dissemination of Listen, Yankee: “Nor would it be surprising if Moscow should announce plans to publish Mills’s book in Russian and other Soviet bloc languages.”62

But Dubois’s comments would not go unchallenged. In the next issue of the Saturday Review, no fewer than eight intellectuals of the Mexican Left—novelists, publishers, and professors (the four who had previously interviewed Mills in Mexico City in 1960, Carlos Fuentes, Víctor Flores Olea, Enrique González Pedrero, and Jamie García Terrés, in addition to four others, Fernando Benítez, Arnaldo Orfila Reynal, Francisco López Cámara, and Pablo González Casanova)—sent a signed letter to the magazine’s editor decrying the bad faith and cynicism of Dubois’s arguments against Mills and the Cuban Revolution. The letter ended: “We, the friends of C. Wright Mills in Mexico, vigorously protest against Jules Dubois’s fallacious criticism, and with equal vigor back C. Wright Mills, whom we consider the true voice of the North American people, for his honesty, his courage, and his awareness of the new forces in the underdeveloped world.”63 It may have been this very public rejoinder from the leading luminaries of Mexico’s intelligentsia that finally put an end to Dubois’s denigration of Mills and his book.

But with the matter of Listen, Yankee Mills seemed to have more foes than friends. And one of the more clamorous of the former was a Cuban exile named Fermím Peinado, who self-published a forty-six-page booklet titled Beware, Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba.64 In this unremarkable piece of unadorned anti-Castro propaganda intended “for the greater enlightenment of American university students,” Peinado proposes to correct mistakes about the Cuban Revolution made in several articles that had recently appeared in U.S. periodicals—one of which was Mills’s essay in Harper’s.65 Peinado criticizes Mills on a number of negligible and significant points: for not doing sufficient research for his “very intense study” of Cuba’s Revolution, for being duped by the Cuban Communist minority, for lacking sociological perceptiveness, for portraying the voice of Castro as the voice of Cuba, for his ignorance of the Spanish language, for claiming that the voice of the Cuban Revolution had not been heard in the United States, for denying that the only variety of leftist thought and action in Cuba was that of communist totalitarianism, for denying that there was a serviceable information agency for foreign journalists in Cuba.66 Peinado ends by issuing a warning to his readers in the tone of McCarthyite paranoia: “the most dangerous foes of this great nation [the United States] are to be found from within. It is necessary to be alert.” Perhaps of greater socio-historical significance than its alarmist message is that Beware, Yankee mimics Listen, Yankee in every particular in regard to its presentation. Not only did the booklet possess a similar title and the same subtitle, it used the identical front-cover design—from the white background, to the typeface, to the black-orange-pink color scheme; it even had the same dimension trim size. In an attempt at maximum mimicry, even the pamphlet’s back cover was done in the same yellow color as Mills’s book.

A couple of other commentators on the Harper’s article also deserve mention, if only for their historic affiliations with Castro and Mills. Two of several opinion pieces, printed in the Letters to the Editor section in the magazine’s February 1961 issue, were submitted by the Cuban historian of U.S.-Cuba relations Herminio Portell Vilá and by congressional representative from Oregon Charles O. Porter. Portell Vilá had been Fidel Castro’s tutor at the University of Havana in 1947. In the early summer of 1953, while the distinguished professor was sitting at a bar in Havana, the twenty-seven-year-old Castro revealed to him that he was planning an attack on the Moncada barracks. Portell Vilá tried to dissuade his former student, but Castro was adamant, explaining that he was prepared for the assault and that it would be a great moral blow to the Batista tyranny.67 On the success of the Revolution, Portell Vilá moved to the United States, where he composed press releases critical of Castro’s government and began broadcasting for the Voice of America. Portell Vilá wrote Harper’s to protest Mills’s “much biased and mendacious article” and challenged him for not disclosing that he was a member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which Portell Vilá charges with “playing in the U.S. the game of the dictatorship of Fidel Castro in Cuba.”68 By contrast, Porter’s letter to the editor was laudatory, congratulating the magazine on the “emphasis and space” that it had given Mills’s essay. “We norteamericanos,” Porter proposed, “are going to have to listen and understand this point of view if we are going to make our way effectively in the world today.”69 The congressman wrote these lines very near the time when he served as Mills’s surrogate on a nationally televised debate in which he took the “pro-Castro” position (see Chapter 8).

Some six months after releasing Listen, Yankee, Ballantine Books brought out another inexpensive paperback on the Cuban revolutionary project, Sartre on Cuba. It was a compilation of essays Jean-Paul Sartre had written for the French newspaper France-Soir, and was touted by its publisher as “a valuable complement” to Listen, Yankee. Indeed, the two books are similar in several ways: they both take a journalistic approach in providing historical accounts of the Revolution, they both give penetrating insights into Castro’s thinking and eyewitness descriptions of events. Mills thought highly of Sartre’s effort and crafted a strong endorsement:

The obvious truth of Sartre on Cuba once again reveals to the world the Yankee school of falsification—about Cuba and about the United States. No matter what now happens, this fascinating book will not become “dated.” It reads like a dramatic novel, and it conveys the moral meaning of Castro’s Cuba for our time. That meaning is this: Whether or not they know it, for the generation just coming to maturity, the revolution in Cuba is their “Spanish Civil War.” More than that: it is foremost among those several events that are signaling the beginnings of a new left in the world. That so many older U.S. intellectuals do not understand this is a sign of their own moral cowardice and cultivated provinciality. But Jean Paul-Sartre knows it—and in this book he tells The Cuban Story as only Sartre could.70

The main difference between Mills’s and Sartre’s books is that the Frenchman’s prose is formal and stilted, it possesses none of the Texan’s verve and fiery rhetoric.

Listen, Yankee was also reviewed by none other than Eleanor Roosevelt in her “My Day” syndicated newspaper column. Just a few weeks before, on November 19, Mills had delivered the address “How to Improve Relations with Cuba and South America” before a meeting of Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), a liberal political organization Mrs. Roosevelt had cofounded.71 No doubt he conveyed to the ADA audience much of the information in the recently completed Listen, Yankee, including urging the U.S. government to accept Castro as the legitimate leader of Cuba. And much to the delight of influential legal scholar Louis B. Schwartz, who was in attendance, Mills also raised the issue of the role of the big corporation in U.S. foreign policy.72 But according to Saul Landau, the ADA audience was furious with Mills and practically accused him of being a communist. Mills answered their questions for hours on the platform. The audience baited and cursed him, but Mills stood there with the most compelling arguments, with facts and statistics and documentation of all kinds—still, he didn’t convince anyone. After it was over, Mills expressed his frustration brusquely and passionately: “Goddamn liberals!,” he complained to Landau, “They are political idiots. Liberal obfuscators! Obfuscators!”73

Mrs. Roosevelt was much more sympathetic to Mills’s message than the ADA audience had been. By December 14 she had read part way through Listen, Yankee and wrote in her “My Day” column: “Up to this point, while I would disagree with certain of the things [the Cuban revolutionaries] have told Mr. Mills, a preponderance of their complaints against us seems valid to me. And though we may not like these expressions from the Cuban revolutionaries I think we should read them and weigh them with care, because they do affect our whole Latin-American policy.” She goes on to note that the United States had long exhibited an irresponsible complacency toward Cuba and Latin America in ignoring their economic and social problems. As long as Americans got the sugar, tobacco, coffee, or whatever commodities they wanted, the United States never protested if a country developed a one-crop economy and never demanded that North American business leaders—who were only interested in profit making—raise the living standards of the people in those countries. She acknowledged that Cuba was building a socialist economy, but this was out of necessity, and it did not necessarily signal their acceptance of Soviet Communism. “If you read the letters in Mr. Mills’s book carefully, however, I think you will realize that in spite of the fact that you want to deny many of their statements and explain many of our acts in a different way from the way they do, still you will have to acknowledge that there is some reason why they should believe as they do. And you would perhaps have to agree that it would be well for us to think with a little humility about our own mistakes in understanding, in exploitation, and in sheer laziness.”74

Eleanor Roosevelt was one Yankee who did listen to the message in Mills’s book and commented that Americans “had better begin … to study what is being done in Cuba and to try to allay the Cuban fear” of an invasion by the United States. Such an invasion, she wrote, “would be counter to all our commitments to the U.N. and unthinkable for us as a nation and the leader of the non-Communist area of the world.”

But the former First Lady was severely mistaken—when at the beginning of her column she praised the incoming president-elect’s transition-team appointments of Dean Rusk as secretary of state, Chester Bowles as undersecretary, and Adlai Stevenson as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations—in thinking that such a team would implement new ideas and better approaches in world affairs. In fact, these men, along with their chief executive, JFK—all members of the ruling elite—would soon be embroiled in the covert operations program for the CIA invasion of Cuba and the attempted overthrow of yet another Latin American leader, this time, Fidel Castro.75

But the lame-duck Eisenhower, who had instigated the invasion, was still in the Oval Office in December 1960. There is no evidence that he or his officials took any account of Listen, Yankee—and if they had, they certainly would not have heeded its warnings. There is, however, some indication that Kennedy may have read the advance copy that Ballantine Books sent him “for his edification.” Only a few weeks before Kennedy’s assassination, the French journalist Jean Daniel, who was on his way to interview Castro, met briefly with the president in the White House. Kennedy surprised Daniel by telling him that he had, from the outset, followed developments in Cuba with painstaking attention; that the Batista regime had been the result of a number of misdeeds by the United States, a matter with which Kennedy was in agreement with the first Cuban revolutionaries; that he had approved of Castro’s Sierra Maestra proclamation for justice; that U.S. policies toward Cuba had unwittingly created the Castro movement. But the situation was no longer only a Cuban problem, Kennedy told Daniel; it had become an international problem, and it was important to realize that, as president of the United States, he was subject to the constraints of office. “I am the President of the United States and not a sociologist.”76

Escucha Yanqui

After three English-language printings, a Spanish translation, Escucha, yanqui, was released in April 1961 by Arnaldo Orfila Reynal, director of Mexico’s leading publishing house, Fondo de Cultura Económica.77 In its first run it had a remarkable printing of 20,000 copies, sold exceptionally well, and several pirated copies were distributed by unknown parties. Orfila was effusive in his praise of the book and wrote to Mills, telling him that, “In reading aloud your Listen, Yankee! with my wife, we were deeply touched with the greatness you show in your sheer understanding of the root of the problems of our Continent. It is the exact essence of the Cuban Revolution. I want to express to you the profound satisfaction I feel to be able to diffuse your beautiful message to the Spanish-speaking world.”78

Fondo, however, was a semipublic institution, and Orfila was fired in 1965, allegedly as a result of releasing the second edition of Escucha, yanqui, to which the conservative Mexican president Gustavo Díaz Ordaz had supposedly objected because it had been supported by funds provided by a foreign government.79 It is not known which foreign government is referred to, but if the presumption was that it was the Cuban government, this was certainly not the case. In fact, in a letter Mills wrote to Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes,80 who had helped him publish the Spanish translation with Fondo, he bluntly tells Fuentes that Fondo “must realize that I do not know the Cuban government’s attitude towards the book, especially my candid handling of Communism.”81 So even though the Cuban political regime had financed the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, and the FPCC had organized Mills’s trip to Cuba, Escucha, yanqui was not, strictly speaking, a politically commissioned book.

However that may be, Esucha, yanqui—and Mills—had their share of detractors in Latin America, not the least of whom was Fondo’s founder, Daniel Cosío Villegas, who deemed it a “stupid” book that should never have been published, not because of its ideological bent, given that Cosío Villegas believed it was neither pro- nor anti-Castro, but chiefly because of Mills’s linguistic deficiencies: “That is to say, when you know that this gentleman [Mills] has produced this book on the basis of taped recordings of Cubans’ opinions, that this gentleman did not know one word of Spanish, and therefore could not have posed questions, could not have known the responses, that gives you a sense of the gravity that this book could possibly possess.”82 But Cosío Villegas’s criticisms are wide of the mark, given that Mills had much previous experience interviewing respondents in several countries and in languages he did not speak, to say nothing of the fact that he had previously worked out effective rules for interviewing a small and highly selected number of respondents while briefly visiting a country (see Chapter 3). Perhaps just as significant to the interviewing protocol that Mills followed is that his interpreter, Juan Arcocha, provided him with first-rate service in interpretation.

Whatever the critiques, the upshot is that the book became an instant commercial success throughout Latin America. In 1964 Mexican historian and economist Jesús Silva Herzog estimated that Escucha, yanqui had sold between 70,000 and 80,000 copies and believed that it was the most successful of Fondo’s books up to that point.83 Twenty years later, Escucha, yanqui was listed as one of Fondo’s fifty most reprinted books, with over 100,000 copies sold.84

Escucha Otra Vez, Yanqui

In April 1961, while vacationing in Switzerland with his family, Mills and Saul Landau, who was now his confidant and personal secretary, worked on an update to Listen, Yankee. Mills instructed Landau to type what he had dictated as follows:

In his campaign President Kennedy convinced many that there would really be a New Frontier. (Capitalize that.) The New Frontiersmen who took up the cry were many of the best known liberal academicians. In Kennedy’s cabinet and in the advisory positions, they have shown themselves to be nothing more or less than moral schlemiels. (You know how to spell that? O.K.) With his decision to send the group of United States financed, trained, equipped and blessed thugs to their just rewards in the well-named Bay of Pigs, Mr. Kennedy has clearly demonstrated before the world that he has neither the brilliance of mind nor the quality of heart to qualify him for greatness, no less for destiny. And the men around him, the Schlesingers and Berles, have proven themselves to be no more than mouthpieces for immorality, spokesmen for thugs and hoodlums.85

Pursuing this theme further, Mills and Landau wrote a satire in the May 19, 1961, issue of the Tribune, London’s democratic socialist newspaper. It is in the form of an open letter to President Kennedy, in which, four months into his presidency, they offer a few modest proposals that they believe will prevent the United States from falling into disaster. They also warn Kennedy of the many perils he faces, not only abroad but also in his own cabinet, given that he has been the victim of the “cowardly suggestions,” the failed policies, of his own advisors, his liberal obfuscators. One of these cowardly suggestions was the “feeble attack” at the Bay of Pigs of the previous month, which simply did not go far enough in eliminating the Communist Conspiracy in Cuba, write Mills and Landau mockingly. They suggest that Kennedy purchase the French Foreign Legion, recruit patriotic Americans into it, and turn it into the American Foreign Legion. Its goal would be to protect, by whatever means necessary, U.S. private investment in Latin America from becoming nationalized. They urge Kennedy to repudiate any support by all radicals at home and abroad. Domestically, they recommend a return to the McCarthyite practices of carefully screening all employees in all industries and ruthlessly weeding out all Communists and Russian agents. Universities must be cleansed of the ideology of Collectivism, which has become the dominant trend on all campuses. “All Professors should, of course, be given loyalty oaths and lie detector tests regularly, and if necessary at gun point,” write Mills and Landau facetiously. “But more than that—they must be constantly watched, in and out of the classrooms, by Loyal Students some of whom are working loyally for our own FBI. More should be.” Here is Mills at his sarcastic best. He and his collaborator end the letter, dripping with contemptuous irony, stating, “There are countless other suggestions that we might make to you, Mister President, but in this brief letter we are seeking merely to congratulate you on so courageously completely your first one hundred days in office. It has indeed been a Profile in Courage.”86

That same month, Arnaldo Orfila Reynal contacted Mills to tell him that since all copies of the first and second editions of Escucha, yanqui had sold out, it was necessary, in light of the Bay of Pigs invasion and other happenings, that Mills prepare an update for a third edition: “This led us to prepare a third edition, which we deemed should be ready for the end of June, but in view of the dynamics of the Cuban Revolution, we have thought that it would be most interesting to add a foreword or appendix, with reference to the fundamental events of the last months, particularly the recent aggression.”87

The update, ultimately published as “Escucha otra vez, yanqui,” served as the afterword to the third Spanish edition and was presented in interview format. It consists of fifty questions posed to Mills during July 1961. The afterword is particularly significant given that the major event that had transpired within a year of Mills’s visit to Cuba, and that outraged him to no end, was the U.S.-engineered armed invasion at the Bay of Pigs.

“Escucha otra vez, yanqui” was the last piece written by Mills to be published during the remaining eight months of his life. It is important because, of all his controversial writings, it represents the furthest political limb on which he went out and the greatest risk to his scholarly authority. It is, in fact, his most candid—and angry—statement in which he resolutely opposes the U.S. neocolonial foreign policy toward Cuba and the military invasion. Here Mills names names and exposes the complicity—and hypocrisy—of U.S. government officials and the North American press. It may also provide a type of preview of some of the issues Mills may have covered in the television debate he was to have with Kennedy advisor Adolph A. Berle Jr. later that year (see Chapter 8).88

The inquiry begins with Mills being asked if anything had happened since August 1960 that would have changed his viewpoints in Listen, Yankee concerning the Cuban Revolution. Mills replies with an emphatic “no”; to the contrary, the opinions he had stated, particularly in the second Note to the Reader, were being confirmed day by day. Mills insists that he had no reason whatsoever to alter any essential aspect of what he had written since mid-1960.

He then spends the first part of the piece giving a chronological account of the April 1961 assault by the CIA-armed mercenaries and the events leading up to it. The Cuban victory at the Bay of Pigs, he insists, was a direct result, a product, of Cuba’s Revolution. It made the Revolution a reality. The CIA organized—illegally—a counterrevolution on U.S. soil. At the same time, it allowed, probably encouraged, and possibly organized—again, illegally—aerial bombings on sugarcane fields as well as various acts of sabotage on the island. In the spring of 1961, the CIA reunited all of the exile groups and instructed them to accept as their chief José Miró Cardona.89 The CIA was in charge of the training, planning, and management of the invasion. Miró Cardona and the other Cuban counterrevolutionaries were, in fact, mere puppets of the United States. The Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon assumed the final military planning and the Defense Department and Army provided the CIA with military advisors. The Marines made available landing craft and engaged in deceptive maneuvers to cover for the real military disembarkation.

It is now clear and obvious, Mills continues, that the anti-Castro forces were nothing more than fronts and puppets, and that without the U.S. there is, in fact, no real counterrevolution in Cuba. This signifies to Mills that Yankee government officials, “with or without their little plastic explosives,” did not know how to listen. No truly impartial observer of revolutionary Cuba could, as far as Mills is concerned, fail to listen to the people and their leaders.

After the invasion, Mills maintains that neutral diplomats residing in Cuba had, as of May 1961, calculated that around 5 percent of the Cuban population harbored counterrevolutionary sentiments, but that at least 70 percent enthusiastically supported the Revolution. What is more, before the invasion, around 25 percent of the population was “passive and undecided.” But after the invasion, this 25 percent came closer to 70 percent in fully supporting the Revolution.90

The invading exiles, deceived by the illusion that the Cuban people were going to support them, found that the Cuban militias proved to be a superior military force, but more importantly they discovered that the militias were a superior moral force. The vast majority of the mercenaries, more than 1,200 them, surrendered within seventy-two hours of their landing on the Bay of Pigs—a site badly selected but one well-named, considering the circumstances.

Mills then turns his attention to the media and charges that after the military intervention, when it was no longer possible to cover up the defeat, U.S. newspapers continued printing lies, likely disseminated by the CIA. Indeed, North American newspapers, magazines, and television are as censored, or better yet, as self-censored, as any in the world. But at this point, Mills continues, not only are the media to blame, so is the president of the United States, who had pressed them to censure themselves. Among notable exceptions to this self-censorship—many on the staff of the New York Times—Mills singles out James Reston, Tad Szulc, and Herbert Matthews, as well as independent journalists I. F. Stone and Joseph Hansen. Their reporting prior to the invasion (and Mills may have included his own reporting in Listen, Yankee) made it possible for at least some readers to follow events intelligently during the invasion.

Mills admits that it is possible to maintain that, concerning the Bay of Pigs debacle, Kennedy was misadvised by CIA director Allen Dulles; Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Lyman Lemnitzer; former U.S. Ambassador to Cuba Earl E.T. Smith—and, of course, by the always-available advisor on all things Latin American, Adolph A. Berle Jr., as well as the new presidential advisor, the Harvard professor of U.S. history who was ignorant of everything concerning Latin America, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Mills refers to them as first-class obfuscators and dogmatic anticommunists of historical, and hysterical, proportions. These Cold War liberals, under the banner of liberalism, have gradually become obfuscators, and, like the conservatives, they also partake of a doctrinaire anticommunism more suitable to the Stalinist era. Given the events of the Bay of Pigs—and what occurred before and after—these buttoned-up liberals have fashioned themselves as “defenders of a New Frontier of thieves and assassins.” What is more, the U.S. naval base on the island—at Guantánamo Bay—is considered by the Cuban people and government, and indeed by all Latin Americans, to be a threat to Cuba’s sovereignty and a symbol of U.S. imperialism.

Because of their subversive aggression toward Cuba, the liberal obfuscators had squandered the moral prestige of the United States before the world and had lost all influence in Latin America—except that which is based on intimidation, violence, and the economics of hunger. Above all, states Mills, it is now evident that concerning the “Cuba situation,” the United States is not a government of laws. All these errors in their various expressions, says Mills, can be read in the writings of anticommunist and anti-Cuba liberals such as Schlesinger’s White Paper on Cuba and freelance journalist Theodore Draper’s Castro’s Cuba: A Revolution Betrayed.91

Asked if he still believed, after all that had transpired, if there existed the possibility that Cuba could become truly neutral again, Mills replies that the actions taken by the United States and the USSR since Castro’s triumph had worked against that possibility. “It may be much too late,” he opines, “but I continue to hold out hope.” Still, he did not believe that Cuba would be left alone. Its Revolution represented too much of a crucial fact in the political emotion of Latin America, too much of an ideal concerning the economic livelihood to which Latin America aspired, and too much of a symbol of national liberty and true independence for the hungry nations for the United States to simply leave it alone. In the end, Mills contends, everything depends on whether or not the Yankees can listen.92

A Good and Honest Book

Dan Wakefield describes Mills’s buoyant spirit while convalescing at the Good Samaritan Hospital in Suffern, New York, during January 1961, after having suffered a serious heart attack a few weeks earlier:

It was incredible to see Mills in a sickbed, and yet his old fire and enthusiasm hadn’t left him. He was pleased and proud about the sales—if not the U.S. reception—of Listen, Yankee, and above his bed was an advertising poster proclaiming there were four hundred thousand copies of the paperback edition in print. Mills delightedly explained that such posters were carried on the sides of news delivery trucks in Philadelphia. He was reaching a greater public now than he ever had—‘mass circulation stuff,’ he proudly called it. He lectured us on publishing, emphasizing that paperbacks were now the important thing.93

In the end, according to Harvey Swados’s unflattering memoir of him, Mills was betrayed by the Revolution. Indeed, Mills had hoped to achieve the properly developing society, the humanist revolution, in the context of democracy. But democracy in Cuba had begun to slip away, and this caused in Mills an immense mental strain. “In his last months,” writes Swados, “Mills was torn between defending Listen, Yankee, as a good and honest book, and acknowledging publicly for the first time in his life that he had been terribly wrong.”94 Rafael Rojas explains the Columbia sociologist’s cognitive dissonance as follows: “Mills’s book was published in the midst of the revolutionary government’s communist evolution, which forced the author to confront reality in the face of his insistence that the Cuban leaders were not communists.”95

But as Rojas also points out, Mills’s main argument in Listen, Yankee—one not taken as seriously at the time as it should have been—is that the New Left should not delay supporting the Cuban Revolution until it took a clear ideological stance, because by supporting it now, the American Left could prevent Cuba from being swallowed up by the Soviet orbit of influence.96 Further, it could avert on the island the formation of a socialist power elite, which Mills had warned about in The Causes of World War Three. But, by year’s end 1961, it was too late for anyone north of the Rio Grande to listen—and much too late to act, responsibly.