In Santiago the news was all about Fidel Castro. He was visiting Chile for several weeks to take part with Salvador Allende in a celebration of Latin American socialism. Allende was Chile’s new president, a freely elected socialist leader. The avenues leading up to La Moneda were packed with students, the Chilean counterparts of the Berkeley protesters, all of them chanting, “Momio, ladrón, fascista, maricón!”
The chant was at once radical and violent, passionate and intolerant. Momio referred to Chile’s reactionary right-wingers. Ladrón means “thief,” which referred to the country’s wealthy landowners. Fascista translates easily. Maricón is a slur used to insult gay men. That was how the crowd chose to attack its political enemies.
I chanted along. I didn’t think about the latent homophobia, which seems so vicious to me now. In the moment being in that crowd only felt like a natural progression from the protests I attended in college. I’d traveled a great distance, politically as well as geographically. Growing up with the memory of the Cuban Missile Crisis, with my dad’s silver calendar a fixture in the house, I never could have guessed that eventually I was going to admire Fidel Castro more than any American political leader.
By the time I arrived in Santiago, I had decided to remain in Chile indefinitely. I really wanted a job. I thought I would try to learn more about farming, since I had been living with and working with farmers along the road south. I also wanted to live in a country with a freely elected socialist president. More than any protests in the Bay Area, these experiences differed from my family’s norms and expectations. This wasn’t just a different path. These were different woods.
I walked all over Santiago, peering into buildings under construction, asking for a job. Work was hard to come by. Sanctions squeezed the country. The momios, backed by the Chilean elite, CIA propaganda, the World Bank, and other forces of capitalism, were effective in curtailing the flow of global financing into Chile. Manufacturing was slow, agriculture was localized, and jobs were scarce. This was the era when America still believed in the bogeyman of “international Communism.” We might be losing in Vietnam, but we weren’t learning our lesson in Latin America either. A quote from Henry Kissinger, speaking about Chile during this period, sums up the American attitude: “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its people.” Never mind what the Chilean people actually wanted and decided through their own elections.
Compared with getting work, finding a place to live was easy. Many other gringos and Europeans, fellow travelers, had made their way to Santiago. While in line at the central post office collecting mail from the US, I met the people who would become my future housemates. They were renting a comfortable home in the hills above the city, in a district called Arrayán.
The rent was cheap. I slept on the living room floor and barely used the kitchen. Every day I’d ride the bus down to the city center and wander through the city’s central market. My favorite meals always included the fresh seafood coming from Valparaiso, dishes like locos (abalone) and pastel de jaiba (crab pie). It wasn’t hard to find local white wine from the Maipo Valley, perfect to pair with fresh fish. During many long days without work, without much to do, I ate and explored to stay busy. My lifestyle was part nomadic and part epicurean.
Staying in touch with my family was challenging. There were plenty of public phones, but connecting internationally was sometimes impossible. As I remember it now, there were not a lot of operators available. One evening, I stumbled into a call center and met a Chilean operator over the phone. She took an interest in the difficulty I was experiencing in connecting my call to the US, and we got to talking. This initial conversation turned into a phone romance. Over the next several months, whenever I made an international call, I hoped that by some stroke of luck she’d be my operator. Whenever I connected with her, we’d chat on the line, comparing notes on the street demonstrations that were taking place across Santiago. We talked about meeting in person, but we never did.
I desperately wanted a girlfriend. I’d been on the road for more than eight months. I had hitchhiked over four thousand miles from Bogotá to Santiago, sleeping in bus stations, on dirt floors, and under the stars in fields of squash and corn. The absence of women in my life was difficult, as it had been in boarding school. More, I wanted a relationship in order to have a direction. I felt myself languishing; I didn’t feel useful.
My Spanish was improving, at least. I was going to the cafés in the mornings, reading the newspapers for practice. I was learning the history of Chile, understanding more about early Spanish colonialism, twentieth-century imperialism, and US interference. That’s why I took to the streets to see Fidel Castro speak in Santiago. That’s why I took up the chant. “Momio, ladrón, fascista, maricón.” The slogan seemed to be everybody’s favorite, out of the dozens that echoed across Santiago in the days leading up to Comandante Fidel’s visit.
As the crowd marched down the Alameda in November of 1971 to see Castro, enveloped in the fragrance and warmth of spring, street vendors hawked mote con huesillo. To recharge our chanting voices, many of us bought this drink, a sweet and clear peach nectar served in a glass, with thick slices of sun-dried peaches and the mote—cooked husked wheat. This cooled me down, but revolutionary fervor was burning inside me. The Chilean students marching by my side had arranged themselves in brigades, carrying red banners with Fidel’s profile and Cuban flags. We started to chant, “El pueblo unido jamás será vencido!” The people united will never be defeated.
Our destination was the Universidad Técnica del Estado. There, Fidel was to give the first of many speeches during his stay in Chile. I stood in the crowd just a few feet below his podium. I don’t remember how I managed to get so close. Fervor and excitement must have propelled me forward.
As Castro began to speak, I was spellbound. I had never heard a political leader articulate with such intensity the importance of providing universal health care and education. Castro also spoke about the evil of US domination in Latin America. With fervor, he declared, “They talk about the failure of socialism. But where is the success of capitalism in Africa, Asia, and Latin America?”
As a kid growing up in the ’60s with a father in the Kennedy administration, I had been in the white-hot center of anti-Communism. The Soviets were the enemy. Fidel, we were taught, was their Latin American pawn. By the time I stood before Castro’s podium, I’d completed a 180-degree turn. For three hours, with my scalp sizzling in the noonday sun, I listened in rapture to a story so different from the one I had been raised with. It wasn’t about the red menace of global Communism but the plight of workers and farmers. I had been on the road for many long and dusty months, meeting subsistence farmers, hoeing their corn and beans, sleeping on their dirt floors, lighting kitchen fires before sunrise to warm milk before heading up the mountains to gather firewood, sweeping the floor with ash from the fire to make it shine. I had come to believe that farming, politics, and power are intrinsically entwined. The poorest farmer can often provide enough food for his or her family, but political instability, war, and greed are eroding that ability in modern times. The farmer is subject to the whims and winds of industrialized history, often forced to drink contaminated water, with no voice in the marketplace.
Chanting for Fidel in the streets, I was focused only on these beliefs. I didn’t think about the undercurrent of hatred that informed our chanting. I was standing with my friend Gordon, a fellow traveler who had also shacked up in Arrayán. He was from Scotland. We had met at the correo, part of the traveler’s trail, while checking for messages, and he had become my Santiago companion.
Gordon told me he was gay, but we didn’t speak much about his sexuality. It didn’t make a difference to me. Did it make a difference to him? He recited that chant along with the rest of us. I feel disgusted knowing that my friend heard me say that word, maricón. Only many years later did I become aware of the extent to which gay people were persecuted in Cuba under Castro. It hurts me to think about this, because I admired Castro so much. We were trying to form a socialist monolith in Chile, but there were mineral veins of evil in it. Gordon was dedicated to the cause, like me a supporter of Allende, and I don’t know how he endured the complications of his identity.
If Robert McNamara had been the hero of my childhood, Fidel Castro held that place when I was in my early twenties. I can’t reconcile the admiration I had for him with the horror I feel at his flaws. As Americans we are quick to point out when foreign leaders have a streak of evil or even shades of gray. My father, a respectable cabinet member with a clean-shaven face, was just as flawed.
I stood just feet away from Fidel Castro as he spoke to a crowd of university students in Santiago, Chile, in 1971.
One morning, I was sitting at a sidewalk café in Santiago, sipping a coffee and catching up on the news. An article in El Mercurio, Santiago’s main newspaper, caught my eye. The United Nations was holding its Third Session on Trade and Development in Santiago. Robert S. McNamara, President of the World Bank, would be giving the keynote address.
I paused, put the paper down, and held my coffee without taking a drink. I had not seen or spoken to my father in almost a year. So many things had changed. The country I had left behind began to reappear in my memory. I recalled that I was an American. I hadn’t even known that he was in Chile.
Before cell phones, and given that they had no fixed address for me, there was no way for my family to know my whereabouts. Yet there Dad was. It almost seems like fiction, the way he caught up with me.
The power of the American Empire was now clearer to me than ever. I had traveled far, but my father’s influence reached farther. Country by country, I was learning more about the role that the US played in the world.
The world education I had begun for myself placed Vietnam in a new light. It no longer seemed like a tragic mistake made by wise but flawed men. It now appeared to reflect an odious national mindset of imperialism.
Picking up the newspaper again, I found another article about my father, a humor piece. It featured a classic photo of him, probably testifying before Congress. The profile shot showed his wire-rimmed glasses tight across his pug nose, his hair combed straight back and parted in the middle, his shoulders hunched and his lips pursed like he was responding to a tough question. The caption to the photo stated: “MCNAMARA: Bought a section of Martha’s Vineyard island for the ‘dolce vita.’”
The accompanying column read:
Robert McNamara, current president of the World Bank and ex North American Secretary of Defense, together with friends, recently purchased an island off the coast of Massachusetts. His objective is to own a private beach where he can practice nudism. It is possible that in this environment new theories of sterilization will occur to him, which he can then offer as a prescription to Latin Americans. This is the true passion of McNamara.
There were grains of truth in this article. My mother and father, together with friends, did purchase a piece of land on Martha’s Vineyard. It included Lucy Vincent Beach, the most secluded nude beach on the island, where island-goers can sneak through fields of huckleberry bushes to dive into the surf and paint their nude bodies with the gray clay from the cliffs.
My father had many concerns about sustainability that informed his work at the World Bank, and they were not separable from his love of the outdoors. I have one of his letters from the early 1990s in which he writes to a friend about global warming. He knew that it was going to become a global concern in the ensuing decades. My father was also a diehard zero-population-growth adherent. Understanding the impact of a single human life on greenhouse gas emissions, he believed governments should provide access to family planning and reproductive care. When my wife and I decided to have a third child, all he said to me was “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
When I put the newspaper down that morning at the café, I understood that I was not going to see my father in Santiago. Although we had traveled to the same city by chance, in our intentions we were too far apart to possibly meet.
A quarter century passed before I got to meet Fidel Castro. It was at the 1996 World Food Summit in Rome, a conference of the United Nations aimed at solving the problems of global food insecurity.
Castro’s arrival in Rome was triumphant. For several days, he was the star of the summit. He branded the developed nations of the First World “hypocritical.” I could relate; I’d often felt that my father, formerly president of the World Bank, had been hypocritical.
I was serving as a US delegate to the summit, and I was obligated to toe the line of diplomatic relations. Because the US had an embargo against Cuba, there was to be no communication between the delegates of the two nations. I spoke with our team leader, Assistant Secretary of State Tim Wirth, about the possibility of meeting Fidel. He said that if the occasion presented itself, he was okay with my jumping on it.
Although Castro didn’t know me, he and my father were in some way intimates, having narrowly avoided a global catastrophe, on opposite sides. Both were considered criminals by their harshest critics. My father had sought to pacify a Communist country and in the process had contributed to millions of deaths while tearing a hole in his own homeland. Fidel would have sacrificed his nation, his people, and his revolution in order to oppose the United States and capitalism.
On day two of the plenary session, Fidel entered the conference building in his usual flurry of charismatic personality. He took his seat in the middle of the oval hall. A guard was posted at either end of his aisle. I hastily scribbled a note of introduction in Spanish on my yellow legal pad with the intent of showing it to the guard. From my seat, I walked down to the plenary floor. Across the hall from me was the entire US delegation, seeming to look me straight in the eye. I took a deep breath and handed my introduction to the guard. To my utter surprise, he waved me past. At that point I was breathless. My heart was pounding so much that I’m sure it could have been heard as far away as Cuba. I crouched down to the floor, avoiding any possibility of being seen, and I proceeded to crawl on all fours between the rows of auditorium seats all the way from the beginning of the aisle to its center, where Fidel Castro was. As I approached his feet, I began to rise. It was like a rebirth.
At his side was his ever-present translator, a very attractive younger woman, who stood up alongside the two of us. In Spanish, I addressed Fidel directly, introducing myself as an organic walnut and olive grower from California and a delegate to the World Food Summit. His eyebrows arched upward as I spoke. I sensed his interest when I mentioned farming. He seemed to believe me when I spoke of our mutual interest in and commitment to reversing global food insecurity.
When I said that I was the son of Robert McNamara, a broad smile formed in the forest of his beard. He and my father had met in Cuba in 1992, when they joined together with other Soviet and Cuban officials to discuss the historic showdown.
“I have great admiration for your father,” he said.
I didn’t have time for a proper reply. The plenary session was about to begin. I hastily asked if he would sign my copy of the summit program. We shook hands, and I returned to my seat, this time walking fully upright.
Things were different now that they were old men. Of course they could admire each other. They were both looking back on long careers. Of course Castro admired him. They shared a son.
I wonder if I’ve been too hard on my father.
Maybe I shouldn’t think that. I cannot be too hard on him.
Perhaps it would have been good for us to come together in Chile in 1972. On the other hand, he might have been too busy. What would he have thought about my transformation? Where in the city would it have been possible for an American dignitary and his left-wing, itinerant son to sit down and make conversation?
Today I know that this period was the most enlightening, engaging, and fulfilling part of my parents’ lives. After 1968, Mom and Dad traveled to almost every country in the world. They met with heads of state, and they brought with them all their American hopes for prosperity, health, and human rights.
Looking back at the timing of Dad’s visit to Chile, I understand that the United Nations conference, focused on free trade and spearheaded by the president of the World Bank, was a counterforce against the Castro-Allende celebration of socialism. The United States played the role of a paternalistic outsider, pushing and dragging and cajoling other countries to develop in ways amenable to American interests and ideology. As the conference was getting underway, CIA operatives were already engaged in toppling the Allende government. Meanwhile, the Vietnam War dragged on.