Iwant to thank my wife Barbara, and sons Troy and Liam, who have accompanied me to Cuba where they wandered in wonder while I spent hours and sometimes days in interviews with Cuban contacts, most importantly Ricardo Alarcón, usually on the empty sixth floor of the Hotel Nacional. I must especially thank Ricardo himself, a leader of the Cuban Revolution and state for over five decades, for his patience with my hundreds of questions since we first began our interviews in 2006. His many years of listening to often-insufferable US diplomats perhaps prepared him well for our fifty hours of back and forth over seven years. His daughter Margarita has gone out of her way to support and sometimes interpret the conversation over time. Many other Cubans, including some who were there from the early revolutionary years right up to the diplomatic achievement of December 17, 2014, have been incredibly open with their observations.
I remained in close touch for years with my late good friends Saul Landau and Len Weinglass. Saul, a San Francisco Bay area graduate student and young journalist, took the sociologist C. Wright Mills on a 1960 trip to Cuba where he interviewed Fidel at length and then wrote the best-selling Listen, Yankee in homage to which I have titled this book. Saul wrote hundreds of articles and filmed numerous documentaries about the Cuban Revolution through all its twists and turns. Even though Saul felt at times that the Cuban revolutionary dream had “faded,” he remained a passionate historian, occasional citizen-diplomat, and defender of Cuba until he succumbed to cancer in 2013. In his final days, Saul was finishing a documentary about a new heroine of his, Mariela Castro, daughter of Raúl Castro and niece of Fidel, who became an elected member of the Cuban parliament and is a passionate advocate of LGBT equality.
Len Weinglass became one of my best friends after we met in Newark in 1965, where I was a young community organizer and he had opened a law practice after Yale Law School and the Air Force. Our lives were changed by the massive urban rebellion of July 1967, which occurred in an atmosphere charged with revolutionary aspirations—fueled in part by the Cubans in Havana and the triumph of their successful revolution. Len was a brilliant member of the team of lawyers defending the Chicago Eight, including myself, when we faced federal charges of conspiring to disrupt the Chicago Democratic convention in 1968. He went on to conduct methodical defenses of many of the most controversial radicals of our time, far from his roots at Yale. But his most challenging case of all was that of the Cuban Five, a group of Cubans who illegally infiltrated the United States to monitor the Cuban exiles attempting to subvert the Castro regime from protected sanctuaries in Florida. The Five were charged variously with conspiracy to murder, illegal entry, and false documentation when they were rounded up in Miami in September 1998. Since impossible cases were Len’s specialty, I suggested that he take the Cuban Five case on federal appeal, which Len did with steady success. He was reading an appellate brief for one of the Cuban Five on his deathbed, alongside Tolstoy’s War and Peace, when he died of cancer in 2011.
Indeed there are only a few survivors left among those who were present in 1959 when the US-supported Batista regime fled Havana before the approaching insurgents, whose leader, Fidel Castro, spoke in Havana while a white dove descended to his shoulder. When I began researching this book, Alfredo Guevara, a lifetime friend of Fidel and Raúl Castro, described the moment as the “pre-post-Castro era.” He too passed away in 2013, at eighty-seven. Another early revolutionary, Enrique Oltuski, passed away shortly after I interviewed him in the nineties. Another old friend of Fidel’s, who left Cuba over communism but promoted détente, was Max Lesnik, who is still around, having survived multiple bombing assaults in Miami for promoting dialogue. I also was pleased to interview Manuel Yepe, an early Prensa Latina editor who brought Mills to meet Fidel in the Sierra in 1960, and his sociologist-feminist partner Marta Núñez.
On the American side I want to thank Ethel Kennedy and her son Bobby Jr., for reminiscing about those perilous times when the Kennedys and Fidel were on the brink of global war, and sharing with me their recollections of how President Kennedy and his brother, US attorney general Robert Kennedy, saw the unfolding drama. The Kennedy family’s subsequent reconciliation and friendship with the Cubans is an important model of reconciliation for the future.
I must thank also the many US officials, diplomats, and American historians who were willing to be interviewed for the chapters on the foiled history of past attempts at reconciliation: Greg Craig, Morton Halperin, Wayne Smith, William LeoGrande, Peter Kornbluh, Richard Feinberg, and Robert Pastor all gave willingly of their time and personal knowledge. Tim Rieser in the office of Sen. Patrick Leahy was invaluable. US Congress members including Karen Bass, Jim McGovern, and Barbara Lee kept me aware of their continuous advocacy for a new policy. The State Department’s Jack McGrath shared the official US perspective with me. Julia Sweig, a protégé of Saul Landau’s now at the Council on Foreign Relations, provided expert insights. William Orme at the United Nations Development Program helped me sift through data about Cuba’s place on their Human Development Index. The Nation’s editor, Katrina vanden Heuvel, was a constant source of encouragement. Authors including Harvard’s Jonathan Hansen, Salim Lamrani, Piero Gleijeses, and Gerald Horne were generous with their work, and I wish to thank Harvard’s Institute of Politics for holding a seminar in 2014 where I shared my findings.
I must thank profusely Andrés Pertierra, a Cuban American philosophy student at the University of Havana, now in Washington, who fact-checked and researched numerous substantive footnotes meant to enrich the history and background of many events described in this book. Andres’s father, the Cuban-born human rights attorney José Pertierra, always has offered wise advice and friendship, as has his wife, the Cuban journalist Rose Miriam Elizalde.
Jill Hamberg, a lifelong follower of Cuba, sent me blogs and articles about the island virtually every day for the past year. Sue Horton of the Los Angeles Times and Gary Reed of the Sacramento Bee were willing to test the waters by publishing my op-ed pieces when people were scoffing at the notion that there would be normalization of relations between Cuba and the United States.
Among the many numerous Cuban solidarity and reconciliation activists who shared their memories were Antonio Gonzales, John McAuliff, Sandra Levinson, Phil Hutchings, and former California Sen. John Burton. My longtime friend Andy Spahn never tired of lobbying President Obama to do the right thing. Michael Thelwell and Courtland Cox were helpful with insights into Stokeley Carmichael’s stance toward the Cuban Revolution, Pan-Africanism and the US black liberation struggle. Alycia Jrapko of the Committee in Defense of the Cuban Five has been tireless in including me in her forums from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. Joe Perez of Cuba Travel has never failed in arranging flights and introductions.
My research assistant Emma Taylor did a great job of steering the manuscript through the shoals of creation. She never made a mistake.
Finally, I want to thank the crew at Seven Stories Press in New York. My publisher, Dan Simon, took a risk on me even when I couldn’t exactly explain what this book would be about. He believed me when I said I would only know the purpose if he let me write it. Great thanks to Ruth Weiner for promotion, Liz DeLong for her managerial stability, Jon Gilbert for production, Stewart Cauley for the jacket design, and Lauren Hooker for her assiduous proofreading at the last minute. Thank you for Dan’s leadership and everyone’s collective passion for a story that, until now, hasn’t been told.
Any infelicities or flaws in Listen, Yankee! are my own. On December 17, 2014, came the wonderful news—just as the last parts of the book were being finalized—that our country and Cuba had decided to normalize relations, requiring a rapid revision for the best of reasons.
—TH, Los Angeles, January 20, 2015