Notes
Introduction
1. C. Wright Mills, Listen, Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba (New York: Ballantine Books, 1960).
2. Saul Landau, “C. Wright Mills: The Last Six Months,” Ramparts, August 1965, 46.
3. Mills, Listen, Yankee, 12.
4. Daniel Geary, Radical Ambition: C. Wright Mills, the Left, and American Social Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 181. Geary says the same of Mills’s The Causes of World War Three.
5. Throughout this book a number of actors involved in the history and politics of Cuba, and in Mills’s professional life, are mentioned, some of whom will be generally recognizable, others not. For a fuller description of their identities and roles, the reader is directed to the Biographical Notes located toward the end of this volume.
Chapter 1
1. C. Wright Mills, Listen, Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba (New York: Ballantine Books, 1960), 9.
2. C. Wright Mills, Clarence Senior, and Rose Kohn Goldsen, The Puerto Rican Journey: New York’s Newest Migrants (New York: Harper and Bros., 1950).
3. Rafael Rojas, “El aparato cultural del imperio. C. Wright Mills, la Revolución Cubana y la Nueva Izquierda,” Perfiles Latinoamericanos 44 (2014): 13.
4. See C. Wright Mills, “The Sailor, Sex Market, and Mexican,” The New Leader 26 (1943): 5.
5. Preliminary draft, “Listen, Yankee,” undated, Box 5S17, Charles Wright Mills Papers, 1934–1965, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, the University of Texas at Austin.
6. Leo Huberman and Paul W. Sweezy, Cuba: Anatomy of a Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1960), 95. There are some superficial resemblances in terms of personal style between Huberman and Sweezy’s book and Listen, Yankee. For example, like Mills, they insert themselves into the narrative and address the reader directly: “Please do not misunderstand us” (p. 89), and use similar verbiage: “it is being built—at breakneck speed” (100); “about what is really going on in Cuba” (193).
7. Raúl Roa Kourí, En el torrente (Havana: Casa de las Américas, 2004), 130.
8. Ibid., 77.
9. As important as the books Mills consulted in preparation for his research is the book he did not consider or, in any event, does not mention in the Notes and Acknowledgments in Listen, Yankee: Ruby Hart Phillips, Cuba: Island of Paradox (New York: McDowell, Obolensk, 1959). The New York Times Havana bureau chief, Phillips had lived on the island for decades. She had cordial relations with Fulgencio Batista and Fidel Castro—both of whom found her likeable (indeed, at one point during 1958 Castro sent her a wild mountain orchid, which he had delivered to her office). Compared with the aforementioned books, this one, which covers events up to the spring of 1959, takes a more balanced approach in recounting the insurrection and earliest days of the Revolution. Phillips soon thereafter became highly critical of the Castro government and left the island for good in 1961.
10. Irving Louis Horowitz, C. Wright Mills: An American Utopian (New York: The Free Press, 1983), 295.
11. Robert Taber, M-26: Biography of a Revolution (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1961), 318.
12. Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills, Character and Social Structure: The Psychology of Social Institutions (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1953), 445.
13. C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), 198–224.
14. C. Wright Mills, The Causes of World War Three (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1958).
15. These events were narrated to me by Raúl Roa Kourí in an e-mail communication on January 27, 2016.
16. David L. Strug, “Witnessing the Revolution: North Americans in Cuba in the 1960s,” International Journal of Cuba Studies 4 (2012).
17. Rafael Rojas, “Anatomía del entusiasmo: la revolución como espectáculo de ideas,” América Latina Hoy 47 (2007). See also Paul Hollander, Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba, 1928–1978 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981); Kepa Artaraz, Cuba and Western Intellectuals since 1959 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
18. Michael B. Conant, “Reception at the Theresa,” Columbia Owl, October 5, 1960, 1, 4.
19. Fernando Martínez Heredia, “El mundo ideológico Cubano de 1959 a marzo de 1960,” in Sartre-Cuba-Sartre: Huracán, surco, semillas, ed. Eduardo Torres-Cuevas (Havana: Imagen Contemporánea, 2005), 219.
20. Stephen Fay, “Liminal Visitors to an Island on the Edge: Sartre and Ginsberg in Revolutionary Cuba,” Studies in Travel Writing 15 (2011): 408.
21. David Caute, The Fellow-Travelers: Intellectual Friends of Communism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973), 405. And it was Mills’s Listen, Yankee, in particular, that, at least to some extent, “helped mobilize pro-Cuba and anti-intervention support.” Saul Landau, “From the Labor Youth League to the Cuban Revolution,” in History and the New Left: Madison, Wisconsin, 1950–1970, ed. Paul Buhle (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 112. Rojas sees both Mills and Sartre not only as spectators but, more importantly, and dangerously, as interpreters of the Cuban Revolution’s “theatre of ideas.” Rojas, “Anatomía del entusiasmo,” 42.
22. Karl E. Meyer and Tad Szulc, The Cuban Invasion: The Chronicle of a Disaster (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1962), 19.
23. Juan Arcocha, “El viaje de Sartre,” in La Habana, 1952–1961: El final de un mundo, el principio de una ilusión, ed. Jacobo Machover (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1995), 231.
24. Carlos Franqui, Family Portrait with Fidel: A Memoir, trans. Alfred MacAdam (New York: Random House, 1984), 68. Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were in Cuba from February 22 to March 20, 1960. They spent many days with Castro and an evening with Guevara, speaking with him (in French) for several hours. About Guevara, Sartre declared that “he was not only an intellectual, but also the most complete human being of our age.” Marianne Sinclair, Viva Che!: Contributions in Tribute to Ernesto “Che” Guevara (London: Lorrimer Publishing, 1968), 102.
A few months later, in October, the French couple returned to the island nation and met with workers, civil servants, administrators, and labor leaders, and also with writers and artists. See Jaime Sarusky, “Sartre en Cuba,” in Sartre-Cuba-Sartre: Huracán, surco, semillas, ed. Eduardo Torres-Cuevas (Havana: Imagen Contemporánea, 2005). They found that Havana had changed; Cuba was toughing up, its atmosphere was tense with the expectation of invasion. By late 1960, Sartre could see that “the honeymoon of the revolution was over.” Simone de Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance, trans. Richard Howard (New York: G.P. Putnam, 1965), 291.
25. On this point, see Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “Poet’s Notes on Cuba,” Liberation 6 (1961): 11–12.
26. “The Causes of C. Wright Mills,” KPFA broadcast, October 1, 1962, Pacifica Radio Archives, no. BB0281b.
27. Built as a hotel-casino in 1957 at a cost of $14 million and originally owned by mobster Meyer Lansky, the Riviera was the largest and most glamorous facility of its kind in Havana; it was Lansky’s masterpiece. After the Revolution, as a symbol of mob corruption and unbounded opulence, the Riviera was subjected to great opprobrium: “In an act of revolutionary audacity, campesinos brought into the city a truckload of pigs and set them loose in the lobby of the hotel and casino, squealing, tracking mud across the floors, shitting and peeing all over Lansky’s pride and joy, one of the most famous mobster gambling emporiums in all the world.” T. J. English, Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba and Then Lost It to the Revolution (New York: Morrow, 2007), 305.
28. K. S. Karol, Guerrillas in Power: The Course of the Cuban Revolution, trans. Arnold Pomerans (New York: Hill & Wang, 1970), 10.
29. Mike Forrest Keen, Stalking the Sociological Imagination: J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI Surveillance of American Sociology (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), 175.
30. Robert Taber, “Cuban Viewpoints: Kennedy and C. Wright Mills,” Fair Play, September 2, 1960, 2.
31. Ibid., 2–3.
Chapter 2
1. C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 143–64.
2. There are, quite simply, no unbiased published accounts of the Cuban historical events of insurrection, revolutionary transition, and invasion. Information for the next three sections dealing with these three epochs and occurrences is taken largely from the following conflicting sources: Robert E. Quirk, Fidel Castro (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993); Robert Taber, M-26: Biography of a Revolution (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1961); Jules Dubois, Fidel Castro: Rebel-Liberator or Dictator? (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1959); Ray Brennan, Castro, Cuba, and Justice (New York: Doubleday, 1959); Ruby Hart Phillips, Cuba: Island of Paradox (New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1959); Leo Huberman and Paul W. Sweezy, Cuba: Anatomy of a Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1960); Antonio Rafael de la Cova, The Moncada Attack: Birth of the Cuban Revolution (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007); Karl E. Meyer and Tad Szulc, The Cuban Invasion: The Chronicle of a Disaster (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1962); Jim Rasenberger, The Brilliant Disaster: JFK, Castro, and America’s Doomed Invasion of Cuba’s Bay of Pigs (New York: Scribner, 2011). The most comprehensive and trusted sources of information are Hugh Thomas, Cuba, or The Pursuit of Freedom (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998) and K. S. Karol, Guerrillas in Power: The Course of the Cuban Revolution, trans. Arnold Pomerans (New York: Hill & Wang, 1970).
3. Jean-Paul Sartre, Sartre on Cuba (New York: Ballantine Books, 1961), 20.
4. C. Wright Mills, Listen, Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba (New York: Ballantine Books, 1960), 38.
5. Van Gosse, Where the Boys Are: Cuba, Cold War America, and the Making of a New Left (New York: Verso, 1993), 82.
6. The three North American teenagers who joined the rebel fighters and spent several months in the Sierra Maestra were Michael Garvey, fifteen, of Watertown, Massachusetts; Victor J. Buehlman, seventeen, of Coronado, California; and Charles E. Ryan, nineteen, of Monson, Massachusetts. Garvey and Buehlman returned to the U.S. Naval Base at Guantánamo with Taber, while Ryan stayed on, explaining his involvement: “I figure the fight in Cuba is for the kind of ideals on which the U.S. was set up,” Life, May 27, 1957, 43. Another high-minded U.S. citizen who fought with the rebels was a sailor, Charles W. Barlett Jr., twenty, from Sebastopol, California, who was later court-martialed by the U.S. Navy for going AWOL. But by far the most famous of the North Americans who took up arms against Batista, in the Second National Front in the Escambray Mountains, was the so-called Yanqui comandante, William Alexander Morgan, a twenty-nine-year-old former paratrooper from Toledo, Ohio. See Michael Sallah and Mitch Weiss, eds., The Yankee Comandante: The Untold Story of Courage, Passion, and One American’s Fight to Liberate Cuba (Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2015).
7. Dubois, Fidel Castro, 313.
8. Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills, Character and Social Structure: The Psychology of Social Institutions (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1953), 442–43.
9. Walter Lippmann, “U.S. Latin Policy Bigger Than Cuba,” St. Petersburg Times, January 28, 1960, A1.
10. Gerth and Mills, Character and Social Structure, 441–43. Gerth and Mills are silent on the question of the humanistic revolution—exactly the kind that Mills, and Sartre, sought in Cuba.
11. Huberman and Sweezy, Cuba, 124.
12. Ibid., 77.
13. Phillips, Cuba, 406–7.
14. Intervention is the legal term meaning to take over a property provisionally, pending final expropriation. In practice, there was no difference between legal and extralegal seizures.
15. These were the owners of large estates, many of whom were absentee landlords who rented small plots to the peasants under strict supervision.
16. Rasenberger, The Brilliant Disaster, 40.
17. Gerth and Mills, Character and Social Structure, 444–45.
18. Meyer and Szulc, The Cuban Invasion, 146.
19. Ibid., 153.
Chapter 3
1. C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 132.
2. Robert Taber, M-26: Biography of a Revolution (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1961), 338.
3. Kathryn Mills with Pamela Mills, eds., C Wright Mills: Letters and Autobiographical Writings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 331.
4. As he states in Listen, Yankee, “I cannot give unconditional loyalties to any institution, man, state, movement, or nation. My loyalties are conditional upon my own convictions and my own values.” C. Wright Mills, Listen, Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba (New York: Ballantine Books, 1960), 179.
5. Harvey Swados, “C. Wright Mills: A Personal Memoir,” Dissent 10 (1963): 42.
6. “Try to understand men not as an isolated fragment, not as an intelligible field or system in and of itself. Try to understand men and women as historical and social actors, and the ways in which the variety of men and women are intricately selected and intricately formed by the variety of human societies.” Mills, Sociological Imagination, 158.
7. Ibid., 174.
8. C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), 304.
9. C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951), xv.
10. Ibid., xvi. Exemplary of the “new little man” is the protagonist in Sloan Wilson’s highly popular 1955 novel, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, that faceless, conforming, lonely everyman of mass society:
I’m just a man in a gray flannel suit. I must keep my suit pressed like anyone else, for I am a very respectable young man.… I will go to my new job, and I will be cheerful, and I will be industrious, and I will be matter-of-fact. I will keep my gray flannel suit spotless. I will have a sense of humor. I will have guts—I’m not the type to start crying now. (98)
11. While Guevara did not publicly propose the notion of the “new man” until 1965 in his brief essay, “Man and Socialism in Cuba,” as will be seen below, the ascendancy of the Cuban new man was already being discerned by Mills in 1960.
12. Ché Guevara, Socialism and Man in Cuba and Other Works (London: Stage 1, 1968), 10–11.
13. Ibid., 13.
14. Mills, Listen, Yankee, 43. Emphasis added.
15. Ibid., 142. Emphasis added.
16. C. Wright Mills, The New Men of Power: America’s Labor Leaders (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1948).
17. C. Wright Mills, The Causes of World War Three (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1958).
18. While Mills may have expected that revolutionary Cuba could potentially become a properly developing society, it was still a long way from being a properly developed society. Cuba’s transition into a socialist (and later a Soviet-aligned) state was achieved not through any considered, deliberative democratic process, but through the unreflective imitation of its significant leader. As K. S. Karol explains, “A people that says: ‘If Fidel is socialist, so are we,’ is not really mature enough to build a socialist society; it has only just been admitted to the rank of builder’s apprentice,” Guerrillas in Power: The Course of the Cuban Revolution, trans. Arnold Pomerans (New York: Hill & Wang, 1970), 185.
19. C. Wright Mills, “On Latin America, the Left, and the U.S.,” Evergreen Review 5 (1961).
20. Mills, The Causes of World War Three, 141.
21. Mills, Listen, Yankee, 17. Emphasis added.
22. Ibid., 179.
23. Mills, “On Latin America,” 120. Here Mills uses the term “intelligentsia” in the Eastern-European sense, to mean all cultural workers, including artists and scientists, as well as “intellectuals” in the Western sense.
24. As quoted in Leo Huberman and Paul M. Sweezy, Cuba: Anatomy of a Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1960), 145.
25. As quoted in Natacha Gómez Velásquez, “La presencia de Sartre en las publicaciones Cubanas de la década del 60,” in Sartre-Cuba-Sartre: Huacán, surco, semillas, ed. Eduardo Torres-Cuevas (Havana: Imagen Contemporánea, 2005), 243. Emphasis added.
26. Jean-Paul Sartre, Sartre on Cuba (New York: Ballantine Books, 1961), 89. The typical age of the rebel youth in 1952, when Batista came to power, was between eighteen and twenty-five years old. See Maurice Zeitlin, “Political Generations in the Cuban Working Class,” American Journal of Sociology 71 (1966): 496. The average age of the Council of Ministers in 1960 was thirty-three. See Huberman and Sweezy, Cuba, 92.
27. Huberman and Sweezy, Cuba, 89.
28. C. Wright Mills, “Letter to the New Left,” New Left Review 5 (September–October 1960). In March 1960 Mills stated that he was “trying to develop” the idea of a New Left, but that he “had not yet gotten [it] straight.” Mills, “On Latin America,” 122. After witnessing the Cuban Revolution being made, he had indeed gotten it straight.
29. A. Javier Treviño, The Social Thought of C. Wright Mills (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2012), 173.
30. Mills, “Letter,” 23.
31. One of Mills’s respondents—Elvira Escobar—identified herself as being of the Thirties generation and was later active in the 26th of July Movement. She was forty-eight years old at the time Mills interviewed her (see Chapter 5, Interview 7).
32. Raúl Roa (1907–1982) was a student at the University of Havana and a member of the leftist students’ directorate who revolted against Machado. Jorge Mañach (1898–1961), a writer and politician known for his essay “El Pensamiento Cubano: Su trayectoria” (1932), opposed the Machado and Batista governments, and later the Castro government. Rafael Trejo (1910–1930) was a student leader at the University of Havana and member of the Directorio Estudiantil Universitario who was killed for his opposition to the Machado regime.
33. On this point, see Rafael Rojas, “El aparato cultural del imperio. C. Wright Mills, la Revolución Cubana y la Nueva Izquierda,” Perfiles Latinoamericanos 44 (2014): 13. Ramiro Guerra (1880–1970) was a historian best known for Azúcar y población de las antillas (1935) and for editing the ten-volume Historia de la nación Cubana (1952). Fernando Ortiz (1881–1969) was an anthropologist and ethnomusicologist who coined the term “transculturation” and wrote Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar (1940). Listen, Yankee does thrice mention Cuba’s foremost national hero of independence, José Martí (1853–1895), but only in passing and without reference to any of his works.
34. Stanley Aronowitz, Taking It Big: C. Wright Mills and the Making of Political Intellectuals (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 212.
35. At least three of the interviewees that Mills recorded where held to be intellectuals, as he defined them: Juan Arcocha, Franz Stettmeier, and Elvira Escobar.
36. Daniel Geary, Radical Ambition: C. Wright Mills, the Left, and American Social Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 112.
37. Mills, Sociological Imagination, 205.
38. Saul Landau, “C. Wright Mills: The Last Six Months,” Ramparts, August 1965, 50.
39. Mills, Sociological Imagination, 224.
40. K. Mills with P. Mills, C. Wright Mills, 300–301.
41. Theodore Draper, Castro’s Revolution: Myths and Realities (London: Thames and Hudson, 1962), 8.
42. Mills, Listen, Yankee, 8.
43. Robert Taber, “Cuban Viewpoints: Kennedy and C. Wright Mills,” Fair Play, September 2, 1960, 3.
44. C. Wright Mills, The Marxists (New York: Dell, 1962). Ché Guevara is the only Latin American Marxist Mills refers to in the book.
45. Landau, “C. Wright Mills,” 46.
46. Mills, Listen, Yankee, 11.
47. Mills’s mother spoke fluent Spanish.
48. “The Causes of C. Wright Mills,” KPFA broadcast, October 1, 1962, Pacifica Radio Archives, no. BB0281b.
49. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “Poet’s Notes on Cuba,” Liberation 6 (1961): 12. For Ferlinghetti’s poem “Parade Tirade,” which he dedicated to Mills, see Appendix 2 in this book.
50. Draper, Castro’s Revolution, 8.
Chapter 4
1. On taking power, Castro dismantled the traditional military apparatus and resolved that there would be no colonels or generals in the Rebel Army; the highest rank would be comandante, roughly equivalent to major. In 1976 this custom was abolished and passed to the conventional ranks under the Soviet designation.
2. Basically, two events, long in coming, compelled Arcocha’s defection: Castro’s support of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and Castro’s censorship and imprisonment, in 1971, of the poet Heberto Padilla, which resulted in the cause célèbre known as the “Padilla affair.”
3. Juan Arcocha, Fidel Castro en rompecabezas (Madrid: Ediciones R, 1973), 9. Arcocha seems not to have been at a loss of personages against which to compare Castro. In his most recent metamorphosis (in 1973), Castro, Arcocha opines, was beginning to more closely resemble Walter Ulbricht, a German Communist politician and Stalinist bureaucrat, “a man who would open an umbrella in Berlin whenever it rained in Moscow,” 31.
4. Ibid., 17–18.
5. On this point, see Tad Szulc, “Cuban Television’s One-Man Show,” in The Eighth Art (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962). In an ironic twist on Gil Scott-Heron’s poem that the U.S. civil rights “revolution will not be televised,” Castro’s Revolution was indeed broadcast into the homes of thousands of Cubans throughout the island. As Ruby Hart Phillips bluntly puts it, “This was a televised revolution.” Cuba: Island of Paradox (New York: McDowell, Obolensk, 1959), 404.
6. The Federación Estudiantíl Universitaria (FEU) was formed in 1922 as a student organization that had a great deal of influence in Cuban politics. It was created by Julio Antonio Mella, who later founded the Cuban Communist Party. During the insurrection, the FEU was allied with Castro’s 26th of July Movement.
7. Arcocha is referring to Castro’s first appearance on Cuban television on January 9, 1959, shortly after making his triumphal entry into Havana. Sartre asserts that Castro won the people over from the first time he addressed them: “This nation, satiated with speeches, mistrusted words. Since Fidel has been speaking to them, they haven’t heard a single word. They hear facts, demonstrations, analyses.” Jean-Paul Sartre, Sartre on Cuba (New York: Ballantine Books, 1961), 143.
8. New York Times reporter Tad Szulc saw not sincerity, but rather deception, in Castro’s propagandistic use of television as a political instrument. See Szulc, “One-Man Show.” On the eve of the Revolution, in 1959, there were 400,000 television sets on the Cuban island.
9. After his break with Castro, Arcocha depicted him antithetically to what he had told Mills, writing that “Fidel Castro is, in reality, a cold man.… In regard to what is personally important to him—that is to say, the retention of power—he is a calculating machine.” Fidel Castro, 118.
10. Arcocha would later describe that feeling as follows: “[Castro’s] very presence was electrifying and the television screens were not able to filter the almost hypnotic current that emanated from him.” Fidel Castro, 33.
11. As early as the spring of 1959 Ruby Hart Phillips had noted that the Cuban Communists clearly wielded tremendous influence, not only in the labor unions but also in the Castro government. “In a small country like Cuba,” she pointed out, “determined and dedicated communists can get control of a large number of posts in key positions, thus exerting disproportionate influence.” Phillips, Cuba, 417. Even as steadfast supporter of the new Cuban regime as Ray Brennan noted that the Communist Party had attempted to infiltrate the government and the labor unions immediately after January 1, 1959. Ray Brennan, Castro, Cuba, and Justice (New York: Doubleday, 1959), 275.
12. In this and all others cases reference is made to the Communist Party of Cuba (officially, the Popular Socialist Party, or PSP) that had been founded in 1925 by Julio Antonio Mella. It was not until 1965 that a “new” Communist Party of Cuba, under the leadership of Fidel Castro, was formed.
13. In February 1960 Soviet Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan went to Cuba to establish relations with Castro, making him the first Soviet leader to visit the island after the Revolution. The visit resulted in a trade agreement in which the Soviets would purchase Cuban sugar in exchange for Russian oil. In 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Mikoyan was involved in persuading Castro to allow the removal of the nuclear missiles from the island.
14. The concepts “direct democracy” and “guided democracy” are not synonymous. Arcocha is referring to Sartre’s claim that he found in Cuba, and in the actions of Fidel Castro, a “direct democracy” in which the leader addresses the people concretely and directly, without mediations between the government and the masses. For a rather banal description of how direct democracy works in fact, see the “warm lemonade” episode that Sartre recounts in Sartre on Cuba, 122. By “guided democracy,” Mills may be referring either to the political system set in place in Indonesia in 1957 by President Sukarno or what the American journalist and commentator Walter Lippmann called “the art of persuasion” and “the manufacture of consent.” See Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Free Press, 1997), 158. Given Castro’s use of the electronic media to deliver his policy proposals, it is more likely that, in this interview, Mills had in mind Lippmann’s notion. According to K. S. Karol, it was Sartre, Mills, and the economist Paul A. Baran “who first spoke of direct democracy in Cuba, at a time when Castro was still too busy practicing it to turn it into theory,” Guerrillas in Power: The Course of the Cuban Revolution, trans. Arnold Pomerans (New York: Hill & Wang, 1970), 453. Years later, Arcocha would write that the direct democracy that had so impressed Sartre had ceased to exist in Cuba and had been replaced by “paternalistic and incontrovertible directives” that came “from above.” Fidel Castro, 54.
15. Five months prior to this interview, Eisenhower had approved a secret plan for the CIA to arm and train a force of Cuban exiles to overthrow the Castro government and replace it “with one more devoted to the true interests of the Cuban people and more acceptable to the U.S. in such a manner as to avoid any appearance of U.S. intervention.” “A Program of Covert Action against the Castro Regime,” Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958–1960, Vol. 6, Cuba Document (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of State).
16. On July 9, 1960, Khrushchev had declared that the Soviet Union was prepared to use its intercontinental ballistic missiles to protect Cuba from U.S. military intervention and stated, threateningly, that, “One should not forget that now the United States is no longer at an unreachable distance from the Soviet Union as it was before.” Arcocha’s supposition was, according to Huberman and Sweezy, shared by government leaders who were convinced that “Khrushchev’s pledge of rocket retaliation in case the United States should directly attack Cuba was wholly serious, and they did not believe that the United States would start World War III over Cuba.” Leo Huberman and Paul M. Sweezy, Cuba: Anatomy of a Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1960), 202.
17. The U.S. presidential election was held, three months later, on November 8, with John F. Kennedy winning over Richard M. Nixon.
18. According to Hugh Thomas, the youngest officer in the Rebel Army, Enrique Acevedo, was only sixteen years old (in 1958). Cuba, or the Pursuit of Freedom (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998), 1042.
19. In this case, a more apt translation is “conscientiousness.”
20. Sartre makes a similar point to that of the captain in noting that only in Cuba does the word “rebel” always precede the words “army” and “soldier”—thus, better to pronounce it as one word, all at once, rebelsoldier—because they must always retain their identity of outlaws. Sartre on Cuba, 108.
21. C. Wright Mills, Listen, Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba (New York: Ballantine, 1960), 64. K. S. Karol, who had served in the Russian Red Army and was an expert on China, appears to contradict the captain when he writes: “The Cuban defense force in no way resembles the Chinese, which is the only truly politicized military force in the world. The Cuban army has a classically hierarchic structure and hence is basically authoritarian, even though it serves the people and is headed by former guerrilleros from the Sierra Maestra.” Karol, Guerrillas in Power, 543.
22. Huberman and Sweezy, Cuba, 128.
23. Sartre too was familiar with the situation and describes it thus: The Cuban landowners “are absent; they live in Havana, in New York; they travel in Europe. Their overseers distribute work to day laborers—four months of wages, from December to March. After that, let them go hang themselves elsewhere. They have to live eight months without doing anything. They get into debt, sometimes to the village grocer, sometimes with their boss. Eight months later, when they go back to work, their future salary is consumed in advance by these mercenary loans.” Sartre on Cuba, 31–32. The tiempo muerto, or dead season, was the long period when the field workers and most of the mill hands were idle, and their families hungry.
24. The captain is doubtless referring to, among others, the defecting chief of the Cuban air force, Major Pedro Luis Díaz Lanz, who on July 10 and 14, 1959, testified before the U.S. Senate subcommittee on internal security and gave several “hair-raising” if incoherent and inaccurate accounts of life in Cuba and of communist infiltration at the highest ranks of the Cuban military. See Hugh Thomas, Cuba, 1232; and Jim Rasenberger, The Brilliant Disaster: JFK, Castro, and America’s Doomed Invasion of Cuba’s Bay of Pigs (New York: Scribner, 2012), 26. Others who testified before the U.S. Senate against Castro in 1959 and 1960—most of whom had been ardent Batistianos—include Fidel Castro’s former brother-in-law, Rafael Díaz-Balart, who served as majority leader of the Cuban House of Representatives and as undersecretary of the interior under Batista; Colonel Manuel Antonio Ugalde Carrillo, who had been Batista’s chief of military intelligence and infantry division commander; and Andres José Rivero-Agüero, who replaced Batista as president of Cuba when the latter fled the island.
25. In early 1960, light aircraft with U.S. markings carried out sabotage and small bombing missions in Cuba. There were several firebomb air raids by North American pilots and Cuban exiles on oil refineries, cane fields, and sugar mills in Cuba. Several were killed in crashes, two were captured. The U.S. State Department acknowledged that one plane, shot down by Cuban troops near Matanzas, carrying two North Americans, had taken off from Florida.
26. These details are taken largely from Mary-Alice Waters, ed., Marianas in Combat: Teté Puebla and the Mariana Grajales Women’s Platoon in Cuba’s Revolutionary War, 1956–58 (New York: Pathfinder Press, 2003).
27. Mariana Grajales (1808–1893) was a heroine of Cuba’s wars of independence from Spain.
28. A dozen years later, when Margaret Randall interviewed her, Rielo, still a captain in the Revolutionary Armed Forces, was in charge of the 13,000-acre Turibacoa Vegetable Plan at Güira de Melena, about an hour and a half from Havana. Prior to that she had served in the medical corps, in the General Staff, and at the Military Technical School.
29. Margaret Randall, Cuban Women Now: Interviews with Cuban Women (Toronto: Women’s Press, 1974), 139.
30. Mills, Listen, Yankee, 136.
31. In Listen, Yankee, Mills states that, during the time he was visiting, there were 250 student-volunteers from various countries in Europe and Latin America working at the school city, digging foundations and constructing the buildings. He quotes Rielo welcoming the volunteers saying, “We are so happy. We feel this is the climax of all our years of effort” (149).
32. In late 1959 Rielo married rebel soldier Rafael Cuadrado, and they had spent their honeymoon in the Sierra Maestra while completing their assigned tasks.
33. Matos, who had been one of the leading rebel chiefs in Oriente province during the war, was charged with treason and conspiring against the Revolutionary government and on December 1959 was sentenced to twenty years in the Presidio Modelo on the Isle of Pines. In Listen, Yankee, Mills names him as one of the “defectors”—along with Pedro Luis Díaz Lanz, Raúl Chibás Rivas, Miguel Ángel Quevedo, and Luis Conte Agüero—who deserted the Revolution and Cuba. But in the case of Matos, Mills admits: “That was the biggest blow” (55).
34. This point had previously been made to Mills by Elvira Escobar. See Interview 6 in Chapter 5.
35. Escalona is referring to the Frank País Second Front under the command of Raúl Castro in the Sierra Cristal mountains, about eighty kilometers northeast of Fidel Castro’s Sierra Maestra area of operations. This is to be distinguished from the two independent guerrilla groups—also called Second Front—in the Sierra del Escambray of Las Villas province in central Cuba: the Second Front under the direction of the Directorio Revolucionario (Revolutionary Student Directorate, the militant rebel organization of university alumni and students), led by Faure Chomon, and the Second Front headed by Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo and the North American William Morgan.
36. I have relied almost exclusively on Arcocha’s translation, given that Escalona’s comments are largely inaudible on the recording. I have, however, made a few stylistic changes to Arcocha’s interpreted syntax in order to make it more comprehensible to Anglophone readers.
37. The counterrevolutionary “aggressions” involved the various bombings and acts of sabotage committed on Cuba by the exiles and defectors.
38. Eusebio Mujal was secretary general of the Cuban Confederation of Workers (CTC), the central labor group, from 1947 to 1959, and engaged in the expulsion of Communist labor leaders.
39. Ordered by Batista under the code name “Christmas Gift,” the Bloody Christmas Massacre, as it became known, took place during December 23–26, 1956, in several towns of Oriente province. The bodies of twenty-nine men and boys were left strewn throughout the countryside or left hanging from trees; all were tortured and shot in the back of the neck.
Chapter 5
1. C. Wright Mills, Listen, Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba (New York: Ballantine Books, 1960), 37.
2. Robert Taber attributes this phrase, which Taber defines as “the fear of losing status or the advantage that one had hoped to give one’s children,” to Stettmeier. Robert Taber, M-26: Biography of a Revolution (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1961), 330.
3. Stettmeier’s insights were doubtless influenced by psychoanalytic theory, given that he taught the courses Psychology of the Normal and Abnormal Personality, Introduction to Psychoanalysis, and Psychological Methods in the Exploration of the Unconscious. See Asel Viguera-Moreno and Yisel González-González, “Acercamiento histórico a las prácticas psicológicas en la Universidad de Oriente durante el período prerrevolucionario (1947–1958),” Santiago, Special Issue (2012): 135–51.
4. C. Wright Mills, “On Latin America, the Left and the U.S.,” Evergreen Review 5 (1961): 112.
5. Mills was requesting Castro’s assistance in helping Stettmeier hire British historian E. P. Thompson, whom Mills was recommending for a teaching position at the university. Kathryn Mills with Pamela Mills, eds., C. Wright Mills: Letters and Autobiographical Writings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 315.
6. Literally, “injured ones,” those who were hurt—financially, culturally, or politically—by the revolutionary process.
7. Coup d’état, no! Revolution, yes! Stettmeier is referring to a declaration made by Fidel Castro through Rebel Radio on January 1, 1959, from General Headquarters on the outskirts of Santiago de Cuba before taking the city. The transmission was made just hours after Batista had fled the country, and Castro was only days away from his triumphal entry into Havana. On taking the city, Castro proclaimed the victory of the Cuban Revolution and again gave the cry, Golpe de estado, no! Revolucion, sí!, from the balcony on Santiago de Cuba’s city hall.
8. In part, Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution states that, after the revolution is successful and once their narrow self-interests are met, the bourgeoisie will turn to counterrevolutionary measures. It is therefore up to the workers and peasants to continue an uninterrupted process of revolution:
The dictatorship of the proletariat which has risen to power as the leader of the democratic revolution is inevitably and, very quickly confronted with tasks, the fulfillment of which is bound up with deep inroads into the rights of bourgeois property. The democratic revolution grows over directly into the socialist revolution and thereby becomes a permanent revolution.
Leon Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution (Seattle: Red Letter Press, 2010), 312.
9. Stettmeier is referring to the corrupt prerevolutionary practice of appointing massive numbers of teachers, many of whom received full salaries but did not teach. On the “scandal of idle teachers” during the graft-ridden era of Ramon Grau in the 1940s, see Hugh Thomas, Cuba, or The Pursuit of Freedom (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998), 1133.
10. K. S. Karol explains this same point as follows: “What was at stake was not simply class privilege, but also old habits of thinking and deeply anchored beliefs and prejudices.” Guerrillas in Power: The Course of the Cuban Revolution, trans. Arnold Pomerans (New York: Hill & Wang, 1970), 184.
11. Mills uses the terms “intellectual” and “intelligentsia,” in this and the following interview, seemingly synonymously. In other writings he had previously used the phrase “cultural workmen” to refer to the intellectuals who influenced “the cultural apparatus,” or “all those organizations and milieu in which artistic, intellectual, and scientific work goes on.” See Mills, “The Man in the Middle,” in The Politics of Truth: The Selected Writings of C. Wright Mills, ed. John H. Summers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 175. “Cultural workers”—such as writers, editors, journalists, professors, artists, and scientists—had the power to shape images and ideas of reality and bring about progressive social change. See also Mills, “The Cultural Apparatus,” in Summers, The Politics of Truth.
12. Mills, Listen, Yankee, 111.
13. Ibid., 90.
14. Interestingly, Castro did all of this for a long time—forty-nine years—until his retirement in 2008.
15. Stettmeier is referring to the sixteen articles serialized in the French daily newspaper France-Soir in June and July, 1960. The articles were later reprinted in Spanish in a volume titled Sartre visita a Cuba (Havana: Ediciones R, 1960) and in English as Sartre on Cuba (New York: Ballantine Books, 1961).
16. The Cuban poet Heberto Padilla, writing in Revolución in January 1961, stated that the French philosopher, during his visit, had analyzed the history and peculiarities of the Cubans “with more insight and sound judgment than had two generations of Cubans,” as quoted in Duanel Díaz, “El fantasma de Sartre en Cuba,” Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos 679 (2007): 98.
17. Mills titled chapter 6 of Listen, Yankee, “Revolutionary Euphoria.”
18. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe (New York: Doubleday, 1948).
19. Eisenhower had been president of Columbia University, 1948–1953, during the time Mills was on the faculty there.
20. Stettmeier is referring to the fact that he and his wife, Elvira Escobar, who was a high school teacher during the time in question, were living in a house outside Santiago de Cuba “up the mountain a way, in between the Batista army and the rebel soldiers.” Mills, Listen, Yankee, 37. Indeed, Stettmeier and Escobar were living as quiet, respectable, middle-class citizens, owners of a medical clinic in Santiago, while also aiding the rebels through the underground support network.
21. Mills, Listen, Yankee, 37.
22. Taber, M-26, 88.
23. Jules Dubois, Fidel Castro: Rebel-Liberator or Dictator? (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1959), 158.
24. The “History Will Absolve Me” speech that Castro made at his trial on October 16, 1953.
25. Perhaps so-called in reference to the Thirty-eighth Parallel, the pre-Korean War political boundary between North Korea and South Korea. In this sense, Escobar’s house served as the demarcation between fighting forces: to the north, in the mountains, were the Fidelistas, to the south, the Batistianos.
26. This was the popular uprising in Santiago de Cuba led by Frank País. The uprising was timed to support the landing on Cuba’s southeastern coast by Fidel Castro and his expeditionary force that had journeyed from Mexico with him on the Granma.
27. Frank País was shot on July 30, 1957, by the Santiago police.
28. The Agrarian Reform Law of 1959 and Decree-Law 135. In pre-Revolutionary Cuba fewer than 3,000 people owned more than 70 percent of the land. The Agrarian Reform Law gave land to the poverty-stricken peasants who worked it. Decree-Law 135, which was part of the urban reforms, introduced price control: it cut rents by 50 percent and sold all apartments to their tenants and reduced telephone and electricity rates.
29. A month before this interview took place, José Miró Cardona resigned his post as Cuban ambassador to Spain, rejecting Castro’s government, and went into exile in October. In Listen, Yankee, Mills names several defectors, including Miró Cardona (incorrectly listing his previous post as “a former ambassador to the United States”), “with money in the banks all over” who “thought he should have been made the President of Cuba,” 55.
30. At the time Roa was foreign minister of Cuba.
31. Raúl Roa Kourí had been instrumental in organizing Mills’s stay in Cuba and was familiar with Mills’s work, given that he had been a student at Columbia University.
32. The Partido Socialista Popular (PSP).
33. Escobar may here be referring to Paquito Rosales, the first Communist mayor (of Manzanillo) in Cuba in 1940.
34. The first soviets, or organs of popular power, were established in August 1933 by the Communist Party in various provincial sugar centers throughout the island.
35. In April 1959, Fidel Castro accepted an invitation from the American Society of Newspaper Editors to visit the United States. On that trip he also met with Vice President Richard Nixon. His brother, Raúl, telephoned Fidel and told him that people in Cuba were accusing him of selling out to the Americans. See Robert E. Quirk, Fidel Castro (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 242. This may have been the reason why Escobar is saying that the immature young man became a communist.
36. The Servicio de Inteligencia Militar, or SIM, was a secretive military intelligence service created in 1934 for the purpose of monitoring the internal movements of the armed forces. After Batista’s military coup in 1952 the SIM’s function was expanded to include clandestine surveillance of all civilian activities.
37. Sacerdote, or priest. Cura is a mildly pejorative term. Mills expresses this sentiment in Listen, Yankee as follows: “The very word for ‘clergy’ used so frequently in Cuba is not a very good word” (62). Cuban anticlericalism was not anti-Catholicism, rather it had more to do with the fact that, of the approximately 1,000 priests on the island, about 800 were not Cuban at all; they were from Franco’s Spain.
38. At some point during that same summer of 1960, Mills, in a series of autobiographical “letters” that he was preparing for a manuscript to be called Contacting the Enemy, wrote the following: “I was an Irish altar boy before I reached the age of consent, … I never revolted from it [Catholicism]; I never had to. For some reason, it never took.” K. Mills with P. Mills, C. Wright Mills, 313. Sartre tells of a similar experience, of revolutionary leader Enrique Oltuski, who was Jewish, joining the 26th of July Movement “as a result of a religious crisis which alienated him from his family and himself.” Sartre on Cuba, 54.
39. Rafael Trejo was the first student martyred in 1930 as a result of President Machado’s repression.
40. Escobar’s comments bear out the popular notion that Cubans “speak very highly of the revolutionary generation of the ’30s, sadly of the hopeless generation that took over, and enthusiastically of the next, which rediscovered the path of victorious revolution under Castro.” Karol, Guerrillas in Power, 109.
41. Latifundista, owner of a large estate. Siquitrillada was a popular term used after the Revolution to refer uniquely to the dispossessed situation of those whose large landholdings had been expropriated by the Castro government. It refers to the landowners having been financially ruined. Here Escobar uses the term as an adjective, “harmed.” Arcocha has some difficulty translating the word for Mills but Escobar can be heard in the background explaining it as rota (broken) and afectada (affected).
42. C. Wright Mills, Clarence Senior, and Rose Kohn Goldsen, The Puerto Rican Journey: New York’s Newest Migrants (New York: Harper and Bros., 1950).
43. Rose Kohn Goldsen, “Mills and the Profession of Sociology,” in The New Sociology: Essays in Social Science and Social Theory in Honor of C. Wright Mills, ed. Irving Louis Horowitz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 90.
44. Theodore Draper, Castro’s Revolution: Myths and Realities (London: Thames and Hudson, 1962), 21.
45. Mills, Listen, Yankee, 48.
46. Leo Huberman and Paul M. Sweezy, Cuba: Anatomy of a Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1960), 127.
47. Thomas, Cuba, 1108–9.
48. For a description of the ranch, see Robert Taber, “Cuban Viewpoints: Kennedy and C. Wright Mills,” Fair Play, September 2, 1960.
49. The Rousseau in question may have been the lawyer Enrique Rousseau, who later emigrated to the United States and, in 1969, married American socialite and fashion designer Lilly Pulitzer. Rousseau, who, as an exile, took part in the Bay of Pigs invasion, was so aristocratic that he “reportedly took a tent, cigars, and a houseboy” to the invasion. Barbara Marshall, “How Lilly Became Lilly!,” Palm Beach Post, April 7, 2013, http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/news/local/how-lilly-became-lilly/nXFdF/.
50. Sartre, Sartre on Cuba, 76.
51. The first answer Elba Batista gave, of being thirty-eight years old, was probably correct: she married at fourteen, was then married for nine years, and had been divorced fourteen years.
52. Arcocha translates this as, “She does not like to sit down.”
53. Mills uses a word that is not quite accurate in Spanish. He means to refer to the ranch or farm. And rather than rancho, finca, or granja, he says ranchera.
54. Batista uses the slang word pa’lante, popular in some Caribbean Spanish-speaking countries. It is a shortened version of para adelante, which can be conveyed as “to move forward,” “to go ahead,” or “onward.” At this point Arcocha explains to Mills that it is a difficult word to translate.
55. A distance of about ten kilometers.
56. Though Elba Batista was not a patient of Dr. Vallejo’s, it is not surprising that she knew him. After working with the United Nations in 1945, caring for victims of World War II in Germany, Vallejo returned to Cuba and was made director of a hospital in Manzanillo, where he came up against the corrupt politics of the hospital administration. As a result, he opened his own clinic, La Caridad, where he took a social and humanitarian approach in the treatment of all patients, regardless of their ability to pay. At the end of 1956, he converted the clinic into a clandestine aid station where he attended to those wounded in the armed struggle against the dictatorship. The clinic was ransacked by Batista forces, and Vallejo subsequently joined the Rebel Army, providing medical services for the troops.
57. Mills is likely referring to Vallejo, who at the time was head of INRA in the province of Oriente.
58. The practice by INRA was that, when an estate like the Rousseau ranch was appropriated by the government, those who had an established record of employment there would become members of the new cooperative and continue their employment. So it is quite likely that Batista got her wish to remain in the house.
Chapter 6
1. C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), 18.
2. Jules Dubois, “Report on Latin America,” Chicago Sunday Tribune, November 20, 1960, 16.
3. Though they may not have been able to name specific admirals, generals, and CEOs, the average Cuban was nevertheless much concerned about a military invasion from the “Marines in Florida” and knew well that major U.S.-owned corporations (e.g., The United Fruit Company, the Nickel Processing Corporation, Bell Telephone Company, Chase Manhattan Bank, the Moa Mining Company, Texaco, etc.) had, for decades, exploited Cuban labor and resources. Thus, for most Cubans, the U.S. power elite and Yankee imperialism were one and the same.
4. Tom Hayden, Listen, Yankee! Why Cuba Matters (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2015), 35.
5. For journalist Lee Lockwood’s detailed, personal account of the many difficulties he experienced in obtaining an interview with Fidel Castro, who was extraordinarily busy and continuously on the move, see Castro’s Cuba, Cuba’s Fidel (New York: Vintage Books, 1969).
6. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995), 201.
7. In Listen, Yankee, Mills estimates that the soldiers had already planted 600,000 eucalyptus trees, with a total of 5 million expected by the end of the year. Listen, Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba (New York: Ballantine Books, 1960).
8. The Isle of Pines was renamed the Isle of Youth in 1978.
9. In Listen, Yankee, Mills changes this observation to: “The big ideological fight going on in the Isle of Pines is between eucalyptus trees and pangola grass” (p. 86).
10. In Listen, Yankee, Mills reproduces this line as: “If you hear the Isle of Pines is taken, Fidel, know that there is not one of us left alive” (p. 70). The Cubans were in on the well-known secret that the CIA was training an invasion force in Guatemala, and because the Isle of Pines is situated directly in the route of a military operation launched from that country, they believed the Isle would be the first target. The Bay of Pigs invasion occurred eight months later, not on the Isle of Pines, but some 200 kilometers away, at Playa Girón. Just prior to the CIA invasion, however, a Cuban Navy Patrol Escort ship was bombed and destroyed in the Isle of Pines by a U.S. attack aircraft.
11. Lockwood, Castro’s Cuba, 71–72. Another description of what a conversation with Castro was like is the following by K. S. Karol:
Fidel finds it difficult to sit still while he speaks. He moves about all the time, gets up, takes a few steps, sits down, stalks back and forth, as if every argument were a kind of hand-to-hand struggle with a wily opponent. His expressive brown eyes remain fixed on his interlocutor and emphasize his words. He uses all the skills of the experienced lawyer—he takes advantage of the slightest weakness, sets traps, interrupts at just the right moment, keeps the initiative all the time. But he does it all so ingenuously, that few people can doubt his sincerity and candor.…
Fidel invariably monopolizes conversations, not because he refuses to listen, but simply because he thinks aloud and likes to answer his own questions. In the end, however, he always manages to get to the heart of the problem. His moral integrity, his sense of honor, his attachment to the simple virtues, invariably lead him there. But he makes his point by way of long monologues which, though fascinating to follow, are sometimes rather involved.
Guerrillas in Power: The Course of the Cuban Revolution, trans. Arnold Pomerans (New York: Hill & Wang, 1970), 479–80.
12. See the chapter “A Day in the Country with Fidel” in Jean-Paul Sartre, Sartre on Cuba (New York: Ballantine Books, 1961).
13. Sartre recounts the humorous story of a campesino throwing himself on the hood of Castro’s car, admonishing him for sitting in front: “What are you doing in the front of this car? … Go sit in the back with Celia and do me the favor of seating all these people [Sartre and Beauvoir] who are lounging in the rear in the front.… Drive around with them as much as you want, but if someone has to die, it might as well be them.” Sartre on Cuba, 130.
14. Leo Huberman and Paul M. Sweezy, Cuba: Anatomy of a Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1960), 177.
15. Karol, Guerrillas in Power, 487.
16. It is not known why Mills did not electronically record the conversation, but a tape recorder would likely have been a distraction, as it was when Lee Lockwood interviewed Castro a few years later. See Lockwood, Castro’s Cuba, 67.
17. “The Causes of C. Wright Mills,” KPFA broadcast, October 1, 1962, Pacifica Radio Archives, Archive number BB0281b.
18. C. Wright Mills, Escucha, yanqui: La revolución en Cuba, trans. Julieta Campos and Enrique González Pedrero (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1961), 240.
19. Indeed, the following year, 1961, saw the second-largest sugar-cane harvest (approximately 7 million tons) in Cuban history.
20. According to Robert Taber, Mills’s interviews with revolutionary leaders confirmed that Cuba had passed the point of economic crisis and that the Revolution was “over the hump” economically, due to the trade treaties with China, the USSR, and other countries. Taber, M-26: Biography of a Revolution (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1961), 330. The United States, in cutting the Cuban sugar quota, made way for other sugar-producing nations to fill the gap, thus leaving Cuban sugar in control of the world market. What is more, reports Taber, expropriation of U.S.-owned mills restored to Cuba 40 percent of its sugar production, an outcome that more than made up for any losses that resulted from the difference between the U.S. and the world price of sugar. Robert Taber, “Cuban Viewpoints: Kennedy and C. Wright Mills,” Fair Play, September 2, 1960, 3. “So the Yankee cut in the Cuban sugar quota is going to turn out to be of benefit to us.” Mills, Listen, Yankee, 75.
21. Enrique Oltuski was at that time director of Organization of the Department of Industrialization of INRA.
22. While the Fidelistas were in the Sierra Maestra they confiscated some herds and distributed them among the campesinos. They gave one cow to each campesino family, and before long practically all the cows had been eaten rather than kept for milk. This experience of the campesino’s preference for the immediate benefit of being able to eat the cow rather than for the longer-range value of having milk, Castro told Lee Lockwood six years after his conversation with Mills, “naturally fortified my conviction that the land of the latifundistas should not be divided but should be organized into cooperatives.” Lockwood, Castro’s Cuba, 97.
23. Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills, Character and Social Structure: The Psychology of Social Institutions (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1953), 404.
24. This scenario is pieced together from accounts given by Yepe and Arcocha in two sources, respectively, Hayden, Listen, Yankee!, 37; and “The Causes of C. Wright Mills.” The “inspection tour” is speculative, but probable, given that this is how Huberman and Sweezy described their experience with Castro at Pinar del Río just a few weeks after Mills had spent time with him there. See Huberman and Sweezy, Cuba, 176, 197.
25. Mike Forrest Keen, Stalking the Sociological Imagination: J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI Surveillance of American Sociology (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999), 175. The seminar never took place.
26. Kathryn Mills with Pamela Mills, eds., C. Wright Mills: Letters and Autobiographical Writings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 324.
27. Karol, Guerrillas in Power, 477. What is more, Mills apparently had sufficient clout in Havana to help Karol gain a personal interview with Ché Guevara. John H. Summers, “The Epigone’s Embrace, Part II: C. Wright Mills and the New Left,” Left History 12 (2008): 114.
28. Mills’s experiences at Belic as detailed here are based on inference. It is, however, very likely that something similar to this occurred, based on how Huberman and Sweezy describe the tour of Belic they took several weeks later, with Vallejo as their guide. See Huberman and Sweezy, Cuba, 194.
29. Mills, Listen, Yankee, 180.
30. Karl E. Meyer and Tad Szulc, The Cuban Invasion: The Chronicle of a Disaster (New York: Praeger, 1962), 98.
31. Irving Louis Horowitz, C. Wright Mills: An American Utopian (New York: Free Press, 1983), 291.
32. Mills, Listen, Yankee, 182.
33. Juan Arcocha gives as the quintessential example of Castro’s cult of personality the sixteen-year-old militiaman, mortally wounded in the bombardment of the Bay of Pigs, who, just before dying, wrote on a door the name “FIDEL” with a finger that the teen had dipped in his own blood. Arcocha, Fidel Castro en rompecabezas (Madrid: Ediciones R, 1973), 56. Ray Brennan, in Castro, Cuba, and Justice (New York: Doubleday, 1959), 264, refers to Castro as “the Rebel messiah.”
34. Sartre on Cuba, 96.
35. Gerth and Mills, Character and Social Structure, 447.
36. C. Wright Mills, Interview 7 (see chapter 5 of this volume).
37. Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 296.
38. Taber, M-26, 337.
39. For Gerth and Mills, “person” refers to the human being as a player of roles that involve reference to emotions, perceptions, and purposes. By “images” they refer to “master symbols” that consist of moral figures, sacred emblems, and legal formulae. Gerth and Mills, Character and Social Structure, 43, 276–77, 405. According to Huberman and Sweezy, “Like many another social revolution before it, the Cuban Revolution has developed its own symbolism—the beard and long hair of the rebel soldier, the peasant with raised machete, the transformation of fortresses into schools, such slogans as ‘Liberty or Death’ and ‘Revolution Means to Construct.’ ” Huberman and Sweezy, Cuba, 133. As for the image that the Cuban people created of their leader early in the Revolution, it was that of a redemptive figure, of a “spiritual Fidel.” See Robert E. Quirk, Fidel Castro (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 255.
40. Gerth and Mills, Character and Social Structure, 425–26.
41. Arcocha, Fidel Castro, 9. Arcocha also compares Castro with Achilles, Robin Hood, and Hitler.
42. Tom Hayden believes this was close to the case: “Fidel was something of a ghost writer for C. Wright Mills’s 1960 book.” Hayden, Listen, Yankee!, 88.
43. Arcocha, Fidel Castro, 22.
44. Juan Arcocha, “El viaje de Sartre,” in La Habana, 1952–1961: El final de un mundo, el principio de una ilusión, ed. Jacobo Machover (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1995), 235.
45. K. Mills with P. Mills, C. Wright Mills, 330.
46. C. Wright Mills, Escucha, yanqui, 241. Emphasis added.
47. Daniel Geary, Radical Ambition: C. Wright Mills, the Left, and American Social Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 213.
48. Keen, Stalking, 183. This comment was made by an FBI informant and may be of questionable reliability.
49. Mills, Listen, Yankee, 95. Emphasis in original. On the topic of wrong predictions, see David Caute, The Fellow-Travelers: Intellectual Friends of Communism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988), 407. The Russians did, of course, resort to military means when, in October 1962, they deployed ballistic missiles on the Caribbean island, thus causing the so-called Cuban Missile Crisis.
50. “Cuba Mourns Professor Mills,” New York Times, March 24, 1962, 25.
51. “The Causes of C. Wright Mills.”
Chapter 7
1. Van Gosse, Where the Boys Are: Cuba, Cold War America and the Making of the New Left (New York: Verso, 1993), 176.
2. Irving Louis Horowitz, C. Wright Mills: An American Utopian (New York: Free Press, 1983), 300.
3. Saul Landau, “C. Wright Mills: The Last Six Months,” Ramparts, August 1965, 47. According to Landau, Mills read the first draft to him in Havana.
4. Carleton Beals to Ian Ballantine, September 25, 1960, box 4S17, folder “Listen, Yankee, Letters and Publicity, 1960–1961,” Charles Wright Mills Papers, 1934–1965, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, the University of Texas at Austin.
5. Letter from Barbara B. Collins to C. Wright Mills, November 11, 1960, box 4S17, folder “Listen, Yankee, Letters and Publicity, 1960–1961,” Charles Wright Mills Papers.
6. According to Todd F. Tietchen, Listen, Yankee might be regarded as a booklength Cubalogue. An explicitly political subgenre of travel narrative, the “Cubalogue” is a politically engaged form of literary reportage of early revolutionary events in Cuba, primarily (but not exclusively) identified with the writers and artists associated with the Beat Generation. See Todd F. Tietchen, The Cubalogues: Beat Writers in Revolutionary Havana (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010).
7. Peter Hulme, “Seeing for Themselves: U.S. Travel Writers in Early Revolutionary Cuba,” in Politics, Identity, and Mobility in Travel Writing, ed. Miguel A. Cabañas et al. (New York: Routledge, 2016), 204.
8. Ibid., 208.
9. Listen, Yankee was written during Mills’s epistolary-polemical period, when he was using the letter format to sermonize to a mass audience. See, for example, “Pagan Letter to the Christian Clergy,” in The Causes of World War Three (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1958); “Letter to the New Left,” which appeared in New Left Review 5 (September–October 1960); and his autobiographical letters written for the unpublished manuscript of Contacting the Enemy, which was supposed to be a volume consisting of a set of letters addressed to an imaginary Soviet colleague. Gosse contends that Listen, Yankee would have fared better as part of Mills’s oeuvre had it been written in the academic third-person with proper scholarly citation. Gosse, Where the Boys Are, 179.
10. Horowitz, C. Wright Mills, 293.
11. C. Wright Mills, Listen, Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba (New York: Ballantine Books, 1960), 12.
12. Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, Character and Social Structure: The Psychology of Social Institutions (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1953), 292.
13. K. S. Karol, Guerrillas in Power: The Course of the Cuban Revolution, trans. Arnold Pomerans (New York: Hill & Wang, 1970), 10.
14. Mills, Listen, Yankee, 151–52.
15. Ibid., 30.
16. One concession to both the English and the Spanish spellings of the word is the not uncommon “Yanki.” This hybrid rendition, for example, is the title of a documentary about Cuba that aired as an episode, on December 8, 1960, for the ABC network’s Close-Up series, “Yanki, No!”
17. Quoted in Jack Newfield, A Prophetic Minority (New York: New American Library, 1966), 78.
18. Jean-Paul Sartre, Sartre on Cuba (New York: Ballantine Books, 1961), 7.
19. Theodore Draper, Castro’s Revolution: Myths and Realities (London: Thames and Hudson, 1962), 8.
20. Robert Taber, “Cuban Viewpoints: Kennedy and C. Wright Mills,” Fair Play, September 2, 1960, 4.
21. Tom Hayden contends that the title Listen, Yankee was, at bottom, “a complaint that Cuba could not receive a fair hearing as long as the United States officials assumed themselves superior in the relationship, able to bend Cuba to America’s will.” Hayden, Listen, Yankee! Why Cuba Matters (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2015), 224–25.
22. Mills, Listen, Yankee, 158.
23. Michael J. Casey, Che’s Afterlife: The Legacy of an Image (New York: Vintage Books, 2009).
24. Jean-Paul Sartre, Sartre visita a Cuba (Havana: Ediciones R, 1960), 25–26.
25. Juan Arcocha, “El viaje de Sartre,” in La Habana, 1952–1961: El final de un mundo, el principio de una ilusión, ed. Jacobo Machover (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1995), 231.
26. Sartre describes the general mood in the aftermath of the La Coubre sabotage as anguish, not anger, Sartre on Cuba, 145.
27. Draper, Castro’s Revolution, 8–9.
28. See Rafael Rojas, “El aparato cultural del imperio: C. Wright Mills, la Revolución Cubana y la Nueva Izquierda,” Perfiles Latinoamericanos 44 (2014): 17. Rojas contends that certain passages in Listen, Yankee clearly demonstrate that it is the Cuban leaders who are speaking, not their “New York translator,” as in when, for instance, Mills quotes the phrase of the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz—this “thick broth of civilization which bubbles on the Caribbean fire”—not in reference to the concept of transculturation as Ortiz intended it, but to underscore the nationalist vision of the island as a “major center of world affairs.” Mills, Listen, Yankee, 160.
29. Kathryn, Mills’s five-year-old daughter, can be heard playing in the background, and at times various conversations by several people are also taking place simultaneously.
30. Kathryn Mills with Pamela Mills, eds., C. Wright Mills: Letters and Autobiographical Writings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 101.
31. Mills, Listen, Yankee, 8.
32. The photograph, in the style of a sort of social realism, is composed so that it makes the lone white-collar worker, the new little man, look dramatically estranged from community and society—and, in the sense of Marx, alienated from his work. Although he seems to be striding hurriedly, with a sense of purpose, the figure is just a small cog in a vast business machinery. He appears to be bearing the weight of the company, the organization, and the bureaucracy (illustrated by the granite base and massive Ionic columns that form the building’s facade) for which he works. The imposing edifice creates a sense of oppression over the human figure. See A. Javier Treviño, “C. Wright Mills As Designer: Personal Practice and Two Public Talks,” American Sociologist 45 (2015): 342.
33. K. Mills with P. Mills, C. Wright Mills, 112.
34. Ibid., 113.
35. Had he finished the sentence, Mills would perhaps have said something like, “Now I’ve got to go down and, you know, interview the revolutionaries in Cuba and take photos.”
36. Mills had entertained the idea of a script—perhaps also in the form of a series of letters—since at least in early 1958, when he was considering writing a “play-novel-movie script” titled “Unmailed Letters to a Fey Tiger” or “The Fey Tiger,” with a rather odd theme: going goat hunting in Yugoslavia with Marshal Tito. See K. Mills with P. Mills, C. Wright Mills, 262, 330.
37. A cartoonist and playwright, Herb Gardner (1934–2003) was best known for his 1962 play, A Thousand Clowns, which was adapted to film in 1965. He was also the creator and illustrator of the syndicated comic strip The Nebbishes, which ran in newspapers from 1959 to 1961.
38. Mills may be referring to the publisher Little, Brown.
39. Clare Barnes Jr., The Political Zoo (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1952).
40. Mills and Ballantine were probably thinking of White Collar Zoo, a 1949 book, also by Clare Barnes Jr., that featured animal photos with humorous captions.
41. Ballantine is referring to the Democratic National Convention held in Chicago in July 1952.
42. K. Mills with P. Mills, C. Wright Mills, 263.
43. Mike Forrest Keen, Stalking the Sociological Imagination: J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI Surveillance of American Sociology (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999), 175. The British publisher Secker and Warburg released it in hardback under the title Castro’s Cuba in March 1961.
44. K. Mills with P. Mills, C. Wright Mills, 263–64. It will be recalled from chapter 1 that Dubois’s Fidel Castro and Huberman and Sweezy’s Cuba were also written fast and produced fast.
45. “The Causes of C. Wright Mills,” KPFA broadcast October 1, 1962, Pacifica Radio Archives, Archive number BB0281b.
46. E. P. Thompson, E. P. Thompson and the Making of the New Left: Essays and Polemics, ed. Cal Winslow (New York: Monthly Press Review, 2014), 222.
47. Robert E. Quirk, Fidel Castro (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 339.
48. Karol, Guerrillas in Power, 7. A farcical and flamboyant depiction of the Cuban delegation’s stay at the Hotel Theresa is portrayed in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1969 film Topaz.
49. Michael B. Conant, “C. Wright Mills Talks, Yankee Listens,” Columbia Owl, October 12, 1960, 1, 4.
50. K. Mills with P. Mills, C. Wright Mills, 330.
51. Herbert J. Gans, “Best-Sellers by American Sociologists: An Exploratory Study,” in Required Reading: Sociology’s Most Influential Books, ed. Dan Clawson (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 19–27. Listen, Yankee joins five other titles in Gans’s numerical interval of 499,999 to 400,000 book sales: Richard Senett, The Fall of Public Man (1976); William Ryan, Blaming the Victim (1971); Robert N. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart (1985); Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man (1960); and Lilian B. Rubin, Worlds of Pain (1976).
52. Gosse, Where the Boys Are, 176.
53. Richard E. Welch, Response to Revolution: The United States and the Cuban Revolution, 1959–1961 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 151.
54. John H. Summers, “The Epigone’s Embrace, Part II: C. Wright Mills and the New Left,” Left History 12 (2008): 94. Ironically, as Rafael Rojas notes, Listen, Yankee has never been published in Cuba. “Charles Wright Mills y otoros peregrinos,” El País, April 15, 2007.
55. E-mail communication from Raúl Roa Kourí on January 27, 2016.
56. C. Wright Mills, “ ‘Listen Yankee’: The Cuban Case against the United States,” Harper’s Magazine, December 1960, 31–37. The Cuban weekly magazine Bohemia published a Spanish translation of the Harper’s excerpt in its issue of September 11, 1960.
57. Listen, Yankee was frequently reviewed in juxtaposition with Nathaniel Weyl’s Red Star over Cuba (1961), where he argues that Fidel Castro had been a Soviet agent since 1948.
58. Lowry Nelson, “Review of Listen, Yankee,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 336 (1961): 191.
59. Henry F. Mins, “A Budget of Books on Cuba,” Science and Society 25 (1961): 344.
60. Fredrick B. Pike, “United States Military Aid and Policies and Cuba,” Review of Politics 23 (1961): 417.
61. Jules Dubois, “Report on Latin America,” Chicago Sunday Tribune, November 20, 1960, 16. The Soviet authorities did prohibit publication of an article by Mills in Amerika. It was later published under the title “The Sociology of Mass Media and Public Opinion,” in Power, Politics, and People: The Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills, ed. Irving Louis Horowitz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963). Mills was more charitable toward Dubois’s Fidel Castro: Rebel-Liberator or Dictator?, recommending it, in Listen, Yankee, as an informative book on the Cuban Revolution.
62. Jules Dubois, “Apologia for Castro,” Saturday Review, December 17, 1960, 36. Listen, Yankee has yet to be translated into Russian. The only “Soviet bloc language” in which it has appeared is Polish.
63. Fernando Benítez et al., “Letter to the Editor: Aftermath of Revolution,” Saturday Review, January 21, 1961, 49.
64. Fermín Peinado, Beware, Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba (Miami, 1961).
65. Peinado, who had been the dean of the Law School at the University of Oriente, where he taught political theory and philosophy of law, was a conservative Catholic living in Miami. It is not known why he opted to critique the excerpted piece in Harper’s rather than the full work, Listen, Yankee.
66. Peinado was correct on this last point: an official news agency, the Prensa Latina, did exist in Cuba, a fact that Mills ignored.
67. On this encounter, see Hugh Thomas, Cuba, or The Pursuit of Freedom (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998), 803.
68. Harper’s Magazine, February, 1961, 6.
69. Ibid.
70. “Dear Richard: Here is a quote you may use as you wish,” letter dated March 16, 1961, Box 4B379, folder “Theory of Cuban Revolution,” Charles Wright Mills Papers, 1934–1965.
71. The ADA represented the traditional liberal Democrats; it was “instinctively anticommunist and pro-Kennedy” and “supported the administration’s Cuba policy” of regime change. Hayden, Listen, Yankee!, 54.
72. Louis B. Schwartz to C. Wright Mills, November 22, 1960, Box 4S17, folder “Listen, Yankee, Letters and Publicity, 1960–1961,” Charles Wright Mills Papers, 1934–1965.
73. “The Causes of C. Wright Mills,” KPFA broadcast October 1, 1962, Pacifica Radio Archives, Archive number BB0281b.
74. Eleanor Roosevelt, “New Look at Cuba,” New York Post, December 14, 1960, 43.
75. Mills, the Cubans, and Eleanor Roosevelt were well acquainted with the CIA’s engineered coup d’état of the government of Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz six years before, in 1954 (and which Ché Guevara, being in Guatemala at the time, experienced directly). Five years later, in 1965, fearing “a second Cuba” in the Dominican Republic, the U.S. Marines invaded that country. U.S. military intervention and CIA involvement, intended to destabilize socialist governments throughout the Western Hemisphere, would continue for the next three decades, in Chile (1973), Nicaragua (1979–1990), and Grenada (1983).
76. Jean Daniel, “Unofficial Envoy: An Historic Report from Two Capitals,” The New Republic, December 14, 1963, 17.
77. The Fondo had previously issued the Spanish translations of The Power Elite in 1957 and, later, The Sociological Imagination in 1961.
78. Quoted in Horowitz, C. Wright Mills, 297.
79. Gerardo Ochoa Sandy, 80 años, las batallas culturales del fondo, Kindle ed. (Mexico City: Nieve de Chamoy, 2014), n.p. The Mexican government also took issue with Fondo’s publication of Oscar Lewis’s The Children of Sánchez.
80. Fuentes dedicated his 1962 novel, The Death of Artemio Cruz, “To C. Wright Mills. True Voice of the United States of America. Friend and companion in Latin America’s struggle.” Another book dedicated “To the Memory of C. Wright Mills” was by his friend Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society (1969).
81. K. Mills with P. Mills, C. Wright Mills, 318.
82. Quoted in James W. Wilke and Edna Monzón Wilke, Frente a la revolución Mexicana: 17 protagonistas de la etapa constructiva (Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, 1995), 1: 195.
83. Ibid., 389. According to Rojas, Fondo paid Mills more than 10,000 Mexican pesos, or about 800 U.S. dollars in 1961, see Rafael Rojas, Fighting over Fidel: The New York Intellectuals and the Cuban Revolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2016), 139.
84. Ochoa Sandy, 80 años, n.p.
85. Landau, “C. Wright Mills,” 48.
86. C. Wright Mills and Saul Landau, “The House That Jack Must Build: Modest Proposals for Patriotic Americans,” London Tribune, May 19, 1961, 5.
87. As quoted in Rojas, Fighting over Fidel, 139.
88. Until “Escucha otra vez, yanqui” is translated into English, appraisal of Mills’s views on the Bay of Pigs will remain limited to the Spanish-reading public.
89. A week after the invasion, Miró Cardona was featured on the cover of Time magazine (April 28, 1961) under the caption “The Cuban Disaster.”
90. Mills does not provide a source for these percentages, and pre-invasion figures concerning Cubans’ attitudes toward the Revolution vary wildly depending on whether the sources giving them endorse or oppose Castro. For example, Jules Dubois wrote in December of 1960 that “the most reliable estimates” (whose source he does not give) “indicate that the Castro popularity index today does not exceed 30 percent throughout the country and that the decline is steady.” Dubois, “Apologia for Castro,” 36. In February 1961, Fermín Peinado stated that Castro had “barely 20 percent” of the popular vote. Peinado, Beware, Yankee, 29. Perhaps the most reliable, and creditable, account of the Cuban peoples’ attitudes toward the Castro regime is from a public opinion survey conducted during the late spring of 1960 by Lloyd A. Free, director of the Institute for International Social Research at Princeton University. Free found that about 10 percent of urban Cubans opposed and 86 percent supported the Castro government. Lloyd A. Free, Attitudes of the Cuban People toward the Castro Regime (Princeton, N.J.: Institute for International Social Research, 1960). Mills’s figures of revolutionary support are closer to those of Free’s. Free’s report was sent to the National Security Council, but it was not read by Kennedy’s advisors (who generally believed that the mass of the Cuban people would rise up in deposing Castro) until after the Bay of Pigs fiasco.
91. The U.S. State Department White Paper on Cuba insists that because Cuba is within “the United States’ sphere of influence” it must therefore “sever its links with the international Communist movement” (Department of State Publication 7171, Inter-American Series 66, April 3, 1961). In his volume, republished as Castro’s Revolution, Draper blasts Mills for having “succeeded brilliantly” as “a front man for the Castro propaganda machine.” Castro’s Revolution, 8.
92. The Yankees were indeed slow to listen. It took over half a century for the U.S. government, under President Barack Obama, to normalize full diplomatic relations with Cuba in 2014.
93. Dan Wakefield, “Introduction,” in K. Mills with and P. Mills, C. Wright Mills, 13.
94. Harvey Swados, “C. Wright Mills: A Personal Memoir,” Dissent 10 (1963): 42.
95. Rojas, Fighting over Fidel, 11.
96. Rojas, “El aparato cultural del imperio,” 27.
Chapter 8
1. James Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), 79.
2. Robert Taber, “Castro’s Cuba,” The Nation, January 23, 1960, 64. Emphasis in original.
3. Jules Dubois, Fidel Castro: Rebel-Liberator or Dictator? (Indianapolis: The Bobbs Merrill Company, 1959), 259.
4. Mike Forrest Keen, Stalking the Sociological Imagination: J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI Surveillance of American Sociology (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999), 174. Mills had come under investigation by the FBI at least as early as 1959, when a confidential informant (perhaps “T-1”) told the Washington, D.C., field office that Mills wanted to travel to the Soviet Union. See “C. Wright Mills FBI File,” Shamus Khan, accessed December 11, 2014, https://scatter.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/c-wright-mills-fbi-file.pdf.
5. Keen, Stalking, 175.
6. Ibid., 177.
7. Ibid., 175–76.
8. Kathryn Mills with Pamela Mills, eds., C. Wright Mills: Letters and Autobiographical Writings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 317.
9. Ibid., 319.
10. Arnold Abrams, “C. Wright Mills: Controversial Figure in Conforming Society,” Columbia Daily Spectator, November 29, 1960, 3.
11. The Militant, May 1, 1961, 4.
12. K. Mills with P. Mills, C. Wright Mills, 319.
13. Carlos Fuentes, Casa con dos puertas (Mexico: Joaquin Mortiz, 1970), 103.
14. The most notorious of the Batista henchmen, Masferrer had founded Los Tigres, his personal “army” of 2,000 men, to ruthlessly suppress the dictator’s critics. He fled Cuba on the victory of the Revolution and settled in Miami, where, with Mafia members, he plotted several unsuccessful attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro. Masferrer was killed, by Cuban exiles, by a car bomb in Miami in 1975. “It would be an understatement to say that Masferrer was to Oriente what Capone had been to Chicago.” Robert Taber, M-26: Biography of a Revolution (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1961), 82.
15. Mills owned several firearms, including a 30-30 Winchester, a .22 rifle, and a semiautomatic M1 carbine.
16. Keen, Stalking, 179.
17. Jules Dubois, “Leftwing U.S. Prof Plumps for Fidel in Book,” Omaha World-Herald, November 27, 1960, n.p.
18. “C. Wright Mills FBI File,” Shamus Khan.
19. Dan Wakefield, “Introduction,” in K. Mills with P. Mills, C. Wright Mills, 13.
20. Van Gosse, Where the Boys Are: Cuba, Cold War America and the Making of the New Left (New York: Verso, 1993), 181. One episode of The Nation’s Future, broadcast two weeks before Mills and Berle were scheduled to appear, had featured Martin Luther King Jr. debating segregationist and newspaper editor James J. Kilpatrick.
21. Karl E. Meyer and Tad Szulc, The Cuban Invasion: The Chronicle of a Disaster (New York: Praeger, 1962), 101.
22. “TV Key Previews,” New York Journal-American, December 10, 1960, n.p.
23. Raymond Lowery, “Goings On,” News & Observer (Raleigh, N.C.), December 10, 1960, n.p.
24. “Miamians to Join TV Debate,” Miami Herald, December 9, 1960, n.p.
25. Wakefield, “Introduction,” 13.
26. Abrams, “C. Wright Mills,” 3.
27. Irving Louis Horowitz, C. Wright Mills: An American Utopian (New York: Free Press, 1983), 300.
28. “Letter from Shapiro to Mills” dated November 28, 1960. Box 4B379, folder “Kennedy and Latin America, 1961,” Charles Wright Mills Papers, 1934–1965, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, the University of Texas at Austin.
29. “The Causes of C. Wright Mills,” KPFA broadcast, October 1, 1962, Pacifica Radio Archives, Archive number BB0281b.
30. Adolf A. Berle, Navigating the Rapids, 1918–1971, ed. Beatrice Bishop Berle and Travis Beal Jacobs (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), 720–21.
31. K. Mills with P. Mills, C. Wright Mills, 320.
32. Ibid., 318.
33. Saul Landau, “C. Wright Mills: The Last Six Months,” Ramparts, August 1965, 47.
34. Ibid. Representative Porter, a liberal Democrat from Oregon, was likely called in as Mills’s replacement because he, along with labor activist Robert J. Alexander, had just completed The Struggle for Democracy in Latin America, a book that criticized the United States for supporting dictators like Batista, but that also criticized Castro for his pro-Communist political policies and for not allowing free elections in Cuba. In March 1958 he spoke before Congress against the continued shipment from the United States of lethal weapons to Batista. Porter, a sociology student at Harvard in the 1940s, had been a teaching assistant to Talcott Parsons. Both Parsons and Porter had been active at Harvard in opposing Nazism in Europe. See Uta Gerhardt, Talcott Parsons: An Intellectual Biography (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 110.
35. K. Mills with P. Mills, C. Wright Mills, 324.
36. Ira S. Youdovin, “$50 Million Suit is Filed against Mills,” Columbia Daily Spectator, February 13, 1961, 1.
37. Hugh Thomas, Cuba, or The Pursuit of Freedom (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998), 1263.
38. Richard Schweid, Che’s Chevrolet, Fidel’s Oldsmobile: On the Road in Cuba (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 164.
39. T. J. English, Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba and Then Lost It to the Revolution (New York: Morrow, 2007), 101.
40. K. S. Karol, Guerrillas in Power: The Course of the Cuban Revolution, trans. Arnold Pomerans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1970), 11.
41. K. Mills with P. Mills, C. Wright Mills, 326.
42. Ibid., 328.
43. Simone de Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance, trans. Richard Howard (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1965), 589–90. Escalante was one of the “old-guard Communists” dating back to the 1930s. He had been editor of Hoy, the official newspaper of the Cuban Communist Party. He was national organizer of the Integrated Revolutionary Organizations (ORI) and in 1962 was publicly denounced by Castro for sectarianism and for being unduly loyal to Moscow. In the late 1960s Escalante established the “microfaction,” a counterrevolutionary movement of the Cuban Communist Party, for which he was tried for treason and imprisoned. Upon his release he was exiled to Prague. Escalante returned to Cuba, where he died in the 1970s.
44. The rest of the conversation and quoted material are taken from Landau, “C. Wright Mills.”
45. In Cuba, in 1960, Sartre had hoped to have at last found what he had been searching for: the synthesis of socialism and freedom, and the perfect coupling of theory and praxis. Yet, he was nonetheless concerned that a reign of terror had the potential to develop. By 1971, when he signed a letter of protest addressed to Fidel Castro on the subject of the Padilla affair, and Castro now looked upon Sartre as an enemy, Sartre “no longer had any illusions about Cuba.” Simone de Beauvoir, Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre, trans. Patrick O’Brien (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 16.
46. Karol, Guerrillas in Power, 246.
47. Fidel Castro, “Words to Intellectuals,” in Fidel Castro Reader (Melbourne, N.Y.: Ocean Press, 2008).
48. C. Wright Mills, Listen, Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba (New York: Ballantine Books, 1960), 142.
49. Juan Arcocha, “El viaje de Sartre,” in La Habana, 1952–1961: El final de un mundo, el principio de una ilusión, ed. Jacobo Machover (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1995), 238–39. In January 1968 Sartre was invited as a delegate to the Cultural Congress of Havana, which was convened around the theme of the role of the intellectual and the place of culture in the revolutionary process and in Third World movements of national liberation. Sartre could not attend the congress for reasons of health, but responded to several questions posed to him in an inquiry. Though Sartre addressed the topic of artistic culture in Cuba, he made reference only to influences external (North American) and traditional (Spanish) to Cuban culture, but avoided discussing internal pressures. He ends the inquiry my stating, “I also want to add that I would be very pleased to return to Cuba, and hope to meet with Fidel Castro, who for me, aside from being a great statesman, is also a friend,” as quoted in “Encuesta a Jean-Paul Sartre,” in Eduardo Torres-Cuevas, ed., Sartre-Cuba-Sartre: Huracán, surco, semillas (Havana: Imagen Contemporánea, 2005), 177. Was Sartre being disingenuous about his relationship with Castro and the issue of cultural freedom, or was Arcocha?
50. Arcocha, “El viaje de Sartre,” 238–39. According to Duanel Díaz, Sartre’s name, ever-present in literary and political discussions during the 1960s, disappeared almost completely from the Cuban media. For two decades, the philosopher was not published on the island, nor were his works included in the curricula of the universities. “El fantasma de Sartre en Cuba,” Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos 679 (2007): 102. What is more, not only was Sartre not read in Cuba, he didn’t even have the benefit of being earnestly critiqued because his philosophy was seen as an expression of the decadence of Western thought. See Aurelio Alonso, “De algo que Jean-Paul Sartre nos dio filosofando,” in Sartre-Cuba-Sartre: Huracán, surco, semillas, ed., Eduardo Torres-Cuevas (Havana: Imagen Contemporánea, 2005), 249.
51. After a couple of years in Moscow, Arcocha was recalled to Havana, reassigned to the Cuban Embassy in Paris as a cultural attaché, and was later allowed to go into exile and settled in Paris. See Seymour Menton, Prose Fiction of the Cuban Revolution (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975), 133. Arcocha recounts the details of his removal from his correspondent’s position in Moscow: In 1963 when Castro paid his first visit to Russia, Arcocha had written a series of articles for Revolución that increasingly departed from the orthodox line. An official with the Soviet diplomatic corps told Castro that he found Arcocha’s articles to be anti-Soviet and regarded them as a poor show of gratitude for the hospitality that the Cuban delegation had received in Russia. Later, Castro accused Revolución of engaging in bourgeois journalism. Juan Arcocha, Fidel Castro en rompecabezas (Madrid: Ediciones R, 1973), 51–54. Karol states that at first people thought that Castro merely had a grudge against Arcocha. “But it became clear soon afterward that it was Revolución as a whole that Castro disliked for its independent approach and its continual harking back to the libertarian spirit of the July 26 Movement.” Karol, Guerrillas in Power, 284n78.
52. Juan Arcocha, “C. Wright Mills on Kennedy,” Fair Play, August 26, 1961, 2.
53. Harvey Swados, “C. Wright Mills: A Personal Memoir,” Dissent 10 (1963): 42.
54. C. Wright Mills, The Marxists (New York: Dell, 1962), 10.
55. C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 165.
56. Fuentes, Casa, 104.
A Note on the Interviews
1. K. S. Karol, Guerrillas in Power: The Course of the Cuban Revolution, trans. Arnold Pomerans (New York: Hill & Wang, 1970), 29. Though Mills refers to Escalona as a “Captain,” he was, in fact a comandante, a rank equivalent to major. A photo of Dermidio Escalona may be found at http://www.ecured.cu/index.php/Dermidio_Escalona.
2. The Cuban web-based encyclopedia EcuRed contains short biographies of Isabel Rielo and Dermidio Escalona.
3. This is generally true, since all of the interviewees, to one degree or another, seemed to support the Revolution at the time Mills spoke with them. What is more, most of them, if not in fact all of them, were involved in the resistance, either militarily or politically—as rebel soldiers or in the urban underground movement.
4. In addition, I provided my own English translations of all Spanish-language bibliographic sources referenced in the book.