Cuba’s socialism was the moral and political wave of
the future. I was stoned on socialism!
—MARK RUDD, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY SDS STRIKE LEADER, 19681
The Tet Offensive, the Columbia student strike, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. as well as Bobby and John F. Kennedy, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia (which disturbingly was supported by Fidel),2 the Chicago convention street battles, all seemed to be cascading signs of a new world. Resistance seemed logical, and revolution at least plausible to many, with no sign the Vietnam War was ending nor the dictatorships blanketing Latin America either. These conditions spurred the birth of the SDS Weather Underground in 1969. Who in those times could be completely sure of any meaningful differences between Richard Nixon, J. Edgar Hoover and the Watergate thugs with their roots in the Bay of Pigs, and the repressive Batista regime of the fifties that forced Ricardo and the 26th of July movement into underground resistance? Wasn’t it only a matter of time, some of us wondered, before the US government abandoned the facade of democratic elections and expanded the roundup of dissidents? And if a repressive US foreign policy was being redeployed toward the home front, wasn’t it time to prepare the resistance? Instead of the mainstream demand to bring the troops home, some started calling to bring the war home. I myself found it hard to distinguish between revolutionary delusion and realism. If it could tip either way, preparations had to begin. I was for Bobby Kennedy and Fidel Castro at the same time.
Boatloads and planes filled with SDS people headed for their Cuban mecca in 1968–1969. Some headed through Mexico City in the very month that its armed forces murdered hundreds of student democracy protestors in the plaza of Tlatelolco in the capital.3 Some traveled on a converted Cuban cattle boat from Halifax, Nova Scotia, staying in Cuba for several weeks. A briefing paper to “Cuba trippers” was signed by “your cruise director, in struggle,” Bernardine Dohrn, a University of Chicago law student who became revolutionized that year. Among travellers were several future leaders of the Weatherman faction of SDS. Twenty-year-old Columbia student Mark Rudd, who traveled to Cuba in January 1968 and returned to lead the strike at his university, spelled out the impact of Cuba in a later autobiography: “the main lesson from Columbia [was] a direct translation of Che Guevara’s strategy of revolt in Latin America to the imperialist homeland.”4 “Like a Christian seeking to emulate the life of Christ, I passionately wanted to be a revolutionary like Che, no matter what the price.”5
Not all the Cuba visitors were from SDS. One of them, Phil Hutchings of Howard University, worked with me in the SDS Newark community organizing project as well as in SNCC. He became SNCC chairman after Stokely’s departure, and then an early organizer of the Venceremos Brigade. As he told me in 2013:
PHIL HUTCHINGS: The Vietnamese suggested to SDS that they help Cuba instead of sending so many people to [faraway and expensive] Vietnam. I went to the first organizing meeting in New York at some rich person’s house to argue for broader inclusion. At first we were going to bring three hundred black, brown, and yellow people—each!—but instead we would up with two hundred mostly white people led by a Weatherperson, Julie Nichamin.
There was a decent sized group of blacks, Native Americans, Latinos, and Asians on the second trip, 30 percent people of color, triple the first brigade.
Another version appears in the autobiography of the late Carl Oglesby, a great writer and orator who became SDS president in 1964. On a trip to Cuba in 1968, Oglesby had the then-wild idea—there were so many in the air—of thousands of Americans breaking the travel ban to cut cane in Cuba. He met in Havana at the home of de facto ambassador Carlos Rafael Rodríguez6 and several times with the same official afterward at a New York bar before eventually winning Cuba’s support. Then, falling amidst the ruins of SDS’s internal divisions, Oglesby was purged on charges that he was proposing only a “liberal” Peace Corps for Cuba, when the purpose should be “to bring back more committed revolutionaries” to the United States.7 That was wrong, at least from the Cuban viewpoint. They wanted more Americans schooled in the realities of the Cuban Revolution, not a training camp for American guerrillas. Despite the sectarian tension within SDS, the Cubans welcomed the first brigadistas in November 1969. It was “one of the most imaginative enterprises ever undertaken by the American Left,” in the appraisal of historian Kirkpatrick Sale.8
PHIL HUTCHINGS: One big problem was what the brigade was supposed to do. The Cubans were nervous about interfering in US politics. Our old enemy, Sen. James O. Eastland [of Mississippi] was saying we were being trained for guerrilla warfare, that we were studying Carlos Marighella’s handbook on urban warfare.9 The Cubans wanted to tone it down, to get the Americans to learn something about Cuba through their experience. The Cubans didn’t want to be flagrant and stick it in the face of the United States. Some of the Americans did want to take it further, and project it into a US movement for revolution.
For some of the Venceremos volunteers, the impact of Cuba lasted for a lifetime. For some, Cuba became a lifetime cause. SDS members like Michael Locker and John Frappier, my Ann Arbor roommate, formed a first-rate research center known as the North American Congress on Latin America, helping birth Cuba studies on many campuses and building a library available to many journalists. Karen Wald, who married a Cuban, wrote in her diary that the experience was “incredible, not even so much in terms of what people are learning about Cuba, as what people are learning about themselves.”10 Another example was Sandra Levinson, an SDS activist from Iowa, who went to Cuba just before the first brigade. I interviewed Sandra in 2014:
SANDRA LEVINSON: I fell for Fidel in 1969 in a cane field, literally. It was the first day of the sugar harvest. Peter Jennings was standing there, his first trip. Fidel gave a speech and came over to a bunch of us, and asked me why I wasn’t cutting. My Spanish wasn’t up to it, but I told him I had polio when I was a kid. So he spent twenty minutes teaching me to cut. Then after I started cutting, something came tearing into my neck and I fell. Lionel Martin [a pro-Cuba activist] had thrown a piece of cane into my neck. Fidel came over, pulled me up and got me to the hospital. I had two surgeries.
Back in New York City, Levinson founded a Cuban studies institute and a Cuban art gallery. She would promote trips to the island for many decades. In 1973 her offices were bombed by a right-wing Cuban exile.
SANDRA: We were promoting Saul’s film on Fidel. No one was there that night. A Spanish class had just left. It was a huge plastique bomb. I was lucky that it was placed in a doorjamb where there was a steel pillar, so the bomb went off in every direction but mine. The guy who did it, a Cuban with two friends, came around to case the place the night before. We gave the police a perfect description but they did nothing. The police instead showed me photos of some Puerto Rican gang members! Then the FBI came and wanted to know about leftist bombings on the West Coast! Nothing about our being bombed.
Sandra came to know Ricardo and his wife Margarita Alarcón very well during their years at New York’s Cuban mission.
SANDRA: During the Cuban missile crisis I think Alarcón said people didn’t think they were going to wake up the next morning. I thought it was a joke to be studying for my doctoral exams if we weren’t going to be around. That was the moment I got involved.
When Ricardo and Margarita were in New York, I would organize small get-togethers for him with journalists and intellectuals. It was fascinating. My friends said he was the only one who didn’t have to call home for instructions. He and Fidel thought alike. They were Fidelistas, not really Communists in the old-fashioned meaning of the term. They had a very nationalist and populist ideology. Ricardo was not seen as Raúl’s favorite person in those days.
I have to tell you a story Margarita told me about when she and Ricardo first started dating, that says a lot. She told her mother that Ricardo was coming over. It would have been the first time he met her mother. But Margarita had to leave the house for a meeting, and told her mother to welcome Ricardo and tell him she would be right back and give him some food. “That is a very strange young man,” the mother told Margarita when she returned. He sat down at the kitchen table, she said, and while she went to get eggs he ate the whole jar of mayonnaise! He’s got a very large head, I don’t know why he ate it, maybe he had more important things to do than eating. Food wasn’t the first thing on his agenda.
Many years later, I asked Bernardine about right-wing charges of Cuban guerrilla training of the type that Debray had secretly undergone. She waved away the question, saying, “I never favored any outside support.” By contrast, she laughed, during a later trip to North Korea, she and SDS were offered weapons, training, and funding by Pyongyang. The only prerequisite, she said, was to watch a lengthy propaganda film about North Korea’s revolution, which she found unbearable. She walked out of the theater and the offer.
The Weather Underground held a last conference in Flint, Michigan, in December 1969, before dispersing into clandestine collectives without public announcement. Copies of the Debray booklet were in their packets. “This is the future,” one cadre said. After going underground, they successfully eluded the FBI for over five years, carrying out a score of bombings against military and corporate installations, including the Bank of America, United Fruit, Chase Manhattan, IBM, Standard Oil, Anaconda, General Motors, and even including a bathroom in the US House of Representatives—and those actions with the Weather signature were only a handful among hundreds of other bombings of ROTC buildings, induction centers, Selective Service offices, and military-related sites around the United States. During 1969–1970, according to government reports, there were six bombings per day, five thousand overall along with forty thousand threats or attempts.11 The Weather Underground also spirited the LSD guru Timothy Leary out of a California prison, in an effort to somehow politicize the youth culture. The code name for the Leary operation was “Juju Eyeballs” from the Beatles’ “Come Together.”12 True to their word, they brought the war home, or at least a skirmish, to the embarrassment of the FBI. Nearly all of the Weather people managed to surface safely by the mid- to late seventies, because the FBI was unwilling or unable to reveal the illegal surveillance methods that were employed in the attempts to capture them. The government dropped its conspiracy charges, citing the “national security” impact if their illegal surveillance methods, including wiretaps of twelve thousand separate conversations were revealed.13
This little-remembered attempt to create a foco in America combined both the revolutionary idealism and fatal isolation foreseen in Debray’s strategy by Ricardo and others. First, the Weathermen lost three precious lives almost immediately when a bomb-in-making blew up in a Greenwich Village townhouse on March 6, 1970, killing Teddy Gold, Diana Oughton, and Terry Robbins. All three victims were like younger brothers and sisters to me, their identities cemented by the revolutionary winds of 1968–1969, when they had been convinced—by the killings of the Kennedys, King, Malcolm X, and so many Panthers—that the earlier years of nonviolence and community organizing were “reformist,” naive, and in vain. Each of them wanted to live like Che and they died like him, in isolation, though by their own hands in a fiery Greenwich Village townhouse rather than a Bolivian arroyo.
Second, they were drifting beyond property damage into the shadows of terrorism. If they had carried out their fateful mission, they would have bombed a military ball, with wives, families, and civilians, at Fort Dix, New Jersey. In the new mindset, the targets were the nearest American soldiers that could be found, their families being no more innocent than countless Vietnamese civilians. It’s impossible to know the state of their thinking at the moment of detonation, or whether the plans were still unsettled.
Third, they detached themselves from mass movements at just the moment that the Vietnam Moratorium of 1969–1970 and Earth Day in 1970 were drawing millions into public protest. The My Lai massacre revealed in 1968, the Pentagon Papers disclosure of 1971, and the evidence of the COINTELPRO surveillance (1971) were exposing the hidden horrors of the Vietnam War. The militant escalation of 1965–1970, provoked by the suffocating hopelessness of the Johnson and Nixon eras, zigzagged unexpectedly toward a new flowering of massive protest in the Watergate time. But the “small motor” of SDS, which did so much to challenge the status quo, had stalled and burned out in anonymity. The “big motor” of those mass protests was taken over by young progressives and Democratic liberals, who devoutly hoped to change the system’s priorities from within. Many of them would become the Clinton Democrats.
Since SDS had either gone underground or splintered itself into sectarian feuding, there was no SDS leadership for the mass movement that, according to the Weather Underground analysis, was impossible in any event in a “mother country” so saturated with racial privilege.14 The Weathermen could cling to their urban cells but did not dare to venture outdoors to leaflet for a mass rally. Their first—and also final—public event, the Days of Rage during the Chicago conspiracy trial, was called on October 11, 1969, the second anniversary of Che’s murder. “Living like Che” consisted of raging through Chicago’s Gold Coast, attacking police and the windows of elegant condominiums. Weathermen were shot and wounded that night, and dozens were injured. The corporation counsel of Chicago, Richard Elrod, suffered a broken neck. I was invited to speak briefly in Lincoln Park before the rampage began, since I knew many of the participants personally from the community organizing projects and antiwar protests only three years earlier. I was taken by surprise when I saw them that night, their heads helmeted and covered by masks, smeared with gel to counter tear gas, holding clubs and branches in their hands. I wasn’t ready for the looks in their eyes. I said a few words assuring them of the Chicago conspiracy trial’s defendants’ general support, then left feeling old, confused and used.
The Weathermen were shocked by the townhouse deaths. They scattered everywhere, finally reassembling at a secret retreat in California a few weeks later. Realizing the total alienation from which their Weather politics was forged, and their subsequent isolation from mass political life, they purged the one individual whom they blamed for their fatal descent to pure militarism. His name was John Jacobs, though everyone called him J.J., and he had been a charismatic newcomer to their inner circle in 1968 who sailed on the fateful journey from New Brunswick to Havana in 1969. I encountered J.J. briefly at Columbia, and was struck by his hyperintense brilliant self-confidence. He could evaluate whole sections of Lenin, Mao, and Che, and excelled at ideological combat with other “tendencies” on the shrinking Left. J.J. combined this ideological skill with a competitive militancy that demanded that everyone “take it to the next level.” During the Columbia strike he was among the first to seize buildings and secretly set a fire in Hamilton Hall.15 I found his charisma to be scary and intimidating. His eyes flamed like mortars and words came in rapid fire. J.J. was the most influential voice, along with his copartner Terry Robbins, in the “New York Tribe” that plotted to make the fragmentation bombs in the townhouse.16 After his expulsion, J.J. eventually made it across the Canadian border, assumed a fictionalized new identity, took construction jobs in Vancouver, created a patch of marijuana growth, had two children in a common-law marriage, and died a painful and premature death from cancer at age fifty in 1997. As he lay writhing on the street in a spasm of pain, a Vancouver policewoman kneeled down to try and help. He is said to have screamed and lashed out at the sight of her uniform.
Che was his hero and role model. J.J.’s family buried his ashes at the monument to Che in Santa Clara. There is a plaque there too, featuring a photo of J.J. in his prime, which thanks “the Cuban government, the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party, and others for the honor and respect shown him by allowing some of his ashes to be spread at the monument to Che Guevara. He wanted to live like Che. Let him rest like Che.”17
J.J.’s thousands of pages of writings have never been published.
While a few Weathermen remain in prison today, the vast majority have returned to life above ground, where they have participated in the vast antiwar protests against Iraq and Afghanistan, or in solidarity movements with torture victims imprisoned everywhere from Baghdad to Pelican Bay, California. They include lawyers, teachers, writers, activists, parents, and grandparents. Bernardine Dohrn became an expert in family law at Northwestern University and her longtime partner Bill Ayers a noted school reformer, professor, and author of multiple books. They attended Thanksgiving parties with Barack and Michelle Obama when the president was running for a state Senate seat, and Bill served on an education foundation board with Obama, which later triggered a national uproar with Sarah Palin accusing candidate Obama of “palling with terrorists”18 and Hillary Clinton having thrown jibes herself several months earlier.19 It is amazing that Obama, protected by a powerful African American base, could survive charges that would have been fatal during the Cold War era. Personally, I am comforted to know that an American president has crossed paths with people who come from the radical traditions of anticolonialism and anti-imperialism long defined as taboo in the American mainstream. Obama’s election and presidency are a reminder of accomplishments we thought impossible in those fugitive times. As I wrote before his December 17, 2014, decision to normalize relations, these past experiences might serve Obama well as he approaches decisions about Cuba that will be part of his legacy one way or another. If he admires King and Mandela, can he not at least understand Che or Fidel?
The period of escalating movement violence, which led also to sectarian infighting and organizational chaos, nevertheless followed a historical logic that can be charted: from the liberal default on civil rights and Vietnam in 1964–1965 and the serial killings of John and Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, and Fred Hampton, there was a steady upswing of antiestablishment confrontations, including civil disobedience, draft resistance, urban rebellions, GI mutinies, the formation of undergrounds of nonviolent war resisters, priests and nuns, fugitives on the run, and the creation of many autonomous revolutionary groups attempting to fight a “war of the flea,” as guerrilla warfare was sometimes called.20 In addition, millions of today’s middle-aged Americans lived in their formative years amidst an outlawed drug culture. Federal repression escalated beyond the breaking point, with the deployment of a White House team of “plumbers,” conspiracy indictments, political trials of antiwar activists, and lethal units of undercover police. The Vietnam War and threats to domestic civil liberties inevitably pushed a few thousand radicalized young people onto a violent path—which came to its end only when the Vietnam War ended and Nixon resigned. Similarly, the urban black rebellions declined when black mayors began to be elected in city after city. Without the revolutionary upsurge, I doubt whether those rational reforms might ever have followed.
RICARDO: Nixon was elected in 1968 with the help of so-called crazy young people...
Did he mean, I asked, hippies, blacks, and antiwar activists?
RICARDO: I do not like at all that expression. But the point is that Nixon managed to gather a majority of voters suspicious of what appeared to them to be a too liberal Democratic candidate. The antiwar movement with its counterculture components objectively, if unwillingly, helped Nixon build such a coalition. After being elected, his China moves and the Vietnam negotiations did the rest: the “movement” got more divided and isolated. You know the story better than I do.
In many ways, Cuba at first, followed by Vietnam, set off the domestic shock effects that awakened, rattled, and polarized America from 1960 through 1976. Even as the “long sixties” in America—1959–1976—subsided, the Cuban Revolution was far from done.
Bertolt Brecht, the German playwright who shaped the consciousness of many in SDS in its eight short years of existence, expressed it well:
To Posterity
1.
Indeed I live in the dark ages!
A guileless word is an absurdity.
A smooth forehead betokens
A hard heart.
He who laughs
Has not yet heard
The terrible tidings.
Ah, what an age it is
When to speak of trees is almost a crime
For it is a kind of silence about injustice!
And he who walks calmly across the street,
Is he not out of reach of his friends
In trouble?
It is true: I earn my living
But, believe me, it is only an accident.
Nothing that I do entitles me to eat my fill.
By chance I was spared. (If my luck leaves me
I am lost.)
They tell me: eat and drink. Be glad you have it!
But how can I eat and drink
When my food is snatched from the hungry
And my glass of water belongs to the thirsty?
And yet I eat and drink.
I would gladly be wise.
The old books tell us what wisdom is:
Avoid the strife of the world
Live out your little time
Fearing no one
Using no violence
Returning good for evil—
Not fulfillment of desire but forgetfulness
Passes for wisdom.
I can do none of this:
Indeed I live in the dark ages!
2.
I came to the cities in a time of disorder
When hunger ruled.
I came among men in a time of uprising
And I revolted with them.
So the time passed away
Which on earth was given me.
I ate my food between massacres.
The shadow of murder lay upon my sleep.
And when I loved, I loved with indifference.
I looked upon nature with impatience.
So the time passed away
Which on earth was given me.
In my time streets led to the quicksand.
Speech betrayed me to the slaughterer.
There was little I could do. But without me
The rulers would have been more secure. This was my hope.
So the time passed away
Which on earth was given me.
3.
You, who shall emerge from the flood
In which we are sinking,
Think—
When you speak of our weaknesses,
Also of the dark time
That brought them forth.
For we went, changing our country more often than our shoes.
In the class war, despairing
When there was only injustice and no resistance.
For we knew only too well:
Even the hatred of squalor
Makes the brow grow stern.
Even anger against injustice
Makes the voice grow harsh. Alas, we
Who wished to lay the foundations of kindness
Could not ourselves be kind.
But you, when at last it comes to pass
That man can help his fellow man,
Do not judge us too harshly.
[translation: H. R. Hays]
As Ricardo has said, a Che Guevara living today would not advocate or instigate guerrilla warfare in Latin America, but would be standing alongside Evo Morales in a much different Latin America. The focos of the sixties contributed as catalysts to the eventual demise of dictatorships and a long-term shift toward democracy in the region. The spark that the martyrs lit travelled on an unexpectedly long fuse, one that inflamed millions of people against the military repression that covered up centuries of poverty and pain. That long fuse of revolution even charged the spirit of liberation theology—a doctrine and praxis both in competition and cooperation with, and definitely in response to, the focos triggered by the Cuban Revolution. The electoral path that seemed to perish with Allende was forced open again to popular movements of the eighties and nineties, movements that always carried the banner of Che and venerated Fidel as the heroic elder of the continent. Many of the Latin American leaders elected in the nineties had roots in the guerrilla past. What began with Pinochet and Nixon’s killing of democratic hopes in Allende’s Chile ended in less than twenty years with a democratic plebiscite to throw the dictator out. Ignácio Lula da Silva, who was elected president of Brazil in 2002 after three failed attempts, had been a trade unionist who was imprisoned by the generals. His successor, Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s current president, was a guerrilla who suffered torture. Carlos Marighella, the author of the 1969 Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla, studied by all Latin American and global revolutionaries, including the Red Army Faction in West Germany, has become an icon in today’s Brazil. Lula identifies him as a “national hero” for having fought the military dictatorship, and is quoted as saying that Marighella looks down from heaven: “He would say ‘it was worth dying’ because we are now reaping what he and his companions sowed.”21
Since Brazil is considered “moderate” on the spectrum of Latin American nationalism, it can be assumed that the veneration of former guerrillas is a continental consensus. On the radical end of the spectrum, Venezuela’s late president Hugo Chávez was virtually a protégé of Fidel, and received boundless assistance from Cuba. Bolivia’s Evo Morales finished what Che began in his country, rising from leadership of the militant coca growers’ union to become the first indigenous president in five centuries. Uruguay’s elected president José Mujica was a Tupamaro guerrilla leader who was shot six times and imprisoned for fourteen years. The father of Michelle Bachelet, Chile’s twice-elected president, served in the Allende government, was detained, tortured, and eventually died in 1974; she, along with her mother, was also imprisoned and tortured. Nicaragua’s president Daniel Ortega was the leader of the Sandinista front. The outgoing president of El Salvador, Mauricio Funes, was elected as the FMLN candidate; his brother was assassinated during the Salvadoran civil war. In 2014, as noted, a former FMLN comandante was elected president of El Salvador. The list of former guerrillas, inspired originally by Che, who came to power peacefully in the nineties is long and unexpected.
None of these democratic transitions in Latin and Central America were identical, but carried their own distinct national features. Some transitions were thwarted too: In Mexico, the Cuba-inspired student revolutionaries who had been crushed in 1968 eventually became the organizers of the Zapatistas in the state of Chiapas and narrowly lost a national referendum to include indigenous rights in Mexico’s constitution. In addition, Mexico’s left-wing nationalist candidates lost in presidential elections that were widely believed to have been stolen in 1988 and 2006.
The impressive roll call of recent Latin American presidents is like a family tree of the descendants of the Cuban Revolution. Che, and therefore Debray, had something to do with this line of evolutionary descent. So of course did Fidel, who will go down in history as a hero of global struggle, remembered for the scope of his impact after his beginnings in the Sierra. As Henry Kissinger would note in his diaries, Fidel “was probably the most revolutionary leader then in power.”22