CHAPTER EIGHT

Confronting the Enemy

C. Wright Mills was no stranger to controversy, inside or outside of American academic sociology. Throughout the 1950s—in books such as White Collar, The Power Elite, The Causes of World War Three, and The Sociological Imagination—he had distinguished himself as one of the foremost dissident intellectuals of postwar America, and an outspoken critic of big business and mass society, of U.S. foreign policy and national security strategy.

Although he remained the quintessential North American throughout his life, Mills had an ostentatious disdain of everything “Made in America.” He was especially indignant toward academic social scientists who were uncritically accepting of what he called the “Great Celebration” of U.S. society without addressing its cultural deficiencies. But his was no simpleminded negativism; indeed, he was always critically concerned with the preservation of the democratic tradition in the United States.

It is significant that Mills wrote the aforementioned books at a particular time in U.S. history: “in the age of the atom bomb and Eisenhower, the Cold War and McCarthy, at the twilight of Stalinism and the zenith of ‘The American Century.’ ”1 This was an era marked by mass political apathy and widespread conformity, by rabid anticommunism and a stalwart belief in American exceptionalism—all symptoms of a social neurosis expressed audaciously, and sanctimoniously, as national arrogance, particularly toward the United States’ self-proclaimed “backyard,” Latin America. And the Cuban Revolution, as Robert Taber put it starkly, “was and is, above all, a Cuban declaration of independence from the United States.”2

At the dawn of the new decade, Mills was becoming increasingly interested, not in the overdeveloped society but in the hungry-nation bloc; not in the other-directed organizational men in their gray flannel suits, but in the revolutionary barbudos in their olive-green military fatigues. And as he journeyed to countries and focused his researches on issues that, at first glance, appeared to counter U.S. interests, he was increasingly coming to be seen as a security threat by federal authorities, perhaps even as someone who could be gathering intelligence for foreign governments. This, in a pre-Watergate world, when governmental institutions were still largely free from scandal and most North Americans had unwavering faith and trust in those institutions and their representatives. “In the United States,” Jules Dubois underscored to his fellow U.S. citizens in 1959, “we accept the honest official statements issued by the White House, by the Pentagon, or by the FBI.”3

It was against this backdrop that in early 1960 Mills gave a seminar on Marxism at the National University of Mexico, but more suspicious to the security agencies was his visit to the Soviet Union later in the spring, and even more questionable still was his journey to Cuba that summer, a country very much in the throes of revolutionary, and therefore of troubling, zeal. It was to be expected that Mills, like many other U.S. citizens at the time, would come under the close scrutiny of the Federal Bureau of Investigation when a confidential informant—identified only as “T-1” in the FBI files—apprised the New York field office of Mills’s upcoming trip to the USSR. The informant’s identity is not known, but Mike Forrest Keen is perhaps correct in thinking that it was a friend, or more likely a colleague, of Mills at Columbia University.4 In any event, T-1 had detailed information of Mills’s travels plans and other comings and goings. In September, while Mills was intensely working on Listen, Yankee, the same T-1 told the FBI that Mills had visited Cuba the previous month and carried out interviews with Cuban officials, which he intended to publish. T-1 also said that Mills was planning a series of five programs to be broadcast on a U.S. or British radio broadcasting station to be called “Dear Yankee” or “Listen Yankee.”5

“Mr. Hadley”

In this context of close monitoring of his movements and inspection of his writings, of confidential informants and FBI surveillance, Mills taped a telephone conversation sometime in the autumn of 1960, while he was still working on Listen, Yankee. Mills’s chat is with a “Mr. Hadley,” doubtless one of the security analysts who had been assigned to his case. Hadley had phoned Mills at this home in West Nyack, a suburb of New York, wanting to arrange a meeting with him in the city. The reasons Hadley gives for requesting the meeting are vague and questionable. Mills is reticent to speak, his responses are short and measured. The recording of that telephonic exchange follows:

MILLS: … Well, that doesn’t matter. Who the hell’s gonna pick that up? Well, anyway, I’m sorry.

HADLEY: Yeah, I [inaudible] that. And you say there’s no way of getting there [West Nyack] by train.

MILLS: Well, you can come by bus to Nyack and get a cab from there. It’s not very far. You take a …

HADLEY: Well, that seems like a rather slow and arduous journey. You don’t expect to be in New York, I take it.

MILLS: No, I couldn’t possibly do that. I’m tied down with this manuscript [Listen, Yankee].

HADLEY: Uh-huh. Well, what if we try to make it next time in New York, which I’ll be back, oh, in about three or four weeks.

MILLS: Well, that’s alright with me. I wish you’d tell me what you wish to see me about though. I haven’t got it clear at all.

HADLEY: Well, the [inaudible] now. I’m talking on another phone from work. I’ve worked for the last three and a half years in the executive decision-making branches of the government. Essentially my background is in psychology and mathematics and I’ve been working very precatory in psychological warfare and so forth. I’m a member on a number of committees of the government which is technically responsible for policy and in the capacity as one of the members [inaudible]. I’ve met and I have sat in committee meetings. I’ve been involved with a sufficient number of the agencies. I know in general how they work and how decisions are created and generated. I have thought for a while that I would like to write a book about it. However, I’ve given long consideration and decided that it would be rather risky for me to do it. I feel that there are certain things which are worth saying about the issue of power relationships and how decisions are formulated and how they’re made.

MILLS: Well, your interest in this and in seeing me is then academic only.

HADLEY: Yes, only.

MILLS: Uh-huh.

HADLEY: I’d like to pass some information on to someone.

MILLS: What information?

HADLEY: Information concerning the way these things are done.

MILLS: Yeah.

HADLEY: Which I think is essentially your interest.

MILLS: Well, that’s one of them, yeah.

HADLEY: Seeing as some of these things are said, which I feel that I cannot personally say.

MILLS: Yeah.

HADLEY: With the understanding, of course, that [inaudible] you would not divulge any of this information.

MILLS: Well, I never have when I’ve talked to the United States government or any other government, and I’ve done a lot of that in the kind of work I’ve done for my publications.

HADLEY: In terms of your interest in Cuba, I might add that I was present at policy formulating sessions concerning Cuba.

MILLS: Uh-huh.

HADLEY: So let me correct this. If there is anything that I would pass on to you, it would be of a nonclassified nature.

MILLS: Yeah, sure.

HADLEY: But I believe there’s a great deal to be said that does not involve security information.

MILLS: Well, I don’t need or want any security information, Mr. Hadley.

HADLEY: I’ll tell you, of course, I do not provide anyone with that.

MILLS: Yeah. What is your position now with the federal government?

HADLEY: I am the staff assistant in the executive branch of government.

MILLS: Well, what branch of government?

HADLEY: This, I’m sorry [chuckles], is classified information.

MILLS: Well, are you speaking to me with the knowledge of your superiors?

HADLEY: No, I’m not.

MILLS: Uh-huh.

HADLEY: No, I’m not.

At this point Mills invites Hadley to visit him in West Nyack and gives him several options for taking public transportation from New York City and instructions on getting to his house. They agree to meet the following afternoon. Hadley ends the conversation by saying, “I would like to speak with you about some of these things, with, of course, the clear understanding that you’ve never heard of me, you see.”

At whatever point Hadley made contact, by November 8 the FBI office in New York was instructed not to initiate an active investigation of Mills or of Listen, Yankee because “investigation of Mills, an author and college professor, under these circumstances would appear undesirable and might result in embarrassment to the Bureau.”6

FBI Surveillance

A few weeks earlier, the FBI had obtained a mimeographed copy of the manuscript to Listen, Yankee from publisher Ian Ballantine. The special agent in the New York office, perhaps the enigmatic “Mr. Hadley,” described the document as “an artfully written piece of pro-Castro and pro-communist propaganda, handled in a competent manner and easily readable style, it is highly likely to become a factor in disarming and confusing public opinion in this country and persuading unwary elements of the reading public to a viewpoint contrary to what he understands as the established outlook of the United States regarding the current Cuban regime.”7 Special Agents in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., also obtained mimeos and submitted their assessment.

Also around this time, someone from the Bureau approached Ian Ballantine in order to convince him to solicit proposals from other writers who would refute the arguments in Listen, Yankee. Ballantine adroitly handled the matter by telling the FBI that it would be able to pursue such a project in a more effective and sophisticated manner than he could himself.8

Mills knew full well that Listen, Yankee would be provocative—indeed, the book’s front cover posted, and boasted, that it was “The Outspoken, Controversial Book about what is Really Happening in Cuba”—and Mills knew that it was “in for much clobbering.”9 Nevertheless, he was compelled to put it out and take the consequences. But had he allowed himself to become so captivated by the revolutionary fervor of the Cubans he interviewed that he lost all sense of perspective and overly identified with their cause? It was reported that in the Social Stratification course he was teaching at Columbia University during the 1960 fall term, he told his students: “I don’t know what you guys are waiting for. You’ve got a beautiful set of mountains in those Rockies. I’ll show you how to use those pistols. Why don’t you get going?”10 By the following spring he was indeed issuing a call to arms. Several days after the Bay of Pigs, Mills wired a telegram from London to a Fair Play for Cuba prorevolutionary demonstration in San Francisco, where 2,000 demonstrators marched from Union Square to the Federal Building. Mills requested that his statement be read at the rally and told the crowd that: “Kennedy and company have returned us to barbarism. Schlesinger and company have disgraced us intellectually and morally. I feel a desperate shame for my country. Sorry I cannot be with you. Were I physically able to do so, I would at this moment be fighting alongside Fidel Castro.”11

The same month that Listen, Yankee was issued, Mills received his first death threat in the form of an anonymous letter informing him that an operative disguised as a South American would assassinate him on his next visit to Cuba, to which he expected to return in early 1961.12 “I received an anonymous letter,” Mills confided to Carlos Fuentes, “it says that if I continue to defend Cuba, I should take care that my daughter does not meet with an accident.”13 He also got threatening phone calls at his home from Los Tigres, a paramilitary group founded by Rolando Masferrer, and from other counterrevolutionary organizations of Cuban exiles in the United States.14 Given the increasing dangers that confronted him and his family, Mills purchased a gun for their protection.15

Another menacing letter from a self-described “ordinary private American citizen,” addressed to Mills with the salutation of “Listen, Communist,” quotes a passage from Listen, Yankee (189) in which Mills cautions against the genteel mannerisms of U.S. spokesmen concerning Cuban grievances about the United States. The writer informs Mills that he can see “through your masterly deceitful arguments in favor of a peaceful co-existence by the U.S. in the Cuban situation.” Copies of the letter, mailed from Miami, were sent to President Eisenhower, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, CIA director Allen Dulles, U.S. senator John F. Kennedy (D-MA), and U.S. senator George Smathers (D-FL), a persistent critic of Castro. The writer accuses Mills of wanting to overthrow the United States by force and violence and asks if Listen, Yankee is “legal.”16

Similar letters addressed to Hoover about Mills and Listen, Yankee were quite common. One such missive from Plainview, Nebraska, was apparently written by a local teacher distressed about books and magazines in libraries that posed a “great danger in spreading communism from the shelves.” Of particular concern in this regard were Norman Cousins’s Dr. Schweitzer of Lambaréné and the Saturday Review magazine, of which Cousins was editor. The troubled teacher implied that the good citizens of Plainview were questioning Cousins’s lenient attitude toward communism. The letter also included a newspaper clipping from the Omaha World-Herald that contained another of Jules Dubois’s excoriating assessments of Mills and Listen, Yankee.17 The teacher ends by stating, in obvious reference to the Columbia professor of sociology: “It is too bad that American people cannot look to the educators in our universities as leaders.”18

Upon the publication of Listen, Yankee in November, the previous directive not to actively investigate Mills was lifted, as J. Edgar Hoover ordered a discreet preliminary investigation with a complete background check. The New York field office was to look into whether Mills was being directed or financed by Cuban officials and was engaged in intelligence activity. After an exhaustive investigation, no evidence was found to support any of the allegations. FBI surveillance of Mills’s residence was nevertheless initiated. His movements in the United States and abroad continued to be monitored by both the FBI and the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Mills’s name was ultimately removed from the FBI’s Security Index, the database used to track individuals considered dangerous to national security—but only after his death had been verified by a special agent.

The Debate That Almost Was

After the enormous effort to get out Listen, Yankee, instead of relaxing Mills shifted himself back into high gear to prepare for the nationwide NBC television program The Nation’s Future, in which he was slated to appear.19 The one-hour live show, which had a studio audience and was broadcast from New York City, was moderated by popular talk-show host John McCaffery. The show’s format pitted two internationally recognized public figures against one another as they expressed their different opinions on a specific issue of the day. Wanting to air an episode on U.S. foreign policy in Latin America, NBC contacted the Fair Play for Cuba Committee seeking a speaker, and FPCC convinced Mills, who had become the most sought-after keynoter at their rallies, to take the “pro-Castro” position in the debate. The “anti-Castro” position was to be represented by Mills’s colleague at Columbia Adolf A. Berle Jr., the Kennedy administration’s expert on Latin American affairs.20 The sixty-five-year-old Berle had served as FDR’s ambassador to Brazil and as assistant secretary of state for Inter-American Affairs. But now as a New Frontiersman, Berle was, as journalists Karl Meyer and Tad Szulc put it, “handicapped by his tendency to see current developments through the spectacles of the past.”21 Mills accepted, and the show was scheduled for December 10 at 9:30 p.m., Saturday night, with a viewing audience of about 20 million. A preview summary of the upcoming program read as follows: “9:30–10:30 P.M. (4)—The Nation’s Future. ‘What Should U.S. Policy Be toward Cuba and Latin America?’ Adolf A. Berle Jr., former Assistant Secretary of State and a former U.S. Ambassador to Brazil, has a challenging opponent in tonight’s debate. He’s Professor C. Wright Mills of Columbia, who has recently returned from a tour of Cuba, and uses words like ‘self-defeating’ and ‘self-deceiving’ in his analysis of the course we’ve taken so far.”22

Four general questions were to be addressed: How should we deal with Castro? Have we neglected Latin America? How can we identify with Latin American aspirations? What economic policies will promote Latin America’s development and freedom?23

For an hour before the NBC program was to air, a Miami audience of about one hundred invited representatives of local civic and professional groups would discuss the debate topic at the broadcast studio of a local television station. Featured speakers included a former U.S. attorney for south Florida, a spokesman for an anti-Castro movement, and the seemingly omnipresent Jules Dubois. During the second half of the NBC program, the Miami audience, which was overwhelmingly critical of the Castro regime, was to pose questions to Mills and Berle in New York.24

According to Dan Wakefield, Mills immersed himself in preparation for the debate and alternated between being terribly worried and unsure of himself and being brashly confident. “He seemed to take it as some crucial test that he would either pass or flunk with profound results.”25 Whatever his doubts and trepidations, Mills, at least in public, downplayed the upcoming event, depicting it as just a lot of “program format nonsense” and postured himself as a gutsy and self-assured spokesman for the Cuban Revolution. “All I need,” he told Columbia Daily Spectator news editor Arnold Abrams about his scheduled television appearance, “is twenty minutes by myself in front of the camera. I wouldn’t need any help in that situation. That stage fright business is a lot of nonsense.”26

Bravado aside, Mills was clearly concerned, privately admitting that he had limited knowledge of hemispheric affairs, and spent the month prior to the scheduled debate soliciting information from such Latin Americanists as Fredrick B. Pike, Donald Bray, Ray Higgins, Waldo Frank, and Ronald Hilton. He requested exact information on the hemisphere, on U.S. military supports, and on Berle himself.27 One of those experts who responded to Mills’s appeal was Samuel Shapiro, an assistant professor of history at Michigan State University’s Oakland campus. Shapiro sent Mills sundry materials, including several articles highly critical of U.S. policy toward Cuba that he had written for the New Republic and The Economist. In preparation for Mills’s bout with Berle, Shapiro recommended that the Columbia sociologist put to the diplomat several concrete questions. He was to ask him what specific good he thought the current get-tough U.S. policy on Cuba had accomplished, how he thought he could get rid of Castro, and to name a Latin American regime that was undertaking the land reform program that everybody (including Berle) agreed was necessary. Shapiro listed anticipated rebuttals with which Berle could counter and also recommended several U.S. policy proposals that Mills could advance: send an ambassador back to Havana; avoid menacing military moves in the Caribbean; agree to have Mexico, Brazil, or a committee of the Organization of American States mediate between the United States and Cuba; and in dealing with the Castro government’s expropriation of U.S. investments on the island, use as the model the noninterventionist Good Neighbor policy employed by FDR during the Mexican oil expropriation of 1938. Perhaps just as beneficial to Mills was the moral support Shapiro offered, encouraging him to “keep cool” during the debate; he depicted Berle as a relic—a frustrated would-be politician—who “has no good answers.”28

Mills also had assistance from Saul Landau, who collected for Mills everything he could find on Cuba and Latin America. But Mills was not unschooled on the issues; he had already conducted a vast amount of research and was quite current on the Cuba situation. By October he had a mine of information, which was the result of years of clipping articles from newspapers and magazines and the widest variety of reading. By November he had even more material, as he prepared for his Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) speech, “How to Improve Relations with Cuba and South America.” By early December he had finally completed his preparations, and Mills had about 400 pages of detailed notes with key facts on every South American country; enough, in fact, to write a definitive work on modern Latin America.29

Just as he had in “Escucha otra vez, yanqui” and in the ADA talk, Mills was ready to criticize the clandestine U.S. sponsorship of the Bay of Pigs fiasco; condemn the Kennedy administration, including Berle, for violating the United States’ own laws and treaties in its aggression toward the Cuban nation; excoriate the American press for its collusion in covering up the affair; and offer a pointed critique of past U.S. policy vis-à-vis Latin America. But Berle, who dismissed Mills as no more than “a ranting propagandist,” would have made a most formidable opponent—one not lacking in bluster, and who, as he pugnaciously put it, “was ready to plaster” Mills.30

Despite being on the edge of exhaustion, Mills felt compelled to participate in the broadcast. “It’s my goddamned duty,” he wrote E. P. Thompson, “because nobody else will stand up and say shit outloud, but … I have to. Then the pressure on me because of Cuba, official and unofficial, is mounting. It is very subtle and very fascinating. But also worrisome and harassing.”31 Clearly, the most worrisome and interesting thing for Mills was the unknown, the unforeseen consequences of what could happen to him, personally and professionally, but also, and perhaps more importantly, what would happen to the Revolution he so admired. He told Carlos Fuentes that “what started out as a little 60,000-word pamphlet is becoming a big thing, or at any rate we hope so. God knows what will happen given the monolithic anti-Castro press and opinion in the USA. It is going to be fascinating to see.”32

The much-anticipated televised match between Mills and Berle did not take place, at least not with Mills. He suffered a massive heart attack the evening before the program was to air and had to cancel the engagement. It was a terrible disappointment to him. He was convinced that the debate would have shown Berle’s position to be suicide: “It would present to all the New Frontiersmen a reasonable and logical approach to Cuba and Latin America, a way out of a terrible situation.”33 For his part, rather than show sympathy for a stricken colleague, the self-aggrandizing Adolf Augustus Berle Jr. attributed Mills’s heart attack to Mills being frightened of having to debate him.

At the last minute, Congressman Charles O. Porter, whom Berle regarded as being “on the wooly-headed side,” was called in as a substitute for Mills. Saul Landau curtly describes the result: “Berle waltzed through the debate with Congressman Porter. It was a farce.”34

A Rough Time

Mills knew only all too well that with the publication of Listen, Yankee he was “going to be in for it.” In a letter to Ralph Miliband in early 1961, Mills tells him that, “I’m afraid there is going to come about a very bad time in my country for people who think as I do; and there is some reason to expect that I personally am in for quite a time.”35 But Mills could hardly have anticipated the backlash that was to come. Just a few days before writing to Miliband, and while he was convalescing from his heart attack, the FBI conducted a surveillance of Mills’s house in West Nyack and reported that Igor G. Aleksandrov, head of the Union of Soviet Societies for Friendship and Cultural Relations, had visited him for one hour. Mills had met Aleksandrov on his visit to Moscow the year before.

Around the same time, a defamation lawsuit was filed against Mills and the publishers of Listen, Yankee—Ballantine Books and McGraw-Hill—for a total of $25 million in damages on behalf of Amadeo Barletta, Barletta’s son, and three Cuban corporations in which they owned controlling shares: Ambar Motors (a General Motors car dealership in Havana), the El Mundo Corp (a daily Cuban newspaper), and Telemundo (a television station). The Barlettas’ complaint cited two paragraphs in Listen, Yankee (139–40) in which Mills describes an unnamed Cuban businessman, “a friend of Mussolini,” owner of El Mundo newspaper, radio and television stations, and forty-three other businesses, who had ties “with a general somewhere” and with the Italian Mafia, and who was involved in drug smuggling. Barletta sued on the grounds that he was readily identifiable as the anonymous man and that Mills’s allegations of black-market dealings and mobster associations were false.36

Barletta, Italian by birth, “had indeed a rather dubious international past.”37 All of the facts that Mills gives about Barletta in Listen, Yankee are correct. In 1939 Mussolini had named him as the Italian ambassador to Cuba. The “general somewhere” referred to by Mills was Generalisimo Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, where Barletta had lived. In 1949 Barletta’s Ambar Motors had over thirty auto dealerships in Cuba. He had previously served as sales representative for several major U.S. auto manufacturers on the island. As for his connections with the Italian Mafia, journalist Richard Schweid writes that Barletta, “the man who sold the Italian Mafiosi their Cadillacs … had close ties to the gangsters.”38 According to T. J. English, “with the backing of Cuban and U.S. financial institutions, he accrued a dizzying array of businesses, many of which served as fronts for various criminal rackets in Havana, including the trafficking of narcotics and precious gems.”39 In 1960 Castro expropriated all of Barletta’s businesses, and Barletta was forced into exile with his family.

Saul Landau planned on going to Cuba on behalf of Mills and Ballantine Books to gather facts and documents for defense against the lawsuit. Many of the facts concerning the Cuban government’s accusations of corruption against Barletta had been published in articles in the newspapers Revolución and Diario de la Marina; the documents were kept in the files of the Revolutionary government’s Office for the Recuperation of Stolen Property. But Landau never made it to Cuba, as his passport was denied by the U.S. State Department.

And so Mills did indeed come in for a rough time, but he evoked the sympathy of friends like K. S. Karol: “It made one sad to see this Texan—and I have never met anyone more typical of the free and independent pioneer—up against a solid wall of hostility and vilification.”40 But it wasn’t all a matter of persecution for Mills; there was also adulation, or at least admiration, from Cuba sympathizers. Indeed, he typically received seven to ten letters a day, from people all over the world, thanking him for having written Listen, Yankee (which had now been translated into all major languages). Many of these people inquired: “How can you help me to get to Cuba so I can help Fidel?”41

Mills was now beginning to realize the significance of Listen, Yankee and was increasingly coming “to see [it] as a pivotal book for me, and not merely a pamphlet.”42 But by late April it was time to escape the lawsuits, the criticisms, the surveillance, and the country that he believed was preparing another attack on Cuba. And so Mills and his family departed for the Soviet Union and Europe. That summer, while in Switzerland, he wrote the sixty-page update of Escucha, yanqui that appeared in the third Mexican printing as the appendix titled “Escucha otra vez, yanqui.” In the United States, sales of the book were approaching the half million mark.

That same month, Mills traveled from Switzerland to Paris to meet Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir for dinner at the La Coupole restaurant on the left bank. All three had visited Cuba the previous year—Sartre and Beauvoir in the spring, and then again in the autumn, and Mills during the summer—and speculated about what was happening there at the moment. They acknowledged that the Communist Party members had stepped in to fill the administrative vacuum that existed in the Revolutionary government and about which Mills had so assiduously inquired in his Cuba interviews (see Interviews 1, 6, and 7). Unfortunately, the party contained a clique led by Aníbal Escalante, whom Sartre and Beauvoir had considered “a pompous imbecile” when they met him in 1960 and whose “sectarianism and opportunism,” they believed, were threatening the Castro regime.43 Sartre expressed disenchantment with the direction the Revolution was taking.44 “But don’t you think Fidel will keep it straight and honest?” inquired Mills. The French philosopher stated that Castro was a great and honest man, but as the Revolution was forced into an ideological rigidity he would lose some of his power, and the sectarians and the United States would then drive Cuba into the Soviet orbit.45 Mills remained optimistic or, perhaps more likely, hopeful, that the Cuban leader’s originality would be strong enough to allow the Revolution to retain its many good elements. The conversation then turned to the Kennedy administration, which Mills described as a “liberal obfuscation.” Sartre wanted to know how Mills explained the Kennedy administration in terms of the power-elite thesis. Mills stated that the Cold War liberals who dominated the cabinet demonstrated the triumph of the political elite over the businessmen and generals. However, he predicted that, despite a few minor disagreements on domestic issues, there would be no fundamental falling out between the three circles of power, and “on foreign policy the intellectuals are, if anything, more fanatical and doctrinaire anti-Communists than the businessmen and generals.”

K. S. Karol, who was at the meeting to translate for Mills and Sartre, adds that Mills wished to go to Havana to plead with Castro. He hoped to take several nonaligned European intellectuals who were respected in Cuba (whom Karol does not name). Mills expressed that Castro should not be attacked or questioned in regard to his choice of socialism; rather Mills and the European intellectuals would warn Castro about identifying too closely with the Soviet system. As it turned out, the intellectuals either told Mills that the trip to see Castro was too premature, since nothing serious had happened, or that it was much too late for appeals, since Castro had already made up his mind and would act accordingly, no matter what. Not wanting to travel alone to Cuba, Mills gave up on the whole idea. “Meanwhile,” Karol wrote, “what scraps of news reached us from Cuba during the latter half of 1961 served merely to confirm our worst fears”—that it was rapidly being turned into Stalinist quagmire.46

Ironically, just a few days after Mills, Sartre, and Beauvoir met in Paris, Fidel Castro gave his historic address “Words to Intellectuals” in the auditorium of Havana’s National Library to a group of artists and writers of the Cuban cultural apparatus. In it he articulated his famous dictum intended to define the cultural revolution in Cuba and that pertained to freedom of artistic expression: “Within the Revolution, everything; against the Revolution, nothing.” Castro told his audience, which included members of the National Council of Culture and representatives of the government, that politically progressive writers from abroad who had previously visited Cuba—and in this context he specifically names Sartre and Mills—had persistently raised to him the fundamental question of cultural freedom. But he had been at a loss as to how to answer them given that a national artistic policy concerning the cultural revolution had, at that time, not yet assumed a clear-cut political form, had not yet become institutionalized.47 Indeed, Mills captured this undetermined position on revolutionary culture in Listen, Yankee as follows: “We want our new cultural establishments to be part of our revolution, and so, like the revolution itself, we want them to be free and useful and beautiful and fluent. So we are thinking about it now, debating quietly among ourselves this great social problem of culture, of art, of literature, of the cinema.”48 After 1961, however, that ambiguity and inchoate ideology had crystallized, as it became increasingly apparent that all aesthetic and intellectual creations were to be adjudged as being within or outside the interests and boundaries of the Revolution by none other than the Maximum Leader himself.

Some four years after that Paris luncheon, Sartre too presumably gave up the idea of appealing to Castro. According to Juan Arcocha, in 1965 Arcocha described to the French thinker the desperate circumstances of censorship in which Cuban writers found themselves. Arcocha requested that Sartre travel to Cuba as, to his thinking, Sartre was the only one capable of explaining to Castro, with the likelihood that he would listen, that his cultural policies were having disastrous consequences. “He will pay me no heed,” Sartre replied, uninterestedly. At which point, Simone de Beauvoir added, presumably speaking for both of them: “In reality we have no desire to return to Cuba. We know that things are not going well there. Another trip there would surely bring us face to face with a great disappointment, and we want to keep the marvelous impression we had of Cuba the first time.… In other words, we want to maintain the vivid memories of the Revolution’s honeymoon period.”49 Arcocha was devastated; he found Beauvoir’s comments horribly “touristic.” What he had proposed to them was not a pleasure trip, and he was deeply disappointed. “I came to the conclusion,” states Arcocha acidly, “that those intellectuals that I had put up on a pedestal were nothing more than distinguished tourists. I burned my idols and never saw them again.”50

But, in August 1961, Arcocha did see Mills again, when Mills and his family arrived in Moscow, where Arcocha was now stationed as correspondent for Revolución.51 Arcocha interviewed Mills about the significance for the United States of the abortive CIA invasion at the Bay of Pigs. His reply was a scathing indictment of Kennedy and the liberal theorists and apologists—Schlesinger and Berle, in particular—who made up his brain trust: “First, … Yankee officials are incapable of listening. They are doctrinaire. They believe what they think they must believe, which means they are often mistaken concerning international questions. But the great consequence of the invasion of Cuba was that it served to unmask Kennedy’s ‘liberalism.’ The liberalism of this ambitious and impetuous young man is not so much a series of moral principles as a mere hollow rhetoric.”52

After their four-month tour of Europe and the USSR, the Millses returned to New York in January 1962. The following month, Kennedy ordered a total embargo against Cuba (but only after taking personal delivery of 1,200 Cuban cigars), and it was clear that the Revolution had become Sovietized. Castro had, at last, come to embrace orthodox historical materialism—the “vulgar” variety of Marxism that Mills had feared: statist, bureaucratic, and dogmatic. All of this was an enormous weight on Mills; “the decline of the revolution, atop his personal pains, was too much” writes Harvey Swados, who saw Mills for the last time in France just before Mills’s departure from Europe.53

A Cautious Assessment

It is altogether appropriate, by way of conclusion, to render a cautious assessment of Mills’s views on the Revolution that he so admired. In so doing, I address three major concerns. The first pertains to Mills’s reading of the Revolution’s ideological direction, particularly in regard to Cuba’s relationship with the Soviet Union. The second raises the question of whether Mills was veraciously reporting on the situation in Cuba, or was he, in fact, projecting his own hopes onto the Revolution? Third, since this has, in large measure, been an analysis of Listen, Yankee, it is important to inquire more closely as to what part of the book reflects the views of the Cuban revolutionaries whom Mills interviewed and what part reflects Mills’s own ideas.

Through early 1961 the governments of Havana and the Kremlin continued to make significant gestures for mutual gain that were increasingly bringing their two countries into closer alignment—diplomatically as well as ideologically. For example, between January and April of that year, a parade of Soviet weapons was held in Havana, it was announced that Russia would send 1,000 experts to the island to help organize “people’s farms,” Cuba’s ambassador to Moscow stated that the Cuban people were “Communistic,” and Castro was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize. In addition, during that same period, the Castro government took several draconian measures in dealing with counterrevolutionary activities inside the country: 500 armed men who opposed the Revolutionary regime were captured and imprisoned; moreover, two of Castro’s former military aides and several counterrevolutionaries were executed in Havana for treason. Despite these and other expressions of Soviet alliance and acts of political repression by the Revolutionary government, as late as the summer of 1961 Mills had expressed to Jean-Paul Sartre his confidence that Castro, and perhaps only Castro, could keep the Revolution “straight and honest”—particularly if he, Mills, personally cautioned Castro against the dangers of Sovietizing the Revolution. Why did Mills continue to hold out hope that the Comandante would not embrace communism? And why, even after Castro’s televised address of December 1961 in which he declared that he was a Marxist-Leninist (a euphemism for Communist), was Mills willing to defend him before an American public that until recently had been grievously afflicted by a Cold War nationalistic paranoia? The answer is as simple as it is complex: because Mills so closely identified with Castro, in outlook and disposition, that Mills, who was never a communist, could not therefore easily accept that his alter-ego could truly be a communist. Only during the last two months of his life would Mills finally be able to allow for the fact that the Pearl of the Antilles had become a dedicated Soviet outpost.

But did Mills’s close identification with the personage of Fidel Castro unduly influence his perspective concerning the Revolution that Castro led? In the opening pages of The Marxists, Mills famously proclaims, “I have tried to be objective. I do not claim to be detached.”54 This pronouncement became the aphorism for which Mills is best known, given that it was perennially inscribed on his gravestone. But more than an aphorism, it was a research methodology and a life principle that allowed Mills to be both partisan and objective in his attempt to ascertain what was happening in Cuba and report it to the U.S. public. For Mills, objective truth, the politics of truth, meant that he was duty bound to reveal the facts of the Revolution through eyewitness, real-time testimony. But as a public intellectual he was also morally bound to practice a politics of responsibility, to defend the potential for a true democratic freedom. This was a freedom that was coming into existence in Cuba for the first time in its history and that would presumably allow the Cuban people to determine their own life chances. Cuba under the Revolution, Mills believed, was transforming into a properly developing society where the Cubans would “know where they stand, where they may be going, and what—if anything—they can do about the present as history and the future as responsibility.”55 It may be said, therefore, that Mills both accurately reported the truth about Cuba as he saw it as well as bestowed his convictions and values onto its Revolution. In short, he was objective—scholarly and rigorous in his methodology—and also engaged.

Lastly, and related, it must be determined if there is any portion of Listen, Yankee that expresses Mills’s own beliefs and sentiments independent of those of his interlocutors. Given Mills’s personal identification with Castro and his principled engagement with the Revolution, it is inevitable that these would somehow influence his research focus, the questions he asked, the information he opted to include, his interpretation of the facts, and his ultimate analysis of the Cuban situation. But as to whether Mills accurately and faithfully conveyed the collective message of the Cubans he interviewed, the answer is an unqualified yes. This is confirmed in Appendix 1 of this volume, where some passages from the interviews are compared with corresponding passages from Listen, Yankee. But it is also the case that Mills’s power-elite thesis, which he applied to the situation in Cuba, can be seen as an undercurrent that drives the message of Listen, Yankee. This, despite the fact that the thesis was not expressly articulated by any of his interviewees. It was, instead, a conceptualization that Mills infused into the contrived letters that he crafted in the words of the Cuban revolutionary. While Mills’s interviewees were painfully aware of the immense influence that the U.S. monopolies, the military missions, and the Eisenhower administration had had over their country (and at least one of them—Franz Stettmeier—was familiar with The Power Elite), they did not explicitly indicate that this influence was due to the machinations of an interlocking coalition of U.S. decision makers.

In the final analysis, Mills did tell the truth about Cuba. Not the whole truth, just the plain truth.

He Died Fighting

Mills died of heart failure on March 20, 1962, at his home in West Nyack, New York, at the age of forty-five. On the door of his study was emblazoned the slogan of the Cuban Revolution: Venceremos [We shall overcome].

In the end, there is perhaps no epigraph more apt in portraying C. Wright Mills and his convictions to the Cuban Revolution than the one penned by his friend, Carlos Fuentes:

[Mills] made sure that his ideas mattered in the United States, and for that he was persecuted. He told the truth and he died fighting for it.56