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In the Northern Hemisphere New Left dreamers also were turning away from the stale politics of the West. Our new North Star beckoned from the Global South, especially Latin America, where Debray declared that “it was all happening.” He was a thirty-year-old, Sorbonne-educated intellectual, a brainy protégé of the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, the latter having been born in the Algerian colony before migrating to French intellectual elite circles. Tired of what he considered the failed French Left, Debray drifted from the prestigious l’École Normale Supérieure to explore Havana. There he was amazed during two months spent observing the revolution’s literacy campaign, and he returned again immediately after the Bay of Pigs along with many French and Spanish republicans whose previous euphoric hopes had died in 1937. “The Spanish Civil War and French Resistance were still alive in Cuba,” Debray wrote.³ Until then, Debray added, “I was ashamed of being French.”⁴ Debray’s writings caught the eye of Che in 1965 when the Argentine was traveling in newly liberated Algiers.⁵ Che, who read French, quickly translated Debray’s essay on Latin America and, once back in Havana, he passed it along to Fidel, who was taken with Debray’s assertion that Cuba held up a new model of revolution, the thesis originated by C. Wright Mills a year before. Debray, in my view, began channeling Fidel. Debray’s article in Les Temps Moderne was written in a literary, complex, and disciplined style that would impress leftist intellectuals already hungry to be persuaded; the revolution, according to Debray, became exportable as a text.⁶ Ideas became weapons, and Debray was a young guerrilla using his pen to create a liberated zone in the sectarian-ridden jungles of Marxist political thought.

RICARDO: There was a lot of controversy within the Latin American Left in those days, just as there had been during the revolution here. Many people were opposed to those trying to recreate the guerrilla movement. Every country had an old guard Communist Party, and also a split group encouraged by the Chinese, as well as others who believed in a Cuban model. There even was an Albanian line. Maybe it is normal when you enter a new epoch of history that you get a large variety of interpretations. We of course had responsibility for the Cuban Revolution.

Debray visited several Latin American revolutionary movements then engaged in the early process of guerrilla warfare, staying for several weeks in Venezuela during the 1963 Falcón state guerrilla campaign, keeping careful diaries and writing for French journals.⁷ He hitchhiked with a Venezuelan girlfriend, a militant named Elisabeth Burgos, who soon became his nominal “wife.” The pair were on the road in Latin America, armed with pens in their backpacks.⁸

By 1966, Fidel transformed Debray into a disciplined “initiate” of the inner brotherhood,⁹ providing the Frenchman with cover by telling the Paris Academy that he was a new “philosophy lecturer” at the University of Havana while he was being trained in Pinar del Río for active military service. Instead Debray was dispatched to a military training complex, Punto Cero, where he was immersed in the details of clandestine warfare: rifle and bazooka practice, surveillance and countersurveillance, sabotage, assassination, explosives, the fine points of mixing lethal chemical ingredients, and so on. He trained not only with Cubans, but Dominicans, Venezuelans, and Guatemalans, one of the thousands whose long march to Latin America’s guerrilla fronts passed through Punto Cero. The Cuban government charged not a penny.¹⁰

By this time Che had disappeared on a secret military mission to central Africa, where he judged conditions were ripe for revolution, a mistaken assessment that eventually led to divisions, debacle, and retreat.¹¹ From there Che would secretly return to Havana and prepare himself for the Andes in 1966, his ultimate objective. “He wanted to go there [to Bolivia] almost at the very beginning,” Castro recalled. “We managed to hold him until at least some preliminary work had been carried out, so he could go there with a little more safety.”¹²

Now facing unremitting hostility from the United States, as Debray later wrote, the revolution was taking an alternative path to the modus vivendi with the United States proposed by Che to Kennedy aide Richard Goodwin, and broached again by the Kennedy White House just before JFK’s murder.

In Debray’s perceptive analysis, “Blockaded on the starting line and forced onto the defensive, the revolution takes its revenge outside, running the blockade with clandestine exports” in both Africa and Latin America.¹³

Fidel spent months tutoring Debray in the concrete mechanics, philosophical orientation, and above all, what he considered the unique strategy of the Cuban Revolution. Just as Fidel was something of a ghost writer for C. Wright Mills’s 1960 book, he played a similar role on Debray’s tract, Revolution in the Revolution?, written during 1966 and released in Havana in January 1967 with three hundred thousand first-run copies and a swelling global circulation.¹⁴

“The Cuban state circulated it, the air of the time gave it wings,” Debray wrote.¹⁵ Its American editors, Leo Huberman and Paul Sweezy, described the 126-page volume as a “comprehensive and authoritative presentation of the revolutionary thought of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.”¹⁶ To Newsweek it was nothing less than “a primer for Marxist insurrection in Latin America.”¹⁷

Debray was sent to Bolivia by Fidel sometime in 1964 to help explore the groundwork for Che’s secret arrival in 1966.¹⁸ According to Jon Lee Anderson, Che wanted Debray to help recruit guerrillas and assess sites in the Bolivian countryside. Familiar problems were surfacing, however. The Bolivian Communist Party, led by Mario Monje Molina, was ambivalent at best about the foco theory, especially since the party was making modest progress in Bolivian elections. But Monje worried about the attraction of guerrilla war to some of his own militants, and competition from a pro-Chinese alternative. Fidel was suggesting that Che would only use Bolivia as a platform for reaching Argentina, to put Monje’s worries to rest.¹⁹

Debray’s journey would end in him being captured, imprisoned, and lined up before a firing squad before international pressures saved his life. A letter demanding a fair trial for Debray, claiming—falsely, as it turned out—that there was no evidence of his being a Cuban agent, was published in the New York Review of Books on July 13, 1967, signed by Mary McCarthy, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, Hannah Arendt, I.F. Stone, William Styron, Dwight Macdonald, Gar Alperovitz, Murray Kempton, Andrew Kopkind, Nat Hentoff, George Plimpton, Joseph Heller, Jason Epstein, Barbara Epstein, Robert Silvers, Norman Thomas, Hans Morgenthau, and Lillian Hellman, a veritable A-list of the liberal elite. President Charles De Gaulle also called for his release, as did the Vatican.

Debray’s arrest also signaled that Che was somewhere in Bolivia. Previously, American intelligence was clueless, debating whether Che was dead, somewhere in the African savannah, or the victim of a falling out with Fidel.

RICARDO: When Debray wrote the pamphlet, there was a lot of publicity here. I told him and others that I profoundly disagreed. The book helped to spread the theory of foco, of small groups going into the mountains. In my opinion, that was wrong. In Cuba, it was not a foco in the Sierra. It was an insurrection, an armed struggle in the mountains as the center of a whole process that was based in cities. The Sierra depended on an underground movement with money, weapons, support, and a supply of many fighters. It could not have been done without a movement connected with social struggles.

I was a member of the drafting committee for the Tricontinental, working with Foreign Minister Raúl Roa. I didn’t know anything about Régis’s secret activities. I met him once or twice in friendly intellectual conversations. We talked about politics, revolution, Cuba, Latin America, and the like. Remember that the main issue at that time was armed struggle versus “peaceful coexistence” and on that we entirely agreed.²⁰ Our differences were around the relations between the guerrilla foco and the urban struggle, and the role of the masses. We dealt with these questions as if it were a discussion on the West Bank in Paris. He was a Rive Gauche intellectual, and always drinking wine. By the way, he was a very good writer.

I asked Ricardo a natural question: But Fidel, Che, and the Cuban government were promoting the Debray thesis, no? Debray was not an independent journalist, he was working for them?

RICARDO: Frankly, that’s my impression. But it’s not true that the Sierra model was the only correct way, and Che suffered the consequences of that mistake in Bolivia, which was more complicated. How can you communicate with a Quechua man who doesn’t speak Spanish? In a plaza you can talk with an Indian lady in Spanish, then they will talk among themselves because you are a foreigner. Of course someday the guerrilla will establish contact, but Che didn’t have time.

Che’s significance is very great. Che will be eighty-something next week. He died as a young man, forty-six years ago. Imagine if you were sitting with Che now. I am sure that he would not be saying now what he was saying then. I don’t mean that he was defeated. It’s not by chance that you have there in Bolivia [president] Evo Morales. You cannot take Che out of Bolivian history. But if the Bolivians were to have applied just the Debray thesis, they would have failed.

You don’t find many examples in life of what Che did, putting your beliefs into life. He abandoned all comfort, the [government] ministry, [being a] big personality, and went off to train himself to fight another war. He was getting into his thirties, and to initiate a new beginning he didn’t have much time to spend while conducting individual business here.

When Che died, what was the reaction of the Soviets and China? Who praised him? For the Soviets, it was embarrassing because it contradicted their line of peaceful coexistence.²¹ The Chinese were not creating another Vietnam, just criticizing the Soviets and sitting down with Kissinger to establish a new relationship. There was no peaceful coexistence for the developing countries, only right-wing dictatorships. Some in our movement started to realize that both [Soviet and Chinese] sides were dogmatic in their approach to Marxism. Che’s approach was to open another front through trying to create “two, three, many Vietnams,” as the way to help Vietnam. The two big powers were criticizing the Vietnam War but not putting themselves at risk. Maybe Che was rather romantic, but you can’t believe in a socialist society if you ignore solidarity with others. Che’s theory was to take revolution to an international level.

When Che died, it was a severe blow to the idea of armed struggle, but it went on anyway. I was ambassador in New York when the word came. I remember it very well. One Soviet colleague, probably with the best of intentions, asked if it could be said that Che was on his own, not authorized. They were concerned with its effect on détente with the United States.

I said, more or less, “Go fuck yourself.”

History continues moving. Who in their right mind could advocate in Latin America for armed struggle today? Now the question should be, where would Che be now? On which side, advocating what? He would be supporting Evo Morales and trying to build this new consensus in Latin America.

It is important today to review Debray’s small book for what it actually said, what happened to Debray, and the tremendous reverberating effect on many of the New Left who turned toward foco-style violence in the late 1960s. Now that he is in France and those times are generally forgotten, it becomes difficult to resurrect the essence of Debray’s thought. But it’s necessary to retrieve his argument as having had a compelling logic at the time, and because revolutionary conditions such as those he was addressing may come again. Such seemingly extreme revolutionary moments have been described before, in the novels of Dostoyevsky (The Possesssed), André Malraux (Man’s Hope), and others. The same impulse has appeared among some of the anarchist factions of antiglobalization protests since the nineties, and among the new clandestine cyber-guerrillas too.

One must begin by understanding what Debray and, through him, Fidel and Che, believed they were confronting in Latin America. In 1960, every Latin American country contained a Communist Party something like Cuba’s, pursuing multi-class alliances with business-oriented parties, battling Cold War anticommunism, agitating for concessions for party-affiliated labor unions, and following the Soviet line of “peaceful coexistence” with the United States.

According to Debray’s doctrine, this “revisionist” Marxist strategy of reform, based on protecting the Soviet bloc, could lead at best to wage concessions in the context of repressive states controlled by their militaries with US advisers and funding. Reform therefore appeared as the enemy of revolution, the latter to be deferred to a hazy Promised Land in the future.

The strategy of “peaceful transition” to socialism seemed bankrupt against military oligarchs like Batista who doomed whole generations of frustrated young idealists to “more of the same” as their common future. The Chinese stood in militant ideological opposition to these pro-Soviet parties while opening the gates to their own sectarian and violent “cultural revolution.”

This latter upheaval, much romanticized by many Western intellectuals, positioned the Chinese as “revolutionary” in comparison to the Soviet Union’s “revisionism,” and contributed to splits across the revolutionary world. Both North Vietnam and Cuba tried to forge a path of independence while seeking support from both Communist powers. The Trotskyists, who also had a small base in Cuba and Latin America at the time, adhered to a line of uncompromising and continuous mass strikes, a strategy that was suicidal given the police and armies at the disposal of Latin America’s oligarchies.

The Cuban Revolution, though led by young intellectuals often steeped in these left-wing debates, represented a sharp break. According to Debay, the Cuban model rejected the need for a vanguard party of the working class to lead the revolution, thus violating a sacred Marxist-Leninist supposition.

Instead Debray retrieved a foco theory of action by small armed vanguards—or, as he later wrote, “Bolívar revisited by [Auguste] Blanqui [1805–1881] with Lenin on the wrapper.”²² To deconstruct Debray’s summary: Simón Bolívar led armies from country to country, “five times expelled from American soil within four years; defeated, ridiculed, alone, and with an obstinacy characterized as insanity,”²³ before finally hounding the Spanish Empire into retreat. Blanqui too was both glorified and abhorred for his lifetime of insurrectionary “foquism.” In Latin America, romantic and hopeless idealism was enshrined in the 1605 epic Spanish tale Don Quixote, a favorite of revolutionaries up through Subcommandante Marcos of the current Zapatista generation.²⁴

Lenin argued that a small, willful vanguard could “detonate” the czarist status quo if its force was targeted at the weakest link. Debray—and certainly Fidel and Che—believed that the immediate duty of all revolutionaries was to “make the revolution”; that the rural areas were the “weakest link” across Latin America; that the stark conditions of guerrilla existence would forge the very consciousness and links giving rise to the future revolutionary government. They believed this based on the Cuban experience and their critique of the lethargy of the traditional Communist parties of Latin America. Debray’s little book didn’t discount the need for an urban underground or external political alliances, but insisted that the foco—the mobile guerrilla force—was the “small motor” that would turn the “larger motor” of nationwide urban-based resistance. Further, the foco experience would “proletarianize” the middle-class revolutionaries living hand to mouth among the peasantry, and would become the embryo of a future party that could reliably lead the revolution.

Debray’s own fate illustrated the extreme risks contained in carrying out such a narrow strategy. By New Year’s Eve 1966,

Che’s Bolivian foco consisted of just twenty-four fighters, only nine of them Bolivian, encamped in a remote farm in the country’s south. The Bolivian Communist Party had withdrawn any support from the venture, and some members may have leaked his presence to his enemies. Links with an urban cell in the capital city, La Paz, were barely existent. Yet Che believed that an insurrection started in Bolivia would spread to his homeland of Argentina, and was already helping dispatch another foco of fifteen combatants to the Peruvian Andes. The ultimate “plan” was to trigger an American military intervention, which would unify the warring Soviet and Chinese governments, and create “another Vietnam in the Americas.”²⁵

Debray arrived in this embryonic revolutionary site in 1966 with several others. According to Anderson, Debray gave Che a copy of Revolution in the Revolution?, which Che immediately read and took notes on. Debray also says he expressed a desire to fight, but was advised that it would be more useful to spread the word as a writer.²⁶ Debray’s life had become an alibi. “As only my Cuban contacts knew that I had lied throughout my trial . . . my defense was that I was an observer [who] kept Havana out of the frame. In reality I had carried a weapon and taken part in the first ambush . . . I was not there to interview people but to follow orders.”²⁷ Debray’s presence, on a secret trip one year earlier, had alerted the Bolivian Communist leadership that Bolivia, not Argentina, was the planned zone of operations, which Debray says led them to “maneuver Che toward the exit” by arranging for his location in the empty Bolivian south.²⁸ “My own case, while not being the determining factor, may have had an effect.”²⁹

On April 13, 1967 the United States openly announced it was sending military advisers to Bolivia, not acknowledging the presence of its operatives already there. On April 20, Debray and a companion were captured by the Bolivian army when they walked into a tiny village pretending to be foreign journalists.³⁰ Apparently buckling under harsh interrogation and torture, Debray may have confirmed that Che was in Bolivia. “When the evidence was confirmed by Debray that he really was there,” said Félix Rodríguez, the Bay of Pigs veteran and CIA agent who was present at Che’s execution, “that’s when they really decided to move forward and put out a maximum effort in Bolivia.”³¹

In high gear, the CIA selected Rodríguez, their Cuban American officer, to track Che, interrogate him after capture, and even offer him a cigarette just before a Bolivian “volunteer” executed the wounded leader on October 11, 1967, in violation of the customary rules of warfare. Rodriguez says he received an order from Washington that the decision be left with the US-funded, US-advised Bolivian authorities, who commanded that Che be shot, buried in a secret grave, his hands cut off for fingerprinting. It was death by outsourcing.

I was in Hanoi when the news of Che’s death crackled over BBC Radio. A sorrowful and somber silence spread quickly. While none of them knew Che Guevara personally, every Vietnamese was aware that he was fighting to create “two, three, many Vietnams.” Everyone knew that the Cuban government was the first to recognize the Viet Cong as the “legitimate representative” of the South, and that Cuba’s ambassador was the only diplomat whose quarters were located amidst the guerrillas on the border of South Vietnam and Cambodia. The bonds were deep, a brotherhood unlike any I had ever seen. On their side, the Cubans believed that America’s war in Vietnam was deterring the option of an American attack on Cuba, and that therefore Vietnamese blood was being shed on their behalf.

I traveled four times to Hanoi in those years, in violation of the United States, a travel ban that applied to Cuba as well. The United States threatened to take my passport, as they had actually done in the beginning of the decade to an African American journalist, William Worthy, who was reporting favorably on Cuba in US newspapers and was refused a new passport when his old one expired. Worthy finally won his protracted litigation with the State Department, but the legal threat hung over my travels in 1965, 1967, 1969, and 1973, as it would for Stokely Carmichael, whose life soon intersected with the Cuban Revolution in the late sixties. I was deeply sympathetic with the Vietnamese for the suffering they endured as a small country fighting one colonial power after another, a sympathy that carried over to Cuba too. My purpose in those Hanoi visits was as a writer who saw his task as telling the story of the “other side,” the Vietnamese people who were entirely invisible behind the Cold War’s Iron Curtain. I had a close sympathy for Debray, who was only slightly older, and embracing a similar challenge. I had worked with Staughton Lynd, a friend in the peace movement, to gain access to North Vietnam for Harrison Salisbury, an effort modeled on the 26th of July movement’s warm welcome of the Times’ Herbert Matthews in the Sierra Maestra. Those reporters, and the peace delegations that preceded them, broke the information blockade and gave Vietnam a somewhat more human face. I also went to Hanoi, like Debray went to Havana, because I became passionately interested in learning how a smaller power could thwart a Goliath like the United States. How were these wars waged? What were their roots in histories we didn’t know? What, if any, was the role of peace movements against intervention? Unlike Debray’s view of France, however, I avoided the temptation to think of the United States, and the West in general, as a dead zone for the spirit of effective protest. Neither the Vietnamese nor the Cubans took such a stark view either, even though they were targeted by the White House and Pentagon for destruction. Both Vietnam and Cuba were aware that progressive movements had arisen in “the belly of the beast.” They were inviting American visitors, including solidarity activists, not to join a third world revolution but to return to America as more enlightened critics of US foreign policy. The understandable error of Debray, shared by thousands of Westerners, was born of a sense of guilt that drove him to extremes of radical alienation.

America was becoming convulsed by insurrections at home. The faces on poster images of Vietnamese and Cuban revolutionaries bore an increasing similarity to the young black people in Newark, Detroit, and Los Angeles raising Molotov cocktails against police and national guardsmen. Hundreds were killed and thousands injured in those racial uprisings in more than one hundred ghettos from 1965–1970. In America’s Southwest, Chicano revolutionaries were at the barricades too, even attempting focos of their own in northern New Mexico.³² Puerto Ricans in the Young Lords Party were on the rise in New York and Chicago, occupying buildings, training for self-defense, and identifying with the Puerto Rican independence cause. Thousands of other young men were resisting the draft for Vietnam, escaping to refuge in Canada, or going to jail against the Vietnam War. Priests, nuns, and lay Catholics were not pouring blood on draft board files, but taking the path of liberation theology across Latin America. Anger rose too within the American army barracks and US prison cells. The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was spreading outward from its Oakland base, attracting the unemployed “brothers on the block” as many in a new generation of the best and brightest black youth in colleges, like Stokely, Angela Davis, and others whose futures arced toward Cuba. The Students for a Democratic Society would evolve, starting in 1969, into the underground Weathermen inspired by Cuba and Vietnam. After a few short years, these militant revolutionary movements would help awaken dissent within the liberal mainstream, even at the highest levels of power, in the presidential campaigns of Eugene McCarthy, Robert Kennedy, and George McGovern.

During those the most intense years of the late sixties, Che was an inspiration. Debray seemed one of us.

Yes, the differences were vast, even incomparable, between our first world and their third world. Not only were we a voting democracy with certain checks and balances, but the vast majority of Americans preferred the status quo or moderate reform to revolutionary goals that sounded vaguely communist. But in the late sixties these obvious differences were becoming blurred in our perceptions, if not disappearing fast. Yes, we lived in a durable democracy, not a police state under colonialism. But our democracy was repeatedly exposed as a subordinate part of a larger Empire whose functions were anything but democratic. It had been necessary, for example, to risk our lives in the South for the simple right to vote. When necessary, this democracy could contract itself into shadow forms: surveillance, counterintelligence (COINTEL) programs, police sweeps and shootings, informal death squads, conspiracy indictments, the targeting of such established figures as Dr. Benjamin Spock and Rev. William Sloan Coffin Jr. The Democratic Party headquarters was infiltrated by the Watergate burglars because it was seen as a shelter for New Left radicals. It was hard for young inexperienced radicals to see the difference between democracy and authoritarianism when blinded by pepper spray. The differences evaporated further during our 1969 Chicago conspiracy trial,³³ a Nixon effort to imprison symbolic leaders of the New Left, during which the Chicago police broke into an apartment at dawn to kill Black Panthers who were working on our legal defense team. The murders at Kent State and Jackson State came three months after our trial’s end. I was in debates about whether to appeal the Chicago verdicts—one count of conspiracy each, carrying a five-year sentence—or join an underground resistance instead. I chose the appeal, but wondered if my faith was already outdated.

Revolution in the Revolution? was included in its entirety in SDS’s New Left Notes in 1969. Starting around 1967, as US protests became disobedient in nature, police and prosecutors began employing more felony arrests and conspiracy charges targeting alleged “leaders.” I was one of those placed on the FBI list of those to be “neutralized,” a term with ominous import. In these circumstances, the natural response of many street protestors was to form “affinity groups,” the political and mostly nonviolent equivalents of focos, small groups that carried out decentralized actions like blocking intersections, taking circuitous routes to evade police, throwing back tear gas canisters, treating the injured in safe houses, and so on. Mick Jagger’s “Street Fighting Man” was the beat, spray-paint was the weapon for graffiti, and paste the weapon for wall postering. Many in the affinity groups lived collectively or shared revolutionary study groups. The influence of Cuba, the Panthers, and the assassinated Malcolm X led to underground networks learning to use and store weapons, mainly small arms, and build underground networks for fugitives on the run. The shared expectation of these groups was that an American police state was unfolding and Sam Cook’s “People Get Ready” was prophetic.

Between 1965 and 1970, there were 1,390 “violent acts” in America, according to an analysis in Scanlan’s Monthly.³⁴ Rough as the estimate was, the arc was clear, from sixteen in 1965 to 546 in 1970, and those numbers would continue growing for several more years. On campuses there were 3,463 recorded protests in 1968, one-third of them involving sit-ins, strikes, hostage-taking, and building takeovers.³⁵ Fueling a general restlessness were over one hundred black uprisings, spreading spontaneously despite a massive police buildup, the largest of them in Rochester, Harlem and Philadelphia in 1964, in Watts in 1965, in Cleveland and Omaha in 1966, in Newark and Detroit in 1967, and in Chicago and Washington, D.C., in 1968. By late 1967, as one hundred thousand anti-Vietnam demonstrators encircled the Pentagon, President Johnson was screaming at his advisers that “I’m not going to let the Communists take this government, and they’re doing it right now!” proving that the smallest bite can cause a massive overreaction.³⁶ At the Pentagon a domestic war room was established to consolidate files on the New Left and prepare military options.³⁷

Our capacity to actually fight the state was ludicrously small, but we couldn’t help asking ourselves: didn’t Fidel begin with a handful of survivors in the Sierra? Didn’t Debray argue that the tiniest groups of dedicated revolutionaries could survive and grow in popularity? The “Sierra effect” was contagious, suggesting that our duty was to “start the revolution” even if the general public was uninterested. The Molotovs would wake them up. Their children would get it. And even if we couldn’t win, wasn’t it still useful to harass our government with resistance to the draft, mutinies in the armed forces, putting our bodies on the machinery of power, making the wars abroad more difficult by threatening instability on the home front?³⁸

According to a 1969 article by SDS’s Julie Nichaman, a University of Michigan anthropology student, published in Cuba’s Verde Olivo, our role was to “destroy the imperialist monster from within.”³⁹ Adding plausibility to this apocalyptic thinking was a too gradual thaw in the views of the public and mainstream policy specialists, which would climax with the Watergate burglaries and cover-ups, bungled by several veterans of the Bay of Pigs, provoking the constitutional crisis that would finally cause Congress to turn against Nixon. President Nixon’s removal, like Lyndon Johnson’s before him, would be due to the “cancer on the presidency” that would grow out of the administration’s unconstitutional efforts to stop the spread of radical dissent from the margins to the mainstream.

Toward the end of 1967, while waiting in Phnom Penh to meet three American POWs being transported over jungle trails and streams from South Vietnam, I met the Cuban ambassador-in-the-jungle, Raúl Valdés Vivo, who played a supportive logistical role in their release. Valdés Vivo, who joined the Cuban party in the 1940s and finally died in November 2013, arrived at my Cambodian hotel lobby with four unsolicited Cuban visas, one for me and three for the POWs traveling with me.⁴⁰ The American prisoners might wish to divert and defect to Cuba, the ambassador said. In that case, the paperwork was ready. The possibility had never crossed my mind and, as I naturally assumed, the three POWs desperately wanted to go home. I still have the Cuban visa in my files, evidence that another future, a very strange one, might have awaited me. I mention this anecdote only to underscore how close were the ties between Cubans and the Vietnamese, which included a Cuban willingness to risk the wrath of the United States by harboring American military defectors. The story also suggests a tendency at the time by Cuba and perhaps Vietnam to overestimate the level of antiwar militancy in America. The three POWs really wanted to go home. And go home they did.

Two months later, in January 1968, I was in Havana for the first time, sitting in an expropriated private residence talking with Fidel Castro about Régis Debray. My purpose for being in Havana was to attend an international solidarity conference, but I was drawn into the Debray case by two determined women who met me at the Hotel Nacional as soon as I arrived. One was Michele Ray, a courageous and adventurous French journalist who was captured by the Viet Cong in 1966 and subsequently spent weeks interviewing her captors for the global media. Michele was a former Chanel model who later became the wife of the Greek-born French filmmaker Costa Gavras. I was helpless before her incessant agenda, which was to introduce me to her petite and militant girlfriend, Elisabeth Burgos, the Venezuelan “wife” of the imprisoned Régis Debray. The two of them lobbied me to lobby Fidel to accept their wild proposal for a prisoner exchange—American POWs for Debray. I was skeptical, but Debray’s life was in danger and it seemed worth a try. It happened that I was invited to see Fidel as part of a small American antiwar delegation, and I agreed to raise the Debray issue if the opportunity came. For a community organizer from Newark, I was in way over my head already and willing to improvise.

It was a time of great mourning in Cuba after Che’s execution two months earlier. Already, however, Che had arisen from his deathbed to the status of revolutionary icon, remarkably like the resurrected Christ after his crucifixion. Huge wall murals and banners everywhere were alive with Alberto Korda’s classic portrait of Che taken after the sabotage of a ship in Havana harbor, on March 5, 1960.⁴¹

Visitors expecting to see Fidel were required to waste several days in their hotel room waiting for The Call from a trusted aide, which could come at any time. If you were impatient, well, it was just a sign of gringo egotism. I missed much of the conference proceedings on the floors below, darting out on short trips and anxiously returning to see if the red mensajes button was flashing on my room’s phone. Then, after several days’ frustration, a caller commanded that I come to the lobby immediately. In minutes I was being driven to the dark, windy streets of Havana’s Miramar district, where the vehicle pulled up to a shuttered, single-story suburban home. It was after midnight in the Cuban state, and the Fidelistas were on the move. They operated, I came to realize, as if they were still on maneuvers in the Sierra. This governance by guerrilla tactics was a reminder that the island was under siege and its leader subject to numerous assassination attempts.

I was accompanied by David Dellinger, then a veteran fifty-three-year-old pacifist from the World War II generation, and Carl Davidson, the twenty-four-year-old national secretary of SDS, a philosophy graduate student out of Nebraska, who had recently declared a new strategy, “from protest to resistance,” a slogan that was inspired by the Cubans. We were asked to meet Fidel to brief him on America’s swirling protest movements.

When we were seated in the empty living room of the safe house I excused myself to use the bathroom, where I found running shoes and sweatpants by a recently used shower. When I returned from the bathroom, I was face-to-face with Fidel, accompanied by his physician and close adviser, René Vallejo, and his master spy, Manuel Piñeiro, whom everyone knew as “Redbeard” or Barbarroja. Fidel’s two aides had spent years in American universities and were completely familiar with US politics. We all sat down to begin one of Fidel’s customary multiple-hour conversations, a habit that I found obsessive and disturbing—which at the time I considered more evidence of my gringo flaws.

I took no notes and can hardly recall all that was said that night forty-five years ago. Carl distinctly remembers that we talked about bringing thousands of Americans to visit, work, and live in Cuba for months at a time, an idea that two years later became the Venceremos Brigade. A month of cutting sugarcane by day and holding educational meetings by night would create lasting bonds in defiance of the embargo, and would build a pro-Cuba constituency in the United States, just as the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project gave thousands of northern students a serious introduction to conditions in the Deep South. Fidel was interested. Carl also remembers a discussion about hippies. My notebook, apparently quoting Fidel, says that “socialist countries view hippies as degenerate while hippies view socialist countries as uninspiring.”

When I managed to raise the issue of Régis Debray, and described the notion of a swap for American POWs, Fidel shifted to a listening mode, a pensive one. He said he would take the proposal “under consideration,” and nothing subsequently came of it, as far as I know. Debray was released eventually with no swaps required.

Fidel moved from discussing the antiwar movement to asking about the black uprisings in the United States, and particularly the status of the young black revolutionary, Stokely Carmichael, whose 1967 trip to Havana generated global excitement. Fidel clearly was worried for Stokely’s life, and said several times that a “united front” was imperative for the Black Power militant’s protection. As he repeated himself for emphasis, I saw a cloudy gravity in his eyes. My intuition was and is that he was also talking about how Che’s death might have been prevented.

That was January 1968, the first month of the most volatile year of the sixties. None of us knew, except perhaps for Fidel, that Vietnam’s Tet Offensive⁴² was one month away. Then came the April assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Then the uprisings at hundreds of university campuses. At Columbia the uprising was led by Mark Rudd, an SDS activist from the Jersey suburbs recently returned from Cuba. Together with other disciples of Che and Debray, he formed an “action faction” that split away from an existing SDS chapter Rudd and his allies considered too intellectual and passive. In fact the majority of SDS members voted against the action the Rudd faction was insisting upon. But the new leadership, schooled by Debray’s doctrine that revolutionaries should start the revolution, stormed buildings and shut down the university in protest of the university’s planned expansion into Harlem and secret military research. Like magic, the vanguard approach worked, drawing a large following of students who went to morning classes not realizing that they would be occupying buildings that night.

By chance I met Stokely that morning at the New York SNCC office. I was there to encourage him to visit Cuba. It turned out, however, that the revolution was erupting down the street at Columbia. Along with SNCC organizers, I found myself in the midst of the Columbia rebellion a few minutes later. Though only intending to observe on the first day, I was drawn in to lead one of the nighttime building occupations, taking over Mathematics Hall for five days before mass arrests by the New York police. The foco theory, transported from the Sierra Maestra to Washington Heights, somehow seemed to be applicable. The campus, the city, and even the nation were polarized and challenged by a core of SDS activists smaller than Fidel’s band on the Granma. As campuses shut down across the country, I wrote a favorable article for Ramparts, titled “Two, Three, Many Columbias,” that noted the complex tensions between the militant vanguard who wanted to simply shut down the campus until the war-makers were purged, and the larger number of students who wanted to reform Columbia along more liberal lines.⁴³

In June, Robert Kennedy was murdered in Los Angeles. I had come to know and respect him starting in 1967 when he invited Staughton Lynd and me to discuss Vietnam and Newark at his New York condominium overlooking the East River. Staughton, a lifelong Quaker practitioner of nonviolent civil disobedience, was deeply suspicious of all politicians, especially charming ones like Bobby. So were my friends in SDS, who thought Bobby was a CIA candidate sent to co-opt the growing New Left movement. Having seen almost everything imaginable in seven short years, I had become more open to multiple paths forward, and was drawn to Bobby because of his own growing affinity with the outcasts of America since the murder of his brother. I had considered an offer from old Kennedy hands within the Democratic administration sometime in 1966 to join the Peace Corps in the Andes, where I might have plunged into guerrilla terrain on the wrong side of Che. I rejected the offer. Still, it was fascinating that Bobby Kennedy was seeking to duplicate, in establishment form, a type of community-based organizing in both Bedford-Stuyvesant and Bolivia, one that attempted to co-opt the projects sponsored by SNCC and SDS at home. President Johnson’s 1964 “great society” speech also was meant to mirror and co-opt our fledgling antipoverty projects. The “ ‘great society’ speech was influenced by the Port Huron Statement,” Goodwin said.⁴⁴

I briefly wondered if we might co-opt the co-opters. And on the uppermost issue of Vietnam, Kennedy seemed altogether serious about finding a way out, his early fascination with Green Beret counterinsurgency waning before the growing evidence of its limits. I thought it was ridiculous to believe that the SDS’s slogan, “Let the People Decide,” could be co-opted in the service of the status quo. We were more like young Catholic Workers than the Peace Corps,⁴⁵ though we were willing to gamble on joining the War on Poverty if only from the bottom up. The difference between the Newark Community Union Project⁴⁶ and the Kennedy community service programs was that we organized poor people to fight City Hall while Sargent Shriver⁴⁷ offered incentives to city halls for “outreach,” job counseling, and legal aid. As it turned out, there wasn’t space for the programs of “parallel power” we envisioned, like the freedom school experiments in Mississippi. Some important reforms were achieved, like Head Start, but little was gained for participatory democracy. At that time, it certainly wasn’t possible to channel any such program into Latin America under the oligarchies, even modest ones through Catholic charities. The Peace Corps raised the consciousness of its volunteers more than the hopes of the poor in the favelas. Che was right about the Alliance for Progress.⁴⁸

I last saw Bobby Kennedy in a San Francisco hotel lobby on the spring night of his final debate with Sen. Eugene McCarthy. We talked briefly about the coming protests in Chicago, and I wished him well as he sought rest in his room. Saying goodbye, I noticed that his hands were swollen and covered with scratches and cuts, torn by thousands of well-wishers as his caravan passed them by. I never got to ask him whether he regretted his administration’s attempts to kill Fidel. Though his family later expressed regret and became friends of the Cuban Revolution.

When Bobby was killed, I wandered in the darkness to St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where his coffin was arriving from the coast. A few close friends and I were permitted to enter and sit quietly in the pews while carpenters built the funeral stage. I joined an ad hoc honor guard around the coffin while the preparations went on. I wore a green Cuban hat. I thought nothing of it. I like to believe that Bobby would have understood.

And what happened to Régis Debray, our generational peer whose words could be hurled like spears? The Bolivian government released him in 1970 after intervention by the French president and worldwide petitioning. According to his own account, he went back into military training in Cuba with, among others, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, the wealthy Italian publisher of Doctor Zhivago, whose own life took a revolutionary turn after the Cubans sent him to meet Debray in prison in 1967. Feltrinelli apparently fantasized about creating a foco in the Alps, “until his shattered body was found at the foot of a giant pylon supplying electricity to Milan, where he had made a bungled attempt to apply our course notes,” wrote Debray.⁴⁹ The publisher’s death came on March 15, 1972. Italy’s Red Brigades later claimed Feltrinelli had committed a “technical error” while on an operation to shut down Milan’s electrical grid. Eight thousand people turned out for his funeral.⁵⁰

Debray was soon taking in the sights of socialist Chile. “Everything was smiling, the future, the women, the eucalyptus trees. And Salvador Allende himself, who liked laughter, good Macul wine, and nice alpaca suits.”⁵¹ Debray, still based in Cuba, became close friends with Allende, and published a book of interviews with the Chilean president exploring the possibility of achieving “socialism in freedom.”⁵² Debray again was bonding with and channeling a great man of power. As noted, Ricardo had befriended Allende as early as 1959 and had actively helped make a peaceful transition in Chile a reality. But Fidel, while also hopeful, presented Allende with a rifle as a gift and tried to convince him that Cuba should arm and train a Chilean militia.

The US-backed coup of 1973 and the death of Allende proved Fidel’s dire premonition to be correct, and profoundly shook Debray, who began to reexamine his Latin America experience. He showed up in Nicaragua in a Sandinista uniform on the last day of the 1979 revolution in Managua. That was his final appearance as a militant.

Debray turned against the Cuban Revolution in the eighties. His complaints—essentially about the lack of democracy—were not without substance, but seemed as extreme and subjective as his earlier desire to become an obedient instrument of his comandante, Fidel. Where once Fidel was his unquestioned Jefe, now Debray suddenly saw Fidel as totalitarian, a magician of power who had employed charisma to bewitch Debray for nearly two decades. Debray returned to France to serve his new hero, the Socialist president François Mitterrand, becoming an official foreign policy adviser. Debray proudly recovered his French national identity from the shame it had once instilled in him. He became a True Believer in reverse, with a racial, even colonial, overtone. Debray now concluded that “my blood group was not Latino,” and wrote with revulsion of “the great Latino slaughter of those leaden years” in Latin America.”⁵³ Had Debray forgotten the guillotine, Robespierre, Napoleon, and the “great French slaughters” of colonial times in his reconversion to the Age of Reason? Debray wasn’t the only French intellectual to approve of revolutionary extremes at the time. Sartre famously approved the thesis of Frantz Fanon that the killing of colonizers was a necessary catharsis.⁵⁴ Others embraced Mao Tse-tung’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution as the way forward.⁵⁵ But in actively dismissing “objective conditions,” Debray was actively encouraging so many middle class young dreamers toward guilt-driven deaths. “That is what responsibility is like,” he reflected on the death of Che, “the real thing: something you cannot answer, and that you discover twenty years afterward.”⁵⁶ He began to think “that I was ready for the funny farm myself.”⁵⁷

CHAPTER 8

Enter and Exit
Régis Debray

CHAPTER 8

Enter and Exit Régis Debray

Enter and Exit
Régis Debray