In spring 1959 Fidel and his entourage blitzed the United States and entered the hearts of many in my generation. Even before the revolution, Fidel had traveled to Miami, Tampa, and other Cuban enclaves in America to raise funds and support. In April, Fidel arrived at the invitation of the American Society of Newspaper Editors.1 President Eisenhower refused to meet him, but sent Vice President Nixon to meet and shake his hand in a famous photo op. Fidel visited Mount Vernon and the Lincoln Memorial—where he read the Gettysburg Address aloud—before being surrounded in New York by twenty thousand people at Penn Station. He dropped by the Bronx Zoo and the Empire State Building, and was given the keys to the city by Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. On a quick trip to Boston he spoke to ten thousand students at Soldiers Field.2 He gave out Cuban cigars to cops and railroad porters. He had at least one affair.
These long-forgotten moments are documented in Van Gosse’s comprehensive history of young Americans’ enthrallment with Cuba, Where the Boys Are, the title borrowed from a Fifties coming-of-age novel about adventuresome young Yankees and their seduction into subversion.3 The Cuban Revolution even awakened an impulse among at least a few to join the battle directly in solidarity. For example, Gosse cites a 1957 letter from Henry di Suvero, then at Berkeley, later an ACLU advocate, and a close friend of mine ten years later in New Jersey; in his letter to New York Times correspondent Matthews, the young Di Suvero suggested bringing eight friends, all UC honors students and “highly adventurous,” along with two jeeps, to “join & aid Fidel Castro.”4 Matthews discouraged them. Instead, some of the same students went on to form SLATE, the first independent student political party at the dawn of the sixties.
The Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC), created in 1960, was a sharp break from the Cold War culture. Among its student organizers was Saul Landau, soon to be the bridge between C. Wright Mills and Fidel;5 its cofounders included the Nation’s Carleton Beals and Waldo Frank6 (the grandfather of today’s Havana-based journalist Marc Frank); and its sponsors included many prominent intellectuals opposed to the chill of McCarthyism: James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, Julian Mayfield, John O. Killens, John Henrik Clarke, Rev. Donald Harrington, Kenneth Tynan, Dan Wakefield, and Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.7 In the emerging spirit of the New Left, there was a “lack of ties to established labor, political, or civil rights institutions, [and] hardly a fellow traveler of the Old Left among them.”8 When Cuba nationalized US refineries in Cuba after the companies refused to process Soviet oil (at the insistence of the State Department), the Fair Play Committee grew “at a dizzying pace,” from three chapters and two thousand subscribers to its Bulletin to twenty-seven chapters, forty student councils, and seven thousand members in 1961.9
Fidel’s most explosive and memorable stop during this period came a year later in Harlem, the capital of America’s black community. Arriving for the September 1960 General Assembly of the UN, Fidel moved into Harlem’s Hotel Theresa after experiencing what he considered a frosty reception at the deluxe downtown Hotel Shelburne.10 In Harlem, amidst street euphoria, Fidel met with the young Malcolm X and a galaxy of black cultural and political leaders, including many who would endorse Fair Play for Cuba.
The chords of empathy between African Americans and Cubans went back long before the 1959 revolution.
RICARDO: The nation of Cuba originated from European colonization. Historically there was immigration in both directions as a result of arriving African slaves, Haitians, and French settlers during the Haitian Revolution ... Later, thousands fled to Cuba during the crisis in Spain [during the Franco era]. Where did José Martí go to organize the Cuban Revolutionary Party in the nineteenth century? To the United States, where many Cubans already lived. Between February and December of 1869, nearly one hundred thousand Cubans—seriously, one hundred thousand!—left for the United States from the port of Havana alone. That’s why José Martí traveled to the United States.11
Those Cubans fighting for independence from Spain in the latter half of the nineteenth century, known popularly as mambises, included many runaway African slaves. The recent runaways were joined by cimarones, known in English as “maroons”: Africans who had “escaped to the Indians” beginning with slavery’s introduction in 1502. The native people, facing extinction themselves, tried to form a resistance across the islands. The most famous uprising, still venerated in Cuba today, was led by a native of Hispaniola, Hatuey, who fought a prolonged guerrilla war against the Spanish before being captured, tied to a stake, and burned alive in 1512.12 As the native people were decimated, they fled to the mountains together with newly arrived Africans, building fortified base communities, known as palenques. Maroon resistance communities spread across the Caribbean, including to Florida’s everglade swamps. Their punishment upon capture was horrific: they were skinned, hanged, roasted alive, or decapitated so that their skulls could be impaled on stakes.13
In his epic history of Cuba and African Americans, Dr. Gerald Horne quotes an 1849 passage from Frederick Douglass’s diaries in which the former slave and abolitionist wrote of Cuba as the “great Western slave mart of the world” and “the channel through which slaves are imported annually into the United States.”14 It was feared by American abolitionists that Confederates with their slaves would retreat to a Cuban sanctuary. Nearly a century later, in 1963, the renowned C. L. R. James wrote of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) that “what took place in French Santo Domingo . . . reappeared in Cuba in 1958.”15 Both revolutions were West Indian in character, James wrote, and “whatever its ultimate fate, the Cuban Revolution marks the ultimate stage of a Caribbean quest for identity.”16
Fidel and the 26th of July movement struck a deep chord with the emerging Beat Generation too, among young bearded poets like Allen Ginsberg, who grew up in a left-wing culture, broke with the mid-century’s stifling conformity, and later would be ejected from the island for his homosexuality and advocacy of marijuana.17 The black poet LeRoi Jones, later to become the revolutionary nationalist Amiri Baraka, issued a famous essay, “Cuba Libre,” in Evergreen Review in fall 1960, which Van Gosse calls “a gauntlet thrown down before the antipolitical ethos of the Beats.”18 A father figure of the Beats, the San Francisco poet-publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, was among the island’s foremost enthusiasts. Robert Scheer, a Berkeley graduate student who worked at Ferlinghetti’s City Lights bookstore, wrote one of the first important books defending the Cuban Revolution,19 and later published Che’s diaries in his magazine, Ramparts. The revolution crossed the lines between cultural and political revolt to tap the fascination of the young intellectuals and students who came to be known as the American New Left, especially through the hugely influential and best-selling writings of the sociologist C. Wright Mills.