Ricardo and I are both lifetime students of Mills, a rebel thinker, sociologist, and writer who suffered a fatal heart attack in 1962. The founders of Students for a Democratic Society, especially those on campuses like Ann Arbor, eagerly absorbed each of Mills’s books—White Collar (1951), about our middle-class culture; The Power Elite (1956), about the stifling of democracy by corporations, the military, and a bureaucratic state; The Causes of World War Three (1958), about the terrifying prospect of thermonuclear war; and, in 1960, Listen, Yankee, an impassioned attempt by Mills to awaken Americans to the challenge of third world revolutions. In those days, Mills was the intellectual parallel to Bob Dylan. Their every page and every lyric were explored like tea leaves. Mills did extraordinary empirical research on power, like virtually no one since, opening our eyes to the reality of elite dominance in a context where democratic pluralism was the conventional wisdom. He wrote in a popular, accessible style. He skewered his timid colleagues in sociology for not “thinking big.” We were amazed by his lifestyle, too: a professor who rode a world-class motorcycle, designed and built a home in Nyack, and modeled himself on Ernest Hemingway. He was unquestionably macho, as was Fidel. I wrote my Michigan graduate thesis on Mills, called Radical Nomad, so titled because I thought him a rebel in search of a cause, a movement, a party to identify with.
In 1960, just following the Cuban Revolution, Mills published a seminal “Letter to the New Left” in the London-based New Left Review, which managed to capture the sense that something “new” was, in Dylan’s language, “blowing in the wind.”1 Mills complained of the “weariness” of the dominant “NATO intellectuals” whose complacent status quo thinking was standing “in the way of a release of the imagination.” He opened the pathway to young people and students imagining ourselves as agents of social change. Decades later, it is vital to recall that youth and students then were categorized as marginal to history in both Marxist revolutionary ideology and Western liberal political theory. It was thought that there were simply too few of us enrolled in colleges, or under twenty-one years old, to make much political difference, and more important, our role in life included no “lever” to make history. That role, in radical theory, was assigned to the industrial working class who had their hands on the gears of production. Mills criticized this view as a nonempirical “labor metaphysic,” an immutable truth held by the Left similar to the scriptural dogma in a religious creed.
Mills empowered our activist generation by his thesis that we were agents of social change, a phrase we imported into the 1962 Port Huron Statement. In the culmination of his 1960 essay he noted that young people were leading uprisings all over the planet, mentioning Japan, South Korea, Poland, Soviet students, the antinuclear marches in England, the sit-ins in the American South, and in Cuba, where Mills emphasized that a revolution was carried out by thirty-year-olds and where organized labor, muddled by its relationship with Batista’s state, definitely was not the key agent of change.
Mills travelled to Cuba for two weeks during the summer of 1960, where he hunkered down with Fidel and many others, also bouncing in a jeep all over the island. He was accompanied by Saul Landau, a young radical graduate student who would devote his life to Cuba before he passed away in 2013. One of the key Cubans helping Mills get around was Manuel Yepe, a young intellectual who went on to become the head of Prensa Latina, the vortex of Cuba’s media services. Yepe, who still lives in Havana with his wife, the social scientist and feminist Dr. Marta Núñez, recalled Mills’s journey when I interviewed him in Havana in 2013.
MANUEL YEPE: Mills was one who was prepared to understand Cuba. Everything he wrote in his book he learned in a few weeks. For his views on Cuba, he was being seriously harassed, including death threats, at home in New York, by the Miami Cubans and, it was proven, by the FBI.2
We drove from Havana to the town of Viñales in Pinar Del Río for the discussions with Fidel. We arrived late at night, and Mills went to his room. I was called very early the next morning to bring Mills to Fidel’s room. Fidel was still in bed, holding a machine gun. Fidel’s medical doctor René Vallejo, also came by. They shut the door. Then I believe they talked for the next eighteen hours.
Mills actually talked with Fidel eighteen hours per day for three and a half days. The collaboration between these two overwhelming personalities seemed somehow destined. It takes nothing from Mills’s talents to say that he channeled Fidel so intensely that the Cuban leader was a de facto coauthor of Listen, Yankee. (The same would be true, I will argue, of Fidel’s role in the writing of Régis Debray’s Revolution in the Revolution? in 1967.3) Mills said as much in his introduction: “I have thought the expression of my own views much less important than the statement of the Cuban revolutionaries’ case. And that is why, insofar as I have been able, I have refrained from expressing a personal opinion . . . Please know, then, that as you read these letters that it is the Cuban revolutionaries who are talking to you.”4
Mills wrote his bestseller in six weeks, worsening his serious heart condition. The stress on him was increased by the FBI. Someone sent him an anonymous letter warning that, in the words of an FBI memo on the incident, “an American agent disguised as a South American will assassinate you on your next visit to Cuba.”5 He stuffed a handgun under the bed in his New York family home. On the eve of a December 1960 nationally televised debate over Latin America with the establishment critic of Cuba, A. A. Berle, Mills fell into a coma from a severe heart attack. He recovered, but doctors discovered evidence of previous attacks. Having no health insurance increased his worries, as he wrote in a letter to the New Left Review’s Ralph Miliband on January 25, 1961. “What bothers me,” he wrote, “is whether or not the damned heart will stand up to what must then be done” in the event of worsening times coming to America.6
“Fidel keeps cabling me to come on down and convalesce in Cuba, and my friend [René] Vallejo, . . . a medical man of real ability, as well as the head of INRA [Cuba’s National Institute of Agrarian Reform] in the Oriente,7 says that just to step on the island will cure me! and that he has some things to talk over anyway!”8 But Mills wouldn’t stop trying to fight “this moral anguish which is crushing me,” as he put it to Landau. His heart gave out on March 20, 1962, just before the founding convention of SDS where he was invited to speak. None of us at Port Huron had known him, but all of us felt his loss. We wanted, I think, to fill his space with hope. Like many young revolutionaries the world over, we believed we would carry on to overcome what killed him.
Fifty-one years later, in 2013, sitting on an outdoor couch at Havana’s Nacional Hotel, Ricardo still brought up Mills.
RICARDO: He said he would come back in 1962. In a way we are still waiting for him. Miliband said Mills was a casualty of the Cuban Revolution. He was victimized by the Cuban Mafia with death threats and lawsuits. He wanted Saul to come ahead to get more documents for his next visit. He was trying to get documents here not just to prepare for his next visit but to prepare his defense in court where he was being accused by some gang- and Batista-related businesspeople. The State Department refused to issue the passport.
Ricardo wrote a remembrance for The Nation on April 9, 2007, on the forty-fifth anniversary of Mills’s death, noting that “his principal message not only retains its relevance; recent historical events vindicate it.” The Soviet Union was no more; “neoliberal capitalism is global, yet its dominion is increasingly challenged by the peoples of Latin America and elsewhere.” Ricardo’s words in 2007 signified to me that he was resuming the search for another New Left. It was one reason that Ricardo had invited me to spend a week being interviewed about the American New Left for Cuba’s archives. “We have, indeed, faced difficult times, bereft of his irreplaceable rebelliousness,” Ricardo told a Montreal conference that same year, speaking of Mills.9
Any aging veteran of the sixties in America is likely to have Mills’s books, even though they are little read or discussed in academia anymore. The pages of my two copies of Listen, Yankee, one a paperback, the other the original hardcover edition, are flaking and subject to tearing if underlined. Many observers might say the aging process has affected Cuba and the American New Left and in the same way. But the content of the pages remains truly original. The overarching themes declare the way we were or, as Ricardo said of our interviews on Cuba and the New Left in 2006, the como éramos, the essential ideas of the revolutions of 1960 and in the years following.
First, Mills’s Cuban voice was that of middle-class youth. “We are new radicals. We really are, we think, a new left in the world”10 . . . “the revolution was incubated at the university”11 . . . “we are middle-class.”12 The voice was euphoric: “We Cubans have made the big connection between fantasy and reality, and now we are living in it.”13 Mills’s Cuban voice declared that “our revolution is not a revolution made by labor unions or wage workers in the cities, or labor parties, or by anything like that. It is far from any revolution you ever heard of before.”14 The SDS document said the same: that our revolution would be led above all by young people, blacks, farmworkers, and students. Like the Cubans taking to their countryside, we would become a catalyst to awaken a moribund American liberal and labor movement.
At the time, the Cuban Revolution was neither Communist nor led by a vanguard party. Mills quotes Fidel’s proclamation of 1959: “Standing between the two political and economic ideologies being debated in the world, we are holding our own position. We have named it humanism . . . the tremendous problem faced by the world is that it has been placed in the position where it must choose between capitalism, which starves people, and communism, which resolves economic problems but suppresses the liberties so greatly cherished by man. . . . Capitalism sacrifices man; the communist state, by its totalitarian concept, sacrifices the rights of man.”15
Not only that: “The Communist parties in Latin America generally go for ‘popular fronts’ and ‘national democratic coalitions’ and so on . . . they sacrifice immediate revolutionary action—and even [revolutionary] thought . . . they are to the right of the revolution.”16
Preferably, Mills claimed, Cuba would want to do away with the US-Soviet Cold War altogether: “We think what gives its character to our revolution is the fight between North America and Latin America. That’s our Cold War.”17 The Port Huron Statement (PHS) issued the same denunciation. But Mills went on quoting Fidel: “Our Cuban opposition to communism doesn’t mean the kind of McCarthyism and hysterical anticommunism that you’ve put up with in your country.”18 As the PHS said it, “An unreasoning anticommunism has become a major social problem for those who want to construct a more democratic America,”19 leading America into expedient alliances with dictators like Cuba’s Batista.20 Written one year after the April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, the PHS said that the US government was mainly interested in Cuba for commercial reasons, and that the invasion further isolated us from Latin America. Meanwhile, we were angered at the fact that “the world is in transformation[,] but America is not.”21 While SDS was “in basic opposition to the communist system,”22 that hardly justified the Cold War’s chain of American-aided dictatorships or its permanent and growing military-industrial complex—a memorable term given us by President Eisenhower but not until the very end of his presidency in his 1959 farewell address. “We should end the distinction between communist hunger and anticommunist hunger,” the Statement said, borrowing Mills’s definition of the third world as “the hungry bloc.” “To support dictators like Diem while trying to destroy ones like Castro will only enforce international cynicism about American ‘principle,’ and is bound to lead to even more authoritarian revolutions, especially in Latin America where we did not even consider foreign aid until Castro had challenged the status quo.”23
While Mills identified with the Cuban Revolution, he never abandoned his private worries about the “nightmares that might occur in the times ahead.” “It might harden into any one of several kinds of dictatorial tyranny.”24 He noted the dangers that Cuban society was “legally arbitrary” and expressed dislike for “the dependence on one man as exists in Cuba today, [and] the virtually absolute power that this one man possesses,” while emphasizing the need to “understand the conditions that have made it so.”25 Mills didn’t believe such trends were inevitable, but due in large part to the American role. And he thought “US policies and lack of policies are very real factors in forcing the government of Cuba to align itself politically with the Soviet bloc,” instead of, as Mills hoped, “assuming a generally neutralist and hence peaceful world orientation.”26 Mills believed in a two-party electoral system for Cuba, but warned that it was an “impossible and meaningless idea” as long as it simply meant giving the US-backed counterrevolution an institutional form.
Besides Fidel’s moral critique of communism as antihumanist, Mills quoted his Cuban narrator: “The [Communist] Party didn’t play any part at all in the making of our revolution . . . and were political rivals of our movement.”27
A policy of neutralism, then arising across the third world, wasn’t any longer a practical possibility for the Cubans, “as we tried to do, a year or so ago.”28 Instead, the menacing pressure of economic and military aggression from the United States made it necessary to accept a protective counterbalance that was only possible from the Soviet Union. “We are glad of their offer . . . to help us if you attack us militarily.”29 Since the United States couldn’t tolerate a New Left Cuba on our “doorstep,” it was guaranteed that the Cubans would move into the Soviet orbit in order to survive. The 26th of July movement would be integrated with the Cuban Communist Party, humanism with Marxism, and Cuba with the Soviet-led socialist bloc.
On one key point, the future of the Soviet Union, Mills was wrong in assuming its permanence—along with even the most fervent anticommunists and “experts” on communism.
RICARDO: I do not have a tradition of other comrades who believed in the Soviet Union. I had very limited experience with the USSR. I was in the Soviet Union once or twice, mainly in transit. My daughter was in East Germany. My main experience with them was at the UN. It showed me how much truth there was in Mills’s theory of convergence of the two blocs.
Ricardo was referring to Mills’s The Causes of World War Three, which analyzed the threat of the raging nuclear arms race. I was surprised at how quickly he emailed me back when I asked him more about Mills’s thesis.
RICARDO: I think Mills put it in a rather prophetic manner: “These two world-dominant societies are becoming overdeveloped in a similar way; the very terms of their world antagonism are furthering their similarities . . . There are many other points of convergence and coincidence between these two countries, both in dream and in reality, and as the Soviet industrial complex is further enlarged these will become more pronounced. In surface ideology they apparently differ; in structural trend and in official action they become increasingly alike. Not ideology but industrial and military technology, geared to total war, may well determine that the dreams of each will in due course befound in the realities of the other.”
Mills saw the problems raised by “hyperdevelopment,” the trend both in the West and the East toward a kind of industrialization that, together with the Cold War, was the basis of their convergence. In a way Mills was also anticipating the concerns about the environment and sustainable development before the Greens were born.
Mills therefore came to a conclusion that was original for its time, and with which the New Left agreed: “And that is why I am for the Cuban Revolution. I do not worry about it. I worry for it and with it.”30
Having worked and lived mainly through the chilling era of McCarthyism, Mills died before he could embrace and worry “for and with” the New Left in the United States. He never went South to the front lines of the civil rights struggle; his southern journey instead took him into the centers of Latin America’s revolution. He appended a dense and cogent twenty-page appendix to Listen, Yankee on conditions of misery in Latin America as a whole, notes for a future study. And while strongly identifying with the potential power of “the young intelligentsia,” it was impossible in 1961–1962 for Mills to see the coming of the anti-Vietnam War movement, draft resistance, student revolts, women’s liberation, gay liberation, the environmental movement, and the rise of a third world movement inside the borders of the United States itself. He was a lonely prophet without a promised land. From this standpoint of isolation, however, Mills had a prophetic insight shared by few at the time, that the domestic costs of Yankee imperialism someday might cause an armed revolutionary vanguard to rise within the United States itself, in the belly of the very beast that Martí hated. Mills was anticipating the Black Panther Party, the Weather Underground, the Young Lords, Reies Tijerina’s 1967 raid on the Tierra Amarilla courthouse, the American Indian Movement’s fight for Wounded Knee, American GI mutinies during the Vietnam War, and numerous acts of violence against the state beginning in the late sixties—all occurring less than a decade after the Cuban Revolution and Mills’s prophetic book. He wrote:
“In Cuba, we had to take to our ‘Rocky Mountains’—you couldn’t do that, could you? Not yet, we suppose. We’re joking—we suppose. But if in ten years, if in five years, if things go as we think they might inside your country, if it comes to that, then know this, Yankee: some of us will be with you. God almighty, those are great mountains!”31