Introduction

The North American sociologist C. Wright Mills traveled to Cuba, once, to experience firsthand that island’s transition to a new sovereign state, some eighteen months after the triumph of its Revolution. Upon returning to the United States, Mills wrote a small paperback on much of what he had heard and seen, which he titled Listen, Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba.1 As he explains in the opening sentence, “This book reflects the mood as well as the contents of discussions and interviews with rebel soldiers and intellectuals, officials, journalists and professors in Cuba, during August, 1960.”

On first reading Listen, Yankee as a graduate student and shortly before undertaking my first trip to Cuba in 1987 I wondered if I would be seeing some of the same places that Mills had visited on his trek through the island over a quarter century before. There were those out-of-the-way cities like Manzanillo and Santiago de Cuba, but also the more well-known locations of Havana and the Sierra Maestra, and the exotically named Isle of Pines. I knew from the book’s foreword—the “Note to the Reader, I”—that Mills had spoken with many “Cubans close to events.” This included discussions with most of the leaders of the Revolutionary government like Fidel Castro and Ernesto “Ché” Guevara. I later learned that he had gone there with a wire recorder in hand and speculated on what those interviews had revealed to him. Who exactly were the Cubans “close to events” with whom he spoke, other than disembodied names that he lists in the note thanking them for their generosity, patience, and time? What in particular did they tell him about their lives—their moods and wishes, their aspirations and discontents? And what about the Revolution—an event that was still very much in the making during Mills’s sojourn to the Caribbean island?

Then there was the enigmatic best-selling paperback itself—presented from the perspective of the Cuban revolutionary—that Mills wrote within a matter of weeks. Was Listen, Yankee a work in sociology? It certainly didn’t read like his previous analytical studies, White Collar and The Power Elite. Was it a polemical academic treatise like his famous volume The Sociological Imagination? Perhaps it was a manifesto of sorts, or a piece of journalism (in the pejorative sense of the term), or a political “pamphlet” as he liked to call it, in the tradition of The Causes of World War Three, which Mills had published a couple of years before and for which he was judged by some to be a touche-à-tout. And that audacious title; it seemed to intentionally mock North American—Yankee—readers, demanding their attention with the imperative, Listen!

Many years passed, during which time I reread Listen, Yankee in preparation for a book I was writing on Mills’s social thought. Then one pleasant Sunday afternoon in 2014, as my wife and I, over coffee and cookies with Kathryn—Mills’s younger daughter—and her husband, poured over photographs that Kathryn had taken on her recent visit to Cuba, I wondered aloud about those long-ago interviews and their recordings. A week or so later I was delighted to receive in the mail CD copies of the original audiotapes. (Later, Kathryn provided several sheets of contact strip proofs of photographs taken by Mills in Cuba, which supplied an additional wealth of information.) If there are other audio recordings of their kind, I am not aware of them. I here make them available—transcribed and translated—for the first time, with extensive annotations to explain and contextualize their content.

It is impossible to say exactly how many people Mills spoke with during the course of his two-week research expedition in Cuba. He audiotaped at least eight interviews. Though Mills spoke with many people on the island, and took copious notes on what they said, he did not record them all. This is likely the case with the highest-ranking Cuban officials. For example, Saul Landau points out that as Mills was leaving to interview Ché Guevara he took with him a notebook and a couple of cameras, but Landau does not mention the wire recorder.2

Mills interviewed and recorded people from different walks of life and social statuses, those who worked for the Revolutionary government and those who did not, the educated and the uneducated, six men and three women.

One purpose of this book is to present the opinions, perspectives, and comments of the Cubans who spoke with Mills in the summer of 1960. As such it is also important to “hear” Mills as an expert interviewer and ascertain how he used what he learned from his informants to write Listen, Yankee. Indeed, the interviews themselves are a study in methodology that give a glimpse into Mills’s own techniques (conscious or otherwise) of investigation: whom he interviewed, which lines of inquiry he pursued, how he managed and timed the interviews, and how he interacted with the respondents.

I have organized the book as follows. The first three chapters provide the historical and theoretical background in which to situate all of the aforementioned. Chapter 1 places Mills’s experiences in Cuba in the larger sociohistorical contemporaneous context. It not only depicts the major social and political transformations in the revolutionary process that were transpiring at the time Mills was on the island, it also considers wider global events of that summer, against the backdrop of Cold War tensions, of pertinence to Castro’s Cuba. In addition, it describes the effervescent mood that permeated the island during his visit.

Chapter 2 furnishes a sociohistorical account of those main events and turning points of the armed struggle against the tyranny of Fulgencio Batista, beginning with Fidel Castro’s first assault on the dictator’s troops in 1953. It also examines how the Revolution was being made at the time that Mills visited Cuba in 1960 as well as how the revolutionary project was threatened by the U.S.-sponsored military invasion at the Bay of Pigs in 1961. Thus, the main period in Cuban history analyzed here is roughly between 1953 and 1961.

Chapter 3 examines the conceptual and empirical methods Mills applied in understanding the Cuban revolutionaries, whose thoughts and sentiments he so eloquently and passionately expressed in Listen, Yankee. These have to do with his view of individuals as seekers of freedom, of intellectuals as agents of social change, and of interviewing as a way of discerning people’s character structure—their symbols, their self-images, their personalities.

Chapters 4 and 5, where those particular Cuban testimonies are presented, form the book’s core. They are intended to show that the Cubans Mills spoke with, and whom he presents in Listen, Yankee in composite portrait, are not anonymous, disembodied revolutionaries, but real people with particular hopes, dreams, and fears. In all cases I have reproduced the interviews either in full, or nearly in full, for two main reasons. First, they constitute the primary data on which Mills relied to compose the unique narrative—the “voice” of the Cuban revolutionary—which he used to great effect. Indeed, in the notes and acknowledgments to Listen, Yankee Mills makes it clear that while he relied on various materials to write the book—memoranda and statistical collections compiled from various Cuban sources, scholarly articles and books on Latin America, books on the Cuban Revolution, and historical accounts of U.S.–Cuban relations—“my fundamental sources, however, are my own interviews and observations in Cuba.” Additionally, since the voice of the Cuban revolutionary is an ideal type of sorts—and many passages in Listen, Yankee are, in fact, composite interviews—it is important to know what exactly Mills’s respondents said to him. All of his interviewees’ responses form a conglomerate, and Mills (with only one brief exception) does not quote them in the book. He explains in the foreword that, “having been given the privilege of seeing whatever I asked to see and candid answers to all the questions I asked, I do not feel direct quotation is permissible.”3 Thus, identifying the interviewees and presenting their specific words, the tone and quality of their arguments, addresses the question of who said what and how.

Similarly, Chapter 6 consists of two transcriptions of recordings that Mills made detailing his experiences and conversations with Fidel Castro. These are important not only because they offer a firsthand account of Mills’s conference with the prime minister, but because they also reveal Mills’s impressions of Castro and the revolution he was leading. Mills, who did not speak Spanish, spent three-and-a-half eighteen-hour days traveling and conversing with Castro and Juan Arcocha, who served as his translator. On at least one occasion Mills took meticulous notes of such a conversation, but did not record it; later that day he made an audio recording of those notes as he dictated them onto the recorder. I have transcribed these verbatim in Chapter 6. In addition, in that same chapter is another recording that Mills made of interactions Castro had with military men on the Isle of Pines.

Because this book is also very much “a book about a book,” the last two chapters tell the story of Listen, Yankee—its contents, but also its production and reception. Chapter 7 examines how the information conveyed and topics covered in the interviews led Mills to construct Listen, Yankee’s full-throated message of revolutionary cry. As a technical extension of this, and as a way of verifying the authenticity of the message Mills articulates in Listen, Yankee, in Appendix 1 selected passages from the interviews are compared with parallel passages from Listen, Yankee. Also included in Chapter 7 is a transcription of a recording Mills made of a meeting he had with the publisher, Ian Ballantine, laying out his vision of, and production plans for, Listen, Yankee. Chapter 8, the final chapter, looks at the considerable consequences this mass-market paperback had on Mills, personally and professionally. That chapter includes a transcription of a telephone conversation, tape-recorded by Mills, with a mysterious “Mr. Hadley,” who was likely an FBI agent assigned to investigate Mills and his ties to the Cuban revolutionaries.

Finally, as a kind of subtext, this book also recounts the experiences of four central figures whose lives became inextricably intertwined during that fateful summer of 1960. First and foremost, of course, is C. Wright Mills, the irascible, larger-than-life sociologist from Columbia University, who, until his death in 1962, garnered a surprising notoriety for writing about the early Cuban Revolution. Absolutely central to any account of the Revolution—including this one—is one of the most influential orators and leaders in the Americas, the indefatigable Fidel Castro, who made the Revolution and continued as its active guide until his retirement in 2008. There is also the indispensable and revealing Juan Arcocha, the young Cuban journalist who served as interpreter to both Mills and Castro during their discussions and Mills’s peregrinations through the island and who, in 1971, went into self-imposed exile. But there is another figure—largely in the background, but very pertinent to this record: the French existentialist philosopher and one of the twentieth century’s most emblematic intellectuals, Jean-Paul Sartre. All four of them—Mills, Castro, Arcocha, and Sartre—had different and complicated relationships with each other. But the singular event that compelled their biographies to intersect at a decisive moment in the history of Cold War geopolitics—with its attendant animosities and intrigues—was the Cuban Revolution.

Setting aside the detailed richness of Mills’s Cuba interviews, we may ask: Isn’t it the case that no matter how much notoriety Listen, Yankee garnered at the time of its publication, no matter how much of a bestseller it was and how informative it may have been to the North American public, it nonetheless lacks the conceptual substance and sociological sophistication of Mills’s earlier works and holds, in fact, “only historical interest today”?4 This is indeed the case, and so a third aim of this book is to tell the story behind the story; that is, to hear the voices and know the inner lives of the human variety that contributed to the making and the attempted unmaking of Listen, Yankee. These include the voices and inner lives of the Cuban revolutionaries, to be sure, but also of the critics, reviewers, publishers, politicians, federal agents, exiles, defectors, intellectuals, journalists, novelists, friends and foes, and of course, Mills himself.5 This then is a study in historical sociology, but one that quite consciously considers biography in the context of social structure. Put another way, the topic of C. Wright Mills and the Cuban Revolution provides the opportunity for engaging in an exercise in the art of sociological imagination.