Copyright
by
John A. Gronbeck-Tedesco
2009
The Dissertation Committee for John A. Gronbeck-Tedesco certifies that this
is the approved version of the following dissertation:
READING REVOLUTION: POLITICS IN THE U.S.-CUBAN
CULTURAL IMAGINATION, 1930-1970
Committee:
____________________________________
Janet Davis, Supervisor
____________________________________
Neil Foley
____________________________________
Frank Guridy
____________________________________
Mark Lawrence
____________________________________
Julia Mickenberg
____________________________________
Shirley Thompson
READING REVOLUTION: POLITICS IN THE U.S.-CUBAN
CULTURAL IMAGINATION, 1930-1970
by
John A. Gronbeck-Tedesco, B.A., M.A.
Dissertation
Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of
The University of Texas at Austin
in Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements
for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
The University of Texas at Austin
May, 2009
Dedication
I dedicate this work to my parents,
who first showed me the value of making hyphens,
and to the countless Cubans and Americans who have supported this project
Acknowledgements
Many professors, researchers, librarians, students, colleagues, and neighbors in
numerous locales have helped bring this projection to fruition. It has been a truly
collaborative enterprise that has relied on mutual understanding and support. I am
grateful to the battalion of fellow graduate students who have served as mentors and
colleagues at different stages of my education. Members of my dissertation reading
group—Phil, Allison, Amy, Tracy, Jason, Anna, Vicky, Danny, and Elizabeth—brought
wit, attentive thought, and encouragement to the writing process. I also give tremendous
thanks to my dissertation committee. Shirley Thompson provided a guiding voice of
reason during wayward moments, with special abilities to humanize the sweat and labor
of graduate school. Mark Lawrence has remained an astute critic of my work and has
nourished my professional development immeasurably. His course on U.S. foreign
relations dramatically reshaped my thinking on U.S.-Cuban cultural history. Frank
Guridy persists as a faithful ally and guide, whose expertise on Cuba, generosity, and
advice made this project possible. I also thank Neil Foley for his wonderful seminar on
race, citizenship, and nationalism, and for his willingness to converse on matters from the
casual to the professional. I am especially grateful to Julia Mickenberg, whose course on
the Popular Front sparked my initial interest in this topic and whose endless insight has
helped me grow as a scholar. I reserve special gratitude and ¡mil gracias! to my advisor,
Janet Davis, whose impeccable editing, tireless support, timely feedback, and Midwest
charm always made this project stronger in its various iterations.
v
I am also indebted to Aline Helg, Frank Guridy, Michele Reid, Larry Gutman,
Robin Moore, Denni Blume, Nancy la Greca, and Jorge Sanhueza-Lyon, who in their
individual ways introduced me to the fantastic world of Havana, Cuba. They offered me
much-needed advice on how to navigate it successfully in all its wonderful complexity
and with a spirit of innovation. When in doubt: improvise! So the motto went, and so
became a mantra of sorts for life. Research in Cuba was made possible by generous
support from the George C. Marshall Foundation, Harry Ransom Center, UT’s office of
International Education, and Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations. I am
especially grateful for the support made possible by the Donald D. Harrington
Dissertation Fellowship at the University of Texas at Austin.
In Cuba, Jorge Ibarra, Ana Suárez Lam, and Tomás Fernández Robaina lent their
expertise to my project. Librarians and researchers at the Instituto de Historia, Instituto
de Literatura y Lingüística, Biblioteca Nacional, Archivo Nacional, and Biblioteca Casa
de las Américas helped enormously with locating and explaining the significance of
sources. The hospitality and camaraderie of Orlando, Rayssa, Iliya, Lola, Rody, María
Julia (y familia), Alfonso, and Pavelín made difficult moments disappear with food and
humor. My all-too-brief time spent with Bill Brent in Havana taught me to challenge fear
and injustice with personal and political convictions. He helped me to link the work of
scholarship to the activity of organizational involvement. Memories of him lie in the
subtext of this work.
Finally, Austin has been a fecund place for musical and political exploration. I
thank the many musicians who allowed me to moonlight as a percussionist and pianist. I
also want to thank the organizers, activists, and members of Casa Marianella, Proyecto
vi
Defensa Laboral, and other allies for showing me what the creative energy of community
building can bring in struggles for justice and human dignity.
vii
Reading Revolution: Politics in the U.S.-Cuban Cultural Imagination, 1930-1970
Publication No.____________________
John A. Gronbeck-Tedesco, Ph.D.
The University of Texas at Austin, 2009
Supervisor: Janet M. Davis
This dissertation examines U.S.-Cuban cultural exchange around the Cuban
revolutions of 1933 and 1959. It argues that the historical period from 1930-1970
represents a critical juncture in global politics, when fascination and dismay for Cuban
revolutionary struggles spawned new ideas about art, aesthetics, governance, and
jurisprudence as part of new state functions and cosmopolitan publics. Drawing from
U.S. and Cuban sources, this project documents the ways in which cultural producers
from across the political spectrum used the language of revolution to craft claims about
race, class, gender, empire, and nationhood. It explains the fractured relationship
following the 1959 revolution by beginning in the 1930s, when narratives of U.S.-led
Pan-Americanism splintered and frayed within the broader project of neocolonialism.
Cultural expressions—from folksongs and poems to presidential speeches and tourist
literature—demonstrate multiple ideological positions and aesthetic forms that reveal a
tension between Pan-American camaraderie on the one hand and neocolonial violence on
the other.
viii
I use poetry, journalism, plays, federal policy, music, and radical literature to
illustrate ideas about Cuba that spanned the ideological gamut—from socialist utopia to
the tragedy of dictatorship—and their location in the generational transition from the
Good Neighbor policy to Cold War containment. In the United States, these two political
moments were anchored between the New Deal coalition and rise of the Old Left on the
one hand, and the dawning of Kennedy/Johnson liberal internationalism and the New
Left on the other. At the same time in Cuba the revolutionary culture industries
restructured nationalist narratives and political ambitions based on anti-Yankee
opposition, which ultimately ushered in a new Cuban state that self-fashioned itself as a
leader of the Third World. I present a case study that reveals how political and cultural
vectors operate in multiple directions, creating the overarching conditions that enable
“minor” states to exert gravitational pull on superpowers in the production of new local
tastes and sensibilities from Harlem to Havana.
ix
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations………………………………………………………………...……...xi
Introduction……………………………………………………………………..…………1
Chapter 1: The U.S.-Cuban Transnational Left and the “New Cuba”…………………...37
Chapter 2: Race and Revolution in Verse: U.S.-Cuban Diasporic
Cultural Politics in the 1930s…………………………………………………….92
Chapter 3: Good or Bad Neighbors? Pan-American Diplomacy and the
1933 Cuban Revolution………………………………………………………...148
Chapter 4: Postmodern Praxis: Revolutionary Tourism and the New Left…………….201
Chapter 5: Race and Revolution in the Post-Bandung Global Moment…………..……260
Chapter 6: Middlebrow Modernization: Cuban Refugees, Catholicism, and
Domestic Containment………………………………………………………....313
Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………...…383
Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………394
Vita……………………………………………………………………………………..418
x
List of Illustrations
Illustration 1.1: Cover, Terror in Cuba (1936) by Arthur Pincus......................................49
Illustration 1.2: Cover, Hands off Cuba (1933) by William Simons.................................51
Illustration 1.3: Spanish Workers Club Flyer, 1935..........................................................58
Illustration 1.4: Letter to Pablo de la Torriente-Brau from Samuel Weinman on
behalf of the Provisional Committee for Cuba, 1936…………………....61
Illustration 1.5: Letter to Arthur Pincus from Pablo de la Torriente-Brau on behalf of
O.R.C.A.,1936…………………………………………………………...63
Illustration 4.1: Venceremos Bulletin, 1971....................................................................220
Illustration 4.2: Photo of Waldo Frank and Fidel Castro, from INRA
(Janurary 1960)…………………………………………………………224
Illustration 4.3: Cover of Cuba internacional (April 1971)…………………………... 228
Illustration 5.1: Photo of KKK Violence, INRA (April 1961)………….........................279
Illustration 5.2: Ripping up Apartheid in South Africa, Tricontinental
(Sept.-Oct., 1971)....................................................................................283
Illustration 5.3: Huey Newton, leader of the "Panteras Negras." Tricontinental
(March-April 1969)………………………………………………..……293
Illustration 5.4: “Save Angela Davis,” Tricontinental (February 1972)……………... 299
Illustration 5.5: Young Lords Party, Cover of Tricontinental (February 1971)..............301
Illustration 6.1: Page from Travel Cuba (1955)………………………………………...342
Illustration 6.2: Cover of Cuba: Ideal Vacation Land (1953-1954)…………………....343
Illustration 6.3: Cuban State Daycare, photo from INRA (Jan. 1961)………………….361
Illustration 6.4: The New Cuban Woman, photo from Cuba, April 1962……………..362
xi
Introduction
If France launched Napoleon, the Soviet Union Lenin, the United States
Superman, India Gandhi, Great Britain the gentleman, China Mao, Spain Don
Quijote, and Vietnam, Uncle Ho—our America has produced Che. So we enter
the saturated iconographic world of contemporary history.
Edmundo Desnoes1
In February 1959, communist journalist Joseph North hailed the Cuban revolution
as a “people’s victory.” He believed that Fulgencio Batista was rightfully overthrown by
a working-class, inter-racial political bloc whose aim was to produce a new nation based
on social democratic principles and progressive legislative reform. This revolution,
North wrote, was for “freedom first, and an end to the torture and terror and bloodshed
suffered by the people all the long years.” He enthusiastically conveyed that he “had the
privilege of seeing the heart of a people’s revolution throbbing in victory.” North’s
mission was to deliver the significance of the Cuban triumph to his leftwing audience:
“From them I bring you this report because I want all Americans to know the truth. Not
merely to know it, but to act on it, to realize our stake in it, to understand that our
national honor and welfare are affected by what the Cubans did.”2
Twenty years earlier, North had reported for New Masses magazine on a prior
revolutionary period in Cuba. In 1933, an alliance of army officers, students, and
workers ejected the U.S.-backed Cuban president, General Gerardo Machado, and
installed a revolutionary government led by Dr. Ramón Grau San Martín. The successful
coup, however, was short-lived. Under subsequent U.S.-sanctioned leaders, island-wide
1
Edmundo Desnoes, “El Che y los ojos del mundo,” Cuba Internacional (April 1970): 16.
Joseph North, Cuba’s Revolution: I Saw the People’s Victory (New York: New Century Publishers,
1959), 5-7.
2
1
discontent persisted through much of the decade, prompting North and others of the then
Old Left to claim that Cuba had never enjoyed true sovereignty as a republic.3
Following North’s interest in Cuba that spanned two revolutionary periods, this
dissertation examines U.S.-Cuban political and cultural exchange around the Cuban
revolutions of 1933 and 1959. Drawing from U.S. and Cuban sources, it documents the
ways in which cultural producers from across the political spectrum used the language of
revolution to craft new claims about race, class, empire, and nationhood that crossed
borders. The use of poetry, journalism, plays, federal policy, music, and radical literature
illuminates ideas about Cuba that encompassed the ideological gamut—from socialist
utopia to the tragedy of dictatorship—and their location in the generational transition
from the Good Neighbor policy to Cold War containment. In the United States, these
two political moments were anchored between the New Deal coalition and rise of the Old
Left on the one hand, and the dawning of Kennedy/Johnson liberal internationalism and
the New Left on the other. At the same time in Cuba the revolutionary culture industries
restructured nationalist narratives and political ambitions based on anti-Yankee
opposition, which ultimately ushered in a new Cuban state that self-fashioned itself as a
leader of the Third World. Conceiving of the Cuban revolutions as a cultural period,
therefore, illustrates how two distinct yet interconnected revolutionary cultures in Cuba
fueled both combative and collaborative ideas about race, politics, and social programs
between Cuban and the United States.
U.S.-Cuban cultural history has occupied a special position in hemispheric
relations; the uniquely imbricated histories of Cuba and the United States makes this
relationship stand apart from other U.S.-Latin American pairings. Accordingly, this
3
Joseph North, “Cuba’s Typhoid Cartel,” New Masses, Aug. 27, 1940, 3-4.
2
study proposes to view both countries in a paradigm of comparative exceptionalisms.
The period 1930-1970 is an important era in this historical trajectory, because it conferred
exceptional status for both national spaces that produced myriad representations, images,
and symbols in hemispheric as well as global imaginations, though in differing form and
function. The political and psychosocial interconnectivity that had historically formed
these national mythologies in terms of one another also produced a structure of
coexistence that tore them apart. This aberrant instance of cultural interaction in the
western hemisphere—what President Williams McKinley famously quipped were “ties of
singular intimacy” shared between the United States and Cuba—was the very
relationship that brought about a severing in ties during this forty-year period.4
The political and cultural rupture surrounding the 1959 revolution proved a
hemispheric foil to a U.S.-based Pan-American vision that originated in the Monroe
Doctrine and later updated under the 1904 Roosevelt Corollary. For generations, Cuba
had occupied a particular space in the U.S. cultural imagination, initially the “Pearl of the
Antilles” for generations of U.S. (and Cuban) annexationists and later a popular travel
destination and financial interest for tourists and business leaders. Cuba was viewed as a
“natural” extension of the United States, a land easily incorporable into the Union, save
the large non-white population that would threaten the myth of a white U.S. polity.
Though not annexed, Cuba remained a strong source of wealth and fascination for U.S.
residents. The United States had enjoyed limitless preeminence in Latin America since
4
Louis Pérez Jr. remains the preeminent scholar on U.S.-Cuban history who has written convincingly on
several occasions that the U.S.-Cuban relationship stands unique in hemispheric politics and identity
because of these particular “ties.” See Cuba and the United States: Ties of Singular Intimacy (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 1990); On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality, and Culture (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1999); and Cuba in the American Cultural Imagination: Metaphor and
Imperial Ethos (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).
3
1823, but its status as guardian of the Americas took on new meaning and scope during
the 1930s under the threat of fascism and war. As the climate of defeating totalitarianism
gave way to Cold War containment, the U.S. entered a new era of intervention in Latin
America, with Cuba becoming a pivotal concern. The era of Good Neighboring, which
in many ways sought to preserve financial security and diplomatic expectations granted
under the Monroe Doctrine, quickly eroded following Cuba’s 1959 revolution, making
the erstwhile Pearl of the Antilles a source of suspicion in need of redress.
It was at this point that Cuba, too, grew to occupy exceptional standing as an
anomaly in Latin America that became a global phenomenon. In delivering a striking
blow to U.S. hegemony in the region, the 1959 Cuban revolution simultaneously
inaugurated a new political and cultural vision of the Tricontinental—the global
identification of people in Asia, Africa, and Latin America—in which the Cuban state
emerged an international leader in the political struggles and the cultural objectives of the
emerging “Third World.” Both U.S. and Cuban imaginaries, therefore, established their
mode of governance as a matter of worldwide political and moral import in the Cold War
battle for hearts and minds. Though occupying unequal positions in terms of economics
and political influence, both nations grew into powerful symbols that were produced and
consumed worldwide, Cuba into that which the United States was not, with Havana
enjoying disproportional prestige and direction on the global landscape in a way not
experienced by other American republics. As certain ties were broken in the history of
singular intimacy, others were formed in the era of decolonization; the new order of
Cuba’s Tricontinental suggested an antidote to Washington and Wall Street, which
4
brought new instances of conflict and collaboration between U.S. and Cuban subjects
amid distinct international visions.
This dissertation explains this period of political declension in cultural terms, with
an emphasis on the discursive tension between neocolonial violence on the one hand and
what I refer to as “Pan-Americanity” on the other. In using this term, I invoke—but
alter—Anibal Quijano and Immanuel Wallerstein’s critique of “Americanity” as the
problematic signifier for “modernity.” Quijano and Wallerstein locate the concept of
Americanity in world-systems theory, maintaining that the Americas emerged in
modernity according to systemic understandings of colonialism, ethnicity, racism, and the
idea of “newness.” Americanity, then, was “the erection of a gigantic ideological overlay
to the modern world-system. It established a series of institutions and worldviews that
sustained the system, and it invented all this out of the American crucible.”5 In this spirit,
I use Pan-Americanity as a neologism that denotes a variety of hemispheric cultural
affinities, from state-sponsored gestures of “Pan-Americanism” in the 1930s to an axis of
resistance to U.S.-led political norms as espoused by Che Guevara, Langston Hughes,
and other hemispheric radicals. The idea of Pan-Americanity was a subjectivity that
operated in and around the diplomatic realm of inter-American relations, but which could
also offer a critique of Pan-Americanism, the mode of inter-American statecraft
consecrated by institutions such as the International Bureau of American Republics,
which convened its first conference in Washington, D.C. in October 1889, morphed into
the Pan American Union, and later became the Organization of American States after
World War II. Pan-Americanity also provides a rubric to describe the political thinking
5
Anibal Quijano and Immanuel Wallerstein, “Americanity as a concept, or the Americas in the Modern
World-System,” International Social Science Journal 134 (Nov. 1992): 552; Chih-ming Wang, “Thinking
and Feeling Asian American in Taiwan,” American Quarterly Vol. 59, No. 1 (March 2007): 138.
5
of dissidents such as Stokely Carmichael and Robert F. Williams, both of whom evinced
a mode of hemispheric nationalism that purported to unite race-based struggles in Cuba
and the United States against capitalism and imperialism. Therefore, Pan-Americanity
could provide the language of both conflict and collaboration; questions surrounding
Cuba’s revolutions resonated within varying logics of local, national, and international
spaces, which held different meaning for writers, politicians, musicians, and exiles.
Following the work of postcolonial scholars, I argue that Pan-Americanity was at
once an ambivalent and polyvalent discourse in U.S.-Cuban relations, which celebrated
cultural commonalities across American nations while also articulating a form of U.S.
neocolonial desire. In my critique of neocolonialist discourse, I follow Homi Bhabha’s
work on colonialism, who, building on the work of Jacques Lacan and Frantz Fanon,
locates constructions of the colonial “self” and “other” as a psychic and social dislocation
in the writing of the nation. In the colonial imaginary, the “location of culture” is such
that images and messages hold discursive “ambivalence” or “play” between settler and
native, which enunciate a different-yet-the-same quality as well as a fragmented
identification between populations. The discursive rupturing unravels any sense of
totality and homogeneity of the colonial/colonized nation or culture, indicated by a
perpetual sense of otherness as well as familiarity between self and other. Thus, the
colonizer is tethered to the colonized, the self to the other, which undermines the notion
of an absolute distinction between national, racial, or cultural subjects.6
Neocolonialism proposes a discursive continuity with colonialism even as it
employs different bureaucratic channels and institutional mechanisms. Cuban politicians
and scholars use the term to describe the period of Cuban history between 1902 and 1958
6
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2004[1994]), 64.
6
[la época neocolonial] and the hegemonic presence of the United States in Cuban
governance and social development. Neocolonialism may include territorial occupancy,
but more than not it conveys economic oversight of a state or region. While
neocolonialism is in many ways—and some would say fundamentally—distinct from
colonialism, its cultural script may remain intact, even while new political arrangements
trumpet decidedly anti- or post-colonial diplomatic and cultural values.7
In the present context, neocolonial desire (and its resistance) structured the terms
of Pan-Americanity, which was historically rooted in the U.S.-Cuban ties of singular
intimacy. While claiming beneficence and altruism—whether by conservative, moderate,
or radical forces—U.S. subjects could also issue a catalog of claims, appraisals, and
evaluations that disempowered Cubans. While the Good Neighbor Policy, leftwing
documentary realism, and tourist literature purported to celebrate and enrich relations
between Cuban and U.S. populations, these cultural forms were also cast in the triumphal
language of neocoloniality, made legitimate by the imperial and erotic desire of a First
World gaze. The wider webs of imperialism and neocolonialism, therefore, intersect in
the U.S.-Cuban imaginary that granted authority to U.S. subjectivity within a First
World/Western epistemology. It gave modernizationists in John F. Kennedy’s
administration and the characters in Terrence McNally’s Cuba, Sí! (1968) the ability to
diagnose political and cultural pathology of Cuban subjects and prescribe its antidote,
assumptions that bore culturalist and racialist biases in global power vectors that
7
Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (New York: International
Publishers,1965); Gilbert M. Joseph, et. al., eds., Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History
of U.S.-Latin American Relations (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998); Immanuel Wallerstein, The
Modern-World System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World Economy in the
Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press ,1976); and Jean-Paul Sartre, Colonialism and
Neocolonialism (Hoboken, NJ: Routledge, 2001).
7
determined wealth and worth. Legitimated and enforced by military power and
capitalism, such arrangements ensured that U.S. subjects could do to Cubans what
Cubans could not do to U.S. subjects. Importantly, however, it was opposition to these
arrangements that made Cuban revolutionary movements powerfully resonate throughout
international waters, including the United States, generated by the inertia of Third World
activism in the era of decolonization.
In telling this story of both mutual identification and divisive modes of “othering”
within the twin poles of Pan-Americanity and neocolonial desire, I seek to discover new
ways of explaining the cultural nature of political conflict. I incorporate Cuban and U.S.
sources in order to illustrate the manner in which a “cross-fertilization” between
populations produced a new body of cultural production in the transnational movement of
people, goods, and ideas during this period.8 This discussion takes on a dialogical nature,
with the production, distribution, and consumption of U.S. and Cuban aural, visual, and
literary texts flowing across borders. Comparing and contrasting these vastly diffuse and
different cultural locations is a labyrinthine affair, but using the rubric of transnationalism
allows us to excavate the inner workings of various “contact zones,” to use Mary Louise
Pratt’s well-known term, while bearing in mind the cultural nuances that shaped U.S. and
Cuban nationalist subjectivities. By working within a transnational mode, this
dissertation aims to reveal the contested uses and interpretations of revolution in the
liminal space of the U.S.-Cuban hyphen. Such a model creates a new historiographical
8
I borrow “cross-fertilization” from Frank Guridy, “From Solidarity to Cross-Fertilization: AfroCuban/African American Interaction during the 1930s and 1940s,” Radical History Review 87 (2003): 1948. Other texts include Louis Pérez, Jr., On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality, and Culture (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Lisa Brock and Digna Castañeda Fuertes, Between Race
and Empire: African-Americans and Afro-Cubans Before the Cuban Revolution (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1999); and Rafael Hernández and John H. Coatsworth, Culturas encontradas: Cuba y los
Estados Unidos (Havana: Centro de Investigación y Desarrollo de la Cultura Cubana Juan Marinello;
Cambridge, MA: Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos David Rockefeller Universidad de Harvard, 2001).
8
and geographical domain that allows for the shifting parameters of nation building
programs. It presents a case study that reveals the overarching conditions that enable
“minor” states to exert gravitational pull on superpowers in the production of new local
tastes and sensibilities from Harlem to Havana.
U.S.-Cuban Historiography
The shared history between Cuba and the United States stands distinct from other
U.S.-Latin American pairings, and indeed there are several “beginnings” to this
economic, cultural, and political relationship. As colonies, America and Cuba were
important possessions for Great Britain and Spain, woven into mercantile economies
based on the Atlantic slave trade. Upon independence, the United States recognized
Spanish Cuba as a valuable commercial interest, sparking debates over its annexation
throughout the 19th century. In 1854 the Pierce administration defended the Ostend
Manifesto, which made the purchase of Cuba a priority. Pro-annexation forces in Cuba
and the United States were forced to reconsider, however, because of the political cost
associated with the explosive subject of slavery, witnessed by the divisive KansasNebraska Act and the growing border conflicts between Slave and Free states.9 The Ten
Years War (1868-1878) produced the first major wave of Cuban emigration to the United
States. Cubans established community enclaves and a regular labor force throughout
Florida and New York. These immigrant networks later provided resources for future
9
David Eltis, F.D. Lewis, and K. Sokoloff, eds., Slavery in the Development of the Americas (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2004); Philip Foner, A History of Cuba and its Relations with the United
States (New York: International Publishers, 1962).
9
independence fighters such as José Martí, who in exile figured prominently in the Cuban
Revolutionary Party and Hispanic-American Literary Society, founded in 1887.10
Most U.S.-Cuban histories, however, point to the combustible year 1898, when
the United States intervened in Cuba’s war of independence against Spain. Inaugurating
a new debate in Washington over U.S. global expansion, the Spanish-American War, or
what Cubans alternatively refer to as the “Guerra Hispana-Cubana-Norteamericana” and
“Guerra de Independencia,” brought new raging questions over whether the United States
should remain continentally contained or expand its governance to locales like the
Philippines and Guam. With victory over Spain and subsequent occupation of Cuba
came divisions among U.S. political and business leaders over questions of isolation and
expansion. The 1898 Teller Amendment prohibited annexation and held that Cuba was
to remain sovereign, at least nominally. U.S. sugar producers feared an increase in local
competition if Cuba were annexed. Many U.S. leaders also shared misgivings about
incorporating a mostly non-white population into the U.S. body politic. Rejecting
annexation did not, however, deter U.S. officials from leaving a political structure
between 1898 and 1902 that allowed for a disproportional influence by Washington in
Cuban affairs directed by Secretary of War Elihu Root, General John R. Brooke, and
General Leonard Wood.11
On February 25, 1901, Orville Platt introduced an amendment to the Cuban
constitution to the U.S. Congress as part of an army appropriations bill, which became a
10
Rolando Alvarez Estevez, La emigración Cubana en Estados Unidos, 1868-1878 (La Habana: Editorial
de Ciencias Sociales, 1986); Louis Pérez, Jr.’s Cuba and the United States: Ties of Singular Intimacy
(Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1990); Pablo de la Torriente Brau, Algebra y política, y otros
textos de Nueva York, ed. and with Introduction by Ana Cairo (Havana: Centro Cultural Pablo de la
Torriente Brau, 2001), vii-viii.
11
“The Teller Amendment, 1898,” http://www.etsu.edu/cas/history/docs/teller.htm (Accessed Sept. 6,
2008); Louis Aguilar, Cuba 1933, 18.
10
constitutional caveat and condition for U.S. withdrawal. With the Platt Amendment
affixed to the Cuban constitution, the legal framework was put in place for the United
States to maintain huge political and economic involvement on the island. U.S.
intervention thus became normalized from the beginning of the Cuban republic,
underwritten by constitutional claims that codified the idea that Cubans were not entirely
fit for self-governance. Such an arrangement justified subsequent military interventions:
in 1906 when Cuba’s first president of the republic, Tomás Estrada Palma, requested U.S.
assistance with electoral problems (which required another three-year occupation); in
1912 to help Cuban authorities suppress Afro-Cuban protests for racial equality; and in
1933, when President Franklin Roosevelt dispatched thirty warships to the Cuban
coastline to keep the 1933 revolution in check.12
In Cuba the year 1898 remains a generative point in both 1933 and 1959
revolutionary narratives. What critics would decry as U.S. imperialism, neocolonialism,
and paternalism, stemmed from the social and legal framework produced by the military
occupation. The autonomous Cuban state emerged beholden to U.S. norms and desires,
which affected the development of democratic practices in Cuba. During the occupation,
U.S. leaders fought to institutionalize segregation and disenfranchisement, as U.S.
military officials opposed universal male suffrage on the island due to fears of potential
instability brought about by Afro-Cuban political participation. Because of the large
mulatto and black population, Cubans were not entrusted with self-rule. Washington
leaders restricted voting rights to men 21 years of age who owned property and who
could pass literacy requirements or who had served in the Cuban army. Cubans opposed
12
Pérez, Cuba under Platt, 96-97.
11
this arrangement in favor of universal male suffrage without requirements.13 Suffrage for
Cuban men of color, however, did not ensure equal consideration of Afro-Cuban rights
and demands. Though evidence suggests that black men did vote in large numbers,
inclusion of Afro-Cubans in national politics was severely limited due to warnings
against “miscegenation” or “mongrelization” from the scientific community and
intellectual rank and file. Such attitudes formed part of broader assumptions about
biological and cultural degeneration of Afro-Cubans and led to the passage of the Moruá
Law in 1910, which prohibited the organization of political parties along racial lines.
Growing Afro-Cuban demonstrations were violently squashed in 1912 when Cuban
authorities began indiscriminately imprisoning and killing people of color in response to
white fears of black rebellion. At the behest of Cuban leaders, the U.S. military again
intervened in order to “protect American property.” The broader project of “whitening”
became both a cultural and biological pursuit associated with republican virtue and
national success. Race continued to drive a divisive wedge through future projections of
Cuban nationalism while it simultaneously remained connected to anti-U.S. politics.14
Economic might maintained U.S. influence in Cuba. The 1903 Treaty of
Reciprocity assured Cuba tariff preference on sugar entering the United States, which
made the U.S. public the largest customer of Cuban sugar as well as its chief economic
patron.15 The Permanent Treaty, part of the “Joint Resolution,” solidified Cuba’s
economic dependence on the United States by establishing stronger market ties to the
United States while discouraging economic diversification in Cuba. Cubans could not
13
de la Fuente, A Nation for All, 12-13, 55-58; Pérez, Cuba under Platt, 37-41.
de la Fuente, A Nation for All, 40-53; Ada Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 18681898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999). Aguilar, Cuba 1933, 35-36; Pérez, Cuba
under Platt, 151; Helg, Our Rightful Share.
15
Aguilar, Cuba 1933, 24.
14
12
compete with U.S. commodities and lending coffers. World War I brought an economic
boom to Cuba with increase demand for sugar by the United States and its allies. In 1919
Cuban sugar production amounted to 25% of world production, with 77% of it bought by
the United States. However, fifty percent of Cuban sugar was produced by U.S.-owned
mills at this time, which meant U.S. business owners profited from the market high. But
the boom would not last, for the following year the value of Cuban sugar began to drop
from an all-time record to date of 22.5 cents/lb to a mere 3.25 cents/lb by decade’s end.16
The crisis made Cuba more dependent on the U.S., with 75%-80% of Cuba’s sugar
exports slated for the U.S. market during the 1920s, which again profited U.S. corporate
leaders in Cuba. By 1934 North American mills produced nearly 70% of sugar made in
Cuba, up from 50% in 1920. Cuban sugar also traveled to Great Britain, France,
Belgium, and Canada, and remained internationally competitive with Puerto Rico,
Philippines, Hawaii (also within the U.S. economic sphere).17
These fiscal arrangements brought new demographic trends to the island in the
first quarter century, marked by an increase in Spanish landowners [peninsulares], West
Indian laborers, and foreign-owned businesses and banks. From 1915-1919, nearly
100,000 contract laborers arrived to Cuba from Haiti and Jamaica.18 Loans from
financial institutions such as Chase National Bank and National City Bank, which opened
an office in Havana in 1915, enabled new business ventures and agricultural expansion
by foreign and local companies. Since the 1890s, total U.S. investment in Latin America
16
Whitney, State and Revolution, 24-25.
Foreign Policy Association, Problems of the New Cuba (New York: Foreign Policy Association, Inc.
1935), 227, 234. Additional histories of the U.S.-Cuban sugar industry include César Ayala’s American
Sugar Kingdom: The Plantation Economy of the Spanish Caribbean (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1999) and Oscar Zanetti and Alejandro Garcia’s United Fruit Company: un caso del
dominio imperialista en Cuba (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1976).
18
Pérez, Cuba under Platt, 74-77, 81.
17
13
had increased from $304 Million to roughly $5.3 Billion by 1929.19 Rivaled only by
investment in Mexico, U.S. banks and businesses controlled 50% of Cuba’s sugar
industry in 1920, valued at $1.2 billion, as well as other agricultural industries and utility
companies, which secured Cuba as an important fiscal investment for northern businesses
and government officials.20
Such oversight suggested that the Cuban republic was born with what Cuban
intellectual Herminio Vilá called a “congenital defect.” Cubans were denied rights to
sovereignty enjoyed by other nations, particularly in the areas of commercial treaties and
debt control.21 Importantly, this congenital defect bore the mark of additional U.S.
cultural vectors, prompting some scholars to argue that no other Latin American country
became so “Americanized” in the 20th century. They point to the generations of Cuban
elites who received their educations in the United States; the technological advancement
that made Cuba exceptional compared to other American republics; and to the selection
of baseball and boxing, rather than soccer, as national sports.22 Cuban nationalism grew
in tandem with the vast consumption of U.S. goods, to the extent that in 1920 73% of
Cuban imports came from United States.23 By the time that Fidel Castro and his
supporters were expressing contempt for Yankee influence in Cuban affairs, Cubans
published 58 daily papers (fourth in Latin America behind Argentina, Mexico, and
Brazil), and aired 23 television stations and 160 radio stations. The number of radio
19
Fred Fejes, Imperialism, Media, and the Good Neighbor: New Deal Foreign Policy and United States
Shortwave Broadcasting to Latin America (Norwood, N.J.: Ablex Publishing Corp., 1986), 16.
20
Whitney, State and Revolution, 24; Pérez, Cuba under Platt, 187-189.
21
“Diario de la VII Conferencia Internacional Americana,” 20 Dec. 1933, Archivo Nacional, Fondo
Donativos y Remisiones, Caja 300, No. 16; Caja 300, No. 10, pp. 28-45; Pérez, Cuba under Platt, 49.
22
Louis Pérez, for instance, argues that technological transformations such as the railroad, radio, and TV
shaped Cuban culture sooner than most other Latin American countries. See Pérez’s On Becoming Cuban:
Identity, Nationality and Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).
23
Whitney, State and Revolution, 24; Pérez, Cuba under Platt, 187-189.
14
stations ranked Cuba eighth in the world, ahead of France and Great Britain.24 This
transnational cultural space produced the circulation of Desi Arnaz, Bacardi rum, jazz
music, and academic research. The extensive cultural circuitry between countries has
fostered the production and consumption of images of Che and Fidel, sounds of hip-hop
and reggaetón, and the illicit and exclusive circulation of Cuban cigars. This level of
interconnectedness makes Cuba an exceptional case ripe for study, for it was within this
transnational exchange of capital, entertainment, technology, and education that friends
and foes of revolution found their expressive vehicles.
While beginning in the interwar era, this dissertation builds on the work of
scholars who have analyzed the 1920s as a formative period in Cuban nationalism. The
1920s proved generative in the Cuban-U.S. dialogic, when modernism’s mix of red
politics and avant-garde experimentalism drove the cultural circuitry between Harlem and
Havana. However, whereas many U.S. residents enjoyed prosperity in the decade of jazz
and the flapper, Cubans were forced to deal with a plummeting economy that followed a
brief zenith after World War I. Hard times contributed to a growing national inquietude
that made the Cuban Communist Party a political vehicle for dissident activists such as
Rubén Martínez Villena and Julio Antonio Mella, who joined a class of international
political bohemians that included Frida Kahlo, Waldo Frank, Tina Modotti, Langston
Hughes, and José Carlos Mariátegui. While the Russian revolution remained influential,
the Latin American equivalent bore something different from a Lenin or Trotsky.
24
Yvonne Conde, Operation Pedro Pan: The Untold Exodus of 14,048 Cuban Children (New York:
Routledge, 1999), 7.
15
Mexican, Nicaraguan, and Cuban revolutionary politics stood apart in their quests for
land-based struggles against local caudillismo and gringo imperialism.25
By the 1930s, Cuban revolutionary politics had emerged as a mass mobilization
of anti-imperialist politics, racial pride, and economic sovereignty, congealing into a
nationalist impulse that sought a “New Cuba.” After months of growing opposition to
the president-turned-dictator President Gerardo Machado and failed mediation attempts
by the United States, Machado fled Cuba on August 12, 1933. He was replaced by U.S.backed Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, whose interim government also failed. On
September 4, 1933, a group of Cuban officers, led by a young and upcoming leader,
Fulgencio Batista, waged a successful coup, later known as the “Sergeants’ Revolt,”
which toppled Céspedes and left a power vacuum in the Cuban government. The result
was a provisional government backed by high-ranking officers, middle-class
professionals, and the influential cohort of academes and students known as the
University Directorate. Eventually power consolidated, and Dr. Ramón Grau San Martín
became Cuba’s next president and first revolutionary leader. The Cuban historical record
refers to this chain of events as the Cuban Revolution of 1933.26
Though notably absent in U.S. diplomatic and cultural histories, the 1933 Cuban
revolution occupies an important space in Cuban historiography, which locates it as the
midway point between the failures of 1898 and the fruits of 1959. In order to understand
25
Robert Whitney, State and Revolution in Cuba: Mass Mobilization and Political change, 1920-1940
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Robin Moore, Nationalizing Blackness:
Afrocubanismo and Artistic Revolution in Havana, 1920-1940 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh
Press, 1997).
26
A note on terminology: I use “1933 Cuban revolution” to refer to the period of broad-based political
activity in Cuba beginning in 1930, with the first major student-led strikes and protests, and culminating in
1940 with the election of Fulgencio Batista to the Cuban presidency and the construction of a new Cuban
constitution. This follows the custom of Cuban scholars who use the term “la revolución del 30” to refer to
the whole decade of the 1930s as a revolutionary moment, with 1933-1935 representing the apex of the
social unrest.
16
the revolution of the 1950s, Cuban historians argue, one must grasp the germane politics
of the 1930s.27 Cuban intellectuals of the post-1959 era have constructed a
historiography of revolution that unites generations of colonial and imperial resistance:
1868-1878; 1895-1898; 1933; and 1953-1959 stand as historical markers for one
continued revolutionary impulse, first against Spain, then in opposition to the United
States. This now canonical narrative uses a Marxist-Leninist model of historical
materialism and teleological determinism in its explanations of history. Under this
formula, Cuban history dialectically progressed according to class antagonisms, which
eventually produced the material conditions necessary to thrust the Cuban nation forth
towards the 1959 vanquish of the local and foreign bourgeoisie.
This dissertation focuses on three interrelated thematic fields to tell this story. It
critically engages both revolutions in the analysis of Left politics between Cuba and the
United States. I endeavor to fill a topical gap in radical history by examining
transnational forms of revolutionary politics in this period. In doing so, I provide two
cases of Left activism that showcase the cultural work of Cuban resistance in the midtwentieth century, including the ways in which Cubans employed Yankee dissent to
further political claims of the patria. I locate this brand of binational oppositional work
on larger maps of international dissent. Widening this radical historical trajectory via
Cuban revolutionary politics suggests viewing these transnational modes of resistance as
a single historical bloc that offers a semblance of continuity between what typically are
seen as two distinct generations of U.S. Lefts, “Old” and “New.” U.S. scholarship has
27
Some examples include Jorge Ibarra, trans. Marjorie Moore, Prologue to Revolution: Cuba, 1898-1958
(Boulder: L. Rienner Publishers, 1998); Lionel Soto, La Revolución del 33 (La Habana: Editorial de
Ciencias Socials, 1977); Ramón de Armas, La revolución pospuesta: contenido y alcance de la revolución
Martiana por la independencia (La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1975); and José Tabares del
Real, La revolución del 30: sus dos últimos años (La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1973).
17
tended to focus on the New Left’s interest in the 1959 revolution, narrowly concentrating
on the figure of Fidel Castro, raw masculinity of his fellow barbudos, and Cuba’s
putative racial reform.28 These studies incorporate popular iconography of the 1959
revolution in conversations on university protest culture and civil rights campaigns.
Resuscitating the 1930s, however, provides a deeper historical context needed to chart the
Left’s longer commitment to Cuban revolutionary politics. This study shows that before
Amiri Baraka envisioned a “Cuba Libre,” C. Wright Mills wrote Listen Yankee!, or
Robert F. Williams broadcast “Radio Free Dixie,” the U.S. “Old Left” and Cuban
“Generación del 30” collaborated towards common political aspirations and produced a
new body of oppositional work, which fit into the wider network of Left internationalism
of the day.
The second thematic strand of this dissertation locates the Cuban revolutions
within the overlay of the African Diaspora. These chapters complement studies that
highlight Afro-Cuban29/African American cultural interaction around race, civil rights,
28
Sample works that bridge generations include Maurice Isserman, If I had a Hammer: The Death of the
Old Left and the Birth of the New Left (New York: Basic Books, 1987); Robin D.G. Kelley, Freedom
Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002); Richard Iton, Solidarity Blues
Solidarity Blues: Race, Culture, and the American Left (Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press,
2000). The literature on the impact of Cuban revolutionary politics on the New Left is extensive. Van
Gosse’s Where the Boys Are remains the most comprehensive and astute look at the how the 1959
revolution affected the emergence of radical thought in the United States during the 1960s. Further studies
on the origin and significance of the 1959 revolution by U.S. scholars include Jules Benjamin, The United
States and the Origins of the Cuban Revolution: An Empire of Liberty in an Age of National Liberation
(Princeton: Princeston University Press, 1990); Thomas Paterson, Contesting Castro: The United States
and the Triumph of the Cuban Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); and Richard Welch,
Response to Revolution: The United States and the Cuban Revolution, 1959-1961 (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1985). On racial politics and the 1959 revolution, see Carlos Moore, Castro, the
Blacks, and Africa, (Los Angeles: University of California, 1988); Timothy Tyson, Radio Free Dixie:
Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999);
and Ruth Reitan’s The Rise and Decline of an Alliance: Cuban and African-American Leaders in the 1960s
(East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1999).
29
For the purposes of this study, “Afro-Cuban” and “black” will be used interchangeably to signify people
of color classified as both mulato and negro. Because race has been constructed and understood differently
in Cuba than in the United States—historically structured on a tripartite system (black, white, mulatto)
18
and (anti)colonialism, while building on scholarship that engages with the manner in
which diasporic cultural politics have shaped and responded to major foreign policy
developments in the twentieth century.30 Interaction between Afro-Cubans and African
Americans in this period was built on the collective experience of racial violence and
segregation rooted in the Middle Passage. Both U.S. and Cuban national economies
emerged out as slavocracies until war slowly and unevenly brought about abolition (1865
and 1886 respectively) and a new labor paradigm. Cuba underwent this change as a
Spanish colony but found its fin-de-siecle independence brokered by the United States,
which heavily affected domestic politics.
In Cuba and the United States the idea of race has been problematically yet
inextricably located in connection to the nation-state, blackness a polyvalent signifier in
determining matters of citizenship, art, work, and self-worth. The race question was
central in the birth of the modern Cuban nation, Marti’s dream of a race-less republic part
of the nationalist discourse that emerged during the course of independence.31 A shift in
racialized labor emerged out of slavery with more mobile black populations, as Afro-
rather than dichotomous (black, white)—statistics regarding Cuba’s population of color vary, a
classificatory conundrum no less problematic in the United States.
30
This volume of literature is immense. Sample works include Between Race and Empire; Frank Guridy,
Diaspora in Action: Afro-Cubans and African-Americans in the U.S.-Caribbean World (University of
North Carolina Press, forthcoming); Martha Cobb, Harlem, Haiti and Havana: A Comparative Critical
Study of Langston Hughes, Jacques Roumain, Nicolás Guillén (Washington: Three Continents Press,
1979); Brock and Castañeda Fuertes, eds., Between Race and Empire; Reitan, The Rise and Decline of an
Alliance; Susan D. Greenbaum, More than Black: Afro-Cubans in Tampa (Gainesville, FL: University
Press of Florida, 2002); Rosemari Mealy, Fidel & Malcolm X: Memories of a Meeting (New York: Talman,
1993); Moore, Castro, the Blacks, and Africa; and Tyson, Radio Free Dixie. On race and U.S. foreign
policy, see James Meriwether, Proudly We can Be Africans: Black Americans and Africa, 1935-1961
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black
Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935-1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996);
Penny Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-1957 (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1997); and Thomas Borstlemann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American
Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
31
de la Fuente, A Nation for All, 23-53; Aline Helg, A Rightful Share: The Afro-Cuban Struggle for
Equality, 1886-1912 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Ada Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba:
Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868-1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).
19
Cubans emigrated to the United States in search of work and Caribbean populations of
color migrated to Cuba to fill agricultural labor demands.32 By 1920, approximately 10%
of the U.S. population was classified “Negro” compared to roughly 30% of a Cuban
population of 3.5 million. In Cuba, these numbers especially fluctuated between 1910
and 1930 due to the ebb and flow of migrant labor to the island from neighboring
countries like Jamaica, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic.33 Building on prior protonationalist movements such as Garveyism, African Americans and Afro-Cubans were
drawn to the racial significance of revolution because of its potential to produce more
equitable conditions across the hemisphere. Revolutionary politics shaped diverse
understandings of “nationalism,” as both state and racial identity. The diasporic voices of
transit and translation—what Homi Bhabha calls “vernacular cosmopolitanism”—
enunciated multiple race-based constructions of culture and nation during this time, from
the modernist art of the Black Atlantic to the establishment of a non-white “Third
World.”34
The third area of analysis rests on the role of culture in foreign policy
developments between Havana and Washington, D.C. Most scholarly sources
concentrate on U.S.-Cuban political interaction around the 1959 revolution and its nearapocalyptic aftermath. Specifically, U.S. scholars tend to focus on the question: How did
the United States let Cuba get away?”35 This dissertation attempts to chart a different
path by focusing on culture in the fraught relations between Washington and Havana. It
32
Nancy Raquel Mirabal, “Telling Silences and Making Community: Afro-Cubans and African-Americans
in Ybor City and Tampa, 1899-1915,” in Between Race and Empire, 49-69.
33
Alejandro de la Fuente, “Race and Inequality in Cuba, 1899-1981,” Journal of Contemporary History,
Vol. 30, No. 1 (Jan. 1995): 134-136.
34
Bhabha, Location of Culture, xiv-xvii.
35
Paterson, Contesting Castro, viii (my emphasis). Other studies include Jules Benjamin, The United
States and the Origins of the Cuban Revolution: An Empire of Liberty in an Age of National Liberation
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990) and Welch, Response to Revolution.
20
seeks not to explain what went wrong or right for U.S. or Cuban leaders in these
revolutionary periods; instead it analyzes political interests and policy decisions within
differing cultural logics. It seeks to rectify one-nation histories by excavating the actions
of both “sides” in a longer historical trajectory, which means critically engaging with
different historiographical traditions and attending to other epistemological frameworks.
This analysis begins the familiar story of Fidel Castro, John F. Kennedy, Bay of Pigs, and
Cuban Missile Crisis in the era of New Dealing, when Franklin Roosevelt’s
administration struggled to change the imperial image of the United States while Cubans
grappled with creating a new sovereign self. This approach, I believe, provides the
historical depth needed to reframe the origins of the groundbreaking 1959 shift and to
show how leaders in both countries made decisions about foreign and domestic policy
according to wider social expectations while creating new cultural programs as vehicles
for national interests.
Remapping Culture and Nation in Politics and Form
As the above indicates, the (neo)colonial relationship and close geographic
proximity between Cuba and the United States made for a constant flow of print, song,
technology, and capital in a virtually unabated manner between the 1890s and 1950s.
The U.S.-Cuban dialogic therefore poses a unique example of cultural transmission that
demands an innovative approach to reading cultural forms. Through its analysis of
expressions such as the autobiography of Angela Davis, poetry of Nicolás Guillén,
journalism of Pablo de la Torriente-Brau, plays of Terrence McNally, music of Wyclef
Jean, and protest bulletins of the Venceremos Brigades, this dissertation seeks to make
theoretical interventions in culture and nation as categories of analysis for rethinking
21
race, class, and gender in the United States and Cuba around themes of revolution during
the mid-twentieth century.
Methodologically, this discussion complements recent work on transnationalism
that has emerged in American Studies, where currently transnational scholars have
expanded standard borders and boundaries of “America” to include other American
republics. This has prompted a reimagining of the United States as one nation among
many in the larger hemispheric cultural system and has produced a new geographic
alignment. The field of American Studies has dedicated considerable energy to
theorizing the transnational routes and roots of community practices, labor, and capital in
and out of the United States. Scholars often begin with Randolph Bourne’s early use of
“trans-national America” in 1916 as an inchoate form of contemporary neologisms like
“tranlocal,” “postnational,” and “glocalization.” The definition of transnationalism
oscillates between inter-/multi-national webs and networks in which the “nation” is
preserved as a category of analysis, to deconstructing the term, describing the movement
of people, goods, and ideas across boundaries and borders that break with models which
locate “culture” in terms of the nation-state. This has raised important questions around
“transnational” versus “comparative” methodology, as well as the importance of nonEnglish sources and dialogue with non-U.S. academics in the study of U.S. history,
politics, and culture.36
36
Examples include Micol Seigel, “Beyond Compare: Comparative Method after the Transnational Turn,”
Radical History Review Winter 2005(91): 62-90; Paul Giles and R.J. Ellis, “E Pluribus Multitudinum: The
New World of Journal Publishing in American Studies,” American Quarterly, Vol. 57, No. 54 (Dec 2005):
1073-1078; Sheila Hones and Julia Leyda, “Geographies of American Studies,” American Quarterly, Vol.
57, No. 4 (Dec 2005): 1019-1032; Shelly Fisher Fishkin, “Crossroads of Culture: The Transnational Turn
in American Studies,” Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, November 12, 2004,
American Quarterly Vol. 57, No. 1 (March 2005): 17-57; David G. Gutiérrez and Pierrette HondagneuSotelo “Introduction: Nation and Migration,” American Quarterly Vol. 60, No. 3 (Sept. 2008): 503-521.
22
I examine the theoretical and methodological contours of the trans-nation by
navigating between these and other definitions. I suggest a rethinking of nationalism as it
is traditionally understood: in terms of homogeneity and coherence among kin or camps,
within networks of similar ideology or ethnicity, or in terms of language and
representation. As we measure and perform nationalism, we suggest its cohesion. The
totality of nationhood, however, has rightfully been challenged and dislocated, now
shown to be fraught with disagreement and contradiction, an entity always becoming.
The idea of transnationalism poses a palatable alternative in its adherence to the
discursive inbetween, the liminal point of narrating nation as both a politics of solidarity
around a common identity (such as queer or black nation) and in the mythologies and
ideals of the nation-state. Rethinking the trans-nation in these terms becomes a
denaturalizing and deconstructive enterprise. It does not do away with nationalist
sensibilities but rather destabilizes and remaps them, showing them linked to other
subjectivities and social positionalities in political activities and cultural forms from
presidential decision making to literature of Left solidarity.
Using a transnational approach suggests a conceptual redress of “nation” and
“culture.” This dissertation critically rethinks the synonymic usage of these terms. In
challenging their equivalence, it is worth recalling Homi Bhabha’s understanding of each
as a discursive construction connected to the writing of history: “The linear equivalence
of event and idea that historicism proposes most commonly signifies a people, a nation,
or a national culture as an empirical sociological category or a holistic cultural entity.
However, the narrative and psychological force that nationness brings to bear on cultural
Laura Briggs, Gladys McCormick, and J. T. Way, “Transnationalism: A Category of Analysis,” American
Quarterly, Vol. 60, No. 3 (Sept. 2008): 625-648.
23
production and political projection is the effect of the ambivalence of the ‘nation’ as
narrative strategy.”37 In reevaluating Cuban and U.S. cultural forms around themes of
revolution, this study resuscitates Bhabha’s pivotal question, how do we narrate the
nation? I am interested in how Cuba and the United States were “written,” that is how
the nation became (re)inscribed in cultural forms—from poems about the Scottsboro
Case to anticommunist testimonials by Cuban exiles—and the ways in which writing the
nation drew from political developments between Havana and Washington, D.C. For
Bhabha, nation and culture are products of hybridity, and as such must take into account
multiple voices from the margin as well as the ever dislocated conception of “other.”
National identity is “never the affirmation of a pre-given identity, never a fulfilling
prophecy”; rather, it always becoming, performed as it is written.38
I draw from Bhabha’s insights on “narrating the nation” in modes of cultural
(dis)location in the three fields that make up the thematic glue of this study—foreign
policy, leftwing movements, and civil rights activism. These serve as discursive camps
as well as institutional trajectories that offer a panorama of diverse artistic and political
affiliations produced in the transnational circuitry of Black Power, revolutionary
feminism, and proletarian solidarity, and their appearance in music, photographs, and
literature. Using concepts of hybridity and ambivalence to “read revolution” forces a
rethinking of the verbal, visual, and aural lexicon of national subjectivity. Reading the
work of Langston Hughes and Nicolás Guillén, for instance, reveals that while both poets
structured their art and activism according to national traditions and with nationalist
intentions, their work drew from cultural codes emerging from the African diaspora and
37
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 201.
Homi K. Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (New York: Routledge, 1990); Bhabha, The Location of
Culture, 64.
38
24
anti-fascism in Spain, which made their verses originate and resonate beyond “U.S.” and
“Cuban” classifications. Similarly, during the 1960s both pro-revolution and
anticommunist populations underwrote their political beliefs using the varied language of
religion, community, and womanhood, discursive developments that gave form to
nationalist allegiances yet also used ideas about piety and gender that broke national
borders. This analysis decenters the nation-state in discussions of culture in order to
relocate ideas about origin and meaning in the circulation of texts from music and plays
to policy and poetry. Denaturalizing nationhood becomes a way to deconstructing
culture’s common sense, making “Cuban” and “U.S.” agreed-upon geographic and social
locations while frustratingly ambiguous descriptors at the same time.
In my approach to cultural analysis, I also follow Birmingham thinkers such as
Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams, and their descendants Paul Gilroy, Cynthia Young,
and Michael Denning, who have drawn from a cultural studies canon indebted to Antonio
Gramsci’s brand of Marxism that interrogates the interrelation between culture, state, and
history under the rubric of hegemony. Broadly summarized, the Birmingham approach
interrogates ideology and form in questions of social dominance and resistance,
disclosing the integrated nature of cultural signs and market factors in processes of
hegemony. Rather then fixed notions of “top/bottom,” “high/low” (as well as the always
problematic “middle”), culture is shown in constant flux, its “common sense” the product
of consensus and contestation in ideologies and aesthetics, beliefs, norms, and tastes,
which give meaning to constructions of class, race, gender, and nation.
In the present work, “reading” refers not only to the activity of producing,
disseminating, and consuming the published word but also the interpretation of cultural
25
texts, which includes the aural and visual evaluation of music, policy decisions, literature,
and photographs and their connections to constructions of race, gender, class, and nation.
I borrow from Michael Denning’s blending of “cultural politics” and “aesthetic
ideologies,” or coupling political affiliations with cultural forms, in locating and
interpreting the language of revolution.39 The Pan American Union, Provisional
Committee for Cuba, and Black Nationalism exemplify cultural politics, whereas Arnold
Wesker’s Four Seasons and Miguel Barnet’s Biography of a Runaway Slave contain
aesthetic ideologies. The union of the two depends on an assessment of ideological
premises as well as themes and styles, so that cultural producers like Josephine Herbst
and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, publications such as Bohemia and New Masses, and songs
like “Guantanamera” and “Che” became interwoven into a broader tapestry of culture and
politics that also produced racial understandings, ideas about foreign affairs, and
commitment to artistic traditions during this period. Hegemonic consensus in effect can
render culture invisible; only through the invocation of cultural difference (itself a
cultural construct) does one expose friend or enemy, antagonism or collaboration. For
some, Cuban revolutionary politics posed a firm challenge to imperial desire, while for
others revolution meant the antithesis of democratic dissent. Attending to the different
meanings of revolution and empire in novels and songs requires an understanding of the
varying cultural logics that crossed borders and boundaries in the global reshuffling of
the World War II era and the ensuing Cold War.
It is in this period that the nation-state as a category of analysis simultaneously
brought about the dawning of national liberation of the dispossessed and nationalism as a
form of identity politics. Cuba’s important position for Third World nationalists emerged
39
Michael Denning, Cultural Front, xix-xx.
26
in the era of decolonization that witnessed a significant increase in the number of nationstates considered part of the world community. Paradoxically, postcoloniality produced
more member states in the United Nations along with a growing sense of nation-less
universalism, an early instance of the globalization discussion that we know today. The
movement of politics and art between the United States and Cuba displayed multiple
guises of nationalism as a politics of identity (race, gender, West) and as a politics of the
state (Cuba, Soviet Union, United States), two forms of nationness that exhibited the
shifting nature of nationalist borders and boundaries in geographical and discursive form.
An evaluation of U.S.-Cuban politics and art in this period suggests a
reformulation of geography and language. How exactly do we locate “Cuba”? Cuba is
comfortably “Caribbean” as well as “Latin American,” designations that satisfy State
Department and academic definitions, but culturally, such regionalisms collapse
important nuances and distinctions. For Cuba is also “African,” a primordial signifier
that has remained powerfully political (as well as problematic) in different discursive
guises of Cuban nationalism since the early twentieth century. Since the 1500s, this
amalgamation of influences, scholars have noted, has made Cuba as colony and republic
into a zone of cultural novelty and indefinability: a space where religious forms such as
Santería, Abakúa, and Palo Monte took root from Christian and Yoruba traditions; where
Spanish is heavily Anglicized in popular culture and colloquial speech; and where one
percent of the population claims Chinese descent—Cuba defies simple cultural
classification. Rather than exception, perhaps Cuba stands as a typical New World entity,
a composition of various races, ethnicities, and religions due to the history of slavery and
immigration and its placement in the capitalist market development of the Americas.
27
Havana evolved as an important port city that bridged hemispheres, becoming a
cosmopolitan center of trade and culture, and developing into what Antonio Benítez Rojo
called a “supersyncretic socio-cultural area,” a space of perpetual cultural hyphens.40
This New Worldliness bonds Cuba to its northern neighbor, for equally problematic is the
location of the “United States,” often conceived of as its own cultural mélange,
containing the world while directing it at the same time. While socially and culturally
fragmented as well, however, the United States remains exceptional due to its
overwhelming financial and political presence in the Americas.
In situating the U.S.-Cuban relationship on the hemispheric remapping of
“America,” it is fitting to invoke the avatar of this imaginary, José Martí. Martí enjoys a
venerated status as poet, revolutionary, and founding father of the Cuban nation as well
as one noted for his articulation of the cultural genetics of Nuestra América. Martí’s
America—Our America—is embodied in Martí himself. As one who lived and traveled
throughout Latin America and the United States, he has come to incarnate America writ
large and Cuban nationalism. As Mauricio Tenorio reminds us, “Latin America” itself
was an imperial construction, dating from the nineteenth century, part of the French
Amérique latine that evolved into that which North America (read: United States) was
not.41 In contrast, the América of Martí suggested civilizational commonality and respect
for national sovereignty. Nuestra América is a useful trope for the new politics of
affiliation in the western hemisphere during the period 1930-1970. Martí’s national and
hemispheric vision was later taken up by Cuban nationalists but in an alternate guise.
40
Antonio Benítez Rojo, La isla que se repite. El Caribe y la perspectiva posmoderna, 2nd ed. (Hanover,
NH: Ediciones del Norte, 1996); Pedro Pérez Sarduy and Jean Stubbs, eds., Afrocuba: An Anthology of
Cuban Writing on Race, Politics, and Culture (New York: Talman, 1993); and Pérez, On Becoming Cuban.
41
Mauricio Tenorio, Argucias de la historia del siglo XIX, América Latina y cultura (Buenos Aires:
Editorial Paidós, 1999).
28
Here Latin America was part of the liberation struggles of the Tricontinental. Following
Martí, the América of Che and other Cuban revolutionaries stood as a geographic
contestation that resisted U.S.-centric ideas about the “American way of life.” Post-1959
Cuban nationalist mythology was bound to this cultural sense of Cubanidad that took on
global significance, the Cuban revolution a triumph of that American vision that denied
U.S. hegemony in the region and Washington’s imperial desires abroad.
In suggesting the theoretical reordering of space and language, I propose the
useful, if uncomfortable, term “discursive cartography” as the point where the
geographical and ideological collide in new imaginaries of place and meaning. My
notion of a discursive cartography is similar to Christina Klein’s use of “global
imaginary,” which she defines as the following:
An ideological creation that maps the world conceptually and defines the primary
relations among peoples, nations, and regions…As an imaginative, discursive
construct, it represents the abstract entity of the ‘world’ as a coherent,
comprehensible whole and situates individual nations within that larger
framework. It produces peoples, nations, and cultures not as isolated entities but
as interconnected with one another.42
Klein argues that global imaginaries are processed through social understandings and
incarnations of class, gender, and race. Place and people are made sense of in the various
expressive forms such as pulp novels, museum art, ceramics, and musicals. Popular
representations of the “other,” she argues, cannot be separated from U.S. military,
economic, and political expansion. They are part of the broader cultural terrain, part of
the “structure of feeling” of a given “historical bloc” that is determined by infinite
amalgamations of social, historic, political, and, I would add, artistic understandings
42
Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 2003), 22-23.
29
(style, traditions, canons)—all elements of culture.43 Importantly for Klein, “[A] global
imaginary…creates an imaginary coherence out of contradictions and disjunctures or real
relations and thereby provides a stable sense of individual and national identity.” She
writes that these imaginaries took the form of both containment and integration in the
United States during the Cold War, the outside world a threat to be combated as well as
fellow human beings to be supported, understood, and, more often than not, saved.44
I build on Klein’s analysis by suggesting that these imaginaries are radically
fragmented and conflictive rather than integrated and coherent. Cartographic molds
operate as different geographic abstractions and on multiple spatial planes: locally,
nationally, as well as globally. These may bring nationalism of the nation-state, as well
as a sense of hemispheric nationalism, or something even broader, such as the
construction of a Third World nation. Discursive cartographies are ideological maps
riddled with contestation and are imaginaries that function beyond the United States,
including Cuba. Cuba and the United States were located on different maps of meaning
for JFK and Fidel Castro, as well as members of the Students for Democratic Society and
the Cuban Catholic Church. Cuba could be rendered a Caribbean paradise, or an example
of Latin American underdevelopment; the United States the epitome of capitalist excess,
or the much-needed antidote to communism. Cuba and the United States became
associated with empire and resistance, and democracy and dictatorship on the combative
terrain of place and meaning, which fluctuated according to different political objectives
and moral purposes.
43
Klein, Cold War, 5-7. Melani McAlister does a similar treatment with respect to the U.S. fascination
with and suspicion for the Middle East. See her Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the
Middle East since 1945 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005).
44
Klein, Cold War, Ch. 1.
30
This study shows that the United States and Cuba were part of new cartographic
imaginings produced during the Cold War, in the intersection of what Michael Denning
calls the “age of three worlds” and the era of decolonization.45 Debates over U.S.-Cuban
politics, economics, and culture became mapped along axes of First, Second, and Third
worlds, and dichotomies of East/West and North/South. Cuba stood unique in this
respect, for it embodied, to different degrees, First World tastes, Second World alliances,
and Third World patterns of “underdevelopment.” Though Cuba conformed to a
communist “Second World” vision by the early 1960s, it was also anointed leader of the
Third World that defied U.S. pressure and put the social concerns of “developing”
nations first and foremost. This analysis joins postcolonial scholarship that has eroded
binaries of settler/native, First/Third World, West/East, and North/South dyads, revealing
the ways in which so-called subaltern subjects can become complicit in empire while
settlers can fight for its destruction.46 María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo has written that the
Cold War inaugurated a link between the seemingly antithetical concepts of Third World
revolutionary programs and the ideology of modernization. Both issued a language of
development that privileged growth, progress, self-sufficiency, and manhood, bringing
together, for example, the revolutionary spirit of Che and the economic rationale of the
Alliance for Progress. In Saldaña-Portillo’s reading, Malcolm X and Walt Rostow could
produce “narratives of liberation” wrapped in similar garments of progress. In different
ways, U.S. and Cuban subjectivity evoked the common theme of development that
45
Michael Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (New York: Verso, 2004).
Sometime referred to as the “comprador class” or “national bourgeoisie,” local elites of colonized or
native populations are now shown as powerful shapers of empire and capitalism, subject positions that
reveal how financial globetrotters can maneuver between and within various national economies and
cultural subjectivities due to their economic mobility. This approach dispels totalizing frameworks of
national subjects. See Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth; Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Aiwah Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics
of Transnationality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999).
46
31
depended on the notion of a nation always becoming, a kind of nationalist bildungsroman
in which “development” supplanted “civilization” as the blueprint for politics and
identity in the post-World War II era.47
Also important in Saldaña-Portillo’s reading is the manner in which uplift
becomes gendered, not only in terms of the masculine First World directing the feminized
Third but also in manifestations of revolutionary manhood. After the 1959 triumph the
Cuban state projected images of a revolutionary manly alternative, el hombre nuevo
[New Man], which sought to combat U.S. supremacy as well as garner strength for the
new nationalism. Cuba’s narrative of the self-sufficient and self-sacrificing revolutionary
New Man against Yankee imperialism and First World fetishism suggested figurative
parallels of David and Goliath, Robin Hood, and even the messianic quality of Jesus
Christ. Such popular narratives made the 1959 revolution assume a mythical quality and
therefore internationally saleable. The revolution—and specifically Fidel Castro—stood
as an exceptional story, the Cuban David that defeated the U.S. Goliath.
In its totality, this dissertation brings together sources such as state publications,
poetry, music, activist testimonials, memoirs of exiles, literary journals, newspapers,
magazines, photographs, and films. This wide array of material unveils an important
segment of U.S.-Cuban cultural development and novel example of the transnational
hermeneutic. Chapter One focuses on the place of the 1933 revolution in shaping U.S.Cuban literary radicalism during the Depression. It examines writer-activists such as
Clifford Odets and Carleton Beals who traveled to Cuba and injected their writing with
revolutionary politics. Their work was influenced by Cuban exiles Pablo de la Torriente-
47
María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, The Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas and the Age of
Development (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 3-5, 17, Epilogue.
32
Brau and members of the Organización Revolucionaria Cubana Antimperialista who
publicized the Cuban struggle in New York City’s Old Left scene. This chapter argues
that social documentary was a modernist genre used by Cuban and U.S. writers to reveal
the promise of revolutionary resistance, yet remained a form that also reinscribed Cuban
alterity and notions of U.S. privilege by northern radicals. Chapter Two focuses on
collaborative campaigns of racial solidarity between Afro-Cubans and African Americans
around the 1933 revolution. I spotlight the political writing and poetry of Langston
Hughes and Nicolás Guillén, who were emblematic of the routes and roots of Harlem and
Havana in the broader cartography of black modernism. Using these figures, I
complicate nationalist interpretations of literature by viewing Hughes and Guillén
through the wider lens of the African diaspora. This chapter attends to the problem of
cultural translation as it offers an investigation of the local and regional traditions that
also informed their racial projects. Chapter Three moves to the 1933 Cuban revolution
and the ways in which it was navigated by the administrations of Franklin Roosevelt and
Ramón Grau San Martín. Cuban politics became a critical focus for U.S. officials in the
era of the Good Neighbor Policy, when the Roosevelt Administration sought to redress
past U.S. infractions against American republics in the ambience of pre-World War II
hemispheric containment. In this period, the Cuban state struggled to legitimate its
revolutionary program in the pan-American arena. Ultimately, the revolution concretized
political change, which culminated with the ironic election of Fulgencio Batista to the
Cuban presidency and the ratification of a new constitution in 1940 that embodied the
populist spirit of the era.
33
Chapter Four returns to the theme of revolutionary reflections by the Left in the
later U.S.-Cuban cultural bloc of the 1950s and 1960s. The ascendancy of Fidel Castro
and his July 26th Movement sparked fascination from a bourgeoning U.S. New Left
counterculture in which the university group Students for a Democratic Society, radical
academician C. Wright Mills, and folk singer Pete Seeger were among those drawn to
Cuba for political and artistic inspiration. This chapter also demonstrates how Cuban
officialdom crafted geopolitical strategy around matters of “culture,” exporting images
and texts of revolution for international consumption in the consolidation of the new state
vision. Chapter Five shifts to the ways in which the Cuban revolution of 1959 influenced
African American civil rights workers during the 1960s. In the era of decolonization, the
revolution transformed the thinking of Angela Davis and Stokely Carmichael as it shaped
the writing of Eldridge Cleaver and Amiri Baraka. Cuba became crucial in the political
turn towards Third World nationalism in the United States. Radical leftists
contextualized Cuba in terms of liberation and nationalist movements in Africa, Asia, and
Latin America. Actively involved in this development were Cuban cultural producers
who hosted notable black Yankee dissidents in the national promotion of the
“Tricontinental” in conferences, speeches, and state publications. In the final chapter I
employ the idea of middlebrow modernization to interpret political debates and popular
readings of revolution in Cuba and the United States during the Cold War. This
discussion foregrounds Operation Peter Pan, an initiative staged by the Miami Catholic
dioceses and the State Department that facilitated the transplantation of thousands of
Cuban children to the United States to combat communism. Exile children were crucial
to the “winning of hearts and minds,” which produced new cultural texts in the discursive
34
cauldron of adoption, domesticity, and religion, as both the United States and Cuba made
national interests inextricably bound to matters of family and home. I conclude with
some comments on Cuba’s fifty-year history as a revolutionary state, focusing on themes
that suggest parallels with, as well as radical divergences from, earlier periods of political
thought.
This study draws from an eclectic theoretical framework of political economy,
diplomatic history, and postcolonial theory in order to contribute to cultural studies
discussions that probe the broader discursive and material transformation from modernist
internationalism to postmodern globalization. The period from 1930-1970 represents a
critical juncture in late capitalism, when fascination and dismay for Cuban revolutionary
struggles spawned new ideas about art, aesthetics, governance, and jurisprudence as part
of new state functions and cosmopolitan publics. Understood markers of race, gender,
and nation became destabilized to the point where neocoloniality threatened panAmerican camaraderie. In its investigation of the longer revolutionary trajectory, this
dissertation bridges conversations between anticolonial politics and modernist forms on
the one hand, and postcolonial politics and postmodern expressions on the other.48
Examining the span of revolutionary politics in the U.S. and Cuba provides a fitting
example of this epochal shift in art and politics.
Finally, this dissertation traces the cultural exchanges brought about by revolution
in an effort to rethink the meaning of Cuba’s transformation in the United States. As
48
See William J. Maxwell, New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism between the
Wars (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); Bill Mullen, Popular Fronts: Chicago and AfricanAmerican Cultural Politics, 1935-1946 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999); Michael Denning,
Cultural Front; Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1991); and Arif Dirlik, Global Modernity: Modernity in the Age of Global
Capitalism (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2007).
35
Cuba underwent a Phoenix-like rebirth and reemerged a nation with decidedly anti-U.S.
attitudes, U.S. cultural producers were divided over what the new relationship would
bring. Providing cultural explanations for such political antagonism challenges
conventional thinking of social and political scientists who often favor quantitative
methods and models in explaining stability and uprising in state governments and
societies. As revolution tore through established political and economic structures, it also
effected a psychological and ideological rupture rooted in culture and identity.49 While
this period witnessed a surge in cultural and economic mobility between countries,
facilitated by more flexible wealth and a robust tourist industry, the era of revolution also
galvanized campaigns against Western imperialism around the world, including those in
the United States. The forceful rewriting of both nations, this project shows, cannot be
explained by structural elements alone. Language and form become important variables
in gauging modern hostility between Cuba and the United States as well as their historical
amity, as two enmeshed discursive cartographies disaggregated psychically, culturally,
and politically. Whereas many Cubans had strived to emulate the politics and culture of
the United States, by the 1950s that connection was firmly understood to be morally
bankrupt and lacking fair and equitable returns for Cubans.
49
The argument that U.S. cultural hegemony eventually led to Cuba’s dissolution is one that Louis Pérez,
Jr. advocates in several of his books, including Cuba under the Platt Amendment, 1902-1934 (Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1986) and Cuba and the United States: Ties of Singular Intimacy (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 1990). Similar arguments occur in Benjamin, The United States and the
Origins of the Cuban Revolution; Paterson, Contesting Castro; and Welch, Response to Revolution.
36
Chapter 1
The U.S.-Cuban Transnational Left and the “New Cuba”
The full liberty of Cuba is part of our salvation, part of our own liberation. Those of us here in the
north who see our own danger clearly know that in helping to free Cuba from exploitation we are
50
striking at the weak spot in the armor of those who seek to exploit us at home.
There is nothing we want to do so much as to carry out our investigation in Cuba, to mingle with
the Cuban people, to see how they work and live, to establish friendly relations with them, to make
them feel the physical force of the friendship we had brought from the people of the United States
51
by going to their homes, the factories, the fields…
In July 1935, the American Commission to Investigate Labor and Social
Conditions in Cuba traveled to Havana at the behest of several U.S. leftwing leaders,
including Waldo Frank, then Chairman of the League of American Writers, and fellow
League member, John Howard Lawson. Clifford Odets, the communist playwright
known for his celebrated Waiting for Lefty (1935), led the commission, which also
included representatives from the Rank and File Needle Trades, Provisional Committee
for Cuba, National Student League, International Labor Defense, Food Workers’
Industrial Union, and the American League Against War and Fascism. Their mission
was to promote international workers’ rights and to investigate the volatile political
atmosphere fostered by an elite triangle that included United States ambassador to Cuba,
Jefferson Caffery, Cuban President Carlos Mendieta, and head of the Cuban army,
Colonel Fulgencio Batista. The commission, however, was unable to achieve its
objectives. Cuban officials prevented the Odets cohort from entering Havana proper and
detained them for possession of illicit literature and intentions of conspiratorial motives.52
50
Carleton Beals, epigraph to Terror in Cuba by Arthur Pincus (New York: Workers Defense League,
1936).
51
Carleton Beals and Clifford Odets, Rifle Rule in Cuba (New York: Provisional Committee for Cuba,
1935), 14-15.
52
Beals and Odets, Rifle Rule; Odets, “What Happened to Us in Cuba,” New Masses, July 16, 1935, 9-10.
The incarceration of the Odets commission caused the State Department to receive letters of complaint
37
This experience led to the publication of Rifle Rule in Cuba (1935), a polemical
booklet written by Odets and an outspoken journalist on Latin American affairs, Carleton
Beals, which heavily criticized the U.S. government and business leaders for political and
financial domination in Cuban affairs. Odets and Beals inveighed against U.S. policy in
Cuba and directly connected it with President Mendieta’s dictatorial rule of the island.
Their publication came two years after the successful ouster of another Cuban dictator,
General Gerardo Machado, whose flight from Cuba on August 12, 1933, highlighted the
brief but watershed moment of the 1933 Cuban revolution. The revolution ended the
presidency of Machado and that of his replacement, Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, and
installed what was meant to be a governmental pentarchy, led by the progressive Ramón
Grau San Martín and his pro-left Secretary of Interior, Antonio Guiteras. Ultimately,
however, San Martín would not last long, and the revolutionary instability continued as
U.S. influence in Cuban politics prevailed. By the time of the Odets expedition in 1935,
critics deemed conditions equal to those under the Machadato.53
This chapter traces the lineaments of U.S. and Cuban literary activism
surrounding Cuba’s 1933 revolution. It foregrounds the ways in which radical writers
and organizations from both countries worked towards political change in Cuba. A
byproduct of Depression-era social movements and Latin American anti-imperialism, the
U.S.-Cuban front produced a revolutionist aesthetic that operated transnationally. It was
a cultural formation that emerged out of a modernist internationalism, which blended
artistic experimentation with the global struggles of the 1930s: the fight against fascism
from Waldo Frank, Lewis Mumford, Lincoln Steffens, and other League members. Irwin Gellman,
Roosevelt and Batista: Good Neighbor Policy in Cuba, 1933-1945 (Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press, 1973), 131.
53
Machadato: Presidency of General Gerardo Machado (1925-1933)
38
in the Spain; liberation of the Scottsboro Boys; opposition to Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia;
and liberation movements in India, China, and Africa, all of which formed Cuba’s
cartography of resistance.
The U.S.-Cuba connection, however, was assembled from a Latin American
variety of revolutionary politics. Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and
Cuba comprised a unique geographic nexus that took on a hemispheric shape, molded out
of structural elements and artistic tastes emerging from the Americas, which were
different from, yet connected to, the cultural appeal of European art and Soviet politics.
Cuba offered a lexicon of anti-latifundia, agrarian insurrection that indicted the United
States for its excessive bank loans and support for military dictatorships that plagued
Cuba and much of Latin America.
What follows is a story of the radical developments of this binational cultural
period, when the U.S. “Old Left” and Cuban “Generación del 30” collaborated for
common political goals and produced a new body of literature in which the platforms of
anti-imperialism and workers’ rights provided a language for writer-activists to voice
their discontents within broader global developments.54 The Depression decade gave life
54
In this chapter, “Old Left” will include individuals from various political organizations, including
Communists, Socialists, Progressives, and even some Rooseveltian liberals. As this motley crew debated
Marxism, “Americanism,” and Stalin’s Soviet Union, many were drawn to Latin America, which nuanced
the strident political and cultural debates of the 1930s in unique ways. I follow Michael Denning’s use of
Antonio Gramsci’s “historical bloc” and Raymond Williams’s “structure of feeling” to suggest that these
dissidents, while holding different political cards (Trotskyists, Stalinists, Progressives), shared a sense of
cultural politics that reflected a new artistic proclivities emerging in the Depression decade. These
individuals offered a similar anti-imperialist and pro-labor vision, and an internationalism that took up the
subject of Cuba’s revolution while in dialogue with members of Cuba’s Generación del 30. Their
transnational cultural politics reflected the broader zeitgeist of the era, which drew inspiration from the
Popular Front social movement and modernist experimentation. Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The
Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 2000 [1997]) 6, 26. For more
on Old Left politics, see John Patrick Diggins, Rise and Fall of the American Left (New York: W.W.
Norton, 1992), 146-217; Judy Kutulas, The Long War: The Intellectual People’s Front and Anti-Stalinism
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), esp. chap. 2; Alan Wald’s Writing from the Left: New Essays on
Radical Culture and Politics (New York: Verso, 1994); and Wald’s Exiles from a Future Time: The
39
to a cultural turn in which strikes, protests, and work stoppages, as well as social debates
about women’s rights and desegregation became staples in political discourse and artistic
expressions in U.S. and Cuban arts and letters. These appraisals produced new forms of
internationalism in the debate over culture and nationalism. The artistic contours of this
conversation included elements of documentary journalism, part of the social realist
movement that sought to unveil the existential woes of the era through similar narrative
and form. Social documentary was a genre used by both Cuban and U.S. radicals that
employed journalistic reportage to offer the reader “backstage” access to the horrors of
the world. But as this chapter demonstrates, in purporting to discover the “truth” of
Cuban conditions, social documentary also became a way to reinscribe Cuban alterity by
well-intentioned northern radicals.
Paying Debts, Curbing Dictatorship: Left Motifs on Cuba’s Revolution
In Cuba, a large network of radical organizations representing multiple class and
racial affiliations competed for the formation of a “New Cuba” in the 1930s. These
groups differed in ideology and strategy but briefly joined forces for political change.
The National Confederation of Cuban Workers (CNOC) and its agricultural affiliate, the
National Syndicate of Sugar Workers (SNOIA), stood as the island’s major unions that
called for the removal of presidential despots and rejection of U.S. commercial presence
on the island. They joined the University Student Directorate (DEU) and the clandestine
society, the ABC, in their struggles for a new national identity. The DEU, founded in
Forging of a Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
On the formation of Cuba’s Generación del 30, see Raúl Roa, La revolución del 30 se fue a bolina
(Havana: Instituto del Libro, 1969); Ana Suarez Diaz, “Pablo de la Torriente Brau: ‘En New York Otra Vez
después de Año y Medio…,’” Revista de la Biblioteca Nacional José Martí (Jan-Jun 2006): 105-117; Pablo
de la Torriente-Brau, Cartas cruzadas (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1981); and Victor Casaus,
Pablo: Con el filo de la hoja (Havana: Ediciones UNIÓN, 2001).
40
1927, represented middle-class progressives, while the Student Left Wing (AIE),
organized in 1931, aligned itself with the Cuban Communist Party (PCC). The ABC, on
the other hand, consisted largely of urban professionals who formed a secretive society
that employed terrorism as a means of political change. It was a collective that enjoyed
links with the Cuban army and jockeyed for power against groups on the left.55
What united these affiliations was an unprecedented, if desultory, nationalist
impulse—a mass mobilization that decried the Platt Amendment and the draconian
measures of the Machado and Mendieta governments. A growing section of Cuban
society protested the closing of the university, proscription of unions, political
imprisonment, and censorship of the media. The U.S.-Cuban cultural circuitry brought
the voices of these revolutionary groups to a U.S. readership. Not unlike past generations
that had employed U.S. resources to garner support for the Ten Years War and the Cuban
War of Independence, Cubans in the 1930s produced a similar, yet arguably more
prolific, transnational literary corpus.56
During the 1930s critics became more vocal in chastising the United States for
what they believed to be unruly intervention. They declared that the U.S. had exercised
unlimited economic and military control in Cuba since its occupation of the island (18981902) following the Spanish-American War (1895-1898). Principally, they found unjust
the Platt Amendment attached to the 1901 Cuban Constitution, which granted the United
States “the right to intervene for the preservation of Cuban independence, the
55
CNOC had a membership of 200,000 workers. Its agricultural counterpart, the National Syndicate of
Sugar Workers (SNOIA), expanded labor organization on the island beginning in 1932. Pérez, Cuba under
Platt, 239.
56
Aguilar, Cuba 1933, 118-127. For more on these organizations, see Justo Carrillo, Cuba 1933.
Estudiantes, Yanquis, soldados (Miami: University of Miami, 1985); Whitney, State and Revolution; and
Soto, Revolución del 33.
41
maintenance of a government adequate for the protection of life, property, and individual
liberty,” and the right to govern treaty deals between Cuba and other countries. The
amendment ostensibly authorized subsequent military interventions in 1906, 1912, and
1933, and provided the legal path for huge financial involvement in Cuban markets. It
permitted trade regulation that skewed favor towards the United States, so that
commercial agreements such as the Hawley-Smoot Tariff (1930) and Chadbourne Plan
(1931) hurt the value of Cuban sugar, which saw a decline from $1.23/lb in 1930 to
$0.57/lb in 1932 and with Cuba’s share of the U.S. sugar market falling from 49% in
1930 to 25% in 1933.57
This type of economic and military oversight, combined with the havoc wrought
by Machado’s dictatorship, caused the pro-Cuba left to decry “Yankee imperialism” in
Cuba. As bombings, assassinations, and political imprisonment in Cuba made headlines
in the United States, activists sought help from the U.S. public to end Cuba’s malaise.58
Organizations such as International Labor Defense, National Committee for the Defense
of Political Prisoners, Provisional Committee for Cuba, and the National Student League
formed contacts with their counterparts in Havana and issued their strong support for the
Cuban cause. They furnished a vein of committee political writing that differed from the
published word of Ernest Hemingway or F. Scott Fitzgerald. Radical writers voiced their
concerns for Cuba in articles, letters, and essays, which appeared in pamphlets, journals,
and serials known for their leftwing politics and anti-imperialist demands.
57
Pérez, Cuba under Platt, 301, 279-280, 52; Aguilar, Cuba 1933, 98; Carleton Beals, The Crime of Cuba
(Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1933), 369-75; Modern History Sourcebook,
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1901platt.html (accessed June 18, 2006).
58
“Three Bombs Explode in Havana Schools,” New York Times, June 1, 1932, 4.
42
Members of the Old Left reasoned that the United States in part was responsible
for the brutality of the Machado dictatorship, and that Cuba’s freedom depended on U.S.
support. Journalist Hubert Herring urged:
We Americans must confess our share of responsibility for the bitter years of
Machado’s tyranny. But that is not enough . . . we cannot rest nor cry all’s well
until we have lent Cuba a hand in clipping the wings of those American financial
interests which have created an effective slave state in a Cuba which seeks to be
free.59
Herring’s language brought the seemingly distant crisis to a domestic context. It held
U.S. businesses and banks accountable for financing the dictatorship and suggested that
U.S. readers bore some of the responsibility for imperialist infractions overseas. If what
were perceived as ubiquitous rights were threatened abroad, then they were at risk at
home; if the U.S. government upheld economic interests and dictatorships in Cuba, then
U.S. freedoms were in jeopardy as well. John Dos Passos expressed this formula in the
following:
If these gentlemen [in the State Department] find that gunman rule in Cuba . . .
produces order and dividends, isn’t there a chance that they will begin to convince
themselves that the American people at home would also be better off without the
blessings of civil liberty, free press and education?60
Cuba’s revolutionary promise offered moral hope under the specter of political
refunctioning. It sparked allusions to America’s own fight for sovereignty and placed the
Cuban struggle in a U.S. cultural vernacular. Connecting the 1933 revolution to the
American colonies under English rule was another way to garner support for the Cuban
cause. One writer likened the Cuban group, the University Student Directorate (DEU), to
the colonists who “dumped British tea into Boston Harbor and that fought at Lexington
59
60
Hubert Herring, “Exit Machado,” The Nation, Aug. 23, 1933, 208.
John Dos Passos, preface to Terror in Cuba (New York: Workers Defense League, 1936), n.p.
43
and Concord.” In Rifle Rule in Cuba, Odets and Beals conclude with the analogy, “[t]he
Cuban people are fighting for their own Declaration of Independence,” and it was
therefore “up to the American people—all who sincerely believe in liberty—to see that
the Cuban people get it.”61
Bolstering revolution inspired political pilgrimages to the island, which animated
other Left struggles as well. U.S. groups sent representatives to assist Cuban resistance
and to report on the political environment to the audience back home. The topic of
women’s rights drew Cuban and U.S. feminists towards a common international goal.
Ellen Starr Brinton of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom
(WILPF) recounted a trip to Cuba in which the group experienced first hand the “illegal
control of the government by President Machado . . . supported and aided by the
American government.” While in Cuba, WILPF met with Cuban women political
prisoners and could testify that the “conditions in Cuba are largely the result of American
domination of Cuban financial affairs.”62
In Cuba, there was a flourishing of women’s groups that combined anti-imperialist
politics with national struggles such as the right to vote, a right women would not enjoy
until 1934. Organizations on the left, including the Women’s Labor Union (later Radical
Women’s Union) and the National Feminist Alliance, joined WILPF in its international
vision.63 Bearing the slogan, “Justice, Love, Freedom,” the National Feminist Alliance
couched political rights within a discourse of domestic and humanitarian necessity, and
61
William Simons, Hands Off Cuba (New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1933), 11; “Our Job in
Cuba,” The Nation, Sept. 20, 1933, 312; Beals and Odets, Rifle Rule, back cover.
62
Ellen Starr Brinton, “The Terror in Cuba,” The Nation, Nov. 9, 1932, 458.
63
Boletín de la Alianza Nacional Feminista [hereafter BANF] (May 1931): 2-4; Hortensia Pichardo, ed.,
Documentos para la historia de Cuba, 4 vols. (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1980), 4:53-56; K.
Lynn Stoner, From the House to the Street: The Cuban Woman's Movement for Legal Reform, 1898-1940
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1991).
44
looked to the examples of Germany, United States, and England, as well as to the
writings of John Stuart Mill for guidance. Cuban feminists echoed earlier suffragette
claims that political participation was necessary, because female virtue was considered
paramount for international justice. Civic duty was considered a natural extension of
women’s supposed inherent moral proclivities. One Cuban suffragette posed the
following questions: “Can we be women citizens in a place where morality doesn’t
count? Without these ideals, can we bring about a government of able individuals that
don’t deserve defeat due to their impudence? Will suffrage benefit us more than it has
men?”64 Cuban feminists drew strength from their northern sisters and incorporated
revolutionary politics in their opposition to the “double oppression” of political and
economic inequality endured by women around the world. Like their U.S. counterparts,
however, the majority of these Cuban groups focused on the needs of white middle-class
and well-to-do women and overlooked the large portion of Cuba’s working-class and
Afro-Cuban populations.65
Revolution and the Proletariat
With respect to revolution, the U.S. and Cuban Communist Parties remained the
most active contingent of this transnational movement. The Cuban Communist Party
(PCC) had supported U.S. social causes since its creation in 1925, participating, for
instance, in global campaigns to liberate Sacco and Vanzetti and in efforts to free the
Scottsboro Boys.66 The year 1930 inaugurated a new chapter in oppositional activity that
64
Marquesa de Tiedra, “Esquema electoral,” BANF (May 1931): 7.
Carmén Valdés Sicardó, “Hacia la emancipación real de la mujer,” Masas (May 1934): 23; Fina Forcade
de Jackson, “Feminista internacional,” BANF (May 1931): 8-11; Eduardo F. Lens, “Situación política de la
mujer en el estado de Louisiana,” BANF, (Dec. 1931): 9-10.
66
Instituto de Historia, El movimiento obrero Cubano. Documentos y artículos, 2 vols. (Havana: Editorial
de Ciencias Sociales, 1981), 2:6, 2:88-90.
65
45
took the form of an island-wide strike in March followed by work stoppages throughout
the summer. In this moment, workers from sugar, tobacco, textile, and transportation
industries collectivized to demand political reform in Santa Clara, Havana, Matanzas,
Cienfuegos, and Santiago de Cuba.67
Hereafter, Cuban dissidents became more active in summoning support for
revolution from their Yankee comrades. The Student Left Wing called for the “union of
the oppressed masses of Latin America in solidarity with the workers of the United
States,” hoping to contribute to the new movement of anti-imperialist change.68
Similarly, Communist Party leader and poet Rubén Martínez Villena applauded what he
believed were “definite gains in the rise of the revolutionary movement” across the
Americas, and intellectual and future leader of the PCC, Juan Marinello, used U.S.
publications such as New Republic and New Masses to denounce the “impregnable
financial control” of Cuba by the United States.69 He and Villena would echo the
revolutionary sentiments of the PCC, which demanded an 8-hour work day, worker-led
government reform, and cancellation of debts by U.S. banks.70
In Cuba, the small PCC membership of 6,000 fueled a movement that reached a
considerably larger audience in Cuba and the United States.71 During the 1930s,
periodicals such as El Trabajador, Masas, Bandera Roja, Hoy, and Revista Bimestre
Cubana maintained channels of revolutionary exchange with the U.S. and delivered
67
For more on the pivotal year 1930, see Casaus, Pablo, 59; Whitney, State and Revolution in Cuba, 67-70.
Quoted in Ladislao González Carbajal, El Ala Izquierda Estudiantil y su época (Havana: Editorial de
Ciencias Sociales, 1974), 72.
69
R. Martinez Villena, “The Rise of the Revolutionary Movement in Cuba,” The Communist (June 1933):
559; Juan Marinello to John Dewey, “From a Cuban Patriot,” New Republic, April 1, 1931, 184; Juan
Marinello, “Cuba’s Dictator,” New Masses, Jan. 19, 1937, 19-20.
70
Instituto de Historia, El movimiento obrero Cubano, 253-54; O. Rodriguez, “Our Present Task in Cuba,”
The Communist (June 1931): 516-24.
71
Pichardo, Documentos, 382-83.
68
46
updates on U.S. radicalism to their Cuban audiences. These serials were disseminated at
newsstands, rallies, and political gatherings. Some made their way to the U.S. via
political pilgrims who visited Cuba and returned with the evidence of solidarity building.
Masas [Masses], monthly organ of Anti-Imperialist League of Cuba, began publication in
1934 with an editorial board consisting of well-known intellectuals and artists including
Manuel Marsal, Juan Marinello, and the poet Regino Pedroso. It declared itself
committed to the “revolutionary rise of the masses,” with Marinello establishing the tone
of the magazine as communist, pro-worker, and against the “financial capitalism of the
United States.”72 Platforms included calls for sovereignty, anti-lynching legislation, and
political struggles in Mexico, Spain, and Nicaragua.
Another Marxist magazine, Bandera Roja, published news of the 1934 San
Francisco dockworkers strike and documented meetings between Cuban and U.S. activist
groups. In one such gathering, U.S. representatives from the Anti-Imperialist League,
League Against War and Fascism, and National Students League met with members of
the Anti-Imperialist League of Cuba, National Confederation of Cuban Workers, Cuban
Communist Party, and the Cuban branch of International Workers Defense to discuss a
common agenda of workers’ rights and revolution. Cuban readers learned that “the
delegates, expressing to the people of Cuba the international solidarity of U.S. workers
and anti-imperialists…were united against exploitation and ready to help propel the
working class and peasant revolution in Cuba.”73
In the United States, members of the CPUSA embraced and furthered this
revolutionary dialogic. They generally supported revolution in Latin America and
72
Masas (May 1934): 3; Juan Marinello; “Al comenzar,” Masas (May 1934): 5.
“Colosal huelga en toda la costa del Pacífico E. Unidos,” Bandera Roja, July 11, 1934, 1; Bandera Roja,
Dec. 10, 1933, 2.
73
47
believed Cuba to be integral in broader hemispheric change. Following the program of
the 1928 Sixth World Congress of the Communist Party, communists stressed the link
between workers’ rights and national sovereignty, both believed to be achievable by
revolution. In addition to the revered status of the Soviet Union, Mexico offered a
tenable revolutionary program, and resistance movements in Nicaragua, China, and India
offered the prospects of further change. U.S. communists contextualized Cuba as part of
the ever growing international trend in revolutionary uprisings and promoted Cuba as the
model for the U.S. proletariat.74
Authur Pincus of the Workers’ Defense League suggested that fellow communists
needed to help end “terror in Cuba”:
A fresh generation has risen in Cuba, destined to self-sacrifice, imbued with love
for the people, dedicated to wage relentless war against the forces of crime and
profit-devouring, tentacular imperialism . . . . They call across ninety miles of
ocean to millions of Americans to rally to their support . . .75
Pincus used the imagined Cuban voices to prod the U.S. working class to help end
dictatorship and to promote solidarity in what he and others saw as the international
proletarian movement. Communists such as Pincus believed that a transnational
community of anti-imperialist workers could challenge capitalism in the Americas (Fig.
1.1).
74
Lucile Perry, “The Coming Pan-American Conference at Montevideo,” The Communist (Nov 1933):
1118; G. Sinani, “The New Phase in the Revolutionary Events in Cuba,” The Communist (Dec. 1933):
1221-1230.
75
Pincus, Terror in Cuba, 28.
48
Figure 1.1: Cover of Arthur Pincus's Terror in Cuba with a Preface by John Dos Passos, 1936.
The link between workers’ rights and national sovereignty was a motif that
flowed through political writings on Cuba throughout the 1930s. Radical writers made
49
connections between workers’ internationalism and national sovereignty, a difficult
pairing in the attempt to bridge the local with the global. William Simons’s Hands Off
Cuba (Fig. 1.2, 1933) placed the success of the Cuban masses in the hands of U.S. labor.
Simons asks, “What do you think, American worker? Are you not in favor of the Cuban
workers setting up their own government as they see fit?” 76 Simons envisioned the
rights and freedoms of Cuban and U.S. working-class populations inextricably bound to
economic improvement. Yearning for solidarity in this broader movement, communists
and fellow travelers believed that a transnational community of anti-imperialist workers
was needed to extirpate capitalism in the Americas.
To the dismay of Cuban and U.S. radicals, the revolutionary experiment ended in
mid-January 1934, after a deal was struck among some of Grau’s erstwhile supporters
and Carlos Mendieta of the Unión Nacionalista party, the new ambassador Jefferson
Caffery, and Fulgencio Batista. After only a four-month tenure, the “government of 100
days,” could not hold out without the broad-based support of students, middle-class
professionals, and the military. Despite progressive legislative reforms such as the 8hour workday and minimum wage for sugar workers, Grau’s administration was unable
to earn recognition from the international community, a move led by the United States.
President Franklin Roosevelt had authorized warships to Cuba’s harbors on former
ambassador Sumner Welles’s suggestion. The military presence and non-recognition of
San Martín further destabilized the revolutionary Cuban
76
Simons, Hands off Cuba, 3.
50
Figure 1.2: Cover of Hands off Cuba by William Simons, 1933
51
government. The result was the new triumvirate of Batista, Mendieta, and Caffery,
which furthered vexed U.S. and Cuban critics who saw rule under Mendieta similar to the
Machadato.77
As the decade wore on, critics saw little improvement in Cuban politics, and
though Grau’s revolutionary government fell apart, Cuba’s revolutionary energy did not.
Widespread dissatisfaction produced another massive strike in March 1935, in which
200,000 Cubans engaged in protests and strikes across the island. Political violence and
repression of civil liberties continued, which prompted Marxist cultural workers from the
United States to continue their criticism and investigative sojourns.78 Writing about the
Mendieta government, John Dos Passos believed that “the result of this virtual ownership
of the island without responsibility in the eyes of the world has been that the financial
interests and the State Department have allowed themselves to drift into backing one of
the most atrocious reigns of terror in all of history.”79 Likewise, John Spivak, author of
the widely acclaimed prison reform book, Georgia Nigger (1932), sent dispatches from
Cuba in 1936 to update the New Masses readership. For Spivak, little had changed: labor
unrest and social turmoil were still abundant and the U.S. presence precluded a stable
Cuban government.80 Fellow New Masses reporter, Joseph North, also visited Cuba late
in the decade. He accused U.S. businesses for maintaining suboptimal health conditions
in Cuba, making poor water quality a vehicle for social outcry. “Water isn’t just H2O in
77
Ahora, Jan. 16, 1934, 1; Ahora, Jan. 18, 1934, 1; Pichardo, Documentos, 190, 352, 596-600.
I borrow “Marxist cultural workers” from Alan Wald, Writing from the Left, 2-3.
79
John Dos Passos, preface to Terror in Cuba, n.p.; Carleton Beals, “The New Machado in Cuba,” The
Nation, Aug. 7, 1935, 152-154.
80
John Spivak, “Cuba Stirs Again,” New Masses, Aug. 11, 1936, 8-10, and “Cuban Labor Underground,”
New Masses, Aug. 25, 1936, 15-17. Spivak’s work was known in Cuba; some of his short stories had been
translated and published in popular culture magazines such as Carteles. See, for example, John L. Spivak,
“El gran misterio de Amherst, Carteles, July 20, 1930, 10-11, 72, and “Un espíritu que dicta novellas,”
Carteles, Oct. 5, 1930, 26, 60, 64-67.
78
52
Manzanillo: it is a slogan, a fighting word, a campaign. It means Wall Street, it means
imperialismo Yanqui [Yankee imperialism], it means death.” North continues with a tale
of a typhoid epidemic and ultimately blames the Cuban water company, Cuba’s
president, and the U.S. government for their role in the suffering.81 Political change, it
was thought, would bear the fruit of transnational collaboration, and conditions in Cuba
could push others towards novel directions in democracy at the hands of an empowered
leftwing readership.
University Students and Exiles: Cuba’s Revolutionary Left Abroad
Similar to past generations that had employed U.S. resources to garner support for
Cuban politics, dissident exiles in the thirties produced a similar transnational movement.
They collaborated with U.S. groups in locales such as Miami and New York City to usher
in political change on the island, and their correspondence, as we have seen, appeared in
the pages of pamphlets, periodicals, and journals, and formed part of the binational
circuitry of revolutionary dialogue. Central to this enterprise was Havana’s university
population. Propelled by anti-imperialist politics and the movement against Machado,
young radicals formed part of Cuba’s Generación del 30 and brought dreams of a New
Cuba to the United States.
The Generación del 30 was a coterie galvanized by the new nationalism and the
fight to keep U.S. influence at bay. In Havana, their struggle escalated dramatically after
a confrontation between police and university students in protest on September 30th,
1930. The altercation ended in the death of one student, Rafael Trejo, who instantly
became a martyr for a new generation of young Cuban radicals who invoked the struggles
81
Joseph North, “Cuba’s Typhoid Cartel,” New Masses, Aug. 27, 1940, 3-4. North’s other articles in New
Masses include “Meet Cuba’s First Negro Mayor,” Sept. 3, 1940, 6, and “Hemisphere, Inc.,” Aug. 6, 1940,
6-7.
53
of independence and promised to fulfill the challenges set forth by José Martí.
Generación member and later Minister of Foreign Relations under Fidel Castro, Raúl
Roa, positioned the important student uprising of 1930 as the beginning of new
revolutionary activity in Cuba, echoing other Cuban historians who point to this date as
the pivotal entrée to the 1933 revolution.82 He remarked that September 30th “is now a
notable date in the trembling dawn of our national and social liberation. It marks the
baptismal fire of our generation.”83
Cuba’s youth movement was born in the 1920s and remained a strong influence in
national politics through the 1930s. It drew inspiration from PCC leader Julio Antonio
Mella and communist poet Rubén Martínez Villena, who helped mobilize the “great
university reform movement.” Beginning in the period 1923-1927, Mella and the newlyformed Communist Party worked with the Federation of University Students (later the
University Student Directorate) to link university reform with nationalist politics. This
followed other student movements in Latin America, as countries such as Argentina,
Peru, Chile, and Colombia produced movements that grew in tandem with the
internationalization of the Communist Party in the 1920s. The Soviet-inspired political
overtones reverberated throughout Latin American universities, fortifying student
activism in a way not witnessed in the United States until the 1960s.84
By the 1930s these collegiate forces had converged with the larger revolutionary
spirit in Cuba. The Student Left Wing (AIE) was one such organization that offered
82
Roa, Revolución del 30, 17; Tabares del Real, La revolución del 30: sus dos últimos años; Soto, La
revolución del 33.
83
Quoted in Casaus, Pablo, 59; Carbajal, El Ala Izquierda, 55-58
84
Carbajal, El Ala Izquierda, 13-16, 27, 30; Roa, La revolución del 30, 19; Jules Benjamin, “The
Machadato and Cuban Nationalism, 1928-1932,” Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 55, No. 1
(Feb., 1975): 66-91.
54
political solutions based on an anti-imperialist internationalism. It distanced itself from
more moderate groups such as the DEU and believed that capitalism and colonialism
were two sides of the same imperialist coin. In its periodical, Línea, the AIE wrote about
themes such as antidiscrimination and workers’ rights, and briefed readers on its work
with the National Student League and Anti-Imperialist League in the United States.85
The paper embraced the polemical language that united U.S. and Cuban radicals, offering
“The AIE denounces the imperialist handling of the ‘Cuban Solution’ and launches its
word of action and combat.” The group proclaimed unity between workers in the U.S.
and Latin America and spread transoceanic calls for revolution: “This is the revolution
that is getting closer to countries in Latin America, and still growing into one, it will have
enormous support from the proletariat and especially from North American workers who
fight by our side.”86
Some of AIE’s members took up exile in the U.S. and used the cultural centers of
Havana and New York to shape leftist politics in both countries. Raúl Roa, Pablo de la
Torriente-Brau, Gabriel Barceló, and Aureliano Sánchez-Arango were among those who
lived in the United States to avoid the repressive years of the Mendieta government.
They immersed themselves in local literary and political networks to promote a Cuban
revolutionary underground, establishing with other exiles the Cuban Anti-imperialist
Revolutionary Organization (ORCA) in New York City, with cells in Tampa,
Philadelphia, and Miami. While in New York, this group also helped form various
“Spanish Clubs,” such as Club José Martí and Club Julio Antonio Mella, which held
85
Línea, Sept. 18, 1933, quoted in Carbajal, El Ala Izquierda, 96; Pichardo, Documentos, 165-168;
Carbajal, 97, 106, 504-05
86
Línea, May 14, 1931, 1, 3; Línea, “El imperialismo cambia de lacayos en la America Latina,” May 14,
1931, 4.
55
meetings in Spanish Harlem, sponsored dances, fund raisers, marches, and conferred
intellectual symposia about freedom fighters such as Mella, Martí, and Marx, as well as
Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui.87
ORCA and its supporters called for “freedom for Cuba” and an end to
“imperialism.”88 The group worked with International Labor Defense and the various
Spanish Clubs toward the liberation of Cuba’s political prisoners, whose number they
believed to total more than 3,000.89 ORCA organized marches and rallies in support of
various local and international causes, and they illustrated an instance in which the
modern-day concern with “the local and the global” operated prior to World War II.
Members held a meeting at Ritz Hall in New York City to strengthen the “united front” in
favor of a democratic and sovereign Cuba and to denounce the Caffery-Batista-Mendieta
partnership. Here an audience gathered to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the
death of fellow student Rafael Trejo and to listen to Pablo de la Torriente-Brau, Carleton
Beals, and various speakers from Cuban and U.S. organizations.90 The environs of New
York City cultivated the political inclinations of such internationalism. Harlem in
particular had been an ally to Cuban political struggles. In 1933 the Harlem Liberator
reported an ample gathering who listened to Earl Browder and James W. Ford speak on
anti-imperialism and the Cuban revolution.91 Symposia and protests would feature local
87
Ana Suárez Díaz, “Pablo de la Torriente Brau,” 109-111; Casaus, Pablo, 234-35; Brau, Cartas cruzadas
(Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1981), 13-15.
88
“Organización Revolucionaria Cubana Antimperialista,” Letter from Brau, Sept. 1, 1935, Instituto de
Historia Cubana, Fondo Salvador Vilaseca [hereafter IHCFSV].
89
Letter from International Labor Defense to ORCA, 20 September 1935, IHCFSV.
90
ORCA Bulletin, “Ritz Hall,” Sept. 30, 1935, IHCFSV.
91
“Harlem Workers Support Struggles of Cuban Toilers,” Harlem Liberator, Aug. 26, 1933, 7; Casaus,
Pablo, 220-21; Letter to Luis Gómez Wangüemert, 9 April 1935, Cartas cruzadas, 39; Letter to Rafael
Suárez Solís, 11 April 1935, Cartas cruzadas 41-42.
56
leftist luminaries such as James Ford, Carleton Beals, and East Harlem Congressman
Vito Marcantonio, all of whom declared their support for “Cuban freedom” (Fig. 1.3).92
92
“Cuba bajo el terror,” Flyer, Nov. 22, 1935, IHCFSV.
57
Figure 1.3: Flyer for a “Grand Meeting of Protest” in New York City, 1935. Note speakers such as
Congressman Vito Mercantonio, Carleton Beals, James Ford, and Pablo de la Torriente-Brau.
58
As General Secretary of ORCA, Pablo de la Torriente Brau firmly positioned himself
within this writer-activist enclave. His letters and correspondence in 1935 and 1936
reveal the extent to which ORCA and Cuban exiles shaped New York’s radical milieu.
ORCA produced fundraisers, exhibitions, and dances as part of the cultural work around
Cuban political change. On November 9, 1935, the group helped sponsor a dance
featuring Cuban clarinetist and bandleader Alberto Socarras and his band, The Estrellas
Habaneras, who played in Audubon Hall.93 Also supporting the Cuba cause were the
Friends of Cuban Youth, a group that proclaimed their support for “Cuban freedom” by
preparing a display that included photographs, maps, and newspaper clippings about
Cuba in order to “give a vivid portrayal of all phases of Cuban life, industries, education,
health, culture, civil rights, and anti-imperialist organization.”94
ORCA not only prompted groups such as the Friends of Cuban Youth to speculate
about “culture” and “civil rights,” but it took its mission to Philadelphia and Miami in
search of Latin American nationals interested in wider hemispheric rebellion.95 On the
fifth anniversary of Rafael Trejo’s death, Torriente-Brau helped organize a multi-city
homage to his fallen comrade. He wrote that the tribute “offers not only a remembrance
of Rafael Trejo, but also as a revolutionary boost for the thousands of Cubans, Latin
Americans and even those citizens in this country who suffer identical or similar
conditions of exploitation.”96 ORCA’s pan-American approach caused them to issue
bulletins to prod “American people” to “join the struggle for a free Cuba” and to
93
Ticket stub, “Gran Baile,” Nov. 9, 1935, IHCFSV.
Letter from Jean Horie of Friends of Cuban Youth to Pablo de la Torriente Brau, Dec. 30, 1935,
IHCFSV.
95
“Manifiesto,” August (n.d.) 1935, IHCFSV.
96
Letter from Pablo to Comité Gestor del Partido Revolucionario Cubano in Miami, Sept. 24, 1935; letter
from Torriente-Brau/ORCA to multiple recipients, Sept. 14 1935, IHCFSV.
94
59
“[d]emand the halt of American imperialist inference in Cuba.” Showcasing
transnationality of the cause remained important to this brand of political work, though a
New Cuba remained the primary goal for exiles abroad. Along with other bulletins and
pamphlets of ORCA, was its briefly-published paper Frente Unico, which was printed in
New York City but intentionally stated its place of publication as Havana.97
ORCA also worked locally with the Provisional Committee for Cuba, which, in
addition to Carleton Beals and Clifford Odets, brandished such signatories as John Dos
Passos, Waldo Frank, and Archibald MacLeish.98 Based in New York City and
functioning under the motto, “Cuba for the Cubans,” the Provisional Committee actively
pursued political change in Cuba by allying with ORCA (Fig. 1.4). In once instance the
groups sought to “collect all the dirt about [Jefferson] Caffery” for an investigation
headed by Congressman Marcantonio who wanted to find out more about Caffery’s
“meddling” tendencies in Cuban affairs.99 The Provisional Committee-ORCA
connection included meetings with the ACLU, League Against War and Fascism, and
International Labor Defense.100
97
Three monthly editions were published: October and November of 1935, and January 1936. See Suárez
Díaz, “Pablo de la Torriente Brau,” 109; “Al pueblo de los Estados Unidos,” and “Al pueblo de Cuba,”
Bulletins, both August (n.d.) 1935, IHCFSV; Casaus, Pablo, 234-35; Brau, Cartas cruzadas, 15-17.
98
Letter from Samuel Weinman to Torriente-Brau, Dec. 10, 1935, IHCFSV.
99
Letter, Weinman to Torriente-Brau, Dec. 4, 1935, IHCFSV.
100
Letter from Weinman to Torriente-Brau, Jan. 22, 1936, IHCFSV.
60
Figure 1.4: Letter to Torriente-Brau from Samuel Weinman on behalf of the Provisional Committee
for Cuba regarding a coalitional meeting on Cuban political prisoners. On the left margin one notes
some of the leftwing luminaries who were affiliated with the committee.
61
The Provisional Committee for Cuba produced, promoted, and distributed
literature, including the polemical piece by Clifford Odets and Carleton Beals, Rifle Rule
in Cuba, which earned approval from Torriente-Brau and ORCA supporters. ORCA was
central in the Old Left community of New York City that focused on the Cuban cause.
Torriente-Brau wrote Arthur Pincus congratulating him on his release of Terror in Cuba,
expressing gratitude on behalf of ORCA and hoped it would help bring about the recall of
Caffery and a general awareness of “the most inhuman and cruel tyranny” taking place in
Cuba (Fig. 1.5).101
101
Letter from Conrad Komorowski of the Provisional Committee for Cuba to ORCA (September (n.d.)
1935), IHCFSV; Letter from Torriente-Brau to Arthur Pincus, Aug. 6, 1936, IHCFSV.
62
Figure 1.5: Letter to Arthur Pincus from Pablo de la Torriente-Brau on behalf of O.R.C.A.,
congratulating Pincus on his “Terror in Cuba” and expressing "deep gratitude for the great effort in
the campaign to educate the people of the United States on the real and dramatic situation" in Cuba
under “the most inhumane and cruel tyranny, with the hypocritical support of Ambassador
Jefferson Caffery.” (1936)
The work of this Cuban exile community sculpted radical politics in both countries.
They informed writers such as Dos Passos, Odets, and Pincus in their portrayals of
Cuba’s revolution. If Cuba offered a fascinating revolutionary spectacle for American
leftwing hopefuls, it was an image and history shaped by Cubans. Without a doubt,
Pablo de la Torriente-Brau represents the central figure in this revolutionary dialogic. It
63
is therefore worthwhile to take a closer look at his writing and activism, for it offers more
specific details of the nature of this transnational nexus.
While leading ORCA in New York City, Torriente-Brau met literary luminaries
such as Langston Hughes, who at one point wanted to translate his work. TorrienteBrau’s cadre also included Carleton Beals, James Ford, Joseph Freeman, Waldo Frank,
Charles Thompson, Hubert Herring, and others who crossed paths with organizations
such as the American Civil Liberties Union, Anti-Imperialist League, and the Provisional
Committee for Cuba. Torriente-Brau’s journalism career included publications in
Carteles, Bohemia, and Ahora out of Cuba; Ruta, Three Americas, and El Machete in
Mexico; and Student Review and New Masses in the United States. Tragically, TorrienteBrau eventually took a job for New Masses as war correspondent in Spain, where he died
in 1936 covering a battle in Majadahonda. 102
In his short career, Torriente-Brau published many articles and vignettes on
various subjects of social activism, fusing an ardent anti-Americanism with the rhetoric
of revolution. U.S. serials pitched Torriente as one who had escaped the tyrannical
Cuban leadership, and one who relentlessly fought for revolution. In one article, New
Masses introduced Torriente-Brau as an exile célèbre: “More fortunate than some of his
colleagues, Torriente-Brau, hunted for days by the Gestapo of the Mendieta-BatistaCaffery government which is rapidly establishing a Hitler dictatorship on the island,
102
Many thanks to Ana Suárez-Díaz for her generous information on Pablo de la Torriente Brau. Without a
doubt, she is the leading expert on Brau’s experiences in the United States. See her book on Brau’s exile,
Escapé de Cuba. El exilio Neoyorquino de Pablo de la Torriente Brau, marzo, 1935-agosto, 1936)
(Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 2008). Casaus, Pablo, 221-23; Pablo de la Torriente-Brau, “Cuba
and America: Student Solidarity,” Student Review (Oct. 1932): 4; Torriente-Brau, “A Cuban Refugee
Speaks,” Student Review (April 1935): 5; Torriente-Brau to José Antonio Fernández de Castro, 8 April
1935, Cartas cruzadas, 35; Suárez-Díaz, “Pablo de la Torriente-Brau,” 107; Letter to Alberto Saumell, 14
May 1935, Cartas cruzadas, 68-69; Letter to Charles Thompson, 20 May 1935, Cartas cruzadas, 71-72.
64
managed to escape to the United States only two weeks ago—we present this vivid firsthand account of three days of terror in Cuba…” His star status spread interest in his
articles on Cuba, United States, and Spain. He wrote about revolution, injustice, and
political imprisonment, and worked through international channels to change social
barriers around the world. Torriente-Brau’s reports from Spain depicted the labors of war
and brought it to readers in vivid form, in once instance relaying an argument between
“fascists” and “rojillos” [reds] and the underlying ideals of each side through the
soldiers’ voices.
But Torriente-Brau was also a literary aspirant, a lover of words. He admired the
writing of Edgar Allen Poe as well as Karl Marx. His “Last Dispatch” reveals another
side of his personality. Here he mentions not only the chaos of war but also his eager
anticipation to visit to Alcalá de Henares, the birthplace of Cervantes. As with other
locales, Spain is not just a site of battle, a political struggle against fascism, but a place of
deeper history and artistic sainthood. Torriente-Brau’s reverence for Spain’s most
celebrated author and the wider international traditions of arts and letters lay inextricably
from his political inclinations, a cultural genetics shared by those such as Dos Passos and
Odets. The pursuit of the creative and poetic complemented the materialist and the
documented; these affinities were not antinomies but interwoven political-artistic
instincts furthered by the social realities and aesthetics of modernism.103
103
Torriente-Brau, “I Escaped from Cuba,” New Masses, April 2, 1935, 11-12; Torriente-Brau, “Polemic in
the Trenches,” New Masses Dec. 8, 1936, 19-20; Torriente-Brau, “Last Dispatch,” New Masses, Jan. 26,
1937, 7-8 [published posthumously]; Torriente-Brau’s longer works would be published posthumously
with the aid of Raúl Roa, save an earlier co-authored book of short stories, Batey (1930). Future titles
included Aventuras del soldado desconocido Cubano (1940), Humor y pólvora (1984), and Presidio
Modelo (1969).
65
Included in Torriente-Brau’s oeuvre is Realengo 18, a piece that originated as a
series of articles under the title “Tierra o Sangre” [Land or Blood] in the Havana
periodical Ahora in 1934. In this exposé Torriente-Brau describes his travels to Realengo
18, a small farming community in Oriente (Eastern Cuba) that grows low-yield crops for
modest subsistence. 104 Torriente-Brau mingles with the realenguistas who are in the
midst of a fight against the Cuban rural guard and Cuban businesses, who claim the
Realengo land as their own. Their struggle is a keystone event, Brau suggests, for it
represents “a prelude to the Agrarian Revolution.” Realengo 18, Torriente-Brau
continues, lies in isolation, a place far from trappings of the modern era. It is a place
where “nature is rich and exuberant” and which fosters “an environment of cordial
harmony.” Here the narrative of revolution evokes the natural setting as home to the
romanticized noble peasant, an icon of anticapitalist resistance. Torriente-Brau evinces a
bucolic innocence of the farm worker who lives off the land like “a child lives off of
mother’s milk.” This serene image is then eviscerated by the encroachment of Batista’s
soldiers and greedy business interests. The image of the agrarian radical matched other
writing of the period, which tied Cuban identity to the sugar industry and history as a
people whose chief resource came from the land.105
Such an environment, writes Torriente-Brau, has produced class equality and
abolished ethnic and racial prejudice: “Spanish, Haitian, Puerto Rican, Dominican and
Cuban convivir sin problemas [live together peacefully]. Striking is Torriente-Brau’s
104
Realengos were plots of land originally owned by Spanish aristocrats during the mid-19th century that
became repartitioned after the Ten Years War. By the 193s, many lay unclaimed, thus resulting in the
settling of landless farmer communities (or “squatters”), which often resulted in clashes with neighboring
landowners and/or the Cuban government.
105
Pablo de la Torriente-Brau, Realengo 18 (Havana: Editorial Gente Nueva, 1979), 17, 9-10, 18, 54. See
also Ramiro Guerra’s Azucar y población en las Antillas (Cultural, S.A.: La Habana, 1935); Fernando
Ortiz’s Contrapunteo Cubano del tabaco y el azúcar (J. Montero: La Habana, 1940).
66
inclusion of Haitians in the multinational conglomerate, since few whites in Cuba and the
United States welcomed Haitians in narratives of belonging. Of particular interest for
Brau is Lino Alvarez, the “president” of Realengo 18 and Afro-Cuban veteran of the War
of Independence who embodies the ideal agrarian revolutionary. Alvarez leads the
recurring call, “Land or Blood!” The farmers testify to the revolutionary spirit and
thriving potential of a Marxian formula realized, a script in many ways already written by
a documentary tradition in Depression-era arts and letters. Like U.S. writers, Brau
documents a rebellion as real as it is safely distant; he echoes the promise of veracity and
morality of his northern colleagues, guaranteeing to deliver the “true history” of the
revolutionary fight.106
Realengo 18 might have stood as an isolated cause for Cubans had it not proved
an enticing topic for U.S. audiences as well. Brau’s position in New York City’s leftwing
ambience, strident prose, and passion for Cuban politics convinced another New Masses
journalist, Josephine Herbst, to publish her encounter with the Realenguistas in a pair of
articles in 1935. That same year produced an account strikingly similar to Brau’s, and it
is reasonable to assume that the Brau-Herbst connection was made via their employment
at New Masses.107
Herbst’s international interests included Spain, Cuba, U.S.S.R. and Mexico.
Herbst ran with the bohemian avant-garde in Mexico until her interest in Depression farm
movements in the United States earned her a position at New Masses writing about rural
106
Torriente-Brau, Realengo 18, 18-19, 36.
New Masses ran both writers’ pieces on Cuba, sometimes in the same issue. Apart from sparse mention
of Herbst in Torriente-Brau’s correspondence, there is little evidence that reveals the magnitude of their
collaboration. See Josephine Herbst, “Cuba—Sick for Freedom,” New Masses, April 2, 1935, 17-18;
Torriente-Brau, “I Escaped from Cuba,” New Masses, April 2, 1935, 11-12; Elinor Langor Josephine
Herbst (Boston: Little, Brown, 1984), 164-178; Torriente-Brau to Lucille Pettyjohn, 22 October 1935,
Cartas cruzadas, 141.
107
67
activism.108 Herbst’s account of Realengo 18 follows Brau’s blueprint: the history of
Realengos, the fight by Lino Alvarez against Batista’s army and the U.S. business
magnates, and the racial fraternity. “There is no race problem here,” she writes, for all
that unites the residents is “struggle, always struggle.”109
Herbst’s credentials as a radical journalist were also proven by Realengo 18’s
limited access. In her piece, Herbst suggests that she is the possessor of a map that
guides the way to a treasure of revolutionary proportions. This land, she writes, is “hard
to find, lost in the mountains….No road ever came here, no teachers, no doctors.”
Herbst, too, situates the Realenguistas as a kind of agrarian vanguard, believing she has
discovered in the Cuban hinterland seeds for revolution, “the first Soviet on the North
American continent,” led by the fearless Lino Alvarez (likened to an Augusto Sandino or
Pancho Villa). Indeed, Alvarez is the real deal, writes Herbst, for he brandishes two
bullet scars on his right arm and one on his left, markers of true revolutionary resistance.
Following an established leftwing script, the farmers again become idealized
embodiments of peasant revolutionaries, prone to talk about politics and history,
including musings on Maxim Gorki. But they are also a population suffering under
conditions ripe for documentary study: “Hunger is the power that drives the farmer,”
Herbst writes, “so much tiredness in children, so many thin bodies…” Thus, the
Realenguistas are both apt revolutionary models and social subjects worthy of Yankee
sympathy, part of neocolonial ambivalence that posits the “other” as both inspiration and
object of uplift. In the end, her mixture of artistry and leftwing ideology concludes with
revolutionary optimism that would have served her New Masses audience well: though
108
109
Langor, Josephine Herbst, 33-34, 91, 103, 46, 164-178.
Josephine Herbst, “The Soviet in Cuba,” New Masses, March 19, 1935, 9-12
68
“much blood has been shed in Cuba [and] the iron military rule has tried to crush strikes,
stifle protests. . . . Neither jail nor guns can completely silence such singing.”110
The narratives of Brau, Herbst, and other revolutionist writers adhered to a
register of aesthetics revealed in social documentary, a genre that became popular during
the Age of Modernism. Scholars of 1930s proletarian writing note that documentary
played a central role in shaping the politics and aesthetics of the modernist age.111
Documentary expression, William Stott shows, was a form by which social commentary
was viewed and distributed; in purporting to relay the conditions “as they were,”
documentary used personal testimony to legitimize claims made by the author. Stott
suggests that documentary acted as the “reader’s eyes and ears,” “mind and voice,” which
exemplified what he calls the “visceral method of persuasion.” The goal, he writes, was
“to right wrongs, to promote social action [and] to influence its audience’s intellect and
feelings.”112
These photographs, films, and articles, in effect, became aesthetic representations
of the “real,” snapshots of quotidian hardships that proposed to eclipse the messenger’s
biases behind the guise of veracity. The promise of “truth,” or reporting only “what I
have heard and seen,” became the mantra for those transmitting their Cuban experiences
via documentary expression. Cuba became part of the visual and verbal lexicon of
humanitarian crisis during the Depression decade, and its topological mosaic of war,
110
Josephine Herbst, “A Passport from Realengo 18,” New Masses, July 16, 1935, 10-11; “The Soviet in
Cuba,” New Masses, March 19, 1935, 9-12. The March 19th issue of New Masses begins with a cable from
Herbst in Cuba. The editors bill Herbst as the “first writer to see and describe Realengo 18.” This is
incorrect, for Brau had visited and written about the area in 1934 and most likely aided Herbst in her 1935
expedition. New Masses, March 19, 1935, 3-4.
111
On connections between 1930s social realism and U.S. political writing, see Denning, Cultural Front,
118-123; Foley, Radical Representations, 362-397; and Maxwell, New Negro, Old Left.
112
Stott provides a definition of document that encapsulates both objective and subjective experience, part
“evidence” and part “personal.” William Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1973), 5-12, 33-35, 26.
69
strikes, and promises of social change. Cuba was a subject that lined leftwing serials and
pamphlets along side reportage of breadlines, migrant workers, and peasant rebellion in
China.113 In wanting to elicit emotions of “shock, pity, and compassion,” political
sojourners to Cuba used personal testimony and eye-witness accounts to convey their
sense of urgency and desperation around the Cuban cause, relaying to the U.S. public
their observations more viscerally, more “real.”114 For those such as Clifford Odets and
John Spivak who had actually witnessed the “awe” and “terror” of Cuba, revolution lent
currency to their political claims. Observing the tempestuous environment first hand
became a way for writers to voice their social commentary while validating their leftwing
credentials, for these authors could claim access to a truth not delivered by the
mainstream press.
Furthermore, the narratives of Brau and Herbst exemplify how documentary was
a genre that crossed borders. That U.S. and Cuban writers projected the 1933 Cuban
revolution in similar literary form reveals an instance of what Cary Nelson has
characterized as a “dialogic cultural conversation.” The notion of dialogic topicality
illustrates how homologous discursive structures can exist within and across different
historical moments. Nelson notes that 1930s political writing “offered a shared vision of
human devastation…economic critique, and revolutionary aspiration.” If we combine
Nelson’s appraisal with William Stott’s definition of documentary, we may trace an
important moment in literary activism. The present discussion shows that the dialogic
imagination took shape along a transnational front that bore similar cultural responses to
113
Cary Nelson, Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory,
1910-1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 134; Nelson, “Poetry Chorus: Dialogic Politics
in 1930s Poetry,” in Bill Mullen and Sherry Lee Linkon, eds., Radical Revisions: Rereading 1930s Culture
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996) 41, 51.
114
Stott, Documentary Expression, 16.
70
revolution; its meaning held symbolic value for leftwing activism in both countries which
offered a shared language of resistance and political change. These depictions were
distributed in transnational form, and they belonged to a broader discourse that focused
on the same themes and aesthetic devices, paying attention to issues of race, class, and
empire during the modernist age.
In describing this interaction, however, we should not assume that Cubans viewed
their situation in the same light as North Americans, or that struggles in Cuba and the
U.S. were identically waged or defined. Indeed, the rhetorical strength of the Cuban
writing at some level depended on a renunciation of Yankee domination. Part of forming
the “New Cuba” by Cubans, then, was balancing the language of international rights with
the new nationalism, which strove to make Cuba modern and progressive yet independent
from U.S. interests and influence.115 Cuban radicals often positioned themselves within
the broader context of Latin American resistance to the United States, which at times
distanced Cuban revolutionaries from their allies to the north. Nevertheless, Cubans used
the resources and partnerships in the U.S. to fight for national change. It was a
collaboration whereby the international political and social realities of the Depression
were revealed through similar narrative and form, a political consciousness that found its
formal strength in journalistic exposé that made the writer the reader’s stand-in—offering
intimate access to the horrors of the world.
Cuba and the 1930s Cultural Turn
The Art of Anti-Imperialism
The modernist impulse bore a mix of artistic experimentalism and radical politics
in which new imaginative cartographies and dissident creativities were formed. Cuba’s
115
Instituto de Historia, El movimiento obrero, 34-36.
71
revolution made Havana one of the centers of Latin American cosmopolitanism, which
joined New York City, Mexico City, and Buenos Aires on a map of programmatic centers
that focused on new considerations of “culture” in the 1930s. This involved the ebb and
flow of art, literature, and politics through a bi-continental debate that delimited and
defined the role of culture in questions of civilizational pasts and nationalist futures.
Regionally, the idea of Latin America—and the location of Cuba therein—increasingly
became part of the anthropological, historical, and poetic questions on culture and
nationalism. These discussions had circulated internationally since the aftermath of
World War I, highlighted by the movement of authors and texts through New York City,
Mexico City, and Havana. Members of the Harlem Renaissance and the Cuban Grupo
Minorista represented notable literary communities that crossed borders during the 1920s.
But this cartography brought something new in the depression decade, as writer, artists,
and activists from the Americas and Europe pressed their efforts towards combating
fascism and colonialism, and exposing the worldwide effects of economic disaster.
Literary venues in the United States and Cuba inspired new cross currents of art
and politics. Cuba’s Revista Bimestre Cubana (RBC) was a journal sympathetic to
communist politics and rigorous intellectual debate, in the vein of a Partisan Review or
Modern Monthly in the United States. Directed by renowned Cuban scholar Fernando
Ortiz, RBC sculpted itself into a serial dedicated to the study of world literature,
philosophy, and history. Here one would find the poetry of Gabriela Mistral and José
Martí and the polemics of Marx and Lenin. It also provided a stage for debates about
U.S.-Latin American politics, in which contributors discussed the global position of the
United States and its approach to Latin American policy. Writers raised the topic of U.S.
72
empire and its relation to cultural autonomy and regional stability, which often took the
form of reprinted and translated articles from around the world. Salient in RBC were
those voices that criticized the U.S. place in the geopolitical build-up to WWII and that
portrayed the United States as the chief aggressor on the north and south continents.
According to Hiram Motherwell, “The hour has arrived that we recognize that the United
States is in reality an imperialist nation. There really is an American empire. We must
get used to speaking such terms out loud…”116
Projections such as these became more common as events in Europe and the Far
East brought images of an increasingly bellicose world. Critics on the left saw parallels
with U.S. hegemony in the Western hemisphere. U.S. intellectuals such as Waldo Frank
would find a receptive audience in Cuba. Author of numerous books and articles on
Latin America, chief among them America Hispana: A Portrait and a Prospect (1931),
Frank’s ruminations on the nature of relations between the United States and what was
termed “Hispano America” reflected the new regionalization that accompanied the era of
Good Neighboring and revolutionary politics. Frank believed that economic domination
marred the U.S.-Latin American relationship. He encouraged stronger activity in the
U.S. towards equitable prosperity in order to bridge differences between continents:
“This situation is our responsibility,” he wrote. “What it signifies is, simply, that North
American businesses have begun to control the continent situated to the south: AND
HAVE BEEN ABLE TO DO SO BECAUSE OF THE LACK OF RESISTANCE
WITHIN OUR OWN BORDERS.”117 For authors such as Frank, an alliance with
116
Hiram Motherwell, “El Imperio Americano,” Revista bimestre Cubana (Nov/Dec 1930): 226-236.
Waldo Frank, “¿Qué es para nosotros Hispano-América?,” RBC (Jul/Oct 1930): 114, 105-116.
Emphasis in the original.
117
73
workers’ movements in Latin America was the best way to engender a pan-American
identity based on hemispheric considerations.
Also important for Frank and others were the cultural nuances of individual
America republics and their place in the region as a whole. This new interaction reflected
the roots and routes of a distinct discursive cartography that praised Mexican muralists,
Chilean poets, and U.S. music. The attention to art and politics invited North American
radicals to go south to find inspiration and acceptance by populations that agreed with
their political reasoning and artistic revelations. These took place within U.S. intellectual
debates on the question of “Americanism.” The discursive shift by U.S. radicals
interested in Latin America called into the question the location and meaning of
“America.”118 The U.S.-Cuban exchange was part of wider attempts to unpack the
“Hispano-American” monolith, and to find balance instead between the regional with the
national in cultural and political terms. It required an alternative approach to statesponsored motifs of Good Neighboring and Pan Americanism (see Chapter 3), as well as
an engagement with cultural producers from various American nations.
The Mexican revolution generated transnational interest in Latin American
politics and culture, including conversations on Cuba. U.S. political pilgrims such as
Carelton Beals and Waldo Frank were drawn to Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s, a place
of progressive bohemianism that chaperoned meetings between Leon Trotsky, Diego
Rivera, Frieda Kahlo, Tina Modotti, and Julio Antonio Mella. The Cuban Communist
leader Mella had found refuge in Mexico’s expat community, even if his intimate contact
with Modotti made for inquisitive murmurs among fellow socialites. When President
118
“What is Americanism? Symposium on Marxism and the American Tradition,” Partisan Review (April
1936): 3-16.
74
Machado had the exiled Mella assassinated in 1929, he became an instant martyr who
would energize Cuban oppositional politics of the 1930s and beyond. Katherine Anne
Porter, Mirta Aguirre, Langston Hughes, Nicolás Guillén, Louis Fraina, Juan Marinello
are additional examples of Cubans and North Americans who found Mexico to be a place
of artistic ferment and political inspiration. The Cuban and Mexican contexts, while
distinct, overlapped in the broader attraction to resistance politics and Latin American
artistry that evolved in the cauldron of Mexico’s revolutionary culture.
Anita Brenner’s fascination with Mexican art and politics led to her interest in
Cuba. As an accomplished writer and art critic, Brenner spent much of her professional
life writing about Mexican and U.S. art and the Spanish Civil War. Born in Mexico of
Latvian Jewish descent, Brenner enjoyed both Mexican and American citizenship. Her
early years were spent growing up in revolutionary Mexico, and she was educated at the
University of Texas and Columbia University, eventually earning a Ph.D. under Franz
Boas at the latter. A friend of Beals, Frank, Bertram and Ella Wolfe, as well as Kahlo
and Rivera, Brenner established herself as a reputable author and dissident in Mexico’s
bustling environment.119
Through her affiliation with the National Committee for the Defense of Political
Prisoners and later Non-Partisan Labor Defense, Brenner gravitated towards Cuban
politics. At one point she headed a campaign on behalf of cigar workers in Ybor City,
Florida.120 In “Tampa’s Reign of Terror,” Brenner told readers that in 1935 Tampa
119
Susannah Joel Glusker, Anita Brenner: A Mind of Her Own (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press,
1998) 2-6, 21, 12, 16.
120
Brenner was Chairwoman of the Committee on Cuba in the Non-Partisan Labor Defense, which worked
with the Committee for Pro-Amnesty for Social and Political Prisoners in Cuba. This organization rallied
against the Mendieta government, and Brenner wrote editorials on behalf of Cuba’s Committee for an
American audience. Anita Brenner Papers, Harry Ransom Center [hereafter HRC], Box 16, Folder 11;
75
authorities had issued a crackdown on organized labor, which resulted in violent clashes
between police and racially-integrated protesters. Brenner’s analysis of the local politics
anticipated modern discussions of globalization, including the subject of non-white and
foreign workers and the risk of deportation. Her conclusion strikes the modern-day
reader as a comment on the local/global and its implications for transnational labor,
saying that “the United States has a Cuba within its borders.” If the U.S. in effect had a
Cuba “within its borders,” it likewise had an authoritarian system, as Brenner drew
parallels between the police crackdown in Tampa and the dictatorial leadership of a
“Machado in Cuba” and “Hitler in Germany.”121
Cuba and Mexico, therefore, became connected for the contingent of the Old Left
that focused on U.S.-Latin American relations. Brenner’s correspondence with Carleton
Beals, Joseph Freeman, Ernest Gruening, and Archibald MacLeish suggests a vibrant
dialogue among a bilingual, transnational coterie that criticized U.S. policy in Latin
America while hailing the cultural achievements of Latin American artists and
intellectuals.122 Brenner’s artistic voice belonged to the critical debate about the artist’s
role in society. It was a question that lined Old Left periodicals and percolated in the face
of economic uncertainty and the rising prospect of world war. This was a discussion that
centered on the distinctions between “art” and “propaganda” and the reputed division
between “art as a weapon” and “art for art’s sake,” all binaries that Brenner challenged.
It was the responsibility of artist, she wrote, to ensure that art concern the lay person, the
Anita Brenner, “Terror in Cuba,” Letter, The Nation, Oct. 23, 1935: 466-67; Glusker, A Mind of Her Own,
158-160.
121
Anita Brenner and S.S. Winthrop, Tampa’s Reign of Terror (n.p.: Tampa Defense Committee), 13,
Anita Brenner Papers, HRC, Box 24, Folder 7. This pamphlet started as an article in The Nation, “Tampa’s
Reign of Terror,” Dec. 7, 1932, 555-557.
122
Letter, Beals to Brenner, 19 June 1925, Anita Brenner Papers, HRC Box 53, Folder 2; Brenner diaries,
June 1 & 28, 1929, Box 121, Folder 4; Letter MacLeish to Brenner, 17 Dec. 1934, Box 61, Folder 3; Frank
to Brenner, 22 Aug. 1930, Box 61, Folder 4.
76
“masses,” to echo a Mike Gold or Bertolt Brecht. Brenner believed that all art—even
religious art in the vein of Michelangelo—had always been charged with a political
message, and that it was the social function of the artist to disseminate messages in
creative ways.123 Brenner also questioned the very notion of “national” art:
We must choose: either nationalism is a meaningless measure of the nature and
worth of products, artistic products included, or else we must go to Hitler for
details on how to distinguish the worthy from the unworthy. The language he
uses is curiously like Mussolini’s, Machado’s, and that of our local cultural
nationalists, all of whom seem to proceed on the theory that whatever is foreign is
‘impure’ and to be outlawed on moral grounds.124
For Brenner, art needed to be part of the bedrock of anti-fascist democracy, yet
unhampered by the restrictive categories of the national-cultural. Good art as well as
effective art, then, should be an experience free from dogmatic definitions by leading
critics in the cultural industries.
Culture of Tourism
Leftwing cultural debates were connected to depictions marketed towards
consumers in search of a new vacation destination. If on the one hand Cuba encouraged
experimentation in politics and art, it also offered the tourist allure of gambling, golf
club, and beaches. The 1920s witnessed an expansion in Cuba’s tourism industry as
Machado invested heavily in Cuba’s vacation veneer. While accruing more debt to
foreign banks, Cuba was remade for a hedonistic U.S. market, which Rosalie Schwartz
has written helped turn Havana into a “naughty Paris” for U.S. tourists. Gambling,
liquor, and prostitution became readily available, along with resorts, restaurants, hotels,
123
Anita Brenner, “Art’s Storied Debate Renewed,” New York Times, Feb. 25, 1934, 12-13, 23. Anita
Brenner Papers, HRC, Box 13, Folder 13.
124
Anita Brenner, “The Tails Wags the Dog,” The Nation, June 28, 1933, 736. Anita Brenner Papers, HRC,
Box 13, Folder 12. Emphasis added.
77
and country clubs. For those seeking the hunting and fishing adventures of Ernest
Hemingway or the paradisiacal allure of an “exotic” Cuba, the island’s tourist pastiche
promised to satisfy the curious North American spectator. U.S. tourism to Cuba
increased between 1927-1930, dipping in 1933-34, then rebounded the following year.
Improvements in steamship, airline travel, and a wider market made gracing Cuba’s
social scene much easier for well-to-do U.S. customers, whose visits increased from
90,000 in 1928 to 178,000 in 1937.125
Ruby Hart Phillips, Ernest Hemingway, and other writers produced a Cuba for a
U.S. market that reflected the antinomies of pleasure and political fray.126 Joining these
portrayals was a form of middle-class tourist literature that displayed the tantalizing
allure of Cuba for a U.S. market in search of escape from the Depression and the
Eighteenth Amendment. Along with “serious” fiction and reportage, mainstream
literature exhibiting a vibrant and exotic Cuba also remade Cuba’s international image.
In Basil Woon’s When it’s Cocktail Time in Cuba (1928), the Cuban setting offers a
tantalizing underworld for U.S. desire. Unchecked impulsiveness is permitted and
encouraged because Cuba is a place that “naturally” fosters inhibition and excess. Author
of other travel narratives such as The Frantic Atlantic (1927), Woon reveals the curious
impetus of his narrative: “I have merely amused myself by setting down on paper what
the tourist to Cuba will see, do (and drink) in a land where personal liberty and climate
are blended in just the right setting of beauty and romance.” With chapters such as
“Where Everyone is Drinking and not a Soul is Drunk!” and “Naughty-Naughty Nights,”
125
Rosalie Schwartz, Pleasure Island: Tourism and Temptation in Cuba (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1997) 15, 42, 51, 64, 98; Pérez, On Becoming Cuban, 167.
126
See Phillips’s Cuban sideshow (Havana: Cuban Press, 1935) and Hemingway’s posthumously published
Islands in the Stream (New York: Scribner, 1970).
78
Woon simply confirms what other tourists thought of Cuba: it is a place of unrestrained
excess, where “natives can thus be berated for their ignorance and dullness of
comprehension.”127
Woon suggests that visitors “follow in the footsteps of Columbus,” and he helps
by providing a brief appendix of translations for the wanton traveler—a “Lover’s
Lexicon”—where phrases such as “Give me a kiss?” “I Love you very much,” and an
assortment of alcoholic beverages inform the intended reader and his anticipated business
in Cuba. In doing so, Woon provided a Euro-American referent who could pass
judgment on the moral economy of Cuban subjects. The power differential that made
U.S. and European economic and political influence disproportionately large secured a
discursive authority of the tourist/visitor as the qualified discussant of Cuban culture.
Woon’s audience could enjoy a fetishized Cuba but still place itself “above” the people
who are inescapably lazy and vice-ridden, thus maintaining the line between “tourist” and
“native.” This allowed readers to partake in fantastical antics while properly preserving
their moral, racial, and economic position on the world stage, securing their membership
in the global population that “others” but who are not “othered” themselves.128
Not all tourist literature in this vein was produced and distributed by U.S. or
European ventures. One popular publication, The Blue Guide to Cuba, brought a yearly
tour guide independently edited and published in Havana with connections to Cuba’s
National Tourist Commission. The “Let’s Go” equivalent of the 1930s, the series asked
U.S. readers to travel south in order to “boost Cuba” and to witness a modern Cuba that
both mirrored and departed from Woon’s appraisal. The guidebooks issued
127
128
Basil Woon, foreward to When it’s Cocktail Time in Cuba (New York: Horace Liveright, 1928), ix, 3.
Ibid., 3, 277.
79
representations of a modern Cuba, which produced interesting, if problematic, projections
of Cuban culture by Cuban and U.S.-affiliated tourist companies. Billing Cuba as the
“Year-round Playground of the Americas,” the Blue Guide, like Woon, suggests that the
trip taker follow in the “footsteps of Columbus” and witness the same allure of Cuba and
“the spell of her languorous beauty” as did the original conquistador. The guide promises
that “No trip south is complete without at least a side trip to Havana...Paris of the New
World…Monte Carlo of America…Here is a gay, modern city, with a background of old
world charm.” Cuba is personified as a female hostess for U.S. travelers, who after “four
centuries of passion and peace, misery and contentment,” now has “wisdom,” for she
“now wears a comb in her hair.” If Cuba now holds feminine blasé, she is not all
together tame: “She has become cultured in the arts of civilization…a charming modern.
Yet, despite the brilliance of her sophistication, she still nourishes the fires of her
untamed youth, the provocative beauty that always lived in the memory of
Columbus…”129
Cuba is thus at once a modern marvel, historical treasure, and playboy’s
paradise—“cultured” yet rebellious and wild for the adventurous yet refined visitor. It is
the legacy of the European colonial enterprise that makes Cuba both “safe” for the U.S.
tourist and a place of unhampered abandon, where newcomers may partake in virginal
enticement while preserving the sanctity of First World civilizational standards. Music,
theatre, museums, fishing and hunting are common topics, as are tobacco cultivation and
cigar wrapping. Throughout the Cuban Blue Guides are advertisements for hotels, beer,
banks, steamship lines, and French jewelry, shoe, and perfume stores, many of which
129
Roger Le Fébure, ed., The Blue Guide to Cuba (Havana: R. Le Fébure, 1935-1936), back cover, 3-4, 6-
7.
80
were owned by U.S., Canadian, and European companies. The neocolonial
representation of Cuba portrays the country’s history and culture in terms of European
and the U.S. tastes, with the machinations of foreign influence in Cuban politics and
finance dutifully omitted. Moreover, this was a narrative shaped and spread by
international tastemakers and Cuban elites. Cuba’s tourist industry used language and
representations familiar to a middle- and upperclass market for lucrative ends. The close
connection between industries informed these transnational representations and
marketing strategies in Cuba and the United States, and literature such as the Blue Guides
disclose how these portrayals were manufactured in part by Cuban financiers as well.
Documenting The Crime of Cuba
While many in the United States looked to Cuba as a pleasure getaway, the
unequal power dynamic this literature reified was not only confined to tourist renderings
of Cuba. Rather, well-intentioned Yankee leftists wanting to bring about radical change
in Cuba’s economy and sovereignty were unable to disarticulate their narratives from
mainstream portrayals such as Woon’s and the Blue Guides. This formed part of the
neocolonial “slippage,” when Cuban subjects took a “less than” or “not quite” quality that
made them part of the erotics and imperial desire of the northern imagination. While
today’s readers may view many members of the Old Left as quite progressive and
enlightened around issues of race and class critique, the same revolutionary virtue was
built on cultural codes and assumptions that ultimately made their radical portrayals
inextricable from the popular discourse in which they emerged. Rather than locate these
writers outside of the dominant assumptions inhered in tourist literature or popular novels
that rendered Cuba “exotic,” it is important to consider that forward-thinking social
81
critics also constructed a revolutionary gaze that made Cuban culture another
commodified and sexualized form for U.S. consumption. Revolutionary writing also
conformed to a register of First World representations that reinscribed the very images of
a subaltern Cuban subject that these leftwing writers sought to debunk. This tension is
best exhibited in the era’s quintessential work that documented the 1933 revolution,
Carleton Beals’s The Crime of Cuba. While Beals marshals the common themes of
anticapitalism and anti-imperialism, his reading also inscribes a power differential
between U.S. and Cuban subjectivity, making it an admirable piece of social criticism but
containing assertions of white male heterosexual privilege.
Beals was one of the most versatile and outspoken Latin American polemicists on
the U.S. news scene, yielding in his life a corpus totaling 34 books and over 200 articles.
As a regular contributor to The Nation, New Republic, and Common Sense, and comrade
to Tina Modotti, Diego Rivera, Carey McWilliams, John Dewey, and Augusto Sandino
(whom Beals had accompanied on his revolutionary trail through Nicaragua), Beals made
his name known among the New York intellectuals throughout the 1920s and 1930s. His
interests included topics on Nicaragua, Dominican Republic, Mexico, and Cuba, with the
sweeping conclusion that U.S. intervention had been historically detrimental to Latin
American development. If John Reed represented the preeminent Latin American
revolutionary tourist of the 1910s, Beals was its star reporter during the 1930s.130
Beals’s The Crime of Cuba stands as a lengthy indictment against U.S.
governmental and business magnates for their complicity in Cuba’s social turmoil.
Published in 1933 and again in 1934 with a new “Afterword” that reflected a post-
130
John Reed, Insurgent Mexico (1914); John Britton, Carleton Beals: A Radical Journalist in Latin
America (University of New Mexico Press, 1987), 229.
82
Machado Cuba, Crime makes plain that U.S. economic and military control of Cuba
continued a colonial pattern begun since the early days of Spanish rule. Weaving through
a genealogy of foreign intervention, mass revolt, José Martí martyrdom, and harm
wrought by the Platt Amendment, Beals ultimately rebukes the U.S. government for its
preoccupation with debt payment rather than curbing Machado’s authoritarian order.
Machado is cast as a Caribbean Hitler, “The President of a Thousand Murders,” financed
and maintained by U.S. financial institutions such as National City Bank and Electric
Bond and Share Company. Throughout, Beals documents the various “crimes” witnessed
during his trip to Cuba in 1932, depicting poor Cubans as “half-naked emaciated
wretches” who lack food and basic necessities. Aiming to expose the “truth,” Beals is
convinced that U.S. tourists “would be shocked if told [the] Eighteenth Amendment had
converted Havana into a gigantic saloon and brothel, or that American vested interests are
ruling Cuba by fraud and murder.” The ultimate crime, writes Beals, was that after 400
years of colonialism, Cuba was still void of sovereignty, and that the United States
“strengthened the Machado tyranny while doing nothing to restrain its violent
excesses.”131
Beals’s account is made more graphic with the accompaniment of 31 photographs
by Walker Evans that capture Cuba’s poor living conditions and democratic injustices.
Evans, who later would become well-known through his work for the Farm Security
Administration and his collaboration with James Agee in Let Us Now Praise Famous
Men, presents the reader with images of an enervated population suffering under
Machado’s authoritarian rule. They reveal a Cuban society in a photographic style that
came to define Evans’s characteristic understated stillness and seeming naturalness of the
131
Beals, Crime of Cuba, 6-7, 36, 387.
83
subject. The plates make the allegations by Beals more vivid; they are visual proof of the
atrocities, intended to goad the U.S. readership into political action.
Ranging in subject and theme, the photographs include images of homelessness,
depravity, and even death. Some function as juxtaposed pairings that represent the
contradictions of Cuban life. Plate Six, for instance, “Parque Central I,” is a shot of an
ornate building showing Havana’s architectural splendor; whereas subsequent Plate
Seven, “Parque Central II,” shows a shabbily clad man, seated and slouched, leaning on
his arm and asleep on a park bench. The concluding photo discloses Evans’s political
voice: a wall in Havana with graffiti that reads, “APOYEMOS LA HUELGA DE LOS
CIGARREROS” [Let’s Support the Cigar Maker Strike] and “ABAJO LA GUERRA
IMPERIALISTA” [Down With the Imperialist War]. Acting as the reader’s “eyes and
ears,” Beals and Evans’s style of documentary represents par excellence William Stott’s
notion of the “vicarious” and the “real,” and delivers a complex Cuba on the pretense of
political praxis.132
Scattered throughout Beals’s analysis of Cuba’s woes is also a striking celebration
of Afro-Cuban culture. The verses of poet Nicolás Guillén, the rhythms of rumba, and
the religious enchantment of Ñáñigo rituals add to the richness of Cuban history and
society. Beals’s praise of Afro-Cuban culture reflected a modernist glorification of racial
and ethnic pluralism, as artists in Europe and the Americas captured folklore and ritual
through the use of indigenous and Africana themes. Beals’s celebration of a multiracial
Cubanidad [Cuban-ness] perhaps stemmed from his experiences with Mexican
nationalism, which sought to elevate the Indio and Mestizo figures in new projections of
Mexicanidad. Anticipating postmodern profiles of Cuba by scholars such as Antonio
132
Beals, Crime of Cuba, Photo Insert; Stott, Documentary Expression, 33-35.
84
Benítez-Rojo, Beals describes Cuba’s cultural mosaic in terms of multiple rhythms—a
kind of cultural polyrhythm—which boast the complex “rhythm of a new nation,
yearning to sing…yearning to be free.” Cuban scholars such as Fernando Ortiz
influenced Beals’s conceptions of racial mestizaje in Cuba, which was part of the broader
discursive turn toward diasporic forms as well as the politics and aesthetics of Cuba’s
new nationalism.133
Beals notes that unfortunately any Afro-Cuban cultural flourishing is muffled by a
system of economic exploitation by U.S. and Cuban white financiers who are motivated
by sugar profit governed by a racial hierarchy of black, white, and mulatto, which has
made for unequal levels social privilege across the island: “Black Cuba and black sweat
and black song and dance, crystallized into a snow cube, held in silver prongs.”
Encapsulated in Beal’s reading of Cuba are celebrations of racial diversity as well as tales
of economic inequality and circumvented sovereignty. Cuba therefore is at once a
frustrating paradoxical landscape of the modern and pre-modern, a country of agricultural
peasants and “Yacht Club habitués.”134
However, if on the one hand Beals’s reading of Cuban culture celebrates diversity
and radicalism, on the other it simultaneously evokes racially essentialist readings
common in the day. Although Beals seeks to celebrate the multiracial composition of
Cubanidad, ultimately Beals’s progressive reading is coupled with racist depictions of
people of color that were built into culturally ingrained understandings of white
subjectivity. On the other side of his critique lie renderings of Afro-Cubans that reduce
133
Beals, Crime, 24; Mauricio A. Font and Alfonso W. Quiroz, eds., Cuban Counterpoints : The Legacy of
Fernando Ortiz (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2005); Benítez-Rojo, La isla que se repite.
134
Beals, Crime of Cuba, 23, 25, 64-66.
85
black Cuban subjectivity to an object of desire to be consumed by a white male
readership.
In one instance, Beals delivers a scene of Afro-Cuban dance in which a female
dancer, Fela, performs a sexually suggestive choreography. Using the trappings of
primitivism and exoticism, Beals discloses that as the rhythm accelerates, the mulatto
female body more violently convulses “the spiral up from dark primal causes,” which
Beals suggests is a mimetic extirpation of slavery. Fela, who Beals notes is “almost
white,” is accompanied by an Afro-Cuban drummer, Toñico, whose presence
encapsulates unmediated desire symbolized by the black male body. Dual racial
referents, black accompanist and dancer, proceed in song and dance in sexualized
spectacle narrated by Beals, who is captivated by Fela’s physique. As the dance and
music increase speed, the reader learns that the accompanist “not merely because of
alcohol and inner abandon, is wrought to fury as he watches [Fela’s] ample buttocks.”
His enticement builds, until finally the climax in the music and dance suggests sexual
gratification, complete before Beals and a titillated U.S. readership. Both dancer and
singer, Beals writes, metaphorically fall into a post-copulative stupor, Toñico’s “sweat
pouring from woolly hair over temple and cheek.” Toñico thus has fulfilled the sexual
fantasy of the white male reader, who may voyeuristically “watch” safely behind Beals,
the reader’s stand-in for white heterosexual authority and deliverer of an alluring
performance of black sexuality.135
Such depictions of African Americans and Afro-Cubans were quite common in
the 1930s, but modern readers may find appropriations by Beals problematic due to his
leftwing sympathies of the day. Beals’s radical tone purports to mitigate the racist
135
Beals, Crime of Cuba, 40-44.
86
imagery, but his portrayal of Cubans as prone to excessive choteo [joking around]
reduces them to a people who opt for silliness rather than serious political debate. Beals
evinces an image of a primitive population in need of liberation not only from U.S.
domination but also from their own backwardness and unrestrained tendencies towards
hypersexuality and substance abuse.136 While Beals’s documentary may move the reader
towards the field of political praxis, it does so at the expense of a disempowered and
fetishized Cuban subject. Documentary, therefore, could at once position the subaltern
subject in a perpetual state of otherness while advancing a progressive politics based on
commendable social purposes. Though Beals’s anti-imperial and multiracial reading of
Cuba was exceptional in the day, its evaluations still operated within a cultural domain of
racialized and sexualized primitivism that lay at the heart of neocolonial desire. A
rereading of The Crime of Cuba, then, finds a modernist approach to Cuban culture that
celebrates cultural diversity but is unable to steer clear of racial essentialism, suggesting
that Left internationalism could operate with its own exotic gazes that intersected with
mainstream publications such as tourist literature and government publications.
Conclusion
For a brief moment it appeared that the 1933 revolution posed a decisive victory
for its supporters. Adding to the outpouring of optimism, the New Republic exclaimed,
“A new spirit of nationalism is alive in Cuba today,” while the Nation described the scene
as “elation in the air,” claiming that “the people in their doorways wear a new dignity, for
Cuba has exerted itself, Cuba has recovered her soul.”137 One journalist touted the
possibilities of San Martín’s presidency, calling it “an extraordinary achievement—an
136
Ibid., 87-89.
“Cuban Hurricane,” New Republic, Sept. 20, 1933, 143; Hubert Herring, “Exit Machado,” The Nation,
Aug. 23, 1933, 207.
137
87
achievement in self-government.”138 In its broad-based mobilization, the 1933 Cuban
Revolution heralded the possibility for real political change in the hands of the working
class. Another writer suggested that “the echo of the Cuban Revolution has resounded all
over the world,” saying that the fruits of revolutionary victory— the eight-hour work day,
equal pay for women, increased workers’ rights, the abrogation of the Platt Amendment,
and the recall of American warships—were grown by the “uprising of the Cuban
masses.”139
Though the revolution proved short-lived, its reverberations continued to impact
the creative imaginations of U.S. writers throughout the 1930s. Josephine Herbst
continued to evince the revolutionary consciousness in her work, publishing a short story
in the Partisan Review in which a well-to-do American woman finds herself in
revolutionary Cuba seeking underground networks between resistance fighters and U.S.
radicals. Clifford Odets labored on an unpublished play about Cuba throughout his life,
alternating between titles, “The Cuban Play” and “Law of Flight.”140 Similarly, Anita
Brenner worked on a screenplay about Cuba, “Rumba,” in which the womanizing,
crooked politician, President Guerra, is running the fictitious country of Palma. His
association with U.S. country-clubers and business executives concludes with revolution,
as a new leader is installed and everyone, “all colors…all nationalities…” are dancing the
rumba.141 Carleton Beals enjoyed modest fame with The Crime of Cuba, which had a
favorable following in the U.S., making the New York Times best sellers list for several
138
“Cuba and the New Deal,” The Nation, Jan. 31, 1934, 116.
Helen Davis, “The Negro Workers and the Cuban Revolution,” Negro Worker (May 1934): 27-29.
140
The Cuban experience entered Herbst’s articles in Partisan Review and her novel, Rope of Gold (1939).
Josephine Herbst, “The Enemy,” Partisan Review (Oct. 1936): 7-12. On Odets, see Margaret BrenmanGibson’s Clifford Odets: American Playwright (New York: Athenum, 1981), 365-66.
141
Anita Brenner, “Rumba,” Anita Brenner Papers, HRC, Box 35, Folder 11, 20.
139
88
consecutive weeks, including the recommended Christmas reading list in 1933.142 His
cavalier politics, however, would land him in trouble at the mock “countertrial” of Leon
Trotsky in Mexico in 1937. The American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky
included notable dissidents such as V.F. Calverton, John Dewey, Anita Brenner, and Max
Eastman. Beals reportedly asked Trotsky awkward questions, which earned rebuke from
his fellow team members and demands to have Beals removed from the editorial board of
V.F. Calverton’s Modern Monthly, a request to which Calverton finally capitulated.
After the trial, Beals lost respect and became a social pariah in Old Left circles.143
In Cuba, the deaths of Pablo de la Torriente-Brau, Antonio Guiteras, Rubén
Martínez Villena, combined with the crackdown by Havana’s leadership, slowed the
efforts of Cuba’s Generación del 30. But radical resistance also receded in large part due
to the 1933 revolution’s progressive spirit that heralded a political shift by decade’s end.
Revolutionary politics produced a constitutional convention in 1939 and new constitution
the following year, which addressed the rights of women and blacks, and implemented
significant labor reform. The period also produced one of the starkest ironies of the era,
the election of military strongman, Fulgencio Batista, to the presidency.144 In a surprise
political about-face, Batista aligned himself with the “masses” and won the trust of the
Cuban Communist Party, a move that reflected both his political acumen and Popular
Front realignment on the left. His victory was received with mixed results among U.S.
142
Britton, Carleton Beals, 112, 116; “Best Sellers Here and Elsewhere,” New York Times, Sept. 4, 1933, 9;
Sept. 11, 1933, 15; Sept. 18, 1933, 17; Oct. 2, 1933, 17; “Reader’s Choice for Christmas,” New York Times,
Dec. 3, 1933, 31. Others traveling to Cuba such as Harry Gannes, Arthur Pincus, and Clifford Odets would
reference Beals’s book. Beals would also publish an article in Modern Quarterly shortly after the book’s
release that paraphrased its major arguments. Harry Gannes, “‘Zafra Libre’,” New Masses, Jan. 9, 1934, 1517; Carleton Beals, “Whither Cuba?” Modern Monthly 7, no. 12 (1933): 586-92.
143
John Britton, Carleton Beals, 166-186; Marion Hammett and William Smith, “Inside the Trotsky
‘Trial,’” New Masses, April 27, 1937, 6-11.
144
For more on the role of the 1933 revolution in the election of Batista and the 1940 Constitution, see
Whitney’s State and Revolution and Irwin Gellman’s Roosevelt and Batista.
89
revolution well-wishers. Arthur Pincus, author of Terror in Cuba, expressed dismay at
the election, and writers for The Nation reacted with caution.145 But influential members
of the CPUSA concurred with the alliance. After attending the Third National Assembly
of the Cuban Communist Party in Santa Clara, Cuba, former CPUSA presidential
candidate William Foster commended the Batista-CP rapprochement.146
Batista’s adept political posturing, however, would not last, as his infamous place
in Cuban politics in the 1950s will show. Perhaps Carleton Beals best expressed the
future ramifications of the 1933 revolution when he offered the following prescient
analysis: “Cuba, unless a remedy is soon found, will be reaped to the holocaust of civil
war. Thousands of acres of American sugar-cane will go up in smoke, and the hammers
of revolution will smash the mills which have become merely symbols of misery.”147
Revolution would return to Cuba a generation later, bringing to fruition Beals’s
forewarning and galvanizing a new cohort of U.S. activists. In the new cultural milieu of
the 1960s, Old Left members such as Beals, Joseph North, and Waldo Frank, would join
university students, teachers, and civil rights workers to articulate their enthusiasm for
Cuba’s rejection of U.S. domination once again; and uphold their commitment to
leftwing politics not via the U.S.S.R. but to a revolutionary impulse shared by New
Leftists who used the context of Cuba to fuel a new form of internationalism.
Before entering the later period, however, we continue in the present era of
radicalism. The 1933 Cuban revolution not only held racial significance for white ethnics
but formed part of the broader global cartography of black cultural politics in this period.
145
Arthur Pincus, “Cuba’s Puppet Democracy,” The Nation, Dec. 17, 1938, 658-660; The Nation, Dec. 16,
1939, 666.
146
William Foster, “The Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba,” The Communist (March 1939): 225231.
147
Beals, Crime of Cuba, 399.
90
The next chapter reveals that revolution sparked collaborative campaigns of
desegregation and civil rights between Afro-Cubans and African Americans, fueling
artistic developments in a diasporic cosmopolitanism that moved between Havana and
Harlem.
91
Chapter 2
Race and Revolution in Verse: U.S.-Cuban Diasporic Cultural Politics in the 1930s
Whereas white ethnic radicals identified a transnational politics of solidarity that
also conformed to a problematic racial logic, other writer-activists of the period
challenged such thinking in the relationship between revolutionary politics and racial
identity. This chapter investigates the diasporic cultural logic shared by Afro-Cubans and
African Americans around Cuba’s 1933 revolution. Cuba formed part of the cartography
of racial resistance that united populations of color in Haiti, India, South Africa, and the
U.S. South. Black activists coupled Cuban developments with major global issues of the
decade: the fight to free the Scottsboro boys, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, and the
Spanish Civil War all comprised a stock of diasporic struggles strengthened by Cuban
politics. Transnational outlets facilitated discussion and debate over these and other
themes, which challenged discriminatory justice and disenfranchisement, motifs that
permeated black radical literature in both countries.
This discussion focuses on the poetry of Afro-Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén and
African American poet Langston Hughes, who formed a lasting friendship after Hughes’s
trip to Cuba in 1930. Hughes and Guillén were key figures in a U.S.-Cuban dialogic
whose literary enterprise encompassed race and revolution in the age of modernism.
During this time, the spotlight on “Negro art” emerged from city centers throughout
Europe, the Americas, and various colonial territories. The cultural forms of blues and
son emanating from the Harlem Renaissance and Afrocubanismo movement joined vogue
nègre and negritude in the francophone world to produce a broader sense of diasporic
92
cosmopolitanism. Guillén and Hughes were emblematic of the roots and routes of this
cartography, which operated within the wider arena of black modernism as political and
artistic expressions of the Black Atlantic and Pacific generated new global imaginings.148
This analysis complements recent studies on the African diaspora that have
remained in the forefront of the transnational turn in cultural studies. These works have
steadily contested culture and history as phenomena confined to the bordered nationstate, opting for interdisciplinary approaches that examine the physical and metaphysical
dislocation and transplantation of Afro-descendant peoples. In this well-established
formula, the collective memory of slavery, migration, cosmopolitanism, and resistance
politics has fueled a diasporic imagination cast in a catalog of representations in similar
politics and form.
These studies, however, have also produced a tension between the “cultural
homogeneity” of black internationalism on the one hand, and the creative tools that
remain decidedly local and disparate on the other.149 This chapter uses the figures of
Guillén and Hughes to attend to the cultural lineaments that made African Americans and
Afro-Cubans pursue radically different goals that reflected local affinities, even while
they located their work within the unifying global logic and affective impulses of
148
Sample works that discuss this literary formation include Bill V. Mullen, Afro-Orientalism
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Etsuko Taketani, “The Cartography of the Black
Pacific: James Weldon Johnson’s Along this Way,” American Quarterly 59:1 (2007): 79-106; Maxwell,
New Negro, Old Left; Jennifer M. Wilks, “Writing Home: Comparative Black Modernism and Form in Jean
Toomer and Aimé Césaire,” Modern Fiction Studies 51:4 (2005): 801-23; and Martha Cobb, Harlem, Haiti
and Havana: A Comparative Critical Study of Langston Hughes, Jacques Roumain, Nicolás Guillén
(Washington: Three Continents Press, 1979).
149
I borrow “cultural homogeneity” from Vera M. Kutzinski, “Fearful Asymmetries: Langston Hughes,
Nicolás Guillén, and Cuba Libre,” Diacritics 34:3-4 (2004): 112.
93
diaspora.150 Following literary historian Brent Hayes Edwards, I suggest that Hughes and
Guillén, like other writers of the period, acted according to literary proclivities that
privileged “translation” and “travel,” which constantly shifted the meaning and location
of their cultural production.151 In this vein I illuminate how the shared sense of black
internationalism of both poets included political instincts and artistic genealogies specific
to their respective spatial contexts. If on the one hand both Guillén and Hughes
suggested wider formulations of “black America,” which looked to conjoin Latin
America and the United States in a hemispheric cultural system shared by AfroAmericans across both continents, they were also rigorously local in their artistic
orientation, drawing from the array of cultural trappings unique to Havana and Harlem.
I begin by describing the politics of diaspora as they appeared in Afro-Cuban and
African American radical literature in this period. I follow this section with a discussion
of Guillén and Hughes around the issues of mestizaje and Pan-Africanism, situating them
within the broader debates over race and culture in the Black Atlantic world. I conclude
with a look at both poets’ writing and activism around the Spanish Civil War.
Politics of Diaspora: The Third International and the “Negro Question”
The late nineteenth century enhanced opportunities for cultural exchange between
Afro-Cubans and African Americans. Upon the abolition of slavery in Cuba in 1886,
Afro-Cubans traveled to the United States en masse in search of work while African
American soldiers served in the Spanish-American War. In the 1920s Garveyism
undergirded an inchoate black nationalist dialogue between populations that strengthened
150
In viewing diasporic affiliation as a function of affect, I borrow from Frank Guridy’s work. He has
written on race and the artistic connections between Hughes and Guillén within what he terms the “U.S.Caribbean world,” see his Diaspora in Action, Ch. 4.
151
Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black
Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 7.
94
transnational projections of racial pride. By the 1930s and 1940s, more black artists and
athletes were crossing borders to participate in popular pastimes such as music and
baseball. Some prominent African Americans traveled to Cuba in pursuit of paradisiacal
tranquility while others visited for political purposes during the interwar era. The
scholar-activist Arthur Schomburg and Congressman Arthur W. Mitchell were among
those who visited the island. While in Cuba, Mitchell and his wife experienced
discrimination in a prominent hotel, which made news headlines and prompted
widespread protest by Afro-Cuban citizens.152
Exchanges such as these were often highly politicized and built new projects of
racial solidarity and “cross-fertilization.”153 Left politics played a crucial role in this
development, as radicals called into question the social position of blacks in the
rethinking of race and empire around the world. The Comintern’s Sixth World Congress
held in Moscow in 1928 directly addressed the “Negro Question” and deemed African
Americans in the South and Caribbean blacks “oppressed nations” entitled to nationalist
claims of self-determination and political autonomy. Soviet inspiration had inhabited
Harlem’s cultural scene early on. Cyril Briggs and the African Blood Brotherhood, as
well as their organ, the Crusader, established a radical presence in New York City. The
vectors of influence also traveled east, with Claude McKay’s trip to the U.S.S.R. in 1922
152
On Afro-Cuban/African American cultural interaction during this period, see Brock and Castañeda
Fuertes, eds., Between Race and Empire and Susan D. Greenbaum, More than Black: Afro-Cubans in
Tampa (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2002). On Arthur Mitchell, see Frank Guridy, “From
Solidarity to Cross-Fertilization: Afro-Cuban/African American Interaction during the 1930s and 1940s,”
Radical History Review 87 (2003): 19-48.
153
Guridy, “From Solidarity,” 19.
95
leading to new initiatives on the Negro Question in Moscow. By the 1930s, Harlem’s
patchwork of the “Old Left” and the “New Negro” had become intricately woven.154
Afro-Americans comprised a significant portion of the world’s proletariat of color
and believed that the struggle against racial oppression and economic exploitation
demanded a wider campaign. Members of the U.S. Communist Party (CPUSA) and the
Cuban Communist Party (PCC) looked to Cuba’s revolutionary ambitions to help
eviscerate what they viewed as a bourgeois racist system in the Americas.155 Afro-Cuban
and African American communists had in place organizational and institutional
mechanisms to create a distinct alliance that bridged the two countries. The
internationalization of Soviet politics and new examples of “race literature” publicized
calls for revolution and produced a more voluminous radical exchange between AfroCubans and African Americans that appeared in leftwing serials of the day. Cuban
politics energized a literary market that showcased the work of intellectuals, artists, and
bohemians, who wrote widely about race, social class, and U.S. imperialism. Authors
and activists viewed the livelihoods of black southern sharecroppers and Afro-Cuban
sugar workers as equal, both exploited by a racist and covetous U.S. regime. This
prompted an assertion by the Liberator that “one can readily see the similarity in the
position of the Cuban slaves of American imperialism, and that of their fellow Negro
slaves in the ‘cotton belt’ in the South.” The writer held that “American Negroes[,] also
the victims of American imperialist oppression as the struggle intensifies, are like the
Cuban workers.” African Americans admired Cuba’s “Negro toilers,” who “ha[d] been
154
Maxwell, New Negro, especially Chapter 2; Hakim Adi, “Pan-Africanism and Communism: The
Comintern, the 'Negro Question' and the First International Conference of Negro Workers, Hamburg 1930,”
African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal, Vol. 1, Issue 2 (July 2008): 237–254.
155
Mullen, Popular Fronts, 6-7; Robin D.G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working
Class (New York: Free Press, 1996), 109.
96
in the forefront of recent struggles of Cuba fighting shoulder to shoulder with the rest of
the Cuban toiling masses for liberation.” 156
The CPUSA’s vice-presidential candidate for the U.S. presidency, James W.
Ford, contextualized Cuba as part of the metastasizing racism throughout Africa, North
America, and the Caribbean. Following other communist writers, he deemed racism
inextricable from U.S. and European modes of empire:
The future history of the Negro in the struggles for liberation, for political, social
and economic advancement depends immeasurably upon how they estimate the
present period of imperialism, the concrete organization tasks they put before
themselves in order to achieve these things, and the unity they establish with the
international struggle against imperialism.
African American communists such as Ford connected local race-based struggles in
Chicago, New York, and Birmingham to a global movement against imperialism and
racism in the build-up to World War II.157
Ford’s pronouncements on Cuba complemented those made by British colonials
and European intellectuals. The Germany-based Negro Worker aimed “to discuss and
analyze the day to day problems of the Negro toilers and connect these up with the
international struggles and problems of the worker.”158 Readers would immerse
themselves in the poetry of Langston Hughes and Claude McKay as well as news on
oppositional politics in South Africa, India, China, and Ethiopia, with instances of “white
156
Otto Hall, “Mass Current under the Cuban ‘Revolution’,” Liberator, Aug. 22, 1931, 2, 5; Helen Davis,
“The Negro Workers and the Cuban Revolution,” Negro Worker (May 1934): 29.
157
J. W. Ford, “The Negro Struggle Against Imperialism,” The Communist (Jan. 1930): 22. For more on
African American communist activism during this period, see Robin D.G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe:
Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press,
1990); Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem during the Depression (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois
Press, 1983); Mullen, Popular Fronts; and Otto E. Huiswood, “World Aspects of the Negro Question,” The
Communist (Feb. 1930): 132-47.
158
“Our Aims,” International Negro Workers’ Review [later Negro Worker] (Jan. 1931): 3.
97
terror” in Cuba appearing in the periodical’s pages.159 Negro Worker editor George
Padmore stated the link between racialized labor in the Caribbean and imperial motives
in no uncertain terms:
The Negro masses in the West Indies are just as viciously exploited as the natives
of Africa or the black toilers in the United States of America. Their exploiters are
not only foreign imperialists, but the native bourgeoisie and the landlords, who
are equally as ruthless in their suppression of the broad toiling masses, as the
foreign blood suckers.160
Padmore’s emphasis on the complicity of the “native bourgeoisie” made local financiers
responsible for perpetuating the ills of imperialism and colonization. Padmore, Ford, and
other anticolonialists mobilized around a shared diasporic identity that combined tenets
of pan-Africanism with anticapitalism. This international collective rebuked the 1935
Italian invasion of Ethiopia, founded organizations such as the Council on African
Affairs, and campaigned to free the Scottsboro Boys. “Negro liberation” would require
an international effort to unite workers of color against imperial and colonial endeavors,
and Cuba became an important nexus for this brand of racial resistance.161
In Cuba, the PCC became more vocal about Afro-Cuban causes within the party
and made interracial solidarity a foremost goal. Cuba’s sugar boom during World War I
had attracted some 300,000 antillanos from Caribbean neighbors such as Barbados,
Puerto Rico, Haiti, and Jamaica between 1917 and 1931. With high numbers of imported
labor, Afro-Caribbean workers fought to improve working conditions through the
implementation of anti-discriminatory practices in sugar and tobacco industries. Most
159
Moreau, “White Terror in Cuba,” Negro Worker (April/May 1931): 6-7.
George Padmore, “Imperialism in the West Indies,” International Negro Workers’ Review (Jan. 1931):
16-17.
161
Penny Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-1957 (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); Charles Alexander, “Negro Workers Starving in Cuba,” Negro
Worker (Oct/Nov 1931): 18-19.
160
98
agrarians lived in environments reminiscent of the sharecropping U.S. South, as U.S.owned centrales often reproduced segregated conditions in line with U.S. social custom.
These conditions, along with Cuba’s air of political dissent, brought new coalitions in
working-class communities. The revolutionary era led to new initiatives in art and
politics, and produced a considerable constituency of workers of color.162
In 1932, the National Syndicate of Sugar Industry Workers (SNOIA) established
itself as a powerful organizer of sugarcane cutters in connection with the island’s leading
union, the National Confederation of Cuban Workers (CNOC). Both groups held ties to
the PCC and recognized black immigrant workers and native Afro-Cubans as part of the
same “oppressed people” with rights to self-determination.163 Their invectives appeared
in literary outlets that looked to the United States for broader hemispheric cooperation
and revolutionary praxis. Bandera Roja, Ahora, and El Trabajador published articles on
an array of topics. In one article, the Cuban International Labor Defense linked lynching
in the United States to racism in Cuba and raised alarm about an unwelcome U.S. import,
the KKK Kubano, which proved that racist organizations as well as racial resistance took
transnational form. Though the popularity of the KKKK was brief and narrowly felt in
Cuban society, Cuba’s chief newspaper, Diario de la Marina, published a manifesto by
the organization in 1933 in which the group denounced miscegenation and advocated for
a Cuba separated into black and white.164 Radical publications focused on the
deportation of Haitian laborers from Cuba and tributes to Paul Robeson that commended
162
Barry Carr, “Identity, Class, and Nation: Black Immigrant Workers, Cuban Communism, and the Sugar
Insurgency, 1925-1934,” Hispanic American Historical Review 78:1 (1998): 101-03; de la Fuente, A
Nation for All, 189-94, 102, 106-109.
163
Instituto de Historia, El movimiento obrero Cubano, 299-301, 646-47; Pichardo, Documentos, 220, 228.
164
Tomás Fernández Robaina, “The 20th-Centurty Black Question,” in Sarduy and Stubbs, eds., Afrocuba,
96-97; “El Ku Klux Klan Kubano,” Diario de la Marina, Nov. 1, 1933, 2.
99
the actor-singer for his support of the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939).165
U.S. thinking on race and rights influenced the Cuban Left, who embraced the Black Belt
thesis (Franja Negra) and applied it to their own political platforms.166
Likewise, African Americans looked south for examples of how black cultural
politics could function at the national level. One Cuban periodical reprinted an article
from the Crisis that acknowledged the flowering of Latin American arts and letters by
people of color around the world, citing Cuba as “the vanguard” in the Antilles. The U.S.
writer held in high regard that Afro-Cubans were “an integral part in Cuban nationalism,”
and that “The Negro [was] defined and completely attached to the formation of
something that resembles a Cuban national conscience.”167
This visibility in nationalist mythology was the product of Afro-Cuban political
struggle in the post-independence era. In the early years of the republic, the Partido
Independiente de Color (Independent Party of Color, PIC) organized to fight for
equitable political representation and challenged Cuba’s discriminatory social system.
Billed as “separatist” by its critics, PIC suffered a defeat in 1910 when the Morúa Law
(drafted by Afro-Cuban senator Morúa Delgado) made it illegal for political parties to
organize along racial lines, which effectively prohibited the existence of the Afro-Cuban
PIC. A racially divided Cuba, it was believed, threatened a unified national vision, which
reportedly was available to all Cubans irrespective of race. Growing numbers of AfroCubans disagreed with the premise that equal political representation was a right for all.
165
Pichardo, Documentos, 220; A. Escalante, “El movimiento obrero de los EE.UU.,” Mediodía, July 4,
1938, 12; “Linchados por error 2 negros en Clarksdale,” Bandera Roja, June 16, 1934, 1; Alfonso Camin,
“A Paul Robesson” [sic], Hoy, June 13, 1938, 2; de la Fuente, A Nation for All, 204; El movimiento obrero
Cubano, 653-54.
166
Carr, “Identity,” 96-99.
167
Richard Pattee, “La América Latina presta atención al Negro,” Revista Bimestre Cubana (July-Aug
1936): 17-23.
100
As protests became larger and stronger, a confrontation arose between PIC and the Cuban
state, prompting the United States to send troops to Guantánamo to “protect U.S.
citizens” in 1912. Cuban president José Miguel Gómez opted to use force against PIC
supporters, which led the indiscriminate slaughter of thousands of blacks from Cuba and
other national working on the island. The state-sponsored race riot was the result of a
white anxiety historically rooted in the fear of a “black state,” a throwback to when
Cuban and U.S. slaveholders’ raised alarm about the potential reverberations of the
Haitian revolution.168
As black sugar workers forged campaigns against exploitation, violence against
Jamaican and Haitian workers increased in eastern Cuba. Racial violence sparked further
comparisons between Cuba and the United States during a time when riots and lynching
escalated in U.S. cities and towns. 169 To complicate matters, racial antipathy in Cuba
was exacerbated by widespread feuding within the Afro-Caribbean community. Whites
such as Carleton Beals, who called Haitians “atrociously backward,” were not the only
ones to create an ethnic hierarchy of black workers. Other Caribbean laborers vilified
Haitians as well, characterizing them as uneducated and poorly kept, whereas Jamaicans
were viewed more favorably. The preferential treatment was influenced by questions of
labor and social prestige, in which white racial beliefs were disproportionately weighed
in the field of public opinion. Cuba’s revolutionary ambience also brought an intensified
nationalism that spawned xenophobia and racist backlash by Afro-Cubans as well. In
1933, the passage of the Provisional Law of Nationalization of Labor (“Fifty Percent
Law”) made it mandatory for agricultural and industrial sectors to hire at least 50%
168
169
On PIC, see Aline Helg, Our Rightful Share and de la Fuente, A Nation for All, 66-91.
El movimiento obrero, 299-301, 647, 653-54.
101
Cuban workers and forced businesses to fire immigrants before natives in the case of
layoffs. Though aimed at Spanish and U.S. workers, the result was a massive repatriation
of West Indian laborers, which, to the dismay of many radicals, fostered interethnic
discontent among workers of color, since it effectively drove a wedge in the labor bloc.
The law, however, benefited Afro-Cubans, since the forced ejection of foreign workers
reduced competition.170
Despite such infighting, linking capitalism to racial exploitation became a way to
broaden race-based struggle between U.S. and Cuban populations. This strategy went
beyond constructions of the national in an effort to globalize the fight against racism and
capitalism, seen here as two sides of the same coin. Fulminations by black radicals were
part of larger diasporic initiatives taking place in the 1930s, which offered hope for vast
political change at the hands of an empowered working class. Cuba occupied a space on
the wider revolutionary landscape by people of color around the world and energized
other global struggles, including the U.S. trial of the decade, Scottsboro.
The Scottsboro Trial
The Scottsboro trial attracted the attention of millions around the world and
represented the most important social justice issue for U.S. black activists during the
1930s.171 When eight of the nine black youths wrongly accused of rape were sentenced
to death in Scottsboro, Alabama in 1931, it caused a shockwave of worldwide protest on
behalf of the condemned. Scottsboro quickly became the symbol of a racist U.S. justice
system and a rallying call for racial injustice around the world. “From the very
170
Beals, The Crime of Cuba, 58; Carr, “Identity,” 93-94, 105-107; de la Fuente, A Nation for All, 189-191,
103-105.
171
On the internationalization of the Scottsboro movement, see James A. Miller, Susan D. Pennybacker,
and Eve Rosenhaft, “Mother Ada Wright and the International Campaign to Free the Scottsboro Boys,
1931-1934,” American Historical Review 106 (2001): 387-430.
102
beginning, wrote James Ford, “we recognized that acts of persecution, the denial of civil
rights, ostracism, jim-crowism [sic], and degradation of the Negro people were factors
involved in the Scottsboro case; and that upon such acts of oppression, economic
remnants of slavery and national oppression, it would be possible to arouse the Negro
people and hundreds of thousands of sympathizers in support of the Scottsboro
defense.”172
Radical writers connected the Scottsboro trial to the U.S. military presence in
Cuba, linking white supremacy to imperialism abroad. When writing about U.S.
warships sent to Cuba in 1933 to calm the revolutionary upsurge, William Simons of the
Workers Defense League argued that they were sent to “protect Wall Street Property”
and asked, “Why have these warships been sent to Cuba? President Roosevelt explained
it by saying that American lives had to be protected. But the Roosevelt administration
does not send troops to protect the Scottsboro boys from being lynched, nor are troops
sent to prevent other lynchings in the South.” According to Simons, the U.S. political
system that allowed for Scottsboro also supported Machado’s dictatorship in Cuba. He
and others viewed domestic racism in geopolitical terms, which blamed capitalistinspired imperialism/colonization for the production and maintenance of racist
practices.173
Afro-Cubans were also trenchant in their denunciations of the Scottsboro affair.
They maintained that the coexistence of U.S. racism and imperialism made Afro-Cubans
and African Americans susceptible to the same system of oppression.174 One Cuban
writer submitted an epistolary reaction to the Scottsboro case that reflected this thinking:
172
James W. Ford, “The United Front in the Field of Negro Work,” The Communist (Feb. 1935): 159.
Simons, Hands Off Cuba, 2-3.
174
El movimiento obrero Cubano, 299-301.
173
103
“This crime of the Alabama bosses is further proof of the savage oppression and
exploitation practiced on the Negro people by Yankee imperialism . . . In Cuba, where
the same Yankee imperialism rules through its native lackey, Machado, the Negroes are
also discriminated against . . .”175 Another urged the Cuban International Labor Defense
to help free the Scottsboro boys by suggesting, “The defense of the young negroes of
Scottsboro means the fight against oppression of negroes of oppressed nations. Our
militants must fight for the freedom of the Scottsboro negroes, and strengthen the fight
against discrimination and for the right to self-determination of blacks in Oriente [eastern
Cuba].” The topic of Scottsboro provoked strong reaction from Cuba’s black population
and influenced the writing of prominent poets to the likes of Mirta Aguirre, Regino
Pedroso, and Nicolás Guillén, with the solid premise that racism was tied to a U.S.
imperial desire that hindered Cuban claims to sovereignty.176
Literature remained an important vehicle for the transmission of such
transnational political campaigns. Scottsboro fit Cary Nelson’s concept of a “dialogical
topic” in the 1930s that sparked the movement of people and cultural texts between
countries around a common concern. The U.S.-Cuban context reveals such a case.
Cuban journalist Manuel Marsal wrote extensively about Scottsboro. An editor for the
Cuban Marxist periodical Masas, he published a book on race in the United States
entitled El negro en los U.S.A.: El caso de Scottsboro (The Negro in the USA: The Case
of Scottsboro). Communist intellectual Juan Marinello wrote the prologue to the book in
which he reiterated the link between race and economics, writing that racial equality
175
“Cuban Workers Denounce Scottsboro Frameup,” Liberator, July 4, 1931, 2.
Rogelio, “Salvemos de la silla eléctrica a los ocho negros de ‘Scottsboro,’” Bandera Roja, May 1, 1934,
7; Carmen Gómez García, “Cuban Social Poetry and the Struggle against Two Racisms,” in Between Race
and Empire, 227-34.
176
104
would never exist in a capitalist system. Marinello stated that Scottsboro was not just
another example of U.S. inequity but a matter that made race a foremost concern in the
quest for revolution change in America writ large.177
Drawing from his own experiences in the United States, Marsal marshaled the
themes of race and revolution in order to argue that the U.S. race problem was due to its
love affair with capitalism. Like Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, and other black
Marxist intellectuals, Marsal believed that the U.S.S.R. offered a better model of social
development. He delivered the testimony of one recently-returned sojourner, who said:
“After a comparison of the Soviet system with the Capitalist in other countries, I feel
convinced that when the black masses in America understand more clearly the ideology
of Communism, they will accept it as the only positive solution to their present
predicament.” Weaving together sociology and political economy, Marsal used the work
of W.E.B. Du Bois to shed light on the history of lynchamientos (lynchings) and the
overall failure of the U.S. democracy since the Civil War, a trajectory that he believed
had culminated in the tragic and inevitable drama of Scottsboro.178
Manuel’s book stands as both a denunciation of racial injustice and a work of
racial solidarity shared by Afro-Cubans and African Americans. In one instance, Marsal
gestures to Langston Hughes’s poem, “I, Too,” when he celebrates, “I, too, sing
America…I, too, am America!” Marsal’s allusion to Hughes’s lines suggested the
premise that as a Cuban, Marsal, too, belonged to “America.”179 In comparing the
177
Juan Marinello, “Rojo y Negro,” Prologue, Manuel Marsal, El negro en los U.S.A. El caso de Scottsboro
(Havana: Editorial Hermes, 1931), 7-21.
178
Marsal, El negro en los U.S.A., 23-26, 34-35. See also Manuel Marsal, “El caso de Scottsboro,”
Bohemia, Oct. 10, 1931, 34, 56.
179
Marsal, El negro en los U.S.A., 57-58. Hughes’s poem in its entirety reads as follows: I, too, sing
America. / I am the darker brother. / They send me to eat in the kitchen / When company comes, / But I
laugh, / And eat well, / And grow strong. / To-morrow, / I’ll sit at the table / When company comes. /
105
exclusion of U.S. blacks from the domain of “America” to Latin Americans ostracized
from the geographic appellation, Marsal evoked the broader spatial significance of
“America,” an allusion to José Martí and his hemispheric formulation of Nuestra
América. The America of this variety served to fuel resistance movements and
oppositional art across the Americas, bearing a rethinking of Western identity among
artists and intellectuals. The writing of Waldo Frank, Juan Marinello, José Mariátegui,
and others invoked Martí’s erstwhile call to celebrate the common customs and traditions
of all Americans, which simultaneously complemented and countered depictions of PanAmericanism and Good Neighboring by the U.S. State Department. Scottsboro, then,
was a topic that represented a hemispheric concern, an opportunity that Marsal and others
surmised could strike a blow against the “capitalist oppressor” the United States, and
stand as a movement of solidarity that all American residents—particularly people of
color—needed to support.
The Poetics of Diaspora: Nicolás Guillén and Langston Hughes
Marsal’s nod towards Langston Hughes also bears witness to the poet’s popularity
among Cubans.180 At the time of his second trip to Cuba in 1930, Hughes was enjoying
international prestige for his Weary Blues (1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927).
Upon meeting poet Nicolás Guillén in Havana, the two forged a lifelong friendship.
Together, the poetic voices of Guillén and Hughes represented diasporic artistry in the
age of modernism, at a time when the antinomies of racial pluralism and exoticism
Nobody’ll dare / Say to me, / “Eat in the kitchen,” / Then. / Besides, / They’ll see how beautiful I am / And
be ashamed— / I, too, am America. In The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, ed. Arnold Rampersad
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 46.
180
Hughes was translated throughout Latin American during the 1920s and 1930s. “I, Too” remained his
most popular poem in Cuba and elsewhere in the region. Vera Kutzinski, “‘Yo también soy América’:
Langston Hughes Translated,” America Literary History 18:3 (2006): 551-52.
106
produced images and representations by white ethnics that ushered in a laudatory—as
well as problematic—cultural catalog of Africana and indigenous themes. During the age
of jazz, expat cosmopolitanism, and the somber realities of a dire economic world,
French painters, British playwrights, and U.S. photographers shifted their attention to the
ethnocultural, which could produce portrayals of black cultures that today seem
derogatory or blatantly racist. Guillén and Hughes, by contrast, belonged to a coterie of
artists and intellectuals who developed new illustrations of black modernism that altered,
redefined, and resisted dominant racial imaginings projected by many white artists,
critics, and politicians. Their work complemented that of Richard Wright, C. L. R.
James, and Aimé Césaire, who used the transnational circuitry of the Black Atlantic (and
Pacific) to put forth an Afro-cultural art and politics that questioned the epistemological
assumptions of European ethics and form during the 1920s and 1930s. Black cultural
producers in Cuba and the United States formed part of this cartography of new
vernacular art. They drew upon a diasporic consciousness that informed the major
debates about ideology and aesthetics, and their meaning for race and (trans)nationalism.
Both Hughes and Guillén were born in 1902. Hughes led an itinerant youth in the
Midwest before settling in New York City, while Guillén made his way from Camagüey
to Havana by the 1920s. The poets spent much of their energy meditating on the fluid
constructions of race in their respective contexts. Though Guillén was referred to as a
“mulatto” poet, he also identified himself as “black.” Like Guillén, Hughes’s lighter
racial type, which Guillén famously characterized as similar to a “mulatico Cubano,”
afforded him access to spaces not granted to those with darker skin color. In 1930,
Guillén interviewed Hughes for Cuba’s major daily, Diario de la Marina, during which
107
Hughes was pressed about his racial identity. Hughes responded with tales of his African
journeys and the assertion that he did not “study” the black condition but “felt” it.181
Hughes placed Cuba on a list of locales that included Haiti, the U.S.S.R., Mexico,
and China. These were spaces that formed important coordinates in his poetic thinking,
for they inscribed images of race, empire, and capitalism, motifs that appeared in his
much of his early political verse. After his third visit to the island in 1931, Hughes
produced “To the Little Fort San Lázaro on the Ocean Front, Havana.” In this poem a
fort’s ruins transform into an architectural relic that hopelessly defends Cuba under siege
not by pirates of empires past but by a more recent conquistador, the United States
economy:
Watch tower once for pirates
That sailed the sun-bright seas—
Red pirates, great romantics.
DRAKE
DE PLAN,
EL GRILLO
Against such as these
Years and years ago
You served quite well—
When time and ships were slow.
But now,
Against a pirate called
THE NATIONAL CITY BANK
What can you do alone?
Would it not be
Just as well you tumbled down,
Stone by helpless stone?
181
Nicolás Guillén, Páginas vueltas. Memorias (Havana: Ediciones Unión, 1982), 48 and Guillén, Prosa de
prisa (1929-1985), 2 vols. (Havana: Ediciones Unión, 2002), 1:16-19. For more on Hughes’s travels to
Cuba, see Guridy, Diaspora in Action, Ch. 4.
108
Whereas the fort had enjoyed a long history of keeping certain invaders at bay, Hughes
questions Cuba’s sturdiness against U.S. financial giants.182 Hughes had experienced the
anti-Machado movement first-hand, having been detained by Machado authorities
momentarily in Santiago de Cuba on his return from Haiti. His experiences in Cuba
would lead him to place Batista and Machado on a list of international bullies that
included Hitler and Mussolini, all of whom he believed threatened freedom and
democracy.183
Hughes likened anti-imperialist struggle to a form of revolution, and he found no
shortage of examples in his travels where he witnessed the fruits of radical political
change. Though never an official member of the Communist Party (unlike Guillén),
Hughes could be classified a “fellow traveler,” for Marxist politics remained ensconced
in his prose and poetry.184 Appearing in leftwing serials such as New Masses, Negro
Worker, and Crisis, Hughes’s poems focused on global racism, capitalism, and empire, a
thematic amalgamation found in his poem, “The Same:”
It is the same everywhere for me:
On the docks at Sierra Leone,
In the cotton fields of Alabama,
In the diamond mines of Kimberley,
On the coffee hills of Haiti,
The banana lands of Central America,
The streets of Harlem,
And the cities of Morocco and Tripoli.
Black:
Exploited, beaten, and robbed,
Shot and killed.
Blood running into
182
Langston Hughes, Good Morning Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings by Langston Hughes,
ed. Faith Berry (New York: Lawrence Hill & Company, 1973), 25-26. This poem appeared in the May
1931 issue of New Masses magazine.
183
Hughes, Good Morning Revolution [hereafter GMR], 97-99, 137-138.
184
Berry, Introduction to GMR, xiii.
109
DOLLARS
POUNDS
FRANCS
PESETAS
LIRE
For the wealth of the exploiters—
Blood that never comes back to me again.
Better that my blood
Runs into the deep channels of Revolution,
Runs into the strong hands of Revolution,
Stains all flags red,
Drives me away from
SIERRA LEONE
KIMBERLEY
ALABAMA
HAITI
CENTRAL AMERICA
HARLEM
MOROCCO
TRIPOLI
All the black lands everywhere.
The force that kills,
The power that robs,
And the greed that does not care.
Better that my blood makes one with the blood
Of all the struggling workers in the world—
Till every land is free of
DOLLAR ROBBERS
POUND ROBBERS
FRANC ROBBERS
PESETA ROBBERS
LIRE ROBBERS
LIFE ROBBERS—
Until the Red Armies of the International Proletariat
Their faces, black, white, olive, yellow, brown,
Unite to raise the blood-red flag that
Never will come down!
110
Echoing Padmore, Du Bois, and other Black Atlantic intellectuals, Hughes ventures that
racial injustice and exploitative labor conditions are part of colonial and imperial forays.
The various locations across Africa and the Americas contain populations that suffer
similar racist conditions due to capitalist endeavors, able to be defeated by a collective
resistance of non-white people united under the principles of communism (“the blood-red
flag”).185
Nicolás Guillén also invoked themes of race and empire in his poetry, with many
of his poems marked by intense criticism of U.S. omnipresence in Cuba. His famous
poem, “Caña,” (Cane) from Sóngoro Cosongo (1931) succinctly states the economic
disparity with arresting brevity:
The negro
next to the canefield
The Yankee
over the canefield
The land
under the canefield
Blood
that flows from us!
Guillén places “Negro” and “Yankee” in unequal social positions on the ladder of land
and labor, with U.S. imperialism continuing the colonial legacy established by Spain.186
Guillén’s poem connects Spanish oversight to the neocolonial presence of the United
States. The following fragment from España (1937) follows this trajectory. The narrator
185
Hughes, GMR, 9-10.
El negro / junto al cañaveral. / El Yanqui / sobre el cañaveral. / La tierra / bajo el cañaveral. / ¡Sangre /
que se nos va!// Nicolás Guillén, Obra poética, 1920-1959, 2 vols., ed. Angel Augier (Havana: Instituto
del Libro, 1972), 1:129.
186
111
bemoans U.S. financial dominance and the immutable location of Cubans as subjugated
workers:
I
son of America
son of you and Africa
yesterday a slave to the white masters with the furious whip
today a slave to the bloodthirsty and ravenous Yankee sugar planters
As slavery under Spain gives way to labor exploitation under U.S. corporate power, the
subject’s status as a “slave” does not change despite the change in master, for the United
States has replaced Spain as the (neo)colonial agent.187 Moreover, like Marsal, Guillén
broadens the meaning and definition of “America,” so that “Yankee” represents the
United States and “son” the Cuban worker. Both are Americans, though each occupies a
different spot on the socio-economic canvas. For Guillén, America is a place where
African and European biology and culture mix. The (male) first-person subject is a
product of both continents, conceived in the hybridic cauldron of the Western
Hemisphere. This evocation of an America of bi-continental lineage reflected Guillén’s
obsession with lo criollo [that which is creole], which made the mulatto figure the central
trope in his poetry. This joined a wider discursive formation in which mestizaje [mulattoness] became the chief symbol of the Cuban nation, producing new ideas about race and
history in the revolutionary era.
Increasingly, Cubanidad [Cuban-ness] called for an interracial solidarity of black
and white vis-à-vis U.S. empire; a racially tolerant Cuba, it was believed, could
demonstrate moral advancement over the northern hegemon and thus more aptly resist its
glacial presence. Racism in this sense was anti-Cuban, because racism was framed as a
187
Guillén’s original is as follows: Yo / hijo de América / hijo de ti y de Africa, / esclavo ayer de mayorales
blancos dueños de látigos / coléricos; / hoy esclavo de rojos yanquis azucareros y voraces.// From “La voz
esperanzada” in España: Poema en cuatro angustias y una esperanza. Guillén, Obra poética, 1:216.
112
U.S. import. For Guillén, Cuban citizenship constantly morphed into a question of
biracial and often masculine patriotism, as it had since the days of José Martí. Guillén
wrote that “[We must] remind whites that we truly are brothers, and that they should
count on us, and to make them aware that we live in the Republic of Cuba and not on a
southern cotton plantation of the United States.” 188 An integrated Cuban population
would make a stronger nation, which, coupled with revolutionary politics, could produce
a solid renunciation of that which bore the imprint “USA,” especially institutionalized
racism. Focusing on mestizaje in a sense deracialized Cuba, since a citizen who was both
black and white was also neither black nor white, a racial hybrid that purported a raceless
quality.189
The mulatto figure stood as an open signifier—both biological and
metaphorical—that figured prominently in the discursive terrain of Cuban nationalism. A
celebrated entity in Guillén’s poetry, the mulatto represented the idealism of a biracial
and bicultural Cuba. “Ballad of Two Grandfathers” is a poem that constructs the modern
Cuban subject (here the poem’s narrator) of both African and European descent, which
are manifested by two grandfathers who are entwined in time and space that is the Cuban
nation. The opening lines read
Shadows that I alone see,
my two grandfathers escort me.
A spear with a bone tip,
a drum of leather and wood:
my black grandfather.
188
Guillén, Prosa de prisa, 1:9.
Vera Kutzinski’s Sugar’s Secrets remains an excellent analysis on the theme of mestizaje and the
mulatto figure in relation to Cuban nationalism, particularly with her focus on the gendered aspects of race
and nation in Afro-Cuban, and more broadly, Afro-Antillean poetry in the 19th and 20th centuries. Vera M.
Kutzinski, Sugar’s Secrets: Race and the Erotics of Cuban Nationalism (Charlottesville, VA: University
Press of Virginia, 1993). On “racelessness” and Cuban nationalism, see de la Fuente’s A Nation for All;
Ada Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba; and Kutzinski’s Sugar’s Secrets.
189
113
Gorget on a broad neck
gray armor
my white grandfather.
The poem concludes with a reconciliation of the two racial lineages, necessary for the
projection of a mulatto Cuba:
—Frederico!
Facundo! The two embrace
The two sigh. The two
raise their strong heads;
both of equal size,
beneath the high stars;
both of equal size,
black and white yearning,
both of equal size
they cry out, dream, and sing.
They dream, cry, and sing.
They cry and sing.
They sing!
Poems such as “Ballad” extolled—rather than vilified—Afro-Cuban culture.190 These
portrayals of black experience went beyond the realm of anthropological novelty or
historical curiosity and instead situated black cultural forms as central to Cuban
identity.191 Guillén became one of the leading figures in the Afrocubanismo movement, a
school that made Afro-Cuban expressions prominent in Cuban cultural nationalism of
this era. Drawing from the cultural logic of diaspora, this cadre mixed the aesthetics of
son with the politics of desegregation. One Cuban critic said Guillén’s work was
important because it highlighted the negotiation of cultural hybridity—the “permanently
190
Guillén, Obra poética, 1:137-39. The two stanzas in their original are as follows: Sombras que sólo yo
veo, / me escoltan mis dos abuelos. / Lanza con punta de hueso, / tambor de cuero y madera: / mi abuelo
negro. / Gorguera en el cuello ancho, / gris armadura guerrera: / mi abuelo blanco.// —¡Frederico! /
¡Facundo! Los dos se abrazan. / Los dos suspiran. Los dos / las fuertes cabezas alzan; / los dos del mismo
tamaño, / bajo las estrellas altas; / los dos del mismo tamaño, / ansia negra y ansia blanca, / los dos del
mismo tamaño, / gritan, sueñan, lloran, cantan. / Sueñan, lloran, cantan. / Lloran, cantan. / ¡Cantan!
191
Nancy Morejón, Prologue, Recopilación de textos sobre Nicolás Guillén (Havana: Instituto Cubano del
Libro, 1974).
114
creole”—which included both African- and European-derived representations in Cuban
history.192
The Afrocubanismo movement included the poetry of Emilio Ballagas and José
Tallet; the paintings of Eduardo Abela and Wilfredo Lam; and the music of Amadeo
Roldán and Gilberto Valdés. Drawing on the work of Stuart Hall, one musicologist has
noted that changes in Cuban music and art in the 1920s and 1930s brought about a
reformulation of national culture in which working-class expressions shifted
representations of the popular. Similar to the Harlem Renaissance, Afrocubanismo
injected Afro-Cuban themes in mass culture, making the voice of the subaltern more
prominent in popular culture, which redefined the new nationalism and collective
memory. This shift was part of the outgrowth of revolution, which made, for instance,
the hitherto banned comparsa sanctified in certain social spaces in the post-Machado
Cuba—now a national symbol emerging out of the politicization of Afro-Cuban heritage
and tradition.193
Guillén became Afrocubanismo’s unofficial poet laureate. His rise to fame was
due in part to his friendship with José Antonio Fernández de Castro, a white Cuban editor
who remained the talent scout for Cuba’s up-and-coming hommes de lettres. Fernández
de Castro brokered the meeting between Hughes, Guillén, and Gustavo Urrutia, who
wrote the legendary literary column, “Ideales de una raza” [Ideals of a Race], published
in Havana’s major daily Diario de la Marina. Shortly after meeting Hughes, Guillén
192
Robin Moore, Nationalizing Blackness: Afrocubanismo and Artistic Revolution in Havana, 1920-1940
(Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997); Regino E. Boti, Revista Bimestre Cubana, “La poesía
Cubana de Nicolás Guillén” (May-June 1932): 343-53.
193
Moore, Nationalizing Blackness, 1-3, 81, 89, 166-168.
115
published his first major volume of poems, Motivos de son [Son Motifs, 1930], which
earned instant acclaim and thrust Guillén into international prominence.194
Guillén’s Motivos de son and later Songoro Cosongo (1931) were collections of
poems that accentuated Africa and deemphasized Europe in the mestizaje formula.
Langston Hughes called Motivos “stupendous.”195 He, along with Howard University
professor Ben Carruthers, translated these and many of Guillén’s other poems into
English, some of which appeared in a collection Cuba Libre in 1948.196 “Mujer Nueva”
appeared in the volume under the title, “New Woman,” and exemplified this form of
Afro-centric internationalism:
With the circle of the equator
girded about her waist
as though about a little world,
the black woman,
the new woman,
comes forward
in robes
light as a serpent’s skin.
Crowned with palms
like a newly arrived goddess,
she brings the unpublished word,
the unknown gesture,
the strong haunches,
voice, teeth of
morning and its leap.
Gush of young blood
beneath fresh skin,
never wearying feet
for the deep music
194
Arnold Rampersad, I, Too, Sing America: The Life of Langston Hughes, Vol. 1, 1902-1941 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1986), 178; Rosalie Schwartz, “Cuba’s Roaring Twenties: Race Consciousness
and the Column ‘Ideales de Una Raza,’” in Between Race and Empire, 104-119.
195
Keith Ellis, “Nicolás Guillén and Langston Hughes: Convergences and Divergences,” in Between Race
and Empire, 140.
196
Nicolás Guillén, Cuba Libre: Poems by Nicolás Guillén, ed. and trans. by Langston Hughes and Ben
Frederic Carruthers (Los Angeles: Anderson & Ritchie, 1948). For more details on Hughes’s and
Carruthers’s collaboration and the volume’s publication, see Kutzinski, “Fearful Asymmetries.”
116
of the bongó!
Guillén’s lines project a continent personified by a royal maternal figure that represents
the “new woman.” She is a goddess who leads an alternative existence to Western
ontology and epistemology, whose development lay in antiquity. The figure is both
exotic and regal; bearing both the “unpublished word” and “serpent skin,” she is an
embodiment of countermodernity, whose charisma and enticement lay in that which the
West negates. The verses critique Western modernity and praise an alternate (if
essentialized) system of meaning in which the emergence of African customs, thought,
and heritage remakes the collective memory that privileged European cultural lineage.197
The poem is an instance of black modernism located in what Pius Adesanmi has called
“trans-modernities,” which produced alternatives to white Eurocentric cultural
expressions. Writing about black arts and letters in Paris, Adesanmi describes transmodernities as “constructed epistemologies of subjecthood and agency through which the
revalued voice of the black man did not only speak the truth to the power of modernity
but also became transmodern in the sense of placing the black subject beyond the
epistemic claims of Euromodernity.”198
Extending this model to other locales such as New York and Havana, we find the
poetry of Guillén and Hughes apt examples of this epistemological shift. However, in
both the poetic lines and argument by Adesanmi we also find a glaring essentialism of
women as objects of pro-natalist ideology that lay at the heart of black nationalism in this
period and its reinscription in subsequent scholarship. Poems by Guillén in particular
suggested a reification of patriarchal notions of womanhood, so that the nationalist
197
Guillén, Cuba Libre, 63.
Pius Adesanmi, “Redefining Paris: Trans-modernity and Francophone African Migritude Fiction,”
Modern Fiction Studies 51:4 (2005): 960.
198
117
instincts that sought racial union through the erasure of black and white did not erase
divides between men and women in the body politic. Africa as a female primordial
signifier reified the place of women as maternal caregivers in the center of diasporic
kinship yet kept them removed from other spaces of political belonging. While
revolutionary politics brought more rights for Afro-Cuban women, including suffrage and
the founding of the Democratic Federation of Cuban Women, which fought for the
placement of Afro-Cuban women in public sector jobs, much of the national symbolism
of the New Cuba appeared in masculine form.199
Like Afrocubanismo, the Harlem Renaissance produced numerous notable artists
and writers in the international community of black modernism. Surrounding Nella
Larsen’s Passing (1929) and James Weldon Johnson’s Black Manhattan (1930) were the
twin ideals of literary prestige and the advancement of civil rights. From New York,
Hughes joined this wider cultural formation using similar diasporic devices. He, too,
moved the poetic subject towards new expressions of black identity rooted in Africa. His
poem, “Negro,” intersects multiple black subjectivities unified by a singular continental
origin:
I am a Negro:
Black as the night is black,
Black like the depths of my Africa.
I’ve been a slave:
Caesar told me to keep his door-steps clean.
I brushed the boots of Washington.
I’ve been a worker:
Under my hand the pyramids arose.
I made mortar for the Woolworth Building.
I’ve been a singer:
199
de la Fuente, A Nation for All, 117.
118
All the way from Africa to Georgia
I carried my sorrow songs.
I made ragtime.
I’ve been a victim:
The Belgians cut off my hands in the Congo.
They lynch me still in Mississippi
I am a Negro:
Black as the night is black,
Black like the depths of my Africa.
Hughes used the Whitmanesque first person to proffer various social locations of black
existence. Entertainers, workers, and victims remained bonded in their origin, creativity,
and common suffering. Hughes constructed an Africa that provided the existential glue
and cultural genetics for black identity, verses that inspired racial empowerment in their
enduring, yet essentialized, ubiquity.200
Guillén continued this trajectory in his “Soldados en Abisinia,” a poem that stood
as a vituperative reaction to Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. Like Scottsboro,
Ethiopia was a salient theme in the world of black modernism that united people of
African descent. Hughes translated this poem as well, which he called “Soldiers in
Ethiopia:”
Mussolini
chin in hand.
On the table
Africa
crucified, bloodless
in green, black, white, and blue
geography on a map.
A finger, son of Caesar’s,
pierces the continent.
The rivers of paper
say nothing,
nor the deserts of paper,
200
Hughes, Collected Poems, 24.
119
nor the cities of paper
where a finger, son of Caesar’s,
with a bloody fingernail
claws over an Ethiopia
of paper.
Hell of a fine pirate
this Mussolini
with his face so hard
and his hands so long!
Ethiopia buckles,
arches its back,
cries aloud,
rages,
protests.
Il Duce!
Soldiers.
War.
Ships.
Mussolini in his automobile
takes his morning ride.
Mussolini on horseback
takes his afternoon exercise.
Mussolini in an airplane
flies from city to city,
so fast he makes your head swim.
Mussolini bathed, fresh, clean,
Mussolini happy
and intent.
Ah, but his soldiers
stumbling and falling—
his soldiers
who do not make their trips on a map
but instead on the earth of Africa,
under an African sun,
finding no cities of paper—
for their cities are something more
than dots that speak
with the little green voices of topography!
Their cities are
Anthills of bullets
And the barking of machine guns
And a cane field of spears.
120
Thus, the soldiers—
who do not make their trips on a map—
the soldiers
far away from Mussolini,
alone,
his soldiers,
burning up in the desert,
grow ever smaller and smaller.
His soldiers—
slowly baking in the sun.
His soldiers—
mixed with the excrement
of buzzards—
his soldiers.
Guillén also challenged the conventions of modern Western cognition and technology by
showing them inferior to the Ethiopian army. Native Africans, he asserts, will be able to
defeat Mussolini’s soldiers because the latter are out of their geographic and
epistemological element. They are no long working with maps and paper, metonyms for
Western thought, but are now in a new environment belonging to a population whose
non-European way of life will ultimately propel the Ethiopians to victory.201
Though their poetry cohered around similar themes and concerns, Hughes and
Guillén rendered diasporic experiences using a black vernacular that evolved in distinct
cultural locations. At times their poems also testified to the ways in which translating the
transnational became problematic, for in addition to language was the difficulty of
translating “culture.” The codes, assumptions, and images that marked the common
sense for one population did not easily translate to another. At the heart of making
meaning of diaspora was translating blackness, which could offer affective identification
that engendered racial pride as well as language that bore questionable racialized
depictions. Portions of Cuba Libre, for instance, employed a U.S. black vernacular to
201
Guillén, Cuba Libre, 52-54.
121
translate the verses of Guillén, whereby Afro-Cuban speech was transliterated to a form
of African American dialect. The translation of Guillén’s “Tú no sabe inglé” (“Don’t
Know no English”) reveals the dilemma of representation:
All dat English you used to know,
Li’l Manuel,
all dat English, now can’t even
say: Yes.
‘Merican gal comes lookin’ fo’ you
an’ you jes’ runs away.
Yo’ English is jes’ strike one!
strike one and one-two-three.
Li’l Manuel, you don’t know no English
you jes don’t know!
You jes’ don’t know!
Don’t fall in love no mo’,
Li’l Manuel,
‘cause you don’t know no English,
don’t know no English.
Guillén’s original Afro-Cuban speech is translated to a stylized African American
southern voice, which, due to the extent of diacritical edits, risks a performance of
caricature.202 However, here the mocking of the black subject also criticizes the racist
and classist system that keeps the poem’s narrator and subject from interacting with
privileged (white) Yankee women from the north. In lampooning the instance of social
inequality, the narrator derides “Li’l Manuel” for pursuing a U.S. female tourist in Cuba,
making it plain that Manuel has no chance of courtship. Manuel and the narrator are
social equals, both working-class Afro-Cubans whose lack of English—here the marker
for whiteness and high social standing—keeps them out of the white woman’s social
202
Guillén, Cuba Libre, 3. Guillén’s original: Con tanto inglé que tú sabía, / Bito Manué, / con tanto inglé,
no sabe ahora / desí ye. / La mericana te buca, / y tú le tiene que huí: / tu inglé era de etrái guan, / de etrái
guan y guan tu tri. / Bito Manúe, tú no sabe inglé, / tú no sabe inglé, / tú no sabe inglé. / No te enamore má
nunca, / Bito Manué, / si no sabe inglé, / si no sabe inglé.
122
domain. Unlike white authors, the interpretive choices made by black writers/translators
could engage such a linguistic style to challenge and even suppress power differentials,
thereby destabilizing the border between caricature and celebration in the process of resignification. This constituted and was constitutive of a tension caused by the method of
language reproduction in which cultural translation could produce a “slippage” in the
diasporic cultural project.203
Brent Hayes Edwards has written on this slippage, suggesting that translating the
language of diaspora necessarily depended on what he terms dècalage, or the
“unevenness or differentiation” that reveals a gap in time and space. He writes:
“dècalage is the kernel of precisely that which cannot be transferred or exchanged, the
received biases that refuse to pass over when one crosses the water. It is a changing core
of difference; it is the work of ‘differences within unity,’ an identifiable point that is
incessantly touched and fingered and pressed.” Through this “disarticulation,” he
concludes, dècalage gestures to the “points of misunderstanding, bad faith, unhappy
translation…” The varied locations of black writers, therefore, fostered an antiessentializing condition in which the broader “practice of diaspora” depended on the
recoding of cultural transcripts in repositioned and putatively universal form. One might
add that such translation could only be effective, acceptable, and indeed oppositional due
to Hughes’ and Caruthers’ authorial location; for translations such as these would convey
a vastly different meaning were they rendered by a Clifford Odets or John Dos Passos.204
Guillén’s “Mulatta” produces a similar linguistic phenomenon. The poem
delivers a black male narrator who derides a mulatto woman for her attempt to socially
203
204
For more on the linguistic obstacles in translating Cuba Libre, see Kutzinski, “Fearful Asymmetries.”
Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora, 13-14.
123
elevate herself via her racial type and sexual allure. Hughes and Carruthers chose to
translate “Mulatta” to “High Brown:”
Yep, now I gets you, high brown!
High brown, I knows you likes to say
how wide my nose is anyway
like a tie-knot flattened down.
Well, look at yo’ self an’ see
you ain’t no prize to wed.
Yo’ mouf’ is awful big fo’ me,
an yo’ naps is short an’ red.
So much switchin’ wid yo’ hips,
jes’ so hot!
So much twitchin’ wid yo’ lips,
jes’ so hot!
So much witchin’ wid yo’ eyes,
jes’ so hot!
If you jes’ knew de truf,
Miss High Brown,
I loves my coal black gal
and don’t need you hangin’ ‘round.
In the poem Guillén condemns the white privilege afforded to lighter-skinned mulatto
women in contrast to the devalued status of those with darker skin color. Guillén’s
remonstration towards mulatto women is interesting, because he did not offer such
criticism to mulatto men, whose social mobility also would have been amplified by their
“whitened” existence. This became a familiar pattern in Guillén’s poetry that praised
male mulatto patriotism in projections of Cuban nationalism but attacked mulatto
femininity for racial opportunism.205 Whereas Guillén held the mulatto male figure (with
which Guillén personally identified) as the symbol of the Cuban nation, the racial
205
Guillén, Cuba Libre, 6. Again, Kutzinski’s Sugar’s Secrets remains an astute appraisal of Guillén’s
poetry and mestizaje through the critical lens of gender.
124
inbetweeness of mulatto women was suspect, rendered inferior to the black “Mujer
Nueva” of primordial Africa.
While both lived an existence of the racial inbetween, Hughes and Guillén
consistently questioned racial distinctions and often wrote about a singular black
experience. Translating and transferring the black condition continued to produce a
“slippage” in the diasporic project. Hughes was struck by the ways race in Cuba
functioned differently from the United States, calling attention, for instance, to the
inability for racial codes to translate in music. “One thing that struck [me],” he wrote,
“was that almost all the love lyrics were about charms of mi negra, my black girl, mi
morena, my dark girl, my chocolate sweetie or my mulatto beauty, plainly described as
such in racial terms. These dusky nuances, I notice, are quite lost in the translations that
Broadway makes of Cuban songs for American consumption.” Hughes described Cuba’s
race structure as having a “triple color line.” He recalled “pure-blood Negroes” who
represented the “bottom” rung of the social ladder, followed by the “middle” “mixed
bloods, the light browns,” then finally “near whites, octoroons.” Hughes also thought it
notable that in Cuba there were “dark blacks” who occupied positions of authority in
higher proportion than in the United States. Hughes believed that Jim Crow in Cuba was
more flexible and not codified into law or social custom to the extent it was in his home
country. This afforded more instances of interracial “mingling” in Cuban society due, in
part, to the large Afro-Cuban percentage population.206
Despite its flexible racial system, Cuba still etched in Hughes’s memory a racist
incident that nearly ended violently, making him painfully aware of how racism crossed
206
Langston Hughes, I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey (New York: Rinehart &
Company, Inc., 1956), 10-11.
125
borders. After attempting to buy tickets at a white-only beach, he and a black friend were
refused admission and told to leave. When he complained, a white bouncer (a former
boxer) was summoned, followed by the white manager (both from the U.S.), who
repeated the demand to exit. Eventually the police arrived in a wagon bearing weapons
and took Hughes and his friend into custody, where they would await their day in court
the following morning. Hughes believed they were treated fairly in jail and eventually
exonerated because the holding officer was black and the judge mulatto. The case was
dismissed.
The incident exemplified how the neocolonial relationship exported U.S. racial
codes to Cuba. It allowed for U.S. citizens to bar other U.S. citizens from public spaces
in a foreign country, upholding social norms by transplanting the racial hierarchy made
legitimate by U.S. market control. Hughes blamed the tourist industry for installing Jim
Crow in Cuba, which imposed a color line in order to court foreign white visitors.
Hughes left Cuba with mixed emotions. Cuba brought diasporic community in music and
verse along with U.S.-style segregation.207
The different cultural contexts also meant that Hughes and Guillén could differ
dramatically in their formal devices and interpretations. Both artists focused on regional
traditions, motivations, predilections, and impulses that made their pursuits at times quite
distinct. The tastes specific to Havana and Harlem reflected sensibilities that grew from
the cultural rhizomes of different habitats. In terms of aesthetics, for instance, son was
not blues.208 One Cuban critic of the day claimed that “Cuba is not the Yankee South nor
is the son blues, just like the guitar is not the banjo.” The writer likened blues to “the
207
Hughes, I Wonder, 10-14; Rampersad, I, Too, 203.
Son refers to both rhythm and harmony and is distinguishable by the clave pulse that provides the
rhythmic skeleton of the music. Moore, Nationalizing Blackness, 90-106.
208
126
weep contained in the slave that longs, the thatched hut of a faraway free forest. It’s the
pain without shores, wider and deeper than the Mississippi, the sadness of dusk on the
cotton plantations of New Orleans…” The son, in contrast, was a form specific to Cuba:
“Child of the jungle, it came from the strings of the tres…” The rhythm and meter in
each poet’s lyricism varied, the “music” of each differed tremendously.209
Thematically, the two could diverge as well. Mestizaje evoked contrasting
images for each; whereas Guillén was apt to praise the mulatto figure in national
narratives of Cubanidad, Hughes’s renderings often disclosed contempt for the biracial
subject, a reflection of the figure’s ignominious place in the United States. Shunned as
either an “impure white” or “racial opportunist” (e.g. “passing”), the mulatto figure
historically was cast outside of the black/white racial dichotomy that governed U.S. legal
and social codes. It also served as a constant reminder of slavery, the condition that
produced its existence and out-of-place quality. For Hughes, mestizaje was inextricably
linked to the violence and vileness of white paternalism brought about by rape and
concubinage. This is the scathing tone evoked in “Mulatto:”
Because I am the white man’s son—his own,
Bearing his bastard birth-mark on my face,
I will dispute his title to his throne,
Forever fight him for my rightful place.
There is a searing hate within my soul,
A hate that makes me vigorous and whole,
And spurs me on increasingly to win.
Because I am my cruel father’s child,
My love of justice stirs me up to hate,
A warring Ishmaelite, unreconciled,
When falls the hour I shall not hesitate
Into my father’s heart to plunge the knife
To gain the utmost freedom that is life.
209
Nancy Morejón, ed., Recopilación de textos sobre Nicolás Guillén (Havana: Casa de las Américas,
1974), 243-44.
127
Here the mulatto’s identity lies in a constant state of flux, “unreconciled,” which thrusts
the subject into a perpetual state of liminality and causes him to spite his white father
who has fostered his unenviable existence. Unlike Guillén’s “Ballad of Two
Grandfathers,” in which (male) Cuban identity is a necessary reconciliation of white and
black progenitors, Hughes’s poem suggests that the death of the white father is the only
manner in which the biracial subject may “gain freedom,” in effect by killing that which
in part conceived him.210
That out-of-place quality Hughes expressed in the mulatto persona Guillén found
in the United States. Guillén viewed the U.S. as a mixed affair, saturated by segregation
and poverty yet a fount of artistic potential. Harlem in particular remained a
contradictory locale for Guillén. Though it offered the riches of literary
cosmopolitanism, Guillén also saw it as “a black city crammed into a white city.” For
him, Harlem was “half a million people separated from the rest of the population as if
they suffered a terrible contagious disease.” Indeed, Harlem made an indelible imprint
on Guillén’s cultural record:
It was that Harlem gave me the slow feeling of anguish, which I can’t easily erase
from my memory, although it’s been a long time since I’ve been to New York.
Oh sure, I knew very well that there was the Apollo, the most important Negro
theatre in the United States, that the Small Paradise and Savoy were luxury
cabarets only for people with dark skin…But along 111th, 113th, 115th and 138th,
thousands of Negroes were miserably dragging themselves at the margins of the
opulence and joy of the richest city in the world.
New York remained a preeminent black artistic capital that also represented the epitome
of U.S. inequality, causing the poet to term the city “cruel but instructive.”211
210
David Levering Lewis, ed., The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader (New York: Penguin Books,
1994), 263. A different version of Hughes’s “Mulatto” with a more stinging tone appears in Hughes’s
Collected Poems, 100.
211
Guillén, Páginas vueltas, 277, 280.
128
Race and the Cultural Turn: Civilizational Debates of Uplift and Anti-fascism
“Silencing the Maracas”
Questions of race and culture thrived amid competing images and moral
justifications. At times, they sparked considerable disagreement in debates over lo negro.
In Cuba, prominent members of the black middle-class objected to the very notion of
Afrocubanismo. Guillén later recalled that Motivos stirred commotion in the Cuban
public, including criticism levied by black leaders and members of exclusive societies
such as Club Atenas and Unión Fraterna who disagreed with the themes and style of
Guillén’s poetry. Afro-Cuban societies had existed in colonial times, with Cabildos de
nación maintaining channels of African and Afro-Cuban cultural practices. But by the
1930s Afro-Cuban elites increasingly couched racial identity in terms of a prescribed
morality that moved to “de-Africanize” black culture. They favored integrative strategies
that even made the term “Afro-Cuban” pejorative because it connoted something separate
from “normal” Cuban citizens. Groups such as the prestigious Club Atenas tended to
shun those gestures and traditions that stood outside the realm of bourgeois respectability,
going so far as to ban dances such as the rumba and percussion instruments such as the
bongo. Thus, the rumba guaguancó, most likely the rumba that mesmerized Carleton
Beals, was condemned by this segment of the population due to the dance’s sexual
connotations and origin in the Cuban underclass, an expression billed too bawdy for
“decent” public spaces.212
A frequenter of Club Atenas, Hughes wryly reported that “the rumba was not a
respectable dance among persons of good breeding.” Outside of exclusive clubs,
212
Guillén, Páginas vueltas, 80-87; Moore, Nationalizing Blackness, 95-96, 168, 210-213; de la Fuente, A
Nation for All, 34-35,165-171.
129
however, Hughes fondly remembered Havana as a place full of “drumbeats and the
wavelike sounds of maracas rustling endless rumbas.” Hughes immersed himself in the
aurality of Havana’s social scene and experienced its music viscerally: “And, best of all
for me, [José Antonio Fernández de Castro] knew the Negro musicians at Marinao, those
fabulous drum beaters who use their bare hands to beat out rhythm, those clave knockers
and maraca shakers who somehow have saved—out of all the centuries of slavery and all
the miles and miles from Guinea—the heartbeat and songbeat of Africa.”213 Cuba would
always conjure images of African musical impulses that for Hughes remained essential in
black identity but which distanced him from some Cuban socialites.
In the United States, lo negro did not enjoy the national presence that it did in
Cuba, though a somewhat comparable phenomenon occurred in urban centers such as
Harlem, Kansas City, and Chicago. The mass dissemination of “race records,” for
instance, generated wider interest in black music, occurring in a moment when
investment in the “folk” precipitated collaboration between practitioners of anthropology
and history and officials in New Deal agencies to conserve the various heritages of the
United States. From the collection of slave narratives to the classification of extant
American Indian languages, the Depression decade called for the preservation—and
simultaneously the construction of—a new usable past in the United States.
Along with the radical politics of “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” and
“Hands Off Ethiopia” campaigns also lay the issues of race and respectability in
Harlem’s cultural environs. Black Harlemites were leery of performing and writing for
an audience that was disproportionately white, made especially problematic by the large
213
Hughes, I Wonder, 6-8.
130
white patronage that funded many artists.214 The New Negro Arts Movement established
by Alain Locke, James Weldon Johnson, and Zora Neale Hurston in the wake of World
War I and the Great Migration was facilitated by nationwide organizations like the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the National
Urban League (NUL). It was a movement that relied more on black churches and Garvey
zealots than on the societies of color common to Cuba.215 Garveyism thrived in Harlem
communities, especially among the significant West Indian population. Garvey focused
on black respectability and used eugenicist reasoning to desire a “pure” African race
based on good health habits, proper partners in procreation, and moral integrity. This
type of regiment supplemented black cultural programs, for Garvey’s “racial destiny”
needed a particular kind of New Negro.216
A founding father of the renaissance, Alain Locke viewed Harlem as a laboratory
for diasporic thought:
As a world phenomenon this wider race consciousness is a different thing from
the much asserted rising tide of color. Its evitable causes are not of our making.
The consequences are not necessarily damaging to the best interests of
civilization. Whether it actually brings into being new Armadas of conflict or
argosies of cultural exchange and enlightenment can only be decided by the
attitude of the dominant races in an era of critical change. With the American
Negro, this new internationalism is primarily an effort to recapture contact with
the scattered peoples of African derivation.
214
On the topic of white and black audiences during the Harlem renaissance, see Charles Scruggs, “‘All
Dressed up but No Place Go’: The Black Writer and his Audience During the Harlem Renaissance,”
American Literature 48 (Jan. 1977): 543-563.
215
Lewis, The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader, xiii-xiv.
216
Michelle Mitchell, Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after
Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), 237. By the 1930s, Garveyism had
lessened substantially due to charges of business fraud. Cuban historian Tomás Fernández Robaina
maintains that Garveyism never took hold in Cuba as it did elsewhere due to the discourse of “racelessness”
in Cuba’s nationalism. UNIA’s Negro World was banned in Cuba, as was Garvey himself in 1930.
Robaina, “Marcus Garvey in Cuba: Urrutia, Cubans, and Black Nationalism,” in Between Race and
Empire, 120-128.
131
Locke triumphed black “artistic endowments and cultural contributions” in the “folktemperament” of the South along with New Negro literature in the North. His concern
with “civilization” resonated with those who embraced W.E.B. Du Bois’s Talented Tenth
and advocates of Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta Compromise. Many of the black
middle-class believed that higher civilization among African Americans was possible via
art and literature, that cultural uplift would complement the much-needed social
restructuring.217
But mass art forms such as son and jazz continued to be money-making ventures
in cabarets and clubs. Havana and Harlem exploded in cultural vibrancy spurred by the
growth of radio and recording industries. In the United States, the division between high
and low culture was also changing. The move towards popular culture had been made
evident in the decade prior by Gilbert Seldes’s The 7 Lively Arts, which declared both
kitsch and genteel art germane in U.S. cultural endeavors. Seldes thought classical opera
and comic strips equally important. Searching for an autochthonous U.S. cultural
program that was antithetical to European modernism, Seldes found popular forms (the
“lively arts”) a worthy antidote to those of high modernist appeal.
Whereas Seldes was apt to praise Krazy Kat and Charlie Chaplin movies,
however, he remained tepid towards “Negro” contributions to mass culture. Irving Berlin
and Paul Whiteman stood as proper jazz representatives rather than the stars of Runnin’
Wild or Shuffle Along. Seldes did honor the black foundations of jazz but echoed the type
of racial inclusion advocated by Carleton Beals and others writers. Seldes held that “the
negro side expresses something which underlies a great deal of America—our
independence, our carelessness, our frankness, and gaiety.” Seldes secured whites and
217
Lewis, Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader, 46-51.
132
Jews as contributors to the “intelligence” of jazz music in contrast to blacks’ “instinctive
qualities,” which preserved the biological construction of the cultural: “I do not think that
the negro…is our salvation,” Seldes wrote, “but he has kept alive things without which
our lives would be perceptibly meaner, paler, and nearer to atrophy and decay.” Like
other white cultural brokers, Seldes placed blacks central in national expressions of U.S.
culture but outside the domain of white subjectivity, which implicitly stripped U.S.
blacks of citizenship (not part of “our salvation…our lives”).218
Black modernist expression in the vein of Hughes and Guillén countered such
appraisals but borrowed from the rewriting of high and low brow to forge a new literary
space. In contrast to W. E. B. Du Bois, for instance, whose writing was never fully
divested from his academic location, though brilliant and foundational his thinking was
and continues to be, Guillén and Hughes performed inter-class affinities—part of the ten
percent who lived, felt, and incorporated the bottom ninety. Du Bois’s Dark Princess or
even legendary Souls of Black Folk did not achieve what Hughes’s Weary Blues or
Guillén’s Motivos de son could in terms of aestheticizing and rendering multiple black
experiences. Guillén and Hughes challenged and exploded “safe” racial depictions with
linguistic intensity and invention. Their poetry, qua Paul Laurence Dunbar, intersected
varying class and racial expressions that commanded the attention of a broad readership
in multiple social settings.
Poetry, then, was part of the broader cultural turn in diasporic arts and letters.
Afro-Cuban and African Americans forged this literary space in serials such as
Opportunity, Crisis, Mediodía, Masas, and Negro Quarterly. The work of Hughes and
218
Gilbert Seldes, The 7 Lively Arts (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 2001 [1924]), 69-74, 93-97.
“Not”: emphasis in the original; “Our”: my emphasis.
133
Guillén appeared in volumes such as Dudley Fitts’s Anthology of Contemporary LatinAmerican Poetry (1942),219 Ramón Guirao’s Orbita de la Poesía Afrocubana (1938), and
the revised edition of James Weldon Johnson’s Book of American Negro Poetry (1931),
all of which became key catalogues of popular black verse of the day. Guillén himself
joined other Cuban literati to found Mediodía in 1936, a magazine dedicated to art,
poetry, and politics. As its director, Guillén established the objective “to offer
revolutionary works wrapped in the expressive cape of literature.” One could read about
lynching in Mississippi, struggles in China written by Anna Louise Strong, and works by
Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, Waldo Frank, Joseph North, and Anton Chekhov.220
Readers also submerged themselves in the poetic debates that circulated
throughout the Americas. In one article, a Cuban writer reflected on U.S. and Cuban
Afro-poetic traditions. Important were Claude McKay’s “If we must die” and Hughes’s
“I, Too” in hemispheric projections of black cultural politics. The critic paid special
homage to Countee Cullen’s “Heritage,” which begins as follows:
What is Africa to me:
Copper sun or scarlet sea,
Jungle star or jungle track,
Strong bronzed men, or regal black
Women from whose loins I sprang
When the birds of Eden sang?
One three centuries removed
From the scenes his fathers loved,
Spicy grove, cinnamon tree,
What is Africa to me?
219
Guillén, Cuba Libre, v; Kuzinski, “Fearful Asymmetries,” 135; Rampersad, I, Too, 203.
Guillén, Páginas vueltas, 113; Guillén, “Conversación con Waldo Frank,”Mediodía, April 5, 1937, 1011; Martha Gillhorn, “Justicia en la noche,” Mediodía, Oct. 17, 1938, 7, 19; Ana Luisa Strong, “Un ejército
sin trencheras,” Mediodía, May 9, 1938, 10, 11, 18; Carlos Montenegro, “Mi entrada en España,”
Mediodía, April 25, 1938, 13, 16; Mediodía, Oct. 10, 1938, 17; Sept. 30, 1938, 6, 7, 15; Francisco V.
Portela, “Como se ayuda a España en los EE.UU.,” Mediodía, Sept. 26, 1938, 6, 17.
220
134
Throughout the poem, Cullen revisits the familiar gendered themes of the African
homeland and exemplified what the Cuban critic positioned as the essence of the
afrocriollo (afro-Creole). Afro-Cuban and African American poetry had a political
purpose, the writer concluded, and he suggested that if people of color wanted more
equitable social conditions, it would be a struggle that left accommodationist pursuits by
the wayside and shunned complacency in the field of entertainment. In his estimation the
Cuban poet who best delivered this line of thinking in verse and form was Regino
Pedroso.221
Pedroso was born in Matanzas in 1896 of Chinese/Afro-Cuban mixed-race origin.
Early in his life he worked as a mechanic and carpenter, and eventually gained fame in
the literary world by publishing in Diario de la Marina through his acquaintance with
José Antonio Fernández de Castro. Pedroso’s poetry often invoked proletarian themes of
the factory and workshop. His landmark Nosotros (Us), published in 1933, bore the mark
of revolutionary politics. It contained stanzas dedicated to anti-imperialist aesthetics and
the construction of the United States as a physical and ideological entity to be combated
and surpassed in the name of Cuban nationalism, racial harmony, and class progress.222
One of Pedroso’s most powerful and popular poems, “Hermano negro” (Negro
Brother), makes reference to several concerns regarding Afro-Cuban identity, labor, and
political mobilization. Pedroso locates black biological and cultural origins in the oftcited Africa, but ultimately argues that merely providing musical or theatrical
221
Lewis, Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader, 244; Carlos Rafael Rodrígruez, “Aforo de la poesía
negra,” Mediodía, (June 1936): 10-11.
222
Regino Pedroso, Antología Poética, 1918-1938 (Havana: Administración del Alcade, 1939), 7-8, 68-69;
Regino Pedroso, Orbita de Regino Pedroso, ed. Osvaldo Navarro (Havana: UNEAC, 1975), 17, 20, 40.
135
entertainment for whites will never achieve equality; rather, a new consciousness among
Afro-Cubans was needed to engender political change:
Negro, brother negro,
you are in me: speak!
Negro, brother negro,
I am in you: Sing!
Your voice lies in my voice,
your anguish in my voice,
your blood in my voice…
I, too, am your race!
You are able to sing,
because the jungle gave you its nights of ferocious rhythms;
you are able to weep,
because the great rivers gave you a torrent of tears.
For his enjoyment
the rich man makes a game of you.
And in Paris, New York, Madrid, and Havana,
like figurines
they make straw negroes for export;
there are men who fulfill your starvation with laughter:
they traffic with your sweat,
they trade with your pain,
and you laugh, you surrender, and you dance.
Negro, brother negro
silence your maracas just a bit.
And learn here,
and look there.
And listen there in Scottsboro, in Scottsboro,
among the cries of slave anguish
man’s yearnings,
man’s rage,
human pain and desire for a man without race.
Negro, brother negro,
muffle your bongo just a bit.
Are we not more than black?
Are we not more than merry?
Are we not more than rumba, black lechery and comparsas?
Are we not more than grins and color,
grins and color?
136
Learn here,
and listen there,
and look there in Scottsboro, in Scottsboro,
dressed in Negro skin,
men that bleed.
Negro, brother negro;
more brotherly in desire than in race
Negro in Haiti, Negro in Jamaica, Negro in New York,
Negro in Havana—pain that sells
exploitation in shop windows—
listen there in Scottsboro, in Scottsboro, in Scottsboro…
Give the world with your rebellious anguish
your human voice…
and briefly silence your maracas!
Pedroso reveals that the economic objectification of diasporic people will change only
upon the collective will to move away from the entertainment world—here cast as a kind
of Uncle Tom existence—and towards a forceful intervention in racist power structures
that produce the Scottsboros of the world. In addition to cultural pursuits, one needed to
embrace revolutionary thought in order to wage political praxis. The rhythmic chorus of
“in Scottsboro, in Scottsboro, in Scottsboro” was a phrase to be etched in the minds of
blacks everywhere, as a melodic lament in a blues song or perhaps the repeated refrain in
a son. According to Pedroso, one could only register the music of political tragedy by
“silencing the maracas.”223
223
Pedroso’s original stanzas: Negro, hermano negro, / tú estás en mí: ¡habla! / Negro, hermano negro, / yo
estoy en ti: ¡canta! / Tu voz está en mi voz, / tu angustia está en mi voz, / tu sangre está en mi voz…/
¡También yo soy tu raza! // Tú tienes el canto, / Porque la selva te dio en sus noches sus ritmos bárbaros; /
tú tienes el llanto, / porque te dieron los grandes ríos raudal de lágrimas. // Para sus goces / el rice hace de ti
un juguete. / Y en París, y en New York, y en Madrid, y en La Habana, / igual que bibelots, / se fabrican
negros de paja para la exportación; / hay hombres que te pagan con hambre la risa: / trafican con tu sudor, /
comercian con tu dolor / y tú ríes, te entregas y danzas. // Negro, hermano negro / silencia un poco tus
maracas. / Y aprende aquí, / y mira allí. / y escucha allá en Scottsboro, en Scottsboro, / entre un clamor de
angustia esclava / ansias de hombre, / iras de hombre, / dolor y anhelo humanos de hombre sin raza. //
Negro, hermano negro / enluta un poco tu bongó. // ¿No somos más que negro? / ¿No somos más que
jácara? / ¿No somos más que rumba, lujurias negras y comparsas? / ¿No somos más que mueca y color, /
mueca y color? // Aprende aquí, / y escucha allí, / y mira allá en Scottsboro, en Scottsboro, / bajo vestido de
piel negra, / hombres que sangran. // Negro, hermano negro; / más hermano en el ansia que en la raza /
137
To be sure, Pedroso’s prescriptions for political mobilization struck at the heart of
the debate over culture, racial uplift, and social progress. This was an intercontinental
discussion fraught with disagreement. Which representations, images, and arguments
would make most political sense in their respective cultural contexts, which would create
a socially equitable world? These were dilemmas that had traveled the Black Atlantic
since abolition. From Martin Delany and Mary Ann Shadd Cary to Quintín Banderas and
Pedro Ivonet, African Americans and Afro-Cubans had put forth a wide assortment of
remedies for the ills of racism. The Harlem Renaissance and Afrocubanismo movement
expanded and fortified these discussions as the threat of a second world war heightened
their urgency and impact. These conversations circulated within the Old Left
community, where Waldo Frank, Carelton Beals, and Anita Brenner pondered the
remaking of “America” using the lynchpin of culture. Guillén and Hughes placed
themselves squarely in this international debate. Both saw political efficacy central to the
social function of black artists. Neither believed that art alone would engender equality,
however, as the character Oceola in Hughes’s “The Blues I’m Playing” makes clear:
“And as for the cultured Negroes who were always saying art would break down color
lines, art could save the race and prevent lynchings! Bunk! My ma and pa were both
artists when it came to making music, and the white folks ran them out of town for being
dressed up in Alabama.”224
Negro en Haití, Negro en Jamaica, negro en New York, / negro en la Habana—dolor que en / vitrinas
negras vende la explotación—/ escucha allá en Scottsboro, en Scottsboro, en Scottsboro…/ Da al mundo
con tu angustia rebelde / tu humana voz…/ ¡y apaga un poco tus maracas! // Pedroso, Orbita de Regino
Pedroso, 150-152.
224
Langston Hughes, “The Blues I’m Playing,” in The Ways of White Folks (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1935), 110. Quoted in David Levering Lewis, When Harlem was in Vogue, (1997[1981]), xxiv. Lewis
miswrites when he places the quote from Hughes’s Not Without Laughter.
138
Boasian anthropology encouraged the decoupling of “race” and “culture,” which
prompted the latter’s extrication from the realm of biology in this landmark
epistemological shift. Social scientists increasingly viewed racial difference and
individual aptitude as a function of cultural assumptions and social constructions, a
paradigm that gained credence during the 1930s. Guillén rejected the dominant assertion
that all Afro-Cubans needed was to “develop mentally” to gain broader access to
organizations and institutions. He wrote that opportunities in education and professional
vocations had been closed to Afro-Cubans, though there continued to be Cubans of color
excelling in the humanities and sciences. He opined about the “Cuban Negro problem”
and the issue of culture by questioning the assumption that all Afro-Cubans needed was
cultural uplift. But he also held that timidity on the part of Afro-Cubans prevented bigger
strides in the professional world. He challenged whites, too, to denaturalize racial
barriers. “In my judgment,” he wrote, “the white man need only live near the black man,
show and handle himself in his spirit, where he would see the same ideology, his same
mentality, his same patriotism, identical yearning for progress, culture, and wellbeing.”225
Hughes expressed his thoughts on race and culture in terms of the social
obligations of writers. At the First American Writers’ Congress in New York City in
1935, he seconded the thinking of Regino Pedroso, saying that the writer of color needed
to “reveal to the white masses those Negro qualities which go beyond the mere ability to
laugh and sing and dance and make music.” At another speaking engagement, Hughes
said that if black and white were to coexist on equal terms so too did black and white
writers need to forge a united front in the literary community. Writers needed to expose
225
Guillén, Prosa de prisa, 1:7-9.
139
fissures in the U.S. democratic creed. He pressed the publishing world to acknowledge
African American writing and to go beyond the niche market of race literature, causing
him to lament, “When we cease to be exotic, we do not sell well.”226
The Fight for Spain
For both authors, questions of race and culture came to a head in a third national
space, in a distant fight whose inception involved neither black Cubans or African
Americans directly, but whose significance would galvanize the activist and creative
imaginations of black radicals around the world: the fight for Spain. The Spanish Civil
War (1936-1939) was the cause that allied Old Left European and American artists and
intellectuals. Spain represented the last-ditch effort to thwart fascism in a horrific dress
rehearsal for another world war. The topic of Spain connected issues of race and
democracy; it was there where anti-racism and anti-fascism melded with black cultural
politics that anticipated Double V campaigns and civil rights initiatives in the World War
II era. And it was where the matter of culture became crucial in the tenuous environment
of the withering Spanish republic.
In July 1937, Hughes and Guillén joined writers and artists from around the world
at the Second International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture in Paris and
various Spanish cities. Their purpose was to support the Loyalists and International
Brigades against Franco and fascism. A byproduct of the Popular Front, the gathering
provided a venue for organizations and representatives from the bellas artes community
to take aim at a number of political issues amid the unsettling reminders of war around
them. Spain brought world-class writers to the likes of W.H. Auden, Pablo Neruda,
Josephine Herbst, and Ernest Hemingway. In Spain, Guillén and Hughes served as war
226
Hughes, GMR, 125-130.
140
correspondents, prompting Guillén to recall later that his time there with Hughes was the
most important phase of their friendship.227
At the congress, Guillén took the opportunity to speak about fascism and its
implications for a desegregated, democratic world. He believed that the war represented
the gravest threat to artistic expression, and that fascism was the worst institutionalized
form of racism. He told his fellow delegates: “I come as a black man...[and] I am here to
remind you that the pariah condition of the Negro makes him the most energetic engine
of humanity, the force that projects him towards a wider horizon, more universal and just,
towards the horizon which all venerable men are fighting for in the world.” Guillén
continued by saying that the history of Afro-Cuba was also Spanish. Using the logic of
mestizaje, Guillén submitted that the ill-gotten legacy of colonization and slavery
produced shared biological and cultural traits between Cubans and Spaniards, a move
which at once condemned the violence of this history while forging empathy for the
Spanish cause. Guillén therefore remarked that at some level he too was Spanish, which
made more pronounced the connection between revolutionary struggle in Cuba and the
anti-fascist fight in Spain.228
Guillén sent dispatches to his literary magazine Mediodía including one that
contained an interview with renowned actor/singer Paul Robeson. Robeson, who sang
for soldiers in Spain and who organized on behalf of the anti-Franco army, linked the
Spanish cause with his racial consciousness:
As an artist, I know that it is dishonorable to put yourself on a plane above the
masses, but rather march at their side, participating in their anxieties and sorrows,
since we artists owe everything to them, from our formation to our well-being;
and it is not only as an artist that I love the cause of democracy in Spain, but also
227
228
Páginas vueltas, 106.
Guillén, Prosa de prisa, 1:80-82, 85.
141
as a Negro. I belong to an oppressed race, discriminated against, one that could
not live if fascism triumphed in the world. My father was a slave, and I don’t
want my children to be slaves.
Robeson’s inkling for activism was based on the familiar racial impulse and devout belief
in democracy. Following other black leftists, Robeson’s understanding of the artist’s
social duty effectively collapsed distinctions between art and politics in the anti-racist and
anti-fascist politics of the era.229
Hughes made his own diasporic connections to Spain: “Why had I come to
Spain?” he asked rhetorically: “To write for the colored press. I knew that Spain once
belonged to the Moors, a colored people ranging from light dark to dark white. Now the
Moors have come again to Spain with the Fascist armies as cannon fodder for France.
But, on the Loyalist side there are many colored people of various nationalities in the
International Brigades. I want to write about both Moors and colored people.” Hughes
followed the thinking of Guillén when he made the biological connection between blacks
and the Spanish cause, using diaspora history to animate modern-day struggles. At the
congress, Hughes delivered a speech in which he argued that U.S. blacks understood
fascism all too well: “Yes, we negroes in America do not have to be told what Fascism is
in action. We know. Its theories of Nordic supremacy and economic suppression have
long been realities to us.” For Hughes, a victory in Spain represented a blow against
fascism and racial oppression around the globe, for “Race means everything when the
Fascists of the world use it as a bugaboo and a terror to keep the working masses from
getting together.”230
229
230
Guillén, “Paul Robeson, al servicio del pueblo Español,” Mediodía, April 11, 1938, 10.
Hughes, GMR, 100, 102-104, 97-98.
142
The brutal war in Spain deeply affected Hughes’s poetic work. The following
excerpt from “Air Raid: Barcelona” reveals an instance in which his vivid language
conveys the chaos of war. The short, staccato phrasing elicits confusion and anxiety, as if
the reader is placed in the center of the bombing:
Flames and bombs and
Death in the ear!
The siren announces
Planes drawing near.
Down from bedrooms
Stumble women in gowns.
Men, half-dressed,
Carrying children rush down.
Up in the sky-lanes
Against the stars
A flock of death birds
Whose wings are steel bars
Fill the sky with a low dull roar
Of a plane,
two planes,
three planes,
five planes,
or more.
The anti-aircraft guns bark into space.
The searchlights make wounds
On the night’s dark face.
The siren’s wild cry
Like a hollow scream
Echoes out of hell in a nightmare dream
Then the BOMBS fall!
All other noises are nothing at all
When the BOMBS fall.
All other noises are suddenly still
When the BOMBS fall
All other noises are deathly still
As blood spatters the wall
The punctuated, march-like iambs produce a scene of bedlam and fright, generating a
gruesome reality of the frenzy of war. The verses also read like an image taken from a
journalistic document. Displaying linguistic devices borrowed from social realism, the
143
piece is a slice of reportage that puts a “print” story or photograph in lyrical form. “Air
Raid: Barcelona” literally reads as a headline, making Hughes’s rendering of war quasidocumentative and therefore more immediate and real to the reader.231
Guillén’s lyrical renditions of Spain’s war could also borrow from the
documentary style made popular during the Depression. “Fusilamiento” is a poem about
an execution that blends poetry and prose, in which the narrator is an eye-witness to a
tragic scene of a man killed by four soldiers. This poem also appeared in the
Hughes/Carruthers anthology under the title “Execution:”
They are about to shoot
a man with his arms tied.
Four soldiers
are about to fire.
Four silent soldiers
tied
the same as the man
they are going to kill
is tied.
Can’t you get away?
I can’t run.
They’re about to fire.
What can we do?
Maybe the guns aren’t loaded…
Loaded with six bullets of hot lead.
Maybe these soldiers won’t fire.
You must be crazy!
They do fire.
(How could they fire?)
They do kill
(How could they kill?)
Four silent soldiers,
an officer giving the signal
by lowering his sword.
Four soldiers
231
Hughes, GMR, 110-11.
144
tied
just like the man
they killed
was tied.
Unlike Guillén’s original, the responses (“I can’t run”) are placed in italics in the
translation, so that the reader may better “hear” both the voice of the soldier waiting to
die and the witnesses to the scene (“What can we do?”). Guillén documents how war
immobilizes the will of both executioner and victim; both are “tied” to the wishes of
political leaders and generals. Recalling Francisco Goya’s The Third of May 1808 that
showed the execution of a Spanish citizen by four soldiers in Napoleon’s army, Guillén
directly implicates the reader in the scene, as Goya did with the viewer of his painting.
Both onlookers are inescapable observers of executions and thus directly connected to—
and tangentially responsible for—the death of the innocent.232
Conclusion
This chapter has demonstrated the ways in which African Americans and AfroCubans participated in a diasporic dialogue energized by Cuban revolutionary politics
and the Spanish Civil War. While progress was made in the revolutionary era, however,
the cultural advancement of Cubans of color in the fields of art and entertainment did not
always translate to greater political participation or social privilege. The segregated
spheres of recreation and politics remained entrenched; like their African American
counterparts, Afro-Cubans remained excluded from many white social spaces such as
cabarets, clubs, and beaches.
Furthermore, this chapter has demonstrated how the poetic form served the
diasporic imaginations of Nicolás Guillén and Langston Hughes in the age of black
232
Guillén, Cuba libre, 48-49. Another version of Hughes’s translation appears in Dudley Fitts, ed.,
Anthology of Contemporary Latin-American Poetry (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1942), 247.
145
modernism. Through their adherence to local considerations, Hughes and Guillén posited
their projections of black cultural politics within broader developments of diasporic art.
Along with Regino Pedroso and Gwendolyn Bennett, the poetry of Hughes and Guillén
was laden with musical associations; music was poetry and poetry music. Aural
sensations remained important, from the rhythms of Cuba to the cacophony of war in
Spain. In thinking about art and politics in social causes, it is worthwhile to consider
Robin D.G. Kelley’s writing on the connection between social movements and poetry,
particularly within what he terms “the black radical imagination.” Kelley suggests that
social movements require poetry to voice the unconscious, the unsaid, and to take us to a
newly imagined future. Poetry, he writes, is “a revolt: a scream in the night, an
emancipation of language and old ways of thinking.” Poetry, he continues, is where we
discover “cognitive maps of the future, of the world not yet born.” 233 Paying attention to
the rhymes and rhythms of prior moments of lyrical activism affords new ways of seeing
the past and forging a more just future. It is therefore worthwhile to engage the formal
qualities used by cultural producers in issues of identity and praxis and excavate the ways
in which the politics of writing—and the aesthetics of politics—have become tied to the
cultural genealogies specific to time and space.
Hughes and Guillén saw each other for the last time in 1949 at a peace conference
in New York. This meeting occurred when memories of the 1933 revolution were fading,
yet on the eve of a revolution in Cuba that would cause a more resounding impact.234
The dismal racial politics in the United States continued to influence Guillén’s poetry.
Poems such as “Lynch,” “KKK,” and “Little Rock” marked the 1930s legacy in his
233
Robin D.G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002),
10.
234
Ellis, “Nicolás Guillén,” 154.
146
poetry of the 1950s and 1960s.235 African Americans also maintained their interest in
Cuban politics in the modern civil rights era. Revolution would thrust Fidel Castro, Che
Guevara, and prominent members of the July 26th Movement to positions of leadership
and would bring race to the foreground of Cuban nationalism once again. As we shall
see, Cuba’s later revolutionary experiment promised to usher in a socialist society free
from racism and class inequality. Cuban politics, therefore, continued to animate
diasporic initiatives.
But before entering this new moment, I will stay in the 1930s in order to delve
into the ways in which Cuban politics shaped the inchoate Roosevelt administration’s
foreign policy in Latin America. Joining Guillén, Hughes, and other cultural producers
of different stripes in the geographic relocation of “America,” state agencies in Havana
and Washington, D.C. promulgated their own formulations of inter-American culture.
Debates over revolution and culture became national concerns for Washington leaders
wishing to maintain pan-American solidarity while Cuban leaders struggled for
legitimacy in the international arena during a time of great geopolitical uncertainly in the
world. This discussion is the subject of the next chapter.
235
Winston Orrillo, ed., Cuba, amor y revolución. Nicolás Guillén (Lima: Editorial Causachun, 1972), 80;
Angel Augier, ed., Nicolás Guillén. Nuevo antología mayor (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1979), 171174.
147
Chapter 3
Good or Bad Neighbors? Pan-American Diplomacy and the 1933 Cuban Revolution
Let the Americas show the way…by being the best of good neighbors, let us offer the
finest possible example for a jaded and disillusioned world.236
Secretary of State Cordell Hull, 1933
The fundamental obstacle to good relations between Cuba and the United States is the
widespread belief in Cuba that the American State Department attempts to make and
unmake governments, and that the present disturbed situation is an outgrowth of a plan
for provisional government which Washington induced the Cubans to accept.237
Foreign Policy Association, 1935
When Franklin Roosevelt entered the White House in 1933 he faced significant
challenges in domestic and foreign policy. Historians have analyzed Roosevelt’s
response to the Great Depression and the action he took to reverse Hoover’s “do nothing”
approach toward economic stimulus. Lesser known, however, are Roosevelt’s early
foreign policy in Latin America, a topic usually eclipsed by his World War II strategy for
an allied victory. Yet in March of 1933 Roosevelt not only inherited from his
predecessors a dismal economy but a marred history of foreign policy across the
Americas as well. Military interventions in Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican
Republic, as well as trade legislation that favored U.S. interests over those of its
neighbors, contributed to an overall hostility and lack of confidence towards the United
States from other American republics. By the time of Roosevelt’s inauguration, these
policies had spawned vast anti-American sentiments both on the home front and from
afar.
236
Cordell Hull, Addresses and Statements by the Honorable Cordell Hull in Connection with His Trip to
South America 1933-1934 (Washington: GPO, 1935), 14.
237
Foreign Policy Association, Problems of the New Cuba, 497.
148
Roosevelt’s counsel believed that perceived hostility in Latin America and rising
anti-imperialist dissent at home threatened Uncle Sam’s interests in the region and the
world. Better hemispheric relations, it was hoped, would produce peace, foster economic
stimulus, and neutralize the threat posed by fascist aggression in Europe and the Far East.
Roosevelt expressed the desire to recast relations between the United States and other
American republics in a different light in what came to be known as his “Good Neighbor
Policy,” a political mantra spelled out in his 1933 inaugural address. Here Roosevelt
introduced a brief but galvanizing philosophy of foreign relations in the Western
Hemisphere: “In the field of world policy I would dedicate this nation to the policy of the
good neighbor—the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and, because he does so,
respects the rights of others…”238 Though only a few words, and never a legally bound
policy, the idea of Good Neighbor would become one of the cornerstones of Roosevelt’s
early foreign diplomacy; it would be a phrase invoked repeatedly throughout his tenure
and beyond, and became the initial blueprint by which the White House and State
Department approached the idea of nonintervention and nonaggression in the Americas.
Using this philosophy, Roosevelt and his staff pursued changing the image of the United
States from a big brother to a good neighbor.239
This chapter investigates the ways in which the administration approached the
1933 Cuban revolution in the era of Good Neighboring and Cuba’s location in inter-war
initiatives of Pan-Americanism. This discussion joins other foreign policy studies that
238
“First Inaugural Address of Franklin D. Roosevelt,” speech given 4 March 1933. From “The Avalon
Project” at Yale Law School, http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/presiden/inaug/froos1.htm (accessed
August 24, 2008).
239
“Good Neighbor” was a trope used by Hoover on a pre-inauguration tour of Latin America, but FDR
augmented its importance by suggesting it as a policy approach in his inaugural address. See Eric P.
Roorda, The Dictator Next Door: The Good Neighbor Policy and the Trujillo Regime in the Dominican
Republic, 1930-1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 29, 34; Espinosa, Inter-American, 2223.
149
focus on U.S.-Latin American relations during the interwar era, and adds to this literature
by understanding the period as the backdrop to the diplomatic meltdown between Cuba
and the United States in 1959.240 Preventing missteps in the “Cuban situation” was
paramount, since the Cuban tumult coincided with the Seventh Conference of InterAmerican States held in Montevideo, Uruguay. If mishandled by Washington, the 1933
revolution threatened to blemish the United States’ record once again. At the same time,
Cuba’s own state leadership wanted to maintain the economic benefits of Good
Neighboring while keeping U.S. intervention at bay. For the United States, Cuba
functioned as an important test case in the promotion of Pan-American cooperation,
while Cuban politics remained volatile following the dictatorship. The new nationalism
was marked by intense anti-U.S. sentiment along with progressive legislative reform.
Revolution brought the abrogation of the Platt Amendment as well suffrage for Cuban
women. Increasingly, Cubans cried foul as they believed their sovereignty was beholden
to U.S. influence, even as the Cuban government also trumpeted the tenets of interAmerican fraternity in order to garner regional legitimacy.
After a discussion of U.S.-Cuban politics and diplomatic maneuvering around the
1933 revolution, this chapter moves to examine the hopes and failures of PanAmericanity along the axis of culture. Within the broader discourse of Pan-Americanity
were government debates, speeches, and literature in which questions of culture became
critical to U.S.-Cuban relations, part of the U.S. Department of State’s strategy for
hemispheric solidarity and the Cuba’s struggle for political stability. This discussion
240
Roorda, The Dictator Next Door; Harvey Neptune, Caliban and the Yankees: Trinidad and the United
States Occupation (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Fredrick B. Pike, FDR's
Good Neighbor policy: Sixty Years of Generally Gentle Chaos (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995).
150
show that with the growth of U.S. institutions such as think tanks and governmental
bureaucracies that disseminated cultural expressions came a form of neocolonial
ambivalence—the “not quite/slightly less than”—that asymmetrically assigned value to
Cuba as a people, culture, and government, which continued a familiar script from the
1898 period and anticipated the triumphalist imaginary of West in the post-World War II
era. Organizations such as the Department of Cultural Relations and Office of the
Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs issued films, tourist literature, and other cultural
vehicles that promoted the idea of reciprocity and sovereign rights, but which also drew
from principles of difference, a historical “Othering” that couched U.S. intervention as
necessary and beneficial to Cubans and other Latin Americans.
The Cuban Revolution and U.S. Mediation
State and Revolution
In the wake of the political reshuffling, a loose confederation of students, military,
and labor unions supported the provisional government led by Dr. Ramón Grau San
Martín in September 1933. The revolutionary program stressed tenets of modern
democracy and national sovereignty built out of a revolutionary impulse that emerged
from the prior decade. Robert Whitney has written about the rise of the clases populares
[popular classes] in Cuba against an oligarchy held by cauldillos and caciques, or Cuban
politicians who came from a class of business and landowning elite whose power was
supported by U.S. financial brokers. Beginning in the 1920s, a process of “mass
mobilization” upset this political structure, though did not destroy it, as Cuba witnessed a
period of modest economic growth and expansion of state power.241
241
Aguilar, Cuba, 163; Whitney, State and Revolution, 19-20.
151
In 1925, Machado won the presidency under the banner of “Cooperativism,”
which sought to unite Conservative, Popular, and Liberal parties. But signs of party
dissent appeared as early as 1927 when the Union Nationalist party formed in opposition
to Machado, with Carlos Mendieta and Mario Menocal its leading representatives. Signs
that Machado intended to work against constitutional dictates to maintain power became
evident in 1928, when the Constitutional Assembly backed an unconstitutional 6-year
term extension for Machado, allowing him presidential power until May 1935.242
The twenties also produced a radical spirit signaled by the formation of groups
such as the Federation of University Students in 1923, which grew and broadened its
political reach by becoming the University Student Directorate (DEU) in 1927. As
Havana took on the veneer of a dictatorship, organized labor made a show of force as
economic conditions worsened. CNOC’s membership grew to 200,000 by 1930 under
the direction of Rubén Martínez Villena. In 1932 SNOIA appeared as a forceful alliance
of some 100,000 rural workers while the AIE grew its ranks between 1931 and 1935.
The ABC remained an organization made up of middle-class professional with ties to
clandestine acts of violence.243
Cuba’s fledging economy heavily affected mobilization of the clases populares.
From 1923-1933 Cuban imports from United States decreased $191M to $22M while
Cuban exports to the U.S. decreased from $362M to $57M.244 Sugar production
plummeted 60% between 1929 and 1933, while U.S. legislation such as the Hawley242
The six-year term extension was approved in 1928. It designated that after May 20, 1935, no president
could aspire to a second term. The same year leaders who supported Machado passed an “Emergency
Law,” which prohibited parties other than Liberal, Conservative, and Popular from running in election. As
a result, Machado became the only legal candidate running and thus ran unopposed. Aguilar, Cuba 1933,
89.
243
Pérez, Cuba under Platt, 258-282; Whitney, State and Revolution, 58-59, 73-80, 84-93, 104.
244
Pérez, Cuba under Platt, 301.
152
Smoot Tariff raised the duty on Cuban sugar 2 cents/lb to spur American beet sugar
production. This made Cuba’s share of the U.S. sugar market decline from 49% in 1930
to 25.3% 1933. The value of Cuban exports to the U.S. was also falling, from $434
million in 1924 to $80 million in 1932, while U.S. imports of Cuban goods decreased
from $290 million in 1924 and to $51.2 million in 1933.245 With a dismal economy and
increasingly restrictive state apparatus, Cuban society rebelled.
U.S. Mediation
By the time Roosevelt took the oath of office, Cuba under Machado suffered
widespread political violence and repression, the University of Havana was closed, and
political imprisonment and assassinations were on the rise. The general anger included
anti-Yankee feeling that indicted the United States for years of economic and political
meddling in Cuban affairs. Cubans called for an end to the Platt Amendment, which
ostensibly legitimized years of U.S. intervention and provided the legal path for huge
financial involvement in Cuba. Roosevelt’s Latin American team saw Cuba as an
opportunity to reverse the trend of U.S. military intervention, and therefore wanted
Machado’s departure peaceful and without further incident. Eager to present a reformed
image, the young administration did not want to rescind its Good Neighbor commitment,
and Cuba developed into a test for Roosevelt’s diplomatic mettle as it had a rallying cry
for U.S. progressives, radicals, and liberals.246 An early bilateral predicament of his
presidency, Roosevelt intended to prove himself an astute diplomat and a faithful steward
of the Good Neighbor policy.
245
Whitney, State and Revolution, 58-59.
Irwin Gellman, Secret Affairs Franklin Roosevelt, Cordell Hull, and Sumner Welles (Baltimore: John
Hopkins University Press, 1995), 85-86.
246
153
In April 1933, Roosevelt sent his specialist in Latin American affairs, Sumner
Welles, to doctor a Cuban compromise. Like Roosevelt, Welles had attended the Groton
Academy and Harvard University, but more than pedigree Welles had proved himself an
astute diplomat, holding posts in Japan at age 22 and Argentina at 24, and eventually
ascending to Chief of the Latin American Division under President Harding—the
youngest to ever hold the position. A long-time student of Latin American policy and
history, and known for his mediation work in the Dominican Republic, Welles believed
that past dealings with Latin American republics had produced no real benefits to the
United States but rather had fomented an unruly imperialist image. A framer of the
administration’s new neighborly precepts, Welles seemed a likely candidate to broker a
compromise in Cuba.247
Welles tried to persuade Machado to hold elections by the fall of 1934, a year
earlier than the president’s self-fashioned term extension dictated. But when Cuban
society became more turbulent, Welles decided to try to convince Machado to resign.
Welles supported Carlos Manuel de Céspedes as the replacement, but after the coup,
Welles advised landing troops on the island, which Roosevelt and Hull wanted to avoid,
though FDR did send a fleet of 30 warships to Cuba’s coastline and mobilized one
thousand marines in Quantico, Virginia. The administration did not recognize the Grauled government, since the State Department advocated official recognition of those
governing bodies that came about through peaceful transitions rather than by abrupt
overthrows of government. Thus, recognition came only for the country that could prove
247
Benjamin Welles, Sumner Welles: FDR’s Global Strategist (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 8689; Sumner Welles, “Pan American Cooperation,” (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1935), 5. There has been a
fair amount of literature on the mediation efforts of Welles. See Gellman, Secret Affairs, 85-86; Aguilar,
Cuba; Pérez, Cuba under Platt; Gellman, Roosevelt and Batista, Ch. 2.
154
legitimate support, with legitimacy defined by the United States. Welles’s replacement,
Jefferson Caffery, would be sent to Cuba as “Special Representative of the President,”
rather than “Ambassador,” since the latter would have conferred official recognition of
the Grau government.248
Elections in Cuba never came under Welles, and he returned to Washington
unsuccessful in December of 1933, a recall that had been planned since the beginning of
his appointment.249 Roosevelt replaced Welles with Jefferson Caffery, a substitution
planned earlier but one perhaps hasted by Welles’s persona non grata status in Cuba.
Grau’s position eventually became tenuous, his popularity plummeting due to a major rift
with university students and the military.250 His replacement was U.S.-backed Carlos
Mendieta, who had the support of Colonel Batista and Welles before his departure.
Despite neither having won an election of any kind, nor having garnered popular support,
the United States recognized Mendieta as president of Cuba in January 1934.251
Good Neighbor on Tour: The Politics of Pan-Americanity
With Welles in Cuba, Secretary of State Cordell Hull geared up for a ten-week
tour of South America, highlighted by the Seventh International Conference of American
States. Inter-American conferences began under Secretary of State James G. Blaine, who
urged the formation of the International Bureau of American Republics in 1889. The first
of such meetings was held in 1890 in Washington, D.C., with subsequent meetings
248
Welles, Sumner Welles, 70; Gellman, Roosevelt and Batista, 46-50; Aguilar, Cuba, 164, 204-05; Pérez,
Cuba under Platt, 324-28; Gellman, Secret Affairs, 75; Gellman, Roosevelt and Batista, 77.
249
Welles, Sumner Welles, 157.
250
Having become disillusioned with Grau, Batista and other officers planned another coup, but were found
out. The University Directorate—staunch supporters of Grau—wanted Batista executed for treason, but
Grau pardoned him. This caused the rift between Grau and the Directorate, which eventually led to its
dissolution.
251
Pérez, Cuba under Platt, 330-332.
155
convened in Mexico City (1901-02), Rio de Janeiro (1906), Buenos Aires (1910),
Santiago, (1923), and the Sixth Conference in Havana in 1928, during which the
organization changed its organ heading to the Pan American Union (PAU), though “Pan
American” had been colloquially used since 1910.252 In the first quarter century,
conference topics ranged from health and hygiene to eugenics, education, and
transportation. Representatives discussed reciprocal trade treaties, railroad initiatives,
and banking, with the primary order of business transnational trade, technology, and
communication among the twenty-one member states.253 Headquartered in Washington,
D.C., the PAU endeavored “to strengthen the work of the Union in every possible way,
and to make it an increasingly important factor in the development of closer economic,
cultural and social ties between the republics of the Americas.” Director General L.S.
Rowe believed that the “moral union” of the American Republics “rest[ed] on the
juridical equality of the Republics of the Continent and in the mutual respect of the rights
inherent in their complete independence, their economic interests, and the coordination of
their social and intellectual activities…”254 Washington, D.C. remained the base of
operations for the organization, a reminder that much of the group’s guidance remained
under U.S. direction.
Pan-American dialogue did not rid the region of hostilities towards the United
States. Events such as the Spanish-American War, building of the Panama Canal, and
numerous instances of “gunboat diplomacy” produced diplomatic rancor. In 1905, the
252
Roorda, Dictator Next Door, 24.
Pan American Union, Seventh International Conference of American States (Baltimore, MD: Sun Book
& Job Printing Office, Inc, 1933), 16-21.
254
Report by the Director General L.S. Rowe, “Organization and Functions of the Pan American Union as
Affected by the Conventions and Resolutions Adopted at the Sixth International Conference of American
States, Havana, Cuba, January 16-February 20, 1928” (March 7, 1928), 1-2.
253
156
Roosevelt Corollary retooled the Monroe Doctrine in a twentieth-century light, which
kept U.S. economic and political prerogatives in the region ahead of those of Europe or
Asia. U.S. economic policy as well as military incursions, in particular, hurt Uncle
Sam’s image in Latin America during the first quarter century, so that by the time of the
1933 conference U.S. leaders were eager to prove that Good Neighbor promises would
extend beyond rhetoric.255
Topping the U.S. agenda at the conference in Montevideo, Uruguay, were the
three interlocking items of securing hemispheric peace, containing militarization of
Europe and the Far East, and insuring economic stability across the Americas. Cordell
Hull promoted peace and mutual financial security while hoping to repair the tarred
image of the United States. Hull used a cultural logic that put the Pan-American
relationship in common civilizational terms, suggesting that the Americas would take up
where Europe slipped, as war and fascism threatened the cradle of Occidental history.
“We know,” the secretary of state announced, “when we survey our assets that we have
the foundations in this part of the world laid for the greatest civilization of all the past—a
civilization built upon the highest moral, intellectual, and spiritual ideals.” Hull posited
peace in the Americas as the new model for world affairs as he appealed to the notion of
a metaphysical commonality shared by all American republics.256 If hemispheric
solidarity promised to be a formidable adversary to a world of instability, then the notion
of a shared history and civilization by the American republics would be the basis of this
alliance:
We come because we share in common the things that are vital to the entire
material, moral, and spiritual welfare of the people of this hemisphere and
255
256
Roorda, Dictator Next Door, 28.
Hull, Addresses and Statements, 10, 92.
157
because the satisfactory development of civilization itself in this Western World
depends on cooperative efforts by all the Americas.…We know when we survey
our assets that we have the foundations in this part of the world laid for the
greatest civilization of all the past—a civilization built upon the highest moral,
intellectual, and spiritual ideals.257
The new Pan-Americanity, therefore, could be the basis for a new world order. With
references to “old” Europe and the “new” republics in the west, the dawn of a new
political age would be forged in contrast to the Europe of old. U.S. leadership wanted to
position the republics on North and South continents as uniquely bonded in their
civilizational past and political future. This U.S.-centered model needed support from
Latin American republics to bring peace and prosperity to the new world order.
Hull revised the frontier mentality that underlined the covetous image of the
United States, favoring support for national sovereignty and a new economic paradigm
sponsored by Roosevelt Democrats:
The United States is determined that its new policy of the New Deal—of
enlightened liberalism—shall have full effect and shall be recognized in its fullest
import by its neighbors. The people of my country strongly feel that the so-called
right of conquest must forever be banished from this hemisphere, and most of all
they shun and reject that so-called right for themselves. 258
The new financial model and retreat from military imperatives were the underpinnings of
the new “enlightened liberalism.” Couched and innovative and modern, it stood in stark
contrast to a Europe that was at risk of becoming a relic of modernity:
Indeed, while older nations totter under the burden of outworn ideas, cling to the
decayed and cruel institution of war, and use precious resources to feed cannon
rather than hungry mouths, we stand ready to carry on in the spirit of that
application of the Golden Rule by which we mean the true good will of the true
good neighbor.
257
258
Peace and War: United States Foreign Policy, 1931-1941 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1943), 196-98.
Ibid.
158
The Good Neighbor trope formed part of a new historical narrative that stressed “political
liberty” and the “greatest common heritage” among American republics. Thus the “new
world order” thrived while “the Old World look[ed] hopefully in this direction.” On
another occasion, Hull intoned that psychology was on the new West’s side: “We have a
belt of sanity on this part of the globe. We are as one as to the objective we seek. We
agree that it is a forward-looking enterprise which brings us here, and we must make it a
forward-moving enterprise.”259 The pledge to be a “good neighbor” committed
Washington to a different direction in Latin American policy, and Hull waxed optimistic:
Let us in the broad spirit of this revitalized policy make this the beginning of a
great new era, of a great renaissance in American cooperative effort to promote
our entire material, moral, and spiritual affairs and to erect an edifice of peace that
will forever endure.
All countries needed to take up the pledge of Good Neighbor, for it insured a prosperous
future for all republics in the hemisphere:
Let actions rather than mere words be the acid test of the conduct and motives of
each nation. Let each country demonstrate by its every act and practice the
sincerity of its purposes and the unselfishness of its relationships as a neighbor. It
is in this spirit that the Government and the people of the United States express
their recognition of the common interests and common aspirations of the
American nations and join with them in a renewed spirit of broad cooperation for
the promotion of liberty under law of peace, of justice, and of righteousness.260
Non-aggression, then, was fundamentally linked to economic growth. Upon returning to
the United States in January 1934, Hull remarked that the conference held a “confidence
born of the feeling that the United States, instead of being an arrogant or indifferent big
brother, is sincerely eager for the role of equal partnership with the other Americas…”
259
260
Ibid.
Ibid.
159
The new beacon of civilization depended on the avenues of moral and commercial uplift
in the U.S.-centric model of hemispheric cohesion.261
Hull and other U.S. representatives floated these and other ideas at the Seventh
Inter-American Conference in Montevideo, Uruguay. The U.S. delegation also included
Ambassador to Argentina, Alexander W. Weddell, former Ambassador to Mexico, J.
Reuben Clark, Minister to Uruguay J. Butler Wright, Professor Sophinsba Breckinridge
from the University of Chicago (one of three women delegates), Dr. Ernest Gruening,
editor of The Nation, and Spruille Braden, later ambassador to Cuba. The conference
convened ten commissions, twenty-four subcommissions, seven plenary sessions, and
adopted six conventions and ninety-four resolutions addressing an array of topics,
including commissions on “Organization of Peace, Political and Civil Rights of Women”
and “Intellectual Cooperation.” Delegates voiced their grievances around ending Chaco
conflict between Bolivia and Paraguay and U.S. trade restrictions such as the HawleySmoot tariff.262
Participants shared the sense of urgency of peace and national sovereignty, but the
United States remained the elephant in the room. U.S. involvement in Cuba complicated
the spirit of camaraderie at the conference, especially as the Platt Amendment remained a
sore spot on Uncle Sam’s record. U.S. warships patrolling Cuba’s coasts represented a
violation of sovereignty, which forced the awkward debate over the distinction between
“intervention” and “mediation.” One of the said Results of the conference sought to
make a distinction between the two, stating “whereby it shall never be considered an
unfriendly act for any State or States to offer good offices or mediation to other States
261
Hull, Addresses and Statements, vii-ix, 3-6, 10, 14, 28-29, 37-38, 84.
Charles A. Thomson, “The Seventh Pan-American Conference, Montevideo,” Foreign Policy Reports,
June 6, 1934, 86-96.
262
160
engaged in a controversy threatening or rupturing their peaceful relations.” Similarly,
Article 8 held that “no state has the right to intervene in the internal or external affairs of
another” while Article 11 ruled that “the territory of a state is inviolable and may not be
the object of military occupation nor of other measures of force imposed by another state
directly or indirectly or for any motive whatever even temporarily.” Finally, Article 10
codified the policy of peace among the 21 states.263
The United States signed off on these initiatives, but Hull delivered
“reservations” around mediation, reiterating that “every observing person must by this
time thoroughly understand that under the Roosevelt Administration the United States
Government is as much opposed as any other government to interference with the
freedom, sovereignty, or other internal affairs or processes of the government of other
nations.” The presence of warships on Cuba’s coastline and refusal to recognize Grau’s
government prompted delegate Giraudy of Cuba and others to protest such measures.
Hull indirectly defended the Platt Amendment and therefore the U.S. position on Cuba
while the matter became a problematic point for Giraudy and other delegates.
Ultimately, the U.S. was forced to comprise and stated intentions to withdraw from Haiti
and to consider the abrogation of Platt.264 The intervention debate at the conference
caused the U.S. to reconsider, and immediately following the conference while speaking
at the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, FDR submitted that “definitely policy of the United
263
“Report on the Results of the Seventh International Conference of American States, Montevideo,
Uruguay, December 2-26, 1933,” Submitted by Director General at the session of February 21, 1934
(Washington, D.C., 1934) 5, 36.
264
Seventh International Conference of American States, Final Act (Montevideo: J. Florensa, 1934), 187195.
161
States from now on is one opposed to armed intervention,” an early sign of FDR’s later
policies of quarantine and neutrality to contain the war in Europe.265
Furthermore, populist and progressive politics undergirded the conference. The
meeting put in place a liberal agenda of multinational rights and privileges, including a
progressive approach to women’s rights, labor, and trade. Delegates called for proposals
for better management over working conditions, immigration rights, and workers
insurance.266 Resolution 79 called for the “Improvement of the Conditions of the
Working Classes,” which advocated “obligatory insurance for all wage earners, without
distinction of age, sex or nationality.”267 The depression-era zeitgeist produced a
hemispheric shift on labor and matters of “social inequality.” Representatives addressed
grievances from “creole and aboriginal populations” and “misery and economic injustice
for the workers of cities and farms.” They proposed an Inter-American Labor Institute to
be headquartered in Buenos Aires that would supervise rights to organize, collective
bargaining, minimum wage, “equal pay for equal work regardless of sex or nationality,”
eight-hour work day, abolition of child labor, obligatory holidays, five-day work week,
insurance, women’s rights, child welfare, and demands for equality from “creole,”
“Indian,” and “mestizo” workers. The laudable agenda, however, omitted protective
measures for Afro-descendant peoples.268
In 1928 the Sixth Pan-American conference in Havana had created the InterAmerican Commission of Women, an ironic measure given that Cuban women lacked
265
Charles A. Thomson, “The Seventh Pan-American Conference, Montevideo,” Foreign Policy Reports,
June 6, 1934, 94-95.
266
Pan American Union, Seventh International Conference of American States (Baltimore, MD: Sun Book
& Job Printing Office, Inc, 1933) 25-56.
267
Final Act, 40, 90-92, 121-122, 134.
268
Final Act, 45-50.
162
suffrage at the time. At the 1933 conference, under the direction of Doris Stevens, the
commission resolved to take on patriarchy: “That men are by nature entitled to rule over
women is, on its face, scandalous and unworthy of a hemisphere dedicated to freedom.”
The group likened women’s status to “that of a slave” and pushed for equal political and
social considerations for female citizens in the 21 republics. Women recommended the
ratification of the “Treaty of Equal Rights for Women,” a treaty to remove sex
discrimination in member states. After initial opposition, the U.S. supported the treaty
that stated “there will be no distinction based on sex as regards nationality, in their
legislation or in their practice.”269 Women across the Americas also fought to eliminate
obstacles on owning businesses and serving on juries. They also organized to augment
marriage age consent laws, which were as low as 12 to 14 for girls in some countries.270
Pan-Americanity and Cuba’s Revolt
Cuba’s revolutionary leadership hoped the conference in Montevideo would bring
regional recognition to President Grau. The Cuban delegation used Good Neighbor logic
to press the case for domestic stability and international legitimacy, and in doing so
delegates Angel Alberto Giraudy, Herminio Portell Vilá, and Alfredo Nogueira Herrera
had to toe the line between levying criticism at the United States for its interventionist
bravado and needing official status from the U.S. and other member states.271 Grau sent
remarks acknowledging the formidable obstacles in his government but followed the
Good Neighbor tone by stressing Cuba’s commitment to “harmony” in the inter269
Charles A. Thomson, “The Seventh Pan-American Conference, Montevideo,” Foreign Policy Reports,
June 6, 1934, 86-96.
270
“Comisión Interamericana de Mujeres,” Archivo Nacional, Fondo Donativos y Remisiones, Caja 300,
Nos. 19, 21.
271
Pichardo, Documentos, 107; Gaceta Oficial de la republica de Cuba, Nov. 14, 1933, Archivo Nacional,
Fondo Donativos y Remisiones, Caja 300, No. 3; “Declaraciones de la Delegación Cubana al VII Congreso
Internacional Americano, Sobre la Significación de la Conferencia,” Archivo Nacional, Fondo Donativos y
Remisiones, Caja 300, No. 25.
163
American collective: “The Cuban delegation will do whatever possible to tighten the
union and the existing bonds of solidarity among the American republics, praising the
Cuban national feeling and the spirit of pan-Americanism to assure success at the
Seventh and future Pan-American conferences.” Grau stressed Cuban nationalism within
the broader inter-American vision and assured other republics that Cuba was unified in its
national vision.272
Herminio Vilá used Good Neighbor [Buen Vecino] rhetoric to pressure the U.S.
into public support of Cuba’s revolutionary government by indicating that “Secretary
Hull personally honors those [Good Neighbor] declarations and Cuba hopes that those
assertions become actions that can dispel suspicion and avoid differences between both
populations.” As the U.S. delegation made positive pronouncements of Pan-Americanity,
Vilá reminded participants of the unequal policies and treaties that undid the merits of
such good will and common identity.273 He assailed the history of U.S. involvement in
Cuba, saying that “Cuba was born with a congenital defect of intervention, and that
intervention, represented by the Platt Amendment, has been the substitute for U.S.
annexation of Cuba.” Vilá used history as a guide for U.S. intentions, recalling that the
Joint Resolution was passed because Cuba was left out of Treaty of Paris negotiations
between Spain and the United States. Vilá called the Platt Amendment and Permanent
Treaty “acts of coercion,” and maintained that Cubans didn’t freely choose the Treaty or
the Amendment because they were under the mercy of “North American bayonets.”
Other nations criticized the United States for its maintenance of Platt, and some, such as
272
“Palabras del Señor Presidente de la República a la Delegación de Cuba a la VII Conferencia
Americana,” Archivo Nacional, Fondo Donativos y Remisiones, Caja 300, No. 5.
273
“Delegación Cubana al VII Congreso Panamericano,” Archivo Nacional, Fondo Donativos y
Remisiones, Caja 300, No. 8, pp. 12, 28-30.
164
Mexico, supported recognition of Cuba’s revolutionary government. Hull responded to
Vilá saying FDR was considering revamping the Permanent Treaty but avoided the issue
directly. Overall, Cuba’s gestures towards confronting the U.S. yielded little action, with
most conference representatives withholding judgment of the United States under the
new Democratic administration.274
Cuban officials presented a strongly-worded report to Cordell Hull that claimed
unity in Cuba under the “unanimous rebellion against Machado and his regime.”
According to the report, the New Cuba was a product of a “stronger, deeper and more
transcendental revolution latent in the heart of the Cuban people for many decades,”
though “dormant at times when a certain degree of artificial prosperity prevailed in the
island.” Cuban leaders may have overstated the level of national unity in Cuba at the
time, but the illusion of a cohesive polity justified criticism towards U.S. intervention and
requests for official recognition. The document berated the United States for minimizing
Cuban participation in the immediate post-independence period and demanded the
retirement of the Platt Amendment in curiously prescient language that would reappear
more trenchant a generation later: “Cuba has been independent in name and spirit only.
The present revolution in this particular sense represents the last desperate efforts of a
people to be free, of a nation to live, of a republic to be born.” The delegation fended off
accusations that Grau was a Communist and instead charged that the United States
inhibited future political reform and social improvement by its stand on non-recognition
and continued intervention. Cuban representatives used anticommunist logic to argue
that the recognition of Grau was necessary, because “if San Martín falls, the masses will
274
“Diario de la VII Conferencia Internacional Americana,” 20 Dec. 1933, Archivo Nacional, Fondo
Donativos y Remisiones, Caja 300, No. 16; Caja 300, No. 10, pp. 28-45.
165
no longer remain peaceful and restrained, but will be prone to pursue a decidedly violent
course in which communism thrives best.”275
Vilá motioned to what would become the dominant narrative of grievances a
generation later: U.S. occupation of Cuba; the absence of Cuban leaders in negotiations
with Spain; the despotic leadership of Leonard Wood and Elihu Root; and the imperial
passage of the Platt Amendment and the Permanent Treaty, which ended the U.S.
occupation but put in place the legal framework for direction of Cuban affairs by the
United States. This testimonial would be revisited by Fidel Castro and other
revolutionary leaders who charged that after 1902, Cuba still existed as a de facto
neocolonial possession of the United States.276 But in 1933, Vilá expressed optimism
about Pan-Americanity and the conference in a letter to President Grau, noting progress
in gaining recognition by Chile, Argentina, and Haiti. He indicated a private one-hour
discussion with Hull during which they talked about Welles and the “errors of North
American politics.” According to Vilá, Hull assured that Welles would no longer deal
with Cuba, Jefferson Caffery would be answering directly to Roosevelt and Hull, and that
the administration would review the possibility of recognition.277
In Cuba, the 1933 revolution produced new nationalist desires that focused on
work, health, and the expansion of democratic rights. The economy had taken a turn for
the worse, with Cuban exports to U.S. declining from $362M in 1924 to a staggeringly
$57M in 1933. U.S. exports to Cuba plummeted from $171M in 1924 to $23M in 1933,
275
“What some American observers have failed to see in the Cuban scene,” Archivo Nacional, Fondo
Donativos y Remisiones, Caja 300, No. 28.
276
“Notas para un discurso, Dec. 19, 1933, Archivo Nacional, Fondo Donativos y Remisiones, Caja 301,
No. 1.
277
Letter from Vilá to Grau, December 25,1933, Archivo Nacional, Fondo Donativos y Remisiones, Caja
301, No. 9, Doc. 12.
166
which represented a considerable business loss for companies in both countries.278 With
a bad economy, more Cubans were out of work. In response to intense labor pressure,
the Grau government passed the “Fifty Percent law,” which imposed limits on foreignborn workers and resulted in the repatriation of thousands of Jamaicans, Haitians, and
Dominicans, some who had set up permanent residency and others who had become part
of seasonal migration waves seeking employment in Cuba since the 1910s.279 The
Nationalization of Labor Decree stipulated that at least fifty percent of a business’s
employees had to consist of Cuban nationals, which targeted mostly Spanish and U.S.
companies in the agricultural industry. CNOC and the Community Party opposed the
law, because it drove a wedge in unions and attempts at working-class solidarity while it
contributed to race-based xenophobia, since a large portion of the repatriated were
workers of color.280 In addition to the fifty percent law, reforms included suffrage for
women, the unilateral abrogation of the Platt Amendment, minimum wage for
sugarworkers, eight-hour workday, and worker’s compensation, all brokered by the new
nationalist spirit.281
Despite such progressive measures in Cuba and diplomatic wrangling in
Montevideo, acrid divisions continued and Grau eventually left office in 1934. He could
not muster the national cohesion needed to equilibrate the divided political atmosphere
nor was he able to obtain legitimacy from the international community, undoubtedly
278
Gellman, Roosevelt and Batista, 9.
Pichardo, Documentos, 80-82, 98-99. According to the 1931 census, out of 4 million Cubans, 80,000
Haitians, 40,000 Jamaicans, and 25,000 Chinese were registered in Cuba. Foreign Policy Association,
Problems of the New Cuba, 27.
280
Whitney, State and Revolution, 115-117.
281
Aguilar, Cuba, 174-175; Pérez, Cuba under Platt, 322.
279
167
hampered by the U.S. position.282 In January 1934, Grau was replaced with Carlos
Mendieta. Cuban and U.S. critics would frame Mendieta in the same vein as Machado,
even though some U.S. decision makers approved of Mendieta, who, according to
Sumner Welles, expressed an “unwillingness to resort to dictatorial methods.” For most
Cubans, however, the diplomatic trio Mendieta, Caffery, and Batista became the new
object of criticism. The partnership produced governmental restrictions of labor activism
and free speech as well as strong reaction. In March 1935, a strike of 500,000 workers,
professionals, and students met a brutal intervention by Batista’s military. Calm was not
restored, but Mendieta was forced to resign in December 1935. After additional attempts
and failures by other Cuban leaders, Federico Laredo Bru was elected president in 1936
and served a term that lasted until 1940.283
Throughout the presidential malaise, Batista made a career for himself as a
military strongman. Though not an elected official, he enjoyed influence in shaping
national policy and made public statements regarding tax increases on foreign companies
and forced repatriation of West Indian workers. By the mid-1930s, Batista began to gain
popularity in the public sphere as a reformed military despot who was adapting to the
spirit of revolutionary change. In 1937, Batista announced the Three Year Plan, which
involved land distribution, changes in national banking, crop diversification, health
282
Having become disillusioned with Grau, Batista and other officers planned another coup, but were
discovered. The University Directorate—staunch supporters of Grau—wanted Batista executed for treason,
but Grau pardoned him, causing further problems between Grau and the Directorate. Grau would become
more centrist in coming years, particularly while in exile in the U.S. When he returned to Cuba for the
election of 1940, he would lose the leftwing support that he enjoyed during his earlier presidency.
However, soon after his exit, Grau formed the Partido Revolucionario Cubano—Aunténticos (PRC-A),
which grew in popularity and delivered him the presidency in 1944.
283
Welles, “Inter-American Relations,” 14; Pichardo, Documentos, 352, 565-67, 596; Whitney, State and
Revolution, 125, 131-132; Gellman, Roosevelt and Batista, 110.
168
insurance, libraries, and the performing arts.284 Leaders in Havana intended to jumpstart
Cuba’s markets, which ideally would also keep tourism a viable source of revenue. The
strong show of Cuban autonomy forced a restructuring of financial arrangements between
Cuba and the United States. U.S. sugar ownership decreased through the 1930s, so that
by 1939 U.S.-owed sugarmills were producing 55% of total Cuban sugar, a significant
drop from previous years.285
The Three Year Plan became a well-publicized document published in both
English and Spanish that offered guarantees by the Cuban Embassy in the U.S. that the
“historical friendship” between the two countries was intact and denied “inaccurate
reports spread in the United States about political, economic, and social developments in
Cuba…” It addressed social and economic problems of Cuba, acknowledged gains by
the 1933 revolution, and promoted a series of reforms inspired by the wider revolutionary
movement. Eager to assure investors and future tourists that Cuba was free from conflict,
the Cuban Embassy assured the reader of Cuba’s democracy and path towards political
stability, emphasizing that the goal of the nation to
establish, following a moderate middle-or-the-road course, an order free from
strife and violence, an order within the democratic framework built by the
founders of the Republic in the longest and bloodiest war for independence of the
Western Hemisphere, an order that will be attended by political stability,
economic progress, and a social life that is pleasing and humane.
Cuban leaders revealed that in the divided world of “the strong and the weak,” Cuba was
“a rich nation” and “extend[ed] a cordial invitation to all Americans interested in
Cuba…to inform themselves about happenings in Cuba during the years from the
Dictatorship to anarchy and from anarchy to the peace and order of today.” Calm had
284
285
Whitney, State and Revolution, 153-165.
Gellman, Roosevelt and Batista, 145.
169
been triumphantly restored by Batista, who “put an end to the communistic chaos in the
sugar mills, factories [and] brought about the return of normal living.”286
Batista spearheaded progressive measures such as the creation of 705 rural civicmilitary rural schools. Run by military personnel who served as teachers and school
administrators, schools opened in September 1936 to 35,000 elementary school children
and 20,000 adults in rural areas. Batista enjoyed an unusual amount of diplomatic clout
as an army colonel, marked by a meeting with Roosevelt in Washington in 1938.
Thereafter Batista created programs that hinted at his shift towards populism.287 Cuba’s
mass mobilization produced a Constitutional Convention and plans to restructure the
Cuban sugar industry in a shift away from privatization and towards collectivization.
Following the revolutionary zeitgeist, these campaigns earned Batista popular support
and remade his image from an authoritarian military man to a leader with populist appeal.
So much so that Batista ran for president against Grau in 1940 and won, 805,000 votes to
Grau’s 583,000.288 This victory depended on an ironic alliance with the Communist
Party. In the Popular Front period, the convergence of anti-fascist progressive forces
created new demands from Cuban leadership. The same unions and Communist
organizing that had been outlawed were now permitted, which brought the formation of
the Confederation of Cuban Workers (CTC) in January 1939, led by an Afro-Cuban
General Secretary, Lázaro Pena. As Grau was trying to win allies in exile, the 1939
Congressional elections shook the political order of Cuba and ended with communist
support of Batista, which saw gains in labor interests under Batista’s tenure. The year
1940 also brought the ratification of a new constitution, touted as a liberal document that
286
Cuba’s Three Year Plan (Havana: Cultural, S.A., 1938), 2-10, 14-15, 19-20, 23-30, 34-42.
Gellman, Roosevelt and Batista, 149-153, 161-163; Whitney, State and Revolution, 132-133.
288
Whitney, State, 165-176; Gellman, Roosevelt and Batista, 183-84.
287
170
codified many of the ideals of the 1933 revolution, including the 8-hour workday, right to
organize/strike, collective bargaining, 44-hour work week, minimum wage and social
security. The new constitution signaled an enduring legacy of the broad-based
revolutionary spirit, now part of the juridical and political framework of Cuban society.
Ironically, however, such constitutional reform would become undone a generation later
by the same leader who supported its founding, when Batista returned to the national
spotlight in 1952.289
Good Neighbor at Home
Upon returning to the United States, Sumner Welles resumed his duties as
Assistant Secretary of State by focusing on winning support for U.S. policies from Latin
American neighbors. Leveling the playing field meant that the United States could
redeem a transgressive past that included unfair trade policies and Marine occupations in
the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Cuba. Welles made the effort to recast
U.S. relations with Latin America as a positive step for all parties and to convince other
American republics of the new U.S. stand on nonintervention, nonaggression, and mutual
economic development. The task of proselytizing Pan-Americanity materialized into
several speeches between 1934 and 1937, making the Good Neighbor Policy into what
one Nation writer referred to as Roosevelt’s “acid test” for United States sincerity.290
In a speech on “Inter-American Relations,” Welles heralded the efforts of Good
Neighbor by taking a reconciliatory tone towards policy errors in the past as he indicated
a new political direction:
289
de la Fuente, 224-235; Gellman, Roosevelt and Batista, 181. On Batista and the 1940 Constitution, see
Robert Whitney, “The Architect of the Cuban State: Fulgencio Batista and Populism in Cuba, 1937-1940,”
Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol. 32, No. 2 (May, 2000), 435-459.
290
“Cuba and the New Deal,” Nation, Jan. 31, 1934, 117.
171
We are neighbors; and it is up to all of us on this continent to see that we are good
neighbors. I am frank to say, and I say it with the utmost regret, that there have
been many occasions in the past when I believe that the United States has been a
pretty poor neighbor. A worth-while policy does not seek to condone or to excuse
past errors of omission or commission; it seeks to rectify them…
Welles’s distaste for trade legislation that disproportionately favored the United States
was a product of unfair trade policies spurred by Dollar Diplomacy, which had cast
aspersions on U.S. relations with its southern neighbors.291 The post-World War I
lending power of the United States pumped capital into Latin American markets, causing
the U.S. economy to grow exponentially during these years while setting up metagovernmental financial entities to help “stabilize” American republics to the south. This
period witnessed the creation of new economic oversight, which consisted of state
governments, U.S. bankers, and financial experts. U.S. business leaders assumed
diplomatic and ambassadorial functions without formal state mandates and were
supported by government officials and, when deemed necessary, the U.S. military.292
Emily Rosenberg argues that during this time the imperialist and anti-imperialist forces of
the 1898 generation focused on economics rather than territory. Vocal opponents to
Dollar Diplomacy, such as Samuel Inman, became dominant voices in the Roosevelt
administration. Inman accompanied Hull and others to the Seventh Pan-American
Conference, which reflected the Roosevelt administration’s incorporation of erstwhile
critics of U.S. policy in its new approach to Latin American politics.293
Critics had long deemed the U.S. culpable of economic puppeteering. The adage,
if the Depression gave the U.S. an economic cold, then Latin America caught pneumonia,
291
Welles, “Inter-American Relations,” 2-3, 6.
Emily Rosenberg, Financial Missionaries to the World: The Politics and Culture of Dollar Diplomacy
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 1-3, 97-98.
293
Rosenberg, Financial Missionaries, 123, 131, 137.
292
172
proved true in Cuba. Cuban exports to the United States declined from $362M to a
staggering $57M in 1933, while U.S. exports to Cuba plummeted from $127M in 1929 to
$23M in 1933.294 Welles criticized legislation such as the Hawley-Smoot tariff, which
raised tariffs on U.S. imports in an effort to help the domestic agricultural market.
Instead it led to a further decline of Latin American and European commercial trade with
the United States. The Hawley-Smoot tariff increased duty on Cuban sugar, which gave
preference to U.S. growers and farmers. Cuba’s share of U.S. market decreases from
49.4% in 1930 to 25.3% in 1933. These changes were acutely felt in Cuba, marked by
the value of Cuba’s second largest export, tobacco, dropping from $43M in 1929 to
$13M in 1933. Welles said the tariff harmed Latin American markets while “it made
effective an act which has done more to destroy good will toward the United States on the
rest of this continent than almost any act that I can think of in our history.” The Good
Neighbor approach meant retreating from such legislation that had given “a death blow to
the sugar industry of Cuba.”295
Cuba remained an important factor in the broader strategy of inter-American
cooperation, but also illustrated a discursive ambivalence of Pan-Americanity. Welles
presented the speech, “Relations between the United States and Cuba” in Washington,
DC, before the Young Democratic Clubs of America, which aired on NBC radio. Welles
believed that erstwhile U.S. policy towards Cuba needed redress, calling, for example,
the decision to land Marines on Cuban soil in 1906 “no greater impediment to the free
exercise by the Cuban people of their inherent right to sovereignty could have well been
294
Gellman, Roosevelt and Batista, 9.
Welles, “Relations between the U.S. and Cuba,” 6. Also contributing to Cuba’s economic malaise was
the Chadbourne Plan of 1931, a six-nation agreement that limited sugar production in order to boost global
sugar prices, which meant a cut in Cuban production. Pérez, Cuba under Platt, 279-280.
295
173
devised.” He affirmed that the Roosevelt administration wanted to cultivate a “mutually
helpful political understanding and a mutually profitable commercial relationship” in the
Caribbean. Yet in the same breath he cited U.S. intervention as historically necessary
and beneficial to the Cuban people, stating that such intervention was profitable for Cuba,
as the United States “brought wealth to the country and employment, directly or
indirectly, to many hundreds of thousands of Cubans.”296
The notion that U.S. arbitration was necessary and profitable for Cubans while at
the same time deleterious and invasive fit within a framework of Pan-Americanity that
sponsored a neocolonial gaze, which simultaneously affirmed U.S. projections of power
and cultural superiority while it purported a new direction in mutual rights and altruism.
Pan-American fraternalism did not erase prior triumphalist posturing of 1898 but
redesigned it. The oscillation between the United States as partner and parent spoke to
the colonial ambivalence of an earlier era and resuscitated it in modern form. Thus,
Welles could deliver the assertion:
Whenever conditions arose in Cuba which required correction, the Cuban people
became accustomed to look to Washington for such correction instead of
undertaking the task themselves. You cannot keep a child in braces until it
reaches the age of maturity and expect it to walk successfully alone.297
Such logic fit within a long-standing political language that accorded matters of truth,
responsibility, and moral virtue to U.S. subjects in contrast to a foreign “other.” These
were appraisals embedded in a discourse of altruism. Welles infantilized Cubans who
were seemingly unable to “walk alone,” which required the 1898 occupation and
subsequent moments of intervention. This pronouncement signaled U.S. beneficence
296
Sumer Welles, “Relations between the U.S. and Cuba,” (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office,
1934), 3-4, 15.
297
Welles, “Relations between the U.S. and Cuba,” 3.
174
while it masked economic and political motives. Neocolonial/imperial reason masked the
undertones of seizure/conquest in its celebration of collaboration and respective
autonomies.
The power differential remains intact, in part, through the gendered discourse of
imperialism. Mary Renda has written about U.S. modes of paternalist posturing in her
study on the U.S. occupation of Haiti between 1915 and 1934. Gunboat diplomacy, she
argues, articulated a catalog of signs and codes, metaphors and tropes that justified
imperial/neocolonial violence in U.S. missions abroad:
Paternalism was an assertion of authority, superiority, and control expressed in
the metaphor of a father’s relationship with his children. It was a form of
domination, a relation of power, masked as benevolent by its reference to paternal
care and guidance, but structured equally by norms of paternal authority and
discipline….[It] should not be seen in opposition to violence, but rather as one
among several cultural vehicles for it.298
Welles and other U.S. subjects could retreat from earlier “imperialistic” policy while also
positioning it as “necessary,” for the United States had saved Cuba from deterioration,
“correcting” the noxious conditions brought about by—and indeed endemic to—Cubans
themselves. Such cultural codes coupled paternalism with altruism, which proposed the
abolition of empire while it became more institutionally entrenched. As will be shown in
Chapter Six, this in part explains the strongman caudillo figure in Cuban politics—and
perhaps Latin America more generally—as Fidel Castro proved an able paternalist figure
in his own right that could offer an virile antidote to U.S. empire.
Pan-Americanity, then, could trumpet claims to mutual sovereignty while it
justified intervention, a recurring aporia in the imperial/neocolonial logic that has
circumscribed U.S. foreign policy in the 20th century and beyond. In an address to the
298
Renda, Taking Haiti, 13, 15.
175
Association of American Colleges in Atlanta, Welles assured “unmistakable progress
toward political peace and toward economic recovery” in Cuba yet remarked elsewhere
that the United States has “extended to the Cubans the hand of friendship” but “the
solution of [the Cubans’] difficulties lies…solely in Cuban hands.”299 Welles even called
the U.S. “imperialistic” in times past, with “a complete disregard of the sovereignty and
independence of the republics…”300 In the same breath, however, Welles duly absolved
the U.S. from ethical wrongdoing with the surprising conclusion:
[A] foreign policy can best be effectively appraised from the practical standpoint
of determining the benefits resulting to the nation carrying out that policy. From
that standpoint alone, it would seem to me that no impartial observer could
maintain that the policy which has been carried out in the Caribbean during the
past 50 years has resulted in any benefits to the people of the United States.301
Rather, Welles waxed confident that the bad image of the United States was one
propagated by uninformed critics:
In the cases of our Cuban policy there has been an astounding distortion of facts
on the part of a few so-called “special correspondents” … those who for purely
partisan political motives have desired to belittle the accomplishments of this
administration … and an even smaller but a yet more vociferous group of writers
who have been insistent that this government should force upon the Cuban people
a government of the type desired by these authors.302
In beating back attacks on U.S. foreign policy decisions, Welles further established that
“the confusion and bitterness of the times have given rise to much propaganda, part of it
deliberately malicious, and to many myths and unfounded rumors regarding the policy of
the United States and the acts of its accredited representatives.”303 Though meddlesome,
299
Welles, “The Roosevelt Administration and its Dealings with the Republics of the Western
Hemisphere,” (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1935), 8-9; Welles, “Pan American Cooperation,” (Washington,
D.C.: GPO, 1935), 5.
300
Welles, “‘Good Neighbor’ Policy in the Caribbean,” (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1935), 1.
301
Ibid., 2.
302
Welles, “‘Good Neighbor’ Policy in the Caribbean,” 6-7.
303
Welles, “Good Neighbor Policy in the Caribbean,” 12.
176
Welles maintained that these policies were not profitable, and that much of U.S.
engagement with Latin America had been unintentionally hostile; rather than providing
any political or economic benefit, past policies had only served to fuel anger and
resentment towards the U.S. government from its southern neighbors. The State
Department hoped U.S.-Cuba relations would be viewed as a positive step forward in
destroying the “wall of misunderstanding and prejudice” between the U.S. and the “great
republics of the south.”304
Welles explained the administration’s refusal to recognize Grau’s revolutionary
government was due to Grau’s lack of broad-based support and that “the army under
Colonel Batista would not permit frank communism to rule unchecked.” Welles accused
the revolution of “curry[ing] favor among the unthinking” and creating “an artificial antiAmerican campaign.”305 However, evidence suggests that the anti-American campaign
was faithful, and to the contrary farmers, laborers, and students initially backed the
government, whereas advocates of big business and trade immediately found fault with
Grau. If Welles was thankful that Batista “would not permit frank communism to rule
unchecked,” it was to be a brief period of grace, for the military strongman needed the
support of the Cuban Communist Party to win the 1940 presidential election.
The topic of Cuba became a theme throughout political literature of the period as
other policymakers weighed in on the debate. In U.S. and Cuba: A Study in International
Relations (1934), Henry Guggenheim believed that during his tenure as ambassador to
Cuba under Hoover the nation witnessed “perhaps the four most turbulent years in [its]
republican history.” The former ambassador advocated a more measured, less intrusive
304
305
Welles, “Good Neighbor Policy in the Caribbean, 5.
Welles, “Relations Between the U.S. and Cuba,” 10.
177
position towards Cuba. He too was critical of the Hawley-Smoot tariff and concluded
that the Platt Amendment was no longer needed. In his estimation, however, past
missteps did not include the 1898 U.S. occupation. Guggenheim invoked the assertion
that rendered Cubans unfit for self-governance: “Following the separation from Spain,
the chaos and the lack of any experience in democratic government made necessary an
American military occupation.” He also submitted that “disorders in the Cuban
Republic…are the result of Cuba’s immature attempts at democratic government.” Like
Welles, Guggenheim regretted the “imperialistic” nature of the United States in Latin
America but believed that economic control and seizure of Cuba’s sugar plantations by
U.S. banks was “unsought” and a matter of circumstance, with U.S. capital “forced to
take over a large part of the sugar business by foreclosure.” These assertions upheld the
thinking the United States was thrust into a position of global authority after 1898, that
empire was not actively sought but a product of circumstance. The United States is
absolved under the pretense of unavoidability, which deemed intercession as necessary
but with a reworking of treaty commitments under the assumption that future Cuban
well-being still depended on legislative adjustment in Washington to end hostilities.
As we have seen, this brand of neocolonialist subjectivity often assessed political
aptitude and cultural vitality through a racial lens. Guggenheim noted that different racial
codes in Cuba allowed for Afro-Cubans to vote and enjoy desegregated public spaces
unlike African Americans in the South. Yet his commentary also reinscribed notions of
cultural atrophy when he reduced Afro-Cuban religious rituals to “barbarism” and
worried that black Cubans were prone to “political instability” due to their “lack of
education.” Mixed-race Cubans, however, posed a different case, due to “the infiltration
178
of white blood,” which produced “energetic farmers [and] brilliant soldiers.” Such racial
logic deemed whiteness part of the DNA of success and virtue. The former ambassador
celebrated mixed-race yeoman farmers of Cuba, who were “hard-working, selfrespecting, splendid citizens.”306
Such racial subjectivity contributed to the rationale of economic dependency.
Racial impurity proposed to explain national atavism that necessitated the injection of
U.S. dollars. Good Neighbor finance was seen by critics as a continuation of Dollar
Diplomacy as well as “Gunboat Diplomacy.” Emily Rosenberg has written that the rise
of Dollar Diplomacy involved a tripartite bloc of private bankers, financial experts, and
government officials that carved a new sphere of managerial professionalism which
undergirded financial hegemony in the region. This discourse inherited the legacies of
late 19th century notions of “lesser” nations and peoples while developing the linguistic
accoutrements for what would become modernization ideology during the Cold War.
The professional-managerial outlook, Rosenberg writes, “envisioned progress as the
spread of markets and monetary exchange through scientific application of economic
laws.” This was connected to racialized and gendered ideas about governance and
economic exchange: white manliness represented “rational thought” while non-white
“primitivism” was feminine. “Just as manhood implied restraint, writes Rosenberg, “selfmastery, and supervision over dependents, uncivilized peoples were marked by feminine
attributes, especially lack of planning and weak self-discipline. Cuba fit into this mold of
306
Henry Guggenheim, The United States and Cuba: A Study in International Relations (New York:
Macmillan, 1934), ix-xv, 48, 122, 138-39, 156, 160, 237-43.
179
“disorganized governance,” and thus continued to take on emasculated and juvenile
depictions in the U.S. cultural imagination as it had since 1898.307
Economic dependency reified the neocolonial relationship. U.S. policymakers
touted “economic independence” in what remained a dependent relationship. Equal
recognition and mutual respect did not necessarily insure equal economic growth, and
detractors would argue that even new trade legislation further entrenched the Cuban
economy under the U.S. yoke. Whereas Grau represented a revolutionary victory for
many, the bold statement of Cuban autonomy was problematic for the United States. The
Roosevelt administration continued a policy of recognizing governments elected by
consensus rather than by revolutionary force. The administration’s position was that
peaceful and constitutional transitions of power in Latin American were preferable to
abrupt overthrows of government. Thus, recognition came only for the country that
could prove legitimate support, with legitimacy defined by the U.S., causing Welles to
advise FDR not to recognize Grau’s government in Cuba. Welles asserted that Grau did
not enjoy wide support and that the U.S. government’s “refusal to recognize was based
solely upon [its] sincere desire to pursue a policy of justice and fairness to Cuba and to
the Cuban people.”308 But critics on both sides of the sea would point out that the refusal
to recognize stemmed from U.S. financial interests not wanting to lose their stronghold in
Cuba and believed the recognition policy to be arbitrary and threatening to Cuba’s
sovereignty. Radical journalist Carleton Beals, for one, was certain wherein lay the
blame: “The assumption, of course, is that the State Department is fully qualified to
determine what government in Cuba represents the will of the people—an interventionist
307
308
Rosenberg, Financial Missionaries, 2, 6-10, 32-33, 61, Chapter 8.
Gellman, Secret Affairs, 75.
180
attitude not one whit different from traditional non-recognition coercion of previous
Washington administrations.”309 “What right,” he asked, “have we to insist that Japan
observe her treaty obligations in Manchuria when we have mutilated the Platt
Amendment in this fashion? What right have we to get exercised about Hitler when we
helped to maintain in Cuba, a protectorate at our very doorstep, a government which as
committed far greater crimes than those which have occurred in Germany?”310 Skeptics
saw the Good Neighbor Policy as merely an extension of the Monroe Doctrine and thus
believed that legislation passed on Capitol Hill still determined the well-being of millions
of Cubans.311 They saw the new trade legislation as unbalanced and U.S. business
dominance still looming; despite slight economic improvement between 1934 and 1935,
U.S. capital still owned a large percentage of Cuban sugar, railroad, and electric
industries, and Cuban unemployment was still widespread.
President Roosevelt felt pressure to succeed in Cuba but wanted to distance the
matter from U.S.-Latin American policy as a whole. During the peak of the
revolutionary tumult, journalists pressed FDR on the Cuban issue. Roosevelt responded
with minor frustration:
Another thing, on the general Latin-American policy: You can’t say that the
Cuban situation is the keynote of Latin-American policy, because there is no other
American nation that is in the same status as Cuba. In Cuba we have treaty
obligations—on other nations we haven’t. In other words, don’t intimate
anything we do in Cuba is the same as we will do in Haiti, Santo Domingo, etc.312
309
Carleton Beals, “American Diplomacy in Cuba,” Nation, Jan. 17, 1934, 68.
Beals, The Crime of Cuba, 7.
311
Lucile Perry, “The Coming Pan-American Conference at Montevideo,” The Communist Nov. 1933:
1113-4.
312
Complete Presidential Press Conferences of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 20 vols. (New York: Da Capo Press,
1972), 2:234-235.
310
181
FDR deflected questions on Cuba, saying that the U.S would not directly intervene but
instead serve as advisors, or as he put it, as “amicus curiae to the Cuban people.” In
another press conference, when asked about possibly forcing Machado out of office, FDR
affirmed his dedication to non-intervention by responding, “We cannot be in the position
of saying to Machado, ‘You have to get out.’ That would be obvious interference with
the internal affairs of another nation.”313 Roosevelt adjusted according to Cuban
developments and national and international pressure. In October 1933, Roosevelt
denied that he was considering the abrogation of the amendment but leveled no objection
when Congress abrogated it in May the following year.314
Roosevelt also had to contend with intense anti-U.S. emotion in Cuba. Both
Sumner Welles and Jefferson Caffery were immensely unpopular in Cuba. The CafferyMendieta connection was seen as a duopoly similar to, if not worse than, the MachadoWelles partnership. Opponents charged that Mendieta’s leadership was dictatorial, in the
same vein as Machado, all the while policymakers such as Welles cast Mendieta as a
positive figure for Cubans, using terms such as “patriotism,” “integrity,” and citing an
“unwillingness to resort to dictatorial methods.”315 These criticisms made their way to the
Executive Branch. When asked to answer allegations regarding the State Department and
the demand for Ambassador Caffery’s recall, FDR expressed his confidence in Caffery
and thought conditions had improved on the island:
As a matter of fact, I had an awfully nice talk with Caffery this morning and all
the reports about the economic conditions in Cuba are very encouraging. Taking
it by and large, the economic conditions in Cuba have picked up…the sugar
plantations and various other work down there, the wages, three years ago, were
down around fifteen and twenty cents a day…they are now up to eighty cents or a
313
Complete Presidential Press Conferences, 2:149-150.
Complete Presidential Press Conferences, 2:342.
315
Welles, “Inter-American Relations,” 14.
314
182
dollar a day…the whole complexion of industry and agriculture is infinitely better
and has been for a long time.316
Roosevelt was partly right, for the political climate had changed. The year 1934 brought
the abrogation of the Platt Amendment and the Reciprocal Trade Agreement and
Costigan-Jones Act, new legislation that promised to create more equitable economic
relations while it kept Cuba in a U.S. financial orbit.317 The Reciprocal Trade Agreement
gave preferential trade status to Cuba for U.S. goods and was the first a series of tariff
reductions for both Cuba and the United States. It did, however, make economic
diversification more difficult for Cuba, since both exports and imports had to compete
with U.S.-manufactured goods, so that Cuba’s local economy could not compete. The
Costigan-Jones was a quota system that insured 1.9 million tons of Cuban sugar to the
United States. U.S. exports to Cuba had declined from $160 million in 1926 to $25
million in 1933. Fixing production, the administration hoped, would assure a steady
stream of capital into Cubans’ pockets and keep work stoppages and strikes to a
minimum.318 It made sugar a basic commodity under the AAA, which meant that the
U.S. Secretary of Agriculture could fix quotas on sugar entering the U.S. market. This
act lowered the sugar tariff, which meant Cuba received more business.319
But Cubans likened the legislation to Platt because it controlled sugar output and
thus still saw the measures as further foreign control over their chief national product.320
If Cuba had become the “acid test” for U.S. sincerity in a new presidential administration,
316
Complete Presidential Press Conferences, 6:75.
Welles, “Inter-American Relations,” 2-3, 6.
318
In May 1934, the Costigan-Jones Act lowered U.S. tariffs on sugar imports and quotas of foreign sugar.
Duty on Cuban sugar decreased from 2 cents to .9 cents/lb, and the Cuban share of market increased from
25.4% in 1933 to 31.4% in 1937. Whitney, State and Revolution, 134; Gellman, Roosevelt and Batista,
114-115.
319
Gellman, Roosevelt and Batista, 103.
320
Pichardo, Documentos, 439, 450.
317
183
there was little consensus on the results. Pan-American peace continued to be a priority
for the Roosevelt administration, with Roosevelt himself promoting and attending the
Inter-American Conference for the Maintenance of Peace in Buenos Aires in 1936. PanAmericanity, it was hoped, would provide armor against fascism from Europe and the Far
East. It became part of the new world of policy that accompanied governmental
prescriptions to liberate the United States from the Depression and the world from
fascism.
Experts, Politicos, and New Deal Liberalism
Along with the creation of new federal acronyms to end U.S. economic distress
through labor and civic duty, New Deal liberalism expanded the segment of political
experts that made up post-World War I public diplomacy. This was a network of
organizations, experts, and politicos that studied, produced, and disseminated models and
theories of modern western governance that professionalized political opinion in the
United States. It was a budding system of evaluation and regulation that was nourished
by evolving ideas about modernization and the superiority of a U.S.-European “West,”
which later became a large bureaucratic network of Cold War strategists, theorists, and
commentators. This emergence began at the turn of the century and matured after World
War I. With a bevy of new interpreters and lobbyists of foreign affairs came the
institutionalization of new disciplines as well as new language of Washington expertise, a
segment of non-government actors whose specializations were valued for their purported
impartial objectivity and rationality. The study of political science nourished this class of
professionals, with Political Science Quarterly founded at Columbia University in 1886
184
and the American Political Science Association in 1903.321 Such institutions became
well-respected markers of the public policy world, an inchoate think tank culture that
institutionalized U.S. political doxa under the creation of groups such as the Brookings
Institute and Foreign Policy Association in 1916 and 1918 respectively. By the 1930s,
academics, politicians, journalists, and intellectuals comprised this segment of critics that
was linked to, yet could proclaim independence from, Washington’s foreign policy
decisions.
The Foreign Policy Association (FPA) employed new analytical and empirical
methods towards the solution of international problems. Under the direction of Raymond
Leslie Buell, the FPA published fortnightly reports on a variety of topics in international
relations, from the rise of the Third Reich and Japanese aggression in China, to Soviet
economic policy and the food market in British India. Cuba also entered the policy
streams, and FPA experts concurred that Cuba was a test for the administration’s Good
Neighbor Policy. Some offered minor criticism for non-recognition and others praised
the abrogation of Platt and the original Permanent Treaty. One writer criticized the U.S.
for holding warships in Cuban waters until September 1934 and questioned the Roosevelt
administration’s support for President Mendieta, who had let military rule continue with
civil rights under duress.322 The new culture of policy experts enjoyed growing clout in
Washington opinion. When Charles A. Thomson wrote that Cuba represented the
Roosevelt administration’s “most acute problem in foreign relations” because “no other
country is so closely linked to the United States by geographical position, as well as by
321
John G. Gunnell, “The Founding of the American Political Science Association: Discipline, Profession,
Political Theory, and Politics,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 100, No. 4 (Nov. 2006): 479.
322
David H. Popper, “Latin American Policy of the Roosevelt Administration,” Foreign Policy Reports,
Dec. 19, 1934, 270-280.
185
political and economic ties,” he could feel confident that his input entered the halls of
Congress and the State Department.323
After traveling to the island at the invitation of President Mendieta on a grant
sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, an FPA committee published a mixed appraisal
of political events on the island. Progressive liberals such as Raymond Leslie Buell,
Ernest Gruening, Leland Hamilton Jenks, and Charles Thomson were members of a new
network of Latin American experts endowed with credentials to diagnose Cuban political
maladies and prescribe solutions. Jenks had risen to prominence within his Our Cuban
Colony (1928), and Charles Thomson was known for his work on Latin America, which
would land him the position of Chief of the Division of Cultural Relations in the State
Department in 1938. Gruening was the well-known editor of the Nation and enjoyed
notoriety as a member of the cosmopolitan ex-pat community of Mexico during the
1920s. He would climb the political ladder, becoming part of counsel at Pan-American
conferences and later governor of the Alaska territory and one of its first senators upon
statehood.
Their publication, Problems of the New Cuba (1935), stood as an academic opus
on the trials and tribulations of Cuba’s political history. Working with Cuban scholars
Fernando Ortiz and Herminio Portell Vilá, the book reveals a disciplinary mix of history,
politics, and social science that assesses the vitality of Cuba’s economy, education,
family life, health, and social welfare. Their opinions rehash the idea that the United
States had attempted to save Cuba from its own inherent problems. Their prescriptions
for Cuban betterment were early instances of later academic proponents of modernization
323
Charles A. Thomson, “The Cuban Revolution: The Fall of Machado,” Foreign Policy Reports, Dec. 18,
1935, 251-260.
186
during the Cold War, when experts from the First World were endowed with the rights
and reasons (and treasury) to identify and diagnose problems of the Third World under
claims of calculus and objectivity. Likewise, the FPA could prescribe solutions towards
social and political improvement in Cuba, condoned and even encouraged by subaltern
leaders such as President Mendieta, who invited the group of experts to the island. Such
expertise functioned on assumptions of power and prestige in knowledge frameworks
authorized by economic and military power. The commission therefore could deliver
generalizations that “Cuba lacks experience in political and economic cooperation” while
minimizing the role of U.S. involvement or the unequal nature of capitalism in Cuba’s
woes. “The restoration of order and moral peace in Cuba,” the authors conclude, “are
essential for the stability of any government [and] depend partly on the adoption of a
program of reconstruction which will fulfill the legitimate aspirations of revolution.”
Similar to Beals and Guggenheim, the FPA’s assessment drew from the construct
of difference, which used a racial logic that linked phenotype to political aptitude.
“History,” they write, “has bequeathed to Cuba an important Negro problem,” which
meant that Afro-Cubans were disproportionately responsible for crime due to their
position on the social ladder and were especially ripe for Communist indoctrination. Like
other arbiters of culture, the FPA valued blackness for its folkloric value in art and ritual,
but criminalized it once it became linked to struggle, connecting it to social anomie and
communist desire. Echoing other U.S. visitors, the evaluators also acknowledge less
visible racial discord in Cuba than in the U.S. South, which remained a measure of social
187
advancement in the liberal paradigm yet still conformed to safe notions of a racially
stratified society.324
The FPA also issued concern that communism loomed as a threat in Cuba. The
FPA cautioned against revolutionary groups and unions such as CNOC, whose numbers
had grown from 200,000 in 1925 to an estimated 300,000 by the mid-thirties. While the
commission ultimately doubted the viability of communism in Cuba due to proximity to
the United States, progressive social legislation signified a left turn in Cuban politics.
The commission ended its evaluation with the prediction that ultimately the United States
would need to rescue the Cuban sugar industry (still largely U.S.-owned) and that “Cuba
would profit from the employment of a small number of foreign assistants, having not
only academic knowledge but years of practical experience.”325
Pan Americanity, Tourism, and Cultural Diplomacy
Cuba also became an object of scrutiny for New Deal progressives because it
continued to be a gauge for Latin American modernity as well as a material source of
U.S. revenue and popular tourist destination. Cubans enjoyed miles of railroad track,
ranked seventh in the Americas, and were consumers and sellers of European perfumes,
New England furniture, and fine Caribbean tobacco. Cubans were important consumers
of U.S. goods, but with U.S. exports to Cuba (other than foodstuffs) down from $134
million in 1924 to $18.3 million in 1933, the groups such as the FPA remained critical of
the Hawley-Smoot tariff but praised the Costigan-Jones Act. In addition to economic
improvement, beauty and charm resurfaced in the list of remedies, with Cuba in need of a
“program of beautification of Cuba’s schools.” The authors were dismayed that “one of
324
325
Foreign Policy Association, Problems of the New Cuba, 5, 14, 19-21, 28-32.
Ibid., 182-189, 192-194, 199-200, 208-212, 492-500.
188
the most distressing outward signs of Cuba’s unhappy recent history is the ugliness which
prevails in a country which should be one of the beauty spots of the world.” The authors
proposed a regimen of regeneration that focused on aesthetics, suggesting that Cubans
take design cues from the French. Cuba was meant to uphold its paradisiacal qualities for
the international traveler. From an appealing visual façade would emerge a renovated
and modern Cuba.326
Such assertions often appeared in tourist literature that displayed Yankee
fascination for Cuban history and culture that took on a fetishized and eroticized tone.
Tourist literature was another way leaders in Washington strove to create commercial and
cultural cohesion across the 21 republics. Information and images disseminated from
governmental institutions were created and consumed in transnational avenues that
formed the cultural diplomacy of Pan-Americanity. Hemispheric understanding
depended on the idea of open cultural exchange, which considered interests of other
American republics besides the United States. The tourist industry proved a growing
gateway to intercultural understanding. Directed to an increasingly mobile and wealthier
leisure class, travel literature throughout the Americas took off during the 1920s and
1930s, and with it so did the consecration of new tastes and information networks. Cuba
stood within this new tourist discourse, which eclipsed the dire reality of revolution in
favor of depictions that stressed the comfort, relaxation, and Cuba’s exotic beauty.
In the PAU publication, Cuba (1931), travel industry leaders extolled the
magnificence of Havana’s architecture, including its new capitol fashioned after
Washington’s. Cuba was praised for its economic success, though omitted was mention
of the extraordinary financial investment by the United States, Great Britain and other
326
Problems of the New Cuba, 46-50, 53-54, 59-62, 145-149.
189
rich nations. Glaringly sparse was discussion of the abundant capital in Cuban industries
by foreign companies and the presence of non-Cuban citizens who maintained Cuban
residency and directed Cuban political affairs domestically and internationally. Such
publications followed what would become a formulaic narrative blueprint that focused on
climate, topography, economy, and Cuba’s harmful colonial history, with the conclusion
that the U.S.-assisted victory against Spain began the trek towards Cuba’s political,
economic, and cultural success.327 According to the PAU, notable cities included
Santiago de Cuba, which boasted the shrine of Cobre, where visitors could see the
preserved image of Nuestra Señora de la Caridad and “be cured or alleviated from their
sufferings by the miraculous power of the Virgin.” Religion and capital intersect in a
depiction of Santiago that depended on an acknowledgement, but ultimate displacement,
of colonialism, which allowed for “those who like to wander about ancient places and
study their varied aspects” to enjoy the preservation of Cuba’s colonial past in the
morally and politically secure democratic and sovereign present.328
Another PAU publication, Havana, reveals the extent that Cuba’s National
Tourist Commission in Havana and Cuban embassy in the United States collaborated on
these publications. The booklet notes Havana’s beaches, yacht clubs, theatres, and other
“entertainment facilities,” which stand as modern emblems that join treasures such as the
newly constructed and magnanimous capitol building as well as the showmanship of
adrenalin-building sports such as jai-alai. Havana stood as a mix of rustic
cosmopolitanism, making Cuba exceptional in Latin America for its anachronistic
modernity yet, like other exotic escapes, noted for its cultural roots in antiquity and bright
327
328
Pan American Union, Cuba (Baltimore, MD: Sun Job Print, 1931).
Pan American Union, Santiago (Baltimore, MD: Sun Job Print, 1933) 17-18.
190
blue skies. Readers could imagine a pastiche of attractions, including colonial relics like
Spanish cathedrals and Havana’s Morro Castle, as well as the accelerated dynamism of
modernity found at cabarets, sporting events, and boutiques.329
In enjoying exotic scapes, tourists could feel confident that their consumption
further spread Pan-Americanity. The pamphlet Cuba: Island Neighbor constructed
America as a community of neighbors, with Cuba-U.S. trade ranking “among the largest
of inter-American exchanges.” By the time of its 1943 publication, much of Latin
America was now involved in World War II. As president of Cuba, Batista insured
Cuba’s alliance with the United States remained strong. Guantántamo Bay continued as a
U.S. stronghold in the Caribbean, and other harbors and landing strips on the island aided
the Allied cause, part of Military and Naval Agreement signed between both countries in
1943.330 Eric Roorda has written about Good Neighbor’s importance in the effort of
defeating the twin enemies of communism and fascism.331 The result was that the U.S.
could support dictatorships in Latin America in the atmosphere of “preparedness,”
tolerating, for example, authoritarian caudillismo and dictators to the likes of Rafael
Trujillo, as long as these leaders aided U.S. goals of winning the war. Preservation of
hemispheric security was the top priority, even if it was to be maintained at the expense
of certain democratic principles. In the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, Cuba immediately
dispatched its military services to the United States and projected itself as a leader in
hemispheric defense, contracting $7.2 Million in military equipment from the U.S. as part
329
Pan American Union, Havana (Washington, DC: Pan American Union, 1939), 3.
Cuba: Island Neighbor (Washington, DC: Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, 1943), n.p.
331
Roorda, Dictator Next Door, 1.
330
191
of the Lend-Lease program and providing additional space for airfields to train B-25
bomber pilots.332
World War II also prompted State Department officials to create the Office for
Coordination of Commercial and Cultural Relations between the American Republics,
which was renamed the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (OCIAA) in
1941 and then further truncated in 1945 to the Office of Inter-American Affairs (OIAA).
Under State Department jurisdiction, the OCIAA/OIAA added a cultural arm to
hemispheric defense.333 Even before the U.S. entered World War II, however,
Washington had begun to think seriously about the idea of culture as a matter of defense
policy. The Inter-American Conference for the Maintenance of Peace in 1936 called for
the promotion of pan-American cultural relations around issues of education and
intellectual exchange. New programs featured language development in inchoate study
abroad programs and raised the importance of transnational communication networks in
print and radio. In 1936, Sumner Welles expounded on the importance of “culture” in
matters of inter-American peace and prosperity, for fighting fascism took on cultural
significance as well. Now culture was something to be mutually celebrated but also
stood as a phenomenon that could be used as a weapon by the Axis powers.334 PanAmerican cultural interaction became an important antidote to German propaganda in
Latin America. Wanting to maintain its influence in the region, the United States
delegation sent an “official cultural advisor,” Samuel Inman, to the Inter-American
conference at Buenos Aires in 1936. Following the conference, the State Department
332
Gellman, Roosevelt and Batista, 194, 201.
Gisela Cramer and Ursula Prutsch, “Nelson A. Rockefeller’s Office of Inter-American Affairs (19401946) and Record Group 229,” Hispanic American Historical Review 86:4: 785-806.
334
Espinosa, Inter-American Beginnings, 80.
333
192
created the Division of Cultural Relations in 1938 in order to supervise cultural activities
between the U.S. and its American neighbors.335
Increasingly, culture was something defined, discussed, and debated by social
scientists, anthropologists, philosophers, and cultural critics. Max Horkheimer, Theodor
Adorno, Margaret Mead, and Dwight MacDonald all ruminated on the location, meaning,
and worth of mass culture. Government representatives, therefore, tapped into an already
existent culturalist mentality. Now the goal was to connect it to Pan-Americanity. The
Pan-American cultural script was written in films such as Flying down to Rio (1933),
Emperor Jones (1933), and Blondie Goes Latin (1942), and in popular songs such as “See
you in C-U-B-A” by Cole Porter. The State Department issued its own filmic narratives
of Pan-Americanity in March of Time footage of Latin America and films such as Uncle
Sam: The Good Neighbor, which featured Cordell Hull and Sumner Welles.336
News agencies such as Universal Newsreel delivered information on Batista’s
Three Year Plan to U.S. viewers.337 Newsreel production companies like Fox Movietone
brought such news stories on national and international events in movies houses in the
United States. By 1940 Fox had cameramen in 51 countries worldwide, having sent
teams to locales such as Ethiopia in 1935 to cover the country’s fight against Italy.
Newsreel theaters popped up in the United States throughout the 1930s but never enjoyed
the popularity that they did abroad, particularly in Great Britain. For 25 cents, U.S.
335
Fejes Imperialism, 74-75.
Roorda, Dictator, 29, 34, 108-109.
337
1937, VHS recording (Norwalk, CT: Easton Press)
336
193
audiences could enjoy films that ran between 45 minutes and an hour, which included
images of the 1933 revolution, including trials of Cuban dissidents in the 1930s.338
It was in this atmosphere that Secretary of state Cordell Hull invited Ben
Cherrington of the University of Denver to be the first Director of the Division of
Cultural Relations. Hull inter-American camaraderie needed to be “bulwarked by an
appreciation by those countries of the spiritual and intellectual values in this country, as
well as by an understanding by the American people of the cultural achievements of their
southern neighbors”339 Cherrington agreed and wrote that “culture in all its aspects must
be utilized as an instrument of the one commanding purpose of the nation—victory over
the enemy…” He worried when the “distinction between unilateral propaganda on the
one hand and reciprocal cultural cooperation on the other hand, so clearly perceived and
adhered to in the prewar years, became increasingly blurred.”340 The Division produced
films and radio broadcast for hemispheric consumption.341 The government used NBC
and CBS to issue short-wave broadcasts, which, by the 1930s were publicizing news and
commercial goods throughout Latin America. Citizens across the Americas heard
advertisements urging them to purchase U.S. goods. In 1935, the Broadcast Abroad Inc.
had advertising contracts with 47 radio stations in 16 Latin American countries,
promoting products such as Quaker Oats, Ford Motor Company, Heinz Ketchup, and
Listerine. By 1937 both NBC and CBS were transmitting programs in Spanish and
Portuguese.342
338
Raymond Fielding, The American Newsreel: A Complete History, 1911-1967, 2nd ed. (Jefferson, N.C.:
McFarland & Co., 2006), 113-114, 124, 127, 134, 136.
339
Espinosa, Inter-American Beginnings, vii, 90-97, quote on p. 330.
340
Qtd. in Espinosa, Inter-American Beginnings, 161.
341
Espinosa, Inter-American Beginnings, 153.
342
Fejes, Imperialism, 5, 84-86.
194
Charles Thomson became Chief of the Division following Cherrington’s one-year
tenure, after which the program morphed into the Office of the Coordinator of InterAmerican Affairs (OCIAA) in 1940 under the leadership of Nelson Rockefeller.343 At
32, Rockefeller guided the OCIAA to become a more ambitiously organized institution.
Divided into four sections—Cultural Relations, Communications, Commercial
Development, and Trade and Financial—the OCIAA became a massive cultural engine
that produced and disseminated films, books, and art across the Americas, taking charge
of thwarting the Nazi threat through economic and cultural initiatives that promoted interAmerican camaraderie.344 The OCIAA evolved into a sizeable cultural industry that
produced and disseminated films, books, and art across the Americas in an effort to
maintain hemispheric order during World War II. The OCIAA started with a budget of
$3.5 million, which grew to more than $30 million by 1944, of which ten percent was
reserved for “cultural activities.”345 Broadcasting to some 74 radio stations throughout
Latin America, the OCIAA prepared films on defense training as well as basketball and
skiing, and eventually began issuing monthly newsreels about the region dispersed
throughout the United States. The OCIAA also facilitated academic exchange, making
available a variety of trade scholarships that financed U.S. art exhibits in Latin America
and created the Inter-American Music Center, which at one point sponsored a Latin
American tour by the Yale University Glee Club.346
OCIAA publications held that Cuba had been a natural ally and cultural partner
since Columbus found Indigenous populations a “mild and trusting people” and a
343
Espinosa, Inter-American Beginnings, 159.
Fejes, Imperialism, 135.
345
Espinosa, Inter-American Beginnings, 162.
346
Espinosa, Inter-American Beginnings, 173-176.
344
195
Caribbean life “perfectly idyllic.” Like other strains of tourist literature, government
publications subscribed to a discourse of Pan-Americanity rooted in the history of
conquest and rebellion and the historical narrative that recounted Columbian contact,
colonial slavery, Wars of Independence, and the birth of the new republic in 1902,
brought about by U.S. altruistic intervention. Out of the ashes emerged U.S.-inspired
accomplishments of a new Cuban people, so that Cuban success was always defined and
enabled by the presence of the United States. Figures such as Leonard Wood and Elihu
Root were gauged to have made possible the medical discoveries of Cuban scientist
Carlos Finlay, whose work led to the eradication of yellow fever and made “Havana one
of the healthiest cities in the tropics.” Cuba was a bastion to be emulated by other Latin
American nations, particularly since “one person out of every three in Havana belongs to
a club” and the boastful presence of “medical and insurance benefits along with
excellently equipped clubhouses, swimming pools, and athletic fields.” The cultural
connection between Cuba and the U.S. was undergirded by Cuba’s economic dependency
on North America. The OCIAA divulged that Canada and the U.S. received 81% of
Cuba’s total exports in 1937, while the country’s total imports reserved 70% from the
U.S. and Canada. This showed the commercial viability of Cuba without the social
volatility, which reinforced the need to maintain good neighborliness and economic wellbeing.347
Inter-American cultural exchange included some 3,000 professors, teachers, and
students crossing borders under grants issued from the State Department between 1938
and 1948.348 The State Department now had at its disposal a large team of advisors that
347
348
“Cuba: Island Neighbor” (Washington, DC: Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, 1943), n.p.
Espinosa, Inter-American Beginnings, 319.
196
included the emerging think tank apparatus. In 1939 Richard Pattee, a professor of Latin
American History at the University of Puerto Rico, published a piece on the role of
Spanish teachers in cultural relations in which he extolled the “exchange of professors,
teachers, and students; co-operation in the field of music, art, literature, and other
intellectual and cultural attainments.” Of utmost importance was the “encouragement of
the formulation and distribution of libraries of representative works of the United States
and suitable translations of such works into other languages…” Such encouragement
included radio broadcasts and “representative intellectual and cultural works of the
United States.”349 Pattee suggested that Cuba, Venezuela, and Colombia represented
neighboring countries in which the “language teacher, eager to gain a knowledge of
Spanish civilization in its native element, can satisfy this desire at a minimum of cost and
distance.”350 If anthropologists, philologists, and other academics were touting the merit
of Latin American culture, it was still a region valued for its European antecedents. The
broader regional umbrella of “Latin America” was also noteworthy for its link to
“Spanish” culture. Pattee shares contentment by writing that countries to the south “are
areas where the characteristics of Spanish culture may be appreciated as effectively in
many instances as in Europe itself.”351
Following Cordell Hull and others, Pattee connected Latin America to Europe but
insisted that the tighter civilizational bond existed between the American republics,
including the United States, especially when Europe’s existence was under threat. PanAmericanity, therefore, remained an articulation of something above and beyond the
349
Richard Pattee, “The Role of the Teacher of Spanish in the Promotion of Inter-American Cultural
Relations,” Hispania Vol. 22, No. 3 (Oct. 1939): 236.
350
Ibid., 239.
351
Ibid.
197
problematic Europe, a new discursive cartography refreshingly modern and secure, yet
evolving out of the cultural DNA of the Old World. In a speech he gave at a meeting of
the Daughters of the American Revolution in April 1939 in Washington, D.C., Ben
Cherrington defended the benefits of cultural diplomacy in the New World. Better
communication and transportation networks, he offered, would bring understanding and
fraternity between populations. While hemispheric history was to be revered, important
now was the “spirit of youth animating the people in all the American countries.” Latin
Americans were “not a people facing backward,” but “on the contrary, throughout Latin
America there is a creative energy, a forward look and faith in better things to come,
which evokes in the citizen of our country a pronounced feeling of kinship.” Revolution
against European powers, Cherrington reminded his audience, bounded all American
republics.352 The hemispheric logic pinned Europe as old, retrograde, volatile, and fragile
under the threat of war. The Americas stood in stark contrast, with the United States at
the helm directing the new world order.
Conclusion
The OCIAA and the Division of Cultural Relations continued through World War
II with Vice President Henry Wallace serving on the advisory committee, complementing
other World War II Washington agents of cultural diplomacy such as the Office of War
Information and Office of Strategic Services that served the war effort. 353 Roosevelt
believed a sound, non-aggressive stance in the West could thwart threat of war. Success
in staving off the growing conflict in Europe and Asia, policy experts believed, depended
on Roosevelt’s ability to check aggression in one’s own backyard. The Good Neighbor
352
Ben M. Cherrington, “Cultural Ties that Bind in the Relations of the American Nations,” Hispania Vol.
22, No. 3 (Oct. 1939): 243-250.
353
Espinosa, Inter-American Beginnings, 161-163.
198
Policy was part of a larger approach to world affairs in the areas of neutrality and
economic leveling, indicated by policy measures such as the Neutrality Acts and
proposals at the London Economic Conference in 1933. One way to check the spread of
fascism was by creating a diplomatic doctrine of neutrality, which stressed quarantine
and lend-lease rather than preemptive strike.
The events surrounding the Cuban Revolution of 1933 provided an opportunity to
prove that the U.S. would not base policy towards its southern neighbors on brash
interventionism. Sumner Welles believed that Good Neighbor could reverse previous
trends in U.S. foreign policy towards Cuba and countries throughout Latin America, and
that self-criticism was necessary if the Roosevelt Administration was going to carry out
refashioned policy with any integrity. Welles continued as an enormous foreign policy
asset to the administration, but after a long diplomatic career, Welles’s professional life
would end abruptly and ignominiously in 1942, when, due to growing rumors concerning
his multiracial bisexual personal life, he was forced into early retirement. His downfall
would continue to eclipse his erstwhile accolades. In March 1956, Confidential magazine
published an exposé about Welles’s homosexuality, conveying to readers that such
matters of personal intimacy still presented a security risk to the United States.354
Writing for the Foreign Policy Association in 1936, Charles Thomson concluded
that Cuba had been witnessing three or more years of revolutionary instability under de
facto dictatorship. Thompson echoed Carleton Beals in a moment of uncanny prescience,
when he concluded: “The forces of protest have been driven underground—but whether
354
Gellman, Secret Affairs, 236-46; B. Welles, Sumner Welles, 58-59, 379.
199
to disappear or to reappear in a more aggressive form, the future alone will decide.”355 In
Cuba, revolution would indeed return a generation later, with social forces converging in
a historical moment of great uncertainty and dissatisfaction in towns and cities. This
rebellion echoed throughout the U.S. culture industries and shaped dimensions of the
New Left, civil rights struggles, and foreign policy debates in the Cold War era. It is to
this story that we now turn.
355
Charles A. Thomson, “The Cuban Revolution: Reform and Reaction,” Foreign Policy Reports, January
1, 1936, 262-276.
200
Chapter Four
Postmodern Praxis: Revolutionary Tourism and the New Left
There was this atmosphere, this fantastic throbbing atmosphere…it’s a revolutionary
euphoria, the early days of any revolution. And in this one, it was fantastic. The whole
place was throbbing with this vitality and, of course—I mean, the Fidelistas were in there
still in their combat boots, sitting in these velvet armchairs with their feet up, smoking
cigars. And then when Neruda came on stage, of course, he got an enormous ovation.
356
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Our revolution has vigorously stimulated artistic creation and has understood the
problems of culture in the broadest sense of the term…We believe, with Martí, that
fighting on behalf of culture is, in the first place, fighting on behalf of national liberation.
But we don’t believe that with national liberation the struggle stops, and we know that
the ideological debate must be kept open during the stage of achieved sovereignty in
order to overcome the dead weight left by colonial ideology.
357
Revolución y cultura, 1967
And that is why this Congress is of such interest to us. Not only because of the presence
of scientists and technicians who practice a profession linked with extraordinary
immediacy, to the economic and material development of the nation, but also because of
the participation of writers and artists, poets and playwrights, because they are also
linked with essential immediacy to the development of the personality of the new
revolutionary man that we aspire to develop.
President Osvaldo Dorticós358
As revolution resounded once again throughout Cuba’s city centers and
agricultural fields, it energized a new generation of U.S. radicals along with aging
dissidents like Joseph North who was proud to write that in 1959 “[he] had the privilege
of seeing the heart of a people’s revolution throbbing in victory.” North now enjoyed a
356
“Legendary Beat Generation Bookseller and Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights Books on the
50th Anniversary of Jack Kerouac's "On The Road", Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" and Poetry As Insurgent Art,
”Interview with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Democracy Now, September 3, 2007,
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/03/138216 (accessed 18 October 2007).
357
“Revolución y cultura: un medio para un fin,” Revolución y cultura, Oct. 1, 1967, 4-5.
358
Osvaldo Dorticós, Cultural Congress of Havana: Meetings of Intellectuals from all the World on
Problems of Asia, Africa and Latin America (Havana: Instituto del Libro, 1968), n.p.
201
notable reputation in socialist circles, which brought the distinction of appearing in the
inaugural issue of Cuba socialista, a leading journal of Fidel Castro’s government.
North’s article criticized Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress, the criminalization of
communism, and Washington’s continued dominating presence in Latin America.
Cubans read North’s comparisons between fascist Europe and the United States under
laws such as the Smith Act and McCarran Act. North yearned for the days of the First
Communist International, at a time when Karl Marx wrote Abraham Lincoln
congratulating him on his reelection victory. North also yearned for his Old Left roots
and suggested that readers “remember that the United States is the country of the greatest
cause ‘celebres’,” which included Tom Mooney, Sacco and Vanzetti, the Scottsboro
agitators, and Angelo Herndon.359 He and others of the earlier revolutionary period saw
the 1959 triumph as an opportunity to vindicate the failed promises of 1933. North
joined Old Left stalwarts Carleton Beals, Waldo Frank, and a new generation of aspiring
dissidents whose politics ushered in the sixties via inspiration not from Moscow but from
Havana. This budding New Left bloc used the context of Cuba to fuel new forms of
internationalism in order to grapple with the turbulent politics of the decade.360
This chapter focuses on the ways in which the political spirit of the 1959 Cuban
revolution emerged in cultural visions of the New Left. It charts Yankee fascination with
Cuba during the 1960s and early 1970s that generated expressions of countercultural
experimentation and global dissent powered by a Cuban revolutionary charge. Central in
359
Joseph North, Cuba’s Revolution: I saw the People’s Victory (New York: 1959), 2, 4-7; Joseph North,
“Engaño y violencia: Doble motor del imperialismo Yanqui,” Cuba socialista (Sept. 1961): 85-104.
360
Waldo Frank published Cuba: Prophetic Island (1961), which updated his prior thoughts on Cuba that
had appeared in his book, America Hispana (1931). Examples of North’s earlier articles in New Masses
include “Meet Cuba’s First Negro Mayor,” Sept. 3, 1940, 6; “Cuba’s Typhoid Cartel,” Aug. 27, 1940, 3-4;
and “Hemisphere, Inc.,” Aug. 6, 1940, 6-7. North’s Cuba: Hope for a Hemisphere (1961) remains another
text that bridges these two periods.
202
this development were new state and social programs in Cuba that used the idea of
culture to shape national development as well as position the country as a space for
artistic creativity and experimentation. Havana became a thriving capital where writers
and artists from the “underdeveloped world” could offer alternative expressions free from
what were perceived as the ideological and economic constraints of the U.S.-led First
World. Cuba fashioned itself as a leader in Third World resistance and revolutionary art,
an awe-inspiring aberration in the Western hemisphere that claimed moral superiority
over U.S.-led empire. Cuban leaders billed their country as a place of moral efficacy that
produced exciting innovation in the realm of art and ideas.
This chapter continues in a dialogical vein by analyzing the transnational forms of
Cuban revolutionary politics, U.S. social activism, and artistic development. It departs
from other studies by demonstrating how and why the U.S. Left drew inspiration from
Cuba’s revolution throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, well beyond the moment when
Cuba lost its charm for most after the Bay of Pigs invasion and Cuban Missile Crisis.
After the initial appeal of C. Wright Mills’s Listen Yankee! and LeRoi Jones’s “Cuba
Libre,” the Left’s fascination with revolution continued to grow through the decade,
becoming further entrenched in select radical circles. I build on the work on Van Gosse,
Timothy Tyson, and others to suggest that the Cuban revolution continued to resonate in
oppositional struggles against racial prejudice, gender inequality, and
imperialism/colonialism into the 1970s. This discussion complements studies by Cynthia
Young and Laura Pulido who have written on the U.S. Third World Left and its impact
on radical films, political campaigns, and community organizing in this period. I derive
203
inspiration from their work to argue that the Cuban revolution remained formative in
these later movements of resistance, even as the New Left began to splinter and fray.361
Using both Cuban and U.S. sources, and textual readings of literature, theater, and
music, this chapter demonstrates the longer period during which Left politics and
countercultural cool collided in the Beat world of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, plays of Arnold
Wesker, folk environment of Pete Seeger and Judy Collins, and in student organizing
campaigns of the Venceremos Brigades. The sustained interest by radicals was shaped
by Cuba’s reconstructed cultural industries, which produced a powerful revolutionary
mythology that helped shape international opinion in this period. By the late 1960s,
Che’s martyrdom and the global disruptions of 1968 led many to position Cuba as an
important guide and rallying cry for young radicals. Meanwhile the Cuban state
promoted images of revolution that posted itself as the avatar of Third World socialism
and cultural freedom. It fashioned this image on the world stage, which inspired
confidence in the country’s ability to withstand U.S.-led pressure to disband its political
program. In this chapter I also discuss the changing nature of cultural politics to reread
plays by Terrence McNally and Arnold Wesker, and the music of Pete Seeger and
Wyclef Jean, which reveal multiple aesthetic ideologies that have emerged from the
Cuban-U.S. cultural cauldron in our current postmodern condition. I explore the success
and controversy around Seeger’s “Guantanamera” and Jean’s subsequent remake to
unveil the ways in which a cultural text becomes reappropriated for popular consumption
in new spatial and temporal contexts. Jean and Seeger become connected through
361
Van Gosse, Where the Boys Are; Timothy Tyson, Radio Free Dixie; Cynthia Young, Soul Power:
Culture, Radicalism, and the Making of a U.S. Third World Left (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2006); Laura Pulido, Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2006).
204
international networks of markets and meanings in the postindustrial and postmodern
world. The historical trajectory of “Guantanamera” reveals how the song’s folk aesthetic
operated transnationally and evolved into an important postnational anthem of the
modern day.
Building the Revolutionary Narrative
On January 1, 1959, members of the July 26th Movement (M-26-7) led by Fidel
Castro paraded through Santiago de Cuba and declared victory over the dictator
Fulgencio Batista, who fled the island in the early morning of the New Year. With the
dawn of a new day came the sense that the victory was a culmination of a century-long
struggle for sovereignty, which began with the Ten Years War, matured through the War
of Independence, resurged in 1933, and gained decisive momentum in 1953, when Castro
and others staged a failed attack on the Moncada Barracks. Castro was imprisoned but
later freed after Batista issued a general amnesty for the prisoners in 1955. Castro went
to Mexico City and began training and planning for another rebellion in Cuba. In
October, he traveled to New York, Florida, and other states to arrange for money and
munitions for the revolutionary cause. At one point, he reportedly swam across the Rio
Grande to meet former Cuban president Carlos Prió Socorrás at the Hotel Casa de Palmas
in McAllen, Texas, where Prió pledged $50,000 to the resistance. On December 2, 1956,
some 150 M-26-7 members landed on Cuban shores in the yacht Granma. This too was a
botched attack, forcing the surviving two dozen would-be attackers to scurry into the hills
205
of Sierra Maestra where they helped build a revolutionary movement already set in
motion in the city centers of Havana and Santiago de Cuba.362
U.S. society enthusiastically followed the Cuban rebellion, its onlookers gripped
by what Van Gosse has referred to as “fidelismo.” Students, journalists, professors, and
activists proudly provided first-hand observations of Cuba, which stood as a model
exemplar of a new zeitgeist that promised social reorganization and political potency of
the people. 363 In search of participatory democracy and fueled by a utopian impulse
with new existential meaning and political direction, the new bloc found Cuba to be an
avenue through which to throw off the shackles of apathy and alienation. Chief among
these revolutionary tourists was C. Wright Mills, the academician-cum-revolutionary
known for his groundbreaking sociology and mid-life motorcycle manhood. Mills was
part of a growing coterie of intellectuals disillusioned by anticommunist red baiting who
actively challenged Cold War liberalism in matters of economics, social welfare, and
U.S. foreign policy.
Mills’s popular Listen Yankee! (1960) used the voices of Cuban revolutionaries to
mark clearly the division between the antiquated Old Left that praised Soviet politics and
the new generation:
Since we did not belong to the old left intelligentsia—the older men who had
gone through Communism and been disillusioned with Stalinism and with the
purges and the trials and the 35 years of all that—we’ve had one enormous
advantage as revolutionaries…We are revolutionaries of the post-Stalin era;
we’ve never had any “God That Failed”…We are new men…We are new
radicals. We really are, we think, a new left in the world.364
362
Paterson, Contesting Castro, 18, 33; Jules DuBois, Fidel Castro: Rebel—Liberator or Dictator?
(Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959), 99, 133-134.
363
Van Gosse, Where the Boys Are, 1.
364
C. Wright Mills, Listen, Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba (New York: Ballantine Books 1960), 43. For
more on Mills and Cuba, see Gosse, Where the Boys Are, 176-183.
206
Even before the decree of the Port Huron Statement, Mills had outlined some principles
of the new politics in his foundational call to arms, “Letter to the New Left,” in which he
dismissed the “end-of-ideology” argument as a “slogan of complacency” and deemed
liberal apologists lackeys of anticommunist paranoia. For Mills, one could choose sides
in matters of praxis: “The Right, among other things, means—what you are doing,
celebrating society as it is, a going concern. Left means, or ought to mean, just the
opposite. It means: structural criticism and reportage and theories of society, which at
some point or another are focussed politically as demands and programmes.” “To be
‘Left,”’ he continued, “means to connect up cultural with political criticism, and both
with demands and programmes….If there is to be a politics of a New Left, what needs to
be analysed is the structure of institutions, the foundation of policies. In this sense, both
in its criticisms and in its proposals, our work is necessarily structural—and so, for us,
just now—utopian.”365
Pilgrimages to Cuba inspired books, pamphlets, and essays that verified Cuba’s
success in human development and economic engineering. Paul Baran, then a professor
of economics at Stanford, relished Cuba’s progress: “We walked through abysmal
quarters of Santiago de Cuba where hovels, the horror and sordidness and misery of
which are beyond my power of description, are being torn down and replaced by entire
streets of light, clean, colorful little houses.”366 Leo Huberman and Paul Sweezy’s Cuba:
Anatomy of a Revolution (1960) also remained a popular book. The authors held Cuba’s
revolution to be “one of the most original and important social transformations of our
time.” Cuba’s visual mosaic of cigar smoking, bearded revolutionaries who were
365
C. Wright Mills, “Letter to the New Left,” New Left Review (Sept.-Oct. 1960): 18-23. Emphasis in the
original.
366
Paul Baran, Reflections on the Cuban Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1961), 5.
207
transforming a country amidst popular jubilation garnered approbation from a world
audience in its staunch rejection of U.S. hegemony. It stood as a symbol of an alternative
order, which the authors believed would hasten a “brighter socialist future.” Academic
journals such as Studies on the Left agreed, and declared the Cuban revolution “the most
important and least understood social development in the recent history of the Western
Hemisphere.”367
Studies resuscitated the thirties labor metaphysic but refashioned it with debates
over theory and praxis that spoke to new existential exigencies. In such publications one
would read essays by Che Guevara, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Frantz Fanon, who expounded
on older revolutionary theories put forth by Lenin, Trotsky, and Luxemburg. The new
generation proposed new models of revolution in Latin America and the “Third World.”
Sartre appeared in Studies translated from the Cuban serial, Lunes de revolución, and Che
from Verde olivo. In “Ideology and Revolution” Sartre proposed that the fusion of
“actions and ideas” meant a pragmatic praxis that determined ideology in a revolutionary
setting. Theory and ideology were organically derived from revolutionary exigencies,
Sartre suggested, the outcome of which was state planning from below built on peasant
revolution.368
Onlookers admired the revolution’s self-proclaimed “rational humanism” and its
adherence to “common sense” and maintained that “in Cuba they are actually doing what
young people all over the world are dreaming about and would like to do.”369 In the
wake of HUAC and intense anti-communist concern, intellectuals used the issue of Cuba
367
Leo Huberman and Paul Sweezy, Cuba: Anatomy of a Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press,
1960), Preface, p. 173; Studies on the Left, vol. 1, no. 3 (1960): 1.
368
Studies on the Left, vol. 1, no. 3 (1960): 1, 15, 75-77.
369
Huberman and Sweezy, Cuba, 81-82, 93.
208
to combat Cold War reductionism and to promote a more nuanced debate about U.S.
diplomacy. One writer pointed out that “unless the United States can be freed from its
own ideological creation, the American people may find themselves isolated from the
world by the devil theory of communism and popular revolution.” The “devil
communism” referred to the Manichaean structure of the Cold War, the tit-for-tat
offensive among nations that followed the U.S.-U.S.S.R. divide. Increasingly, critics
held that intractable positions and dichotomous absolutisms were harmful to U.S. policy
and lacked ethical responsibility.370
Such thinking supported the belief that Cubans could celebrate the “dramatic
resurrection of their nation” as a nation without barriers of class and race.371 To be sure, a
growing audience around the world wanted to witness Cuban history in the making.
Cuba became a fertile ground for exploring new cultural and political options by
renegade activists, intellectuals, and poets. Accounts by North Americans reinforced and
expanded the simultaneous Cuban production of history. Many wanted to catch a
glimpse of Fidel Castro, who enjoyed immense international appeal. One visitor wrote
that “it was not until Fidel Castro came along that the people of that island found the
leader they were willing to follow, to fight for their lost liberty.” Castro helped construct
this image by his impeccable use of the media and his engaging speaking style. He
appeared on major U.S. television networks on programs such as Face the Nation and
Meet the Press and in the magazine publications Life and Time. His vitality as a public
figure grew enormously after his famous interview with Herbert Matthews of the New
370
371
Studies on the Left, 1, 15, 75-77.
Baran, Reflections, 6.
209
York Times in 1957.372 To the approval of supporters, and the detriment of Batistianos,
the interview proved that Castro was not dead and that the revolution was very much
alive. The Times ran the articles in February 1957, which generated much support for
Castro and suggested that he was the rebel leader of note.373
Political sojourns taken by Baran, Huberman, Sweezy, Mills and others became
academic works of sociology, economics, history that touted a new government system.
Readers followed what would become a similar narrative blueprint, learning about
Cuba’s transition from a Spanish colony to a republic under U.S. tutelage, a trajectory
often framed as one of declension to progress with the summation that Cuba faired better
under the current revolutionary system. These testimonies also reinforced the remaking
of Cuba’s collective memory. A principal component of the revolutionary consolidation
was the massive rewriting of history, the construction of new heroes and dominant
themes that used a Marxist-Leninist teleology to bring about the rebirth of the nation.
These accounts highlighted Cuban resistance in the Ten Years War, the War of
Independence, the revolution of 1933, and ended with the 1959 revolution, when true
Cuban autonomy was said to have been realized. The story of 1953-1959 became an ofttold narrative of Castro-led resistance, beginning with the Moncada Barracks, followed
by the landing of the Granma, and the subsequent escape to the hills of Sierra Maestra,
where the tiny troop generated an organic revolution in the fields while helping to
manage urban uprisings from afar. Virtuous rebels, who did not torture, rape, or execute
enemies, but rather converted Batistianos and Cuban peasantry through sound political
philosophy and good moral standing, suggested a Robin Hood bunch that grew a
372
Examples include Jules Dubois’s Fidel Castro; Waldo Frank’s Cuba: Prophetic Island (1961); Ruby
Hart Phillips’s Cuba: Island of Paradox (1959); and Herbert Mattews’s The Cuban Story (1961).
373
Paterson, Contesting Castro, 174-180.
210
movement of agrarian radicals. The focus on the Cuban compesino and guajiro would
once again become national icons of resistance and a considerable constituency for the
revolutionary state, reflected by the ambitious agrarian reform measures and
redistribution of land.
Fidel Castro thus appears as the dramatis persona in virtually all of these
accounts, consumed and constructed by a worldwide audience gripped by the larger-thanlife disposition and iconoclastic character of the comandante. Castro began to build his
political self when he espoused the rhetoric of liberation in his famous “History Will
Absolve Me” speech, a text that effectively became the founding manifesto of M-26-7.
The loquacious and lengthy call to arms against the Batista regime was presented in 1953
before a court that would sentence him to 15 years in prison for his role in the Moncada
assault. Castro called for the liberation of Cuba, legal reinstatement of the 1940
Constitution, and the insistence that Cubans rise up against the Batista dictatorship. He
famously ended his discourse with “convict me if you must, but history will absolve
me.”374
This narrative template has remained seminal in Cuban revolutionary mythology.
The focus on the fields has trumped the importance of urban rebellion fought most
notably by the group the Directorio Revolucionario led by José Antonio Echeverría and
the urban M-26-7 column directed by Frank País. But documents from Cuba show the
internal wrangling of M-26-7 and the importance of city forces in the revolution. Julia
Sweig in particular has debunked some of the mythmaking surrounding Castro and Che
by illustrating that the agrarian insurrection (Sierra) and the urban resistance (Llano)
374
Fidel Castro Ruz, “La historia me absolverá,” in Hoy somos un pueblo entero conquistando el porvenir,
2nd ed. (Mexico: Siglo XXI, S.A., 1975), 3-90.
211
initially were intertwined and coordinated branches of M-26-7 but later became a rivalry.
Her analysis reveals the importance of the Llano forces in Santiago and Havana, and the
centrality of figures Frank País, Armando Hart, Haydeé Santamaría, Vilma Espín, and
Raúl Chibás in the island insurrection. It was not until late in 1958 that Fidel Castro
began to consolidate power from Sierra Maestra and emerge as the principal voice in the
revolutionary victory.375
Venceremos! Overcoming Alienation and Anxiety in Cuba
Initially, the Cuban government remained tacit on the subject of communism and
projected praise for democratic Cuba. But already by 1960, Cuba had revealed a
diplomatic preference for the Soviet Union and in January 1961 declared the revolution
officially socialist. U.S. supporters that included academic Marxists, Maoists, feminists,
and self-declared Third World revolutionaries believed that Cuba’s revolution would
yield future dividends in social organization. They joined the broader university
movement in the early stages of a change in national mood that challenged U.S.
imperialism and racial apartheid. The meaning and symbolism that Cuba’s revolution
carried just 90 miles from U.S. borders energized these inchoate political claims and
delivered Washington’s young critics proof of what collective perseverance could inspire.
As a young man, Todd Gitlin watched the Cuban revolution unfold on television:
[W]e saw the black-and-white footage of bearded Cubans wearing fatigues,
smoking big cigars, grinning big grins to the cheers of throngs deliriously happy
at the news that Batista had fled; and we cheered too. The overthrow of a brutal
dictator, yes. But more, on the face of the striding, barbudos surrounded by
adoring crowds we read redemption—a revolt of young people, underdogs, who
might just cleanse one scrap of earth of the bloodletting and misery we had heard
375
Julia Sweig, Inside the Cuban Revolution: Fidel Castro and the Urban Underground (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2002).
212
about all our lives. From a living room in the Bronx we saluted our unruly
champions.376
These images remained indelible imprints for those coming of age in the postwar
expansion, where the university environment began to yield a larger and more diverse
student body of dedicated polemicists. Young people traveled to Cuba to witness the
revolutionary euphoria. These visits became publicized affairs in Cuba, as collegians
arrived as guests of the University of Havana’s Federation of University Students (FEU)
and the Cuban Women’s Federation (FMC). Enthusiastic about the revolutionary
process, students returned to the United States with photos, memorabilia, and an
affirmation of political purpose. Cuba became an idealized nation with its ideological
and moral compass pointed in the right direction for approving observers.377
The Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) was perhaps the best known
organization that helped produced broad support for the revolution. The FPCC included
Left stalwarts Waldo Frank, Jean Paul Sartre, Carleton Beals, and Simone de Beauvoir.
The group advertised in the New York Times and Evergreen Review where Executive
Secretary Robert Taber implored readers to “learn what is really happening in Cuba.”378
Fair Play arranged a 1960 Christmas Trip to Cuba in which more than 300 traveled after
having raised $19,000 for the adventure. One could become an FPCC fellow traveler by
purchasing literature, buttons, and stickers, and by reading bulletins and reports that
placed Che Guevara’s Guerilla Warfare on the FPCC recommended reading list.379
376
Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam Books, 1987), 2, 122-123.
Peter Clark, New Cuba: The Story of 84 Young American workers and Students who Defied the U.S.
State Department’s Travel Ban and toured Cuba from June 12th through August 12th 1964 as Written by the
Students Themselves (Chicago: Chicagoans for Freedom of Travel to Cuba, 1964), n.p.
378
Evergreen Review (Nov-Dec 1960), n.p.
379
“Fair Play,” Vol. 2, No. 15, June 5, 1961, n.p.
377
213
FPCC member Sidney Lens later remembered the Cuban revolution as the lifeline for the
new political bloc, calling it “a blood transfusion for the American left” that offered “a
new pole of attraction, and a reaffirmation that socialism was still viable.” Comparing
the Cuban cause to the union activism of a generation earlier, Lens offered, “I had never
seen such a high pitch of popular sentiment, not even in the days in Detroit during the sitdown strikes.380 Left observers believed that Cuba under Castro was infinitely better than
under Batista. Eye-witnesses held that the gap between rich and poor was now gone and
that racial inequality was also a relic of the bourgeois past. Blacks and whites now
visited integrated public spaces such as the renamed Patrice Lumumba Public Beach.381
Revolutionary enthusiasts also stood in awe of Castro, his charismatic demeanor,
and his unrivaled penchant for public speaking (half-day marathon speeches at times).
One young visitor said that Castro inspired “male virtues, or ‘macho’ quality, admired so
much in Latin America.”382 Van Gosse has written that the topic of Cuba highly charged
the New Left because it provided an activist cauldron in which themes of antiimperialism and civil rights mixed. Moreover, Cuba represented the antithesis of
alienation and anxiety, a staunch rejection of Cold War conformity with masculinist
underpinnings. Castro and company were the antidote for a disaffected generation of
mostly white middle-class young men who hadn’t served in World War II and for whom
fifties conformity culture was dull and uninspiring. According to Gosse, the young
generation that heralded James Dean and Marlon Brando also upheld Fidel Castro and
380
Sidney Lens, Unrepentant Radical: An American Activist’s Account of Five Turbulent Decades (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1980), 173, 239-243.
381
C.K. McClatchy, Cuba 1965: A Reporter’s Observations (Sacramento, CA: n.p., 1965), n.p.
382
Ibid.
214
Che Guevara, and supported Cuban nationalism in its blow to Uncle Sam and Cold War
culture as a whole.383
Gosse and other scholars have rightly shown that broad-based U.S. enthusiasm for
Cuba lessened considerably following the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. While Cuba
became part of the “Red Menace” for most North Americans, support for Cuba did not
disappear. Far from it. Rather, the political and cultural significance of Cuba’s
revolution became stronger in certain pockets of U.S. radicalism. As the sixties became
more fractured and divided, campaigns for racial and sexual equality and anti-war more
entrenched and vocal, Cuba’s place in Third World politics was more vital and
internationally recognized, and remained influential in the multiple social upheavals that
intersected in 1968.
Political sojourns continued and coalesced once again into an FPCC-like moment
when the Cubans publicized the national goal to harvest ten million tons of sugarcane
between 1969 and 1970. The “zafra de los diez millones” was a monumental initiative
meant to rally Cubans in honor of the tenth anniversary of the revolution, proving that the
revolution was durable and that economic advancement was possible via a national
collective will. It was meant to move Cuba’s revolution from the realm of experiment to
a place of permanence. In 1969, Castro announced that the challenge combined work
ethic, national pride, and social advancement: “This is why we are absolutely sure that
this is a decisive test, that this is a decisive battle for the future of our people, that this is a
historic battle. Because this 10 million ton harvest will open the confidence of the
country absolutely while opening the doors of credit to our country, and it will
383
Van Gosse, Where the Boys Are.
215
consolidate the confidence of those that have invested in Cuba.”384 Cuban leaders
promised that the harvest would “keep firm and unyieldingly its revolutionary example
and position for revolutionary combatants in Latin America and all around the world.”385
Yet another marker of national pride, the harvest was seen as another way to defeat the
U.S. blockade.
Responding to this call were some 2,000 students who formed the Venceremos
Brigades. Organized principally by SDS, the Brigades provided additional labor towards
the harvest while increasing international visibility for the Cuban cause. This multiracial
conglomerate brought messages of solidarity from various racial and ethnic nationalist
groups and second-wave feminists to the sugar fields of Cuba.386 Cuban hosts praised
North American students who joined others from around the world to cut cane.387 State
publications commended the volunteers, who “risked everything” to elude the blockade
against Cuba. The image of multinational, interracial machetes cutting cane for Cuba and
broader socialist principles presented the specter of foreign backing for the Cuban state.
Volunteers were said to have been able to “express their true solidarity with the Cuban
effort, to know the land of real revolution.” University students from Boston, New York,
San Francisco, and New Haven eagerly traveled to Cuba, and, in addition to laboring in
the fields, enjoyed the opportunity to meet Fidel Castro, who on occasion visited with
384
“Diez millones para abrir una década,” Cuba internacional (Jan. 1970): 26-29.
Tricontinental (Sept. 1969): 17.
386
Lekus, “Queer Harvests,” 63-64; “The Political Purpose of La Brigada Venceremos,” Brigada
Venceremos Bulletin, May 1971, 8.
387
“Solidaridad: Un nuevo estilo,” Cuba internacional (March 1970): 52; Carlos María Gutiérrez,
“Brigada Venceremos 9 de Abril” Casa de las Américas (Sept.-Oct. 1970): 106-108; Domingo del Pino,
“Fiesta de la solidaridad,” Cuba internacional (Oct. 1970): 58-61.
385
216
workers. Others made trips to famous sites of revolutionary resistance, including Playa
Girón and the Moncada Barracks.388
In turn, young people from SDS, Black Panthers, and the Young Lords worked
with Cubans in order to legitimate and further their own radical credentials. Wrote one
Brigader:
The expression of solidarity with the people of Cuba goes beyond merely making
the political statement by going there. We expanded the concept of solidarity by
doing concrete work while we were in Cuba. Precisely the most dynamic
experience of the Brigada Venceremos is that political consciousness is
transformed into productive work; and it is this concrete work itself which
becomes the common denominator for a revolutionary.389
Physical labor was viewed as a necessary element in bolstering the Cuban cause and
more importantly in the formation of the U.S. Third World Left. The foregrounding of
work by the “masses” in a revolutionary society had a long history in communist and
socialist thinking. Social improvement was though to require state planning as well as
sacrifice by the individual on behalf of the body politic. For Yankee dissidents, working
in the sugar fields helped Cuba towards its goal while proving their political veracity.
Whereas Brigaders may have been hesitant to pick up a pitchfork in Oklahoma or
Kansas, in Cuba such work was deemed necessary in the existential fulfillment of
political ideals. Young people concretized their radical and racial identities through this
collective labor. The corporeal enactment translated to the laboring of ideology, which
further inspired their political action and added to their Left credentials in organizing
echelons in the United States (Fig. 4.1).
In 1969 Angela Davis went to the fields and remembered billboards promoting
the “Ten Million Ton Campaign” along with commemorations of Che and “posters
388
389
Arnaldo Hutchinson, “A Machetazos contra el Bloqueo,” Cuba internacional (April 1970): 3-15.
“The Political Purpose of La Brigada Venceremos,” Brigada Venceremos Bulletin, May 1971, 8.
217
praising the people of Vietnam.” Davis, too, was inspired by the laboring of ideas, “the
passion of commitment.” She recalled working under the hot sun in physical demanding
conditions but was determined to proceed undeterred. When a fellow Cuban canecutter
admonished her for “having romanticized something which was really nothing more than
terribly hard work,” it turned out to be a lesson is Davis’s political development: “It was
then that I began to realize the true meaning of underdevelopment: it is nothing to be
utopianized. Romanticizing the plight of oppressed people is dangerous and
misleading.”390
By decade’s end, Cuba became part of the discursive cartography that included
populations in Vietnam, Angola, China, and the emergence of the non-white “Third
World” in the United States. Venceremos participants held that
Colored people are waging a struggle everywhere in the world, just as they are
within the United States. The realities of underdevelopment are reflected not only
in Asia, Africa and Latin America but also in urban and rural areas of North
America. We affirm that the common economic, cultural, and racial exploitation
of our brothers and sisters of the Third World has put them in the vanguard of the
struggle for liberation and development of mankind.391
Their unifying goals, however, were fraught with divisions. Travel to Cuba became
another outlet for acrimony on the left, for while many wanted to go on trips, only some
were selected. Venceremos leadership viewed the work pilgrimages as highly visible and
representative of the Left as a whole. The cult of authenticity assumed revolutionary
meaning, so that applicants who were “gung ho on Cuba” and looking for “far out trips,”
or “romanticize[d] Cuba without being able to give specific information about the Cuban
revolution” were not considered model ambassadors of dissent.392 Racial divisions also
390
Angela Davis, An Autobiography, 203-209.
“The Political Purpose of La Brigada Venceremos,” Brigada Venceremos Bulletin, May 1971, 14.
392
Ibid.
391
218
appeared. Some whites complained that they were underrepresented in Brigade
leadership. The small Central Committee was comprised predominantly of blacks,
Chicanos, and Puerto Ricans. Leaders responded that they felt it “entirely
appropriate…that an organization dealing mainly with solidarity with a Third World
country have a leadership that is predominantly Third World.” As will be shown in the
following chapter, the growing umbrella of Third World identity raised questions over
making radical alliances across racial lines. The Brigades illustrated an example of
internecine fighting in and across activist networks in the late 1960s during a moment of
intense reorganization of racial understandings.393
393
Ibid., 2-5.
219
Figure 4.1: Cover Venceremos Bulletin, May 1971
220
The caravans of New Left travelers were inspired by state programs and everyday
Cubans who emphasized unity against capitalism and imperialism. Cuban college goers
were deemed central in the new national program and necessary for Cuba’s future
success. At a university conference, one Cuban student proclaimed:
We must commit ourselves to constant and conscious combat against the past,
without falling into a flat improvised conception of what the future must be. This
always will be more beautiful, always more universal, and always more elevated
and human…As students we have the duty to politicize ourselves and to politicize
our activities in the best and highest sense of the expression: its revolutionary
meaning. Total politicization of the process will assure its development at all
times, with perfectly defined objectives and with the willing participation of each
one of us. On the position of participation a profound task is necessarily
sustained around methods of work. We have the duty to incorporate all students
in the process, based on voluntary participation, consciously, critically, and
politically alert.
Such “work” depended on national cohesion against the singular enemy of “Yankee
imperialism,” as demonstrated in Vietnam.394 Northern visitors found Cuban students
more politically engaged and in the center of nation forming, in contrast to many of their
Yankee brethren who were depicted as turned off and tuned out. As Cuba boasted a
visual and discursive mosaic of “Patria o Muerte,” “Venceremos,” and the “Hombre
Nuevo,” the United States stood at the opposite end of the spectrum, a culture of
contradictions and moral bankruptcy. The U.S. remained an ongoing enemy to confront
as well as a society steeped in degradation and vice.
Visitors from France, Canada, the United States, and other industrialized nations
strengthened notions of Cubanidad by lending credence to assertions that Cuba was on its
way to achieving a successful society. Their approval aided the revolutionary project in
the face of constant international disapproval led by the United States and mass
emigration from the island. To counter such attacks, Cuban thinkers remained critical of
394
“Declaraciones de los Estudiantes Cubanos,” Revolución y cultura, Supplement, Feb. 15, 1969, 130-134.
221
what they billed “the American way without life.” For Cubans, U.S. counterculture
remained an oddity, with reports of Hippies, Panthers, LSD, and the Pill showing the
waywardness of U.S. culture as well as Cuba’s determination to steer away from social
divisions and popular culture pettiness. They translated Margaret Randall who wrote
about American counterculture, saying “the sociological importance of this great Hippie
movement lies in its gigantic ‘No’: no to society, no to automatization, no to false
intellectualism and to university factories, no to the American way of life.” Randall and
a new cadre of intellectuals preached saying “no” because the 1950s taught everybody to
say “yes” to the false idol the American dream.395
Cuban media ran interviews with U.S. professors who sanctified Cuba’s
revolutionary progress. These experts exalted Cuba’s advancements while charging that
the United States lagged in areas of social development. Said one U.S. professor visiting
Cuba: “I would say that a young person in the U.S. feels exactly opposite of what a
young person in Cuba feels. There, a young person finds himself lost, alienated, in the
Marxist sense of the word and totally divorced from the center of action.” Another
intoned, “The generation of today is looking socially, emotionally, and personally, as
much as politically, towards other paths.” The Cuban way of life, therefore, presented a
necessary panacea to the social ills cultivated by egregious capitalism and the imperial
ethos. Cubans believed themselves on the forefront in these areas and highlighted their
country’s role in U.S. social movements.396
395
Herbert Marcuse, “El origin de la civilización represiva” and Lipset, “La rebelion estudiantil,”
Revolución y cultura, Aug. 15, 1968, 40-48, 109-112; Margaret Randall, “Los Hippies: Un fenómeno social
Norte-Americano,” Revolución y cultura, Aug. 15, 1968, 24-30.
396
Cuba internacional, Nov. 1969, 6-15.
222
Cubans covered U.S. democratic failures as well as left politics throughout the
1960s and early 1970s, which included sharp rebuke in matters of civil rights, political
repression, and the war in Vietnam. In 1970, one Havana publication expressed dismay
at “the criminal assassination of the four students at Kent by the National Guard.”
Writers linked this moment of state violence to “the assassinations and imprisonment of
the leaders and militants of the civil rights movement and other progressive movements,
[which] show the true side of Nixon, his fascist and warmongering history and his
desperation before his inevitable defeat.” Cubans were called upon to “express to the
students and to all the North American people solidarity and the recognition from our
people of their extraordinary and brave actions, proud to be at their side in the only
possible trenches for honest men who fight for true freedom and independence in these
decisive moments of humanity…”397 While young people in the United States were
rebelling and saying “no,” their peers in Cuba were energized and saying “yes.” In Cuba,
“dropping out” was not an option, and thus Cuba presented an attractive alternative to
North American activists because it represented political participation towards social
ideals acceptable for progressive radicals.
U.S. writer-activists also appeared on Cuban bookshelves. Saul Landau, Tom
Hayden, Todd Gitlin, Paul Sweezy, Leo Huberman, and C. Wright Mills were wellknown in educated circles. Waldo Frank received royal treatment when he returned to
Cuba in 1960 and Michael Harrington’s The Other America (1962) offered further proof
of U.S. failures in social welfare Fig. 4.2). The words of Joseph North appeared in Cuba
socialista, which criticized Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress, suppression of the
Communist Party, and the excessive U.S. military and economic presence in Latin
397
“Rebelde de los estudiantes,” Tricontinental (Jul-Aug. 1970): 4, 35.
223
America.398 North and others could earn favorable status in Cuba as political allies, so
that in the momentous tenth anniversary of the revolution their congratulatory remarks
were published and remained important voices in the island’s narrative of national
progress.399
Figure 4.2: Waldo Frank and Fidel Castro walk through Havana. The caption reads, “U.S. writer
Waldo Frank and Fidel Castro travel through the new neighborhoods containing beautiful and
comfortable houses that the National Institute for Savings and Housing is building around the city of
Havana. From INRA, Jan. 1960.
398
Joseph North, “Engaño y violencia: Doble motor del imperialismo Yanqui,” Cuba socialista (Sept.
1961): 85-104.
399
Julio le Riverand, “The American Way without Life,” Casa de las Américas (Jan.-Feb. 1966): 134-136;
Casa de las Américas (Nov-Feb 1968-1969); “Lo que sucede en Cuba es apasionante,” INRA (May 1960):
11; Orlando Albornoz, “Wright Mills, Sociólogomilitante,” Casa de las Américas (March-June 1962): 86102; Casa de las Américas, (Aug-Sept. 1960): 68-74.
224
However, transnational attitudes did not always translate. Certain political ideas
could prove discomforting. As the New Left wrestled with issues of gender and
sexuality, many Cubans cast the in-fighting as another symptom of individual
competition in the capitalist world. Feminism was discussed in Cuba but enjoyed limited
public space, though Cuban women increasingly took more public interest in issues of
women’s liberation later in the decade. While the business of Cuban nation building and
intellectual debate was a male-dominated affair, Cubans did read about second-wave
feminism in articles by Margaret Randall, Isabel Larguía, and John Dumoulin, who
promoted the “science of women’s liberation.”400 As will be further explained in Chapter
Six, Cuban women were meant to be patriotic revolutionaries and guardians of
domesticity, fulfilling obligations to both state and family. In terms of sexuality, the
topic of homosexuality was taboo and virtually absent from Cuban public discourse. This
proved problematic for some members of the Vencerermos Brigades who were forced to
suppress the matter of gay liberation while in Cuba.401
Women’s liberation remained a delicate subject where the New Man, exemplified
most readily by Che Guevara, was the model citizen.402 Che and other male leaders
ventured that revolution established equality between the sexes, citing equal wage
practices and state-sponsored education.403 Young people viewed Che not as an
400
Isabel Larguía and John Dumoulin, “Hacia una ciencia de la liberación de la mujer,” Casa de las
Américas (March-June 1971): 37-53.
401
“La caña de Margaret Randall,” trans. by Oscar de las Reyes Casa de las Américas (Sept.-Oct. 1970):
130-135. On homosexuality and the Cuban revolution, see Ian Keith Lekus, “Queer Harvests:
Homosexuality, the U.S. New Left, and the Venceremos Brigades to Cuba,” Radical History Review 89
(2004): 57-91.
402
Che Guevara, “Man and Socialism in Cuba,” in John Gerassi, ed., Venceremos! The Speeches and
Writings of Ernesto Che Guevara (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968), 387-400.
403
Che Guevara, “On Growth and Imperialism,” Inter-American and Social Council of the Organization of
American States in Punta del Este, Uruguay, August 8, 1961, in John Gerassi, ed., Venceremos! The
Speeches and Writings of Ernesto Che Guevara (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968), 163.
225
organizational bureaucrat but a free-thinking humanist. He spoke about revolution in the
Americas and elsewhere, but focused on the Americas in the legacy of José Martí. His
brand of Pan-Americanity also focused on the role of the individual towards
revolutionary change and sacrifice on behalf of the whole:
Isolated individual endeavor, for all its purity of ideals, is of no use, and the desire
to sacrifice an entire lifetime to the noblest of ideals serves no purpose if one
works alone, solitarily, in some corner of America, fighting against adverse
governments and social conditions which prevent progress. To create a
revolution, one must have what there is in Cuba—the mobilization of a whole
people, who learn by the use of arms and the exercise of militant unity to
understand the value of arms and the value of this unity. 404
Che’s death in 1967 heightened the impact of the New Man symbol while it set up a
global Che market. Cuba helped create and sustain worldwide fascination with Che and
his life instantly became part of the country’s revolutionary mystique (Fig. 4.3).405 Che
was immortalized and mythologized on bill boards, buildings, museums, and across
communication networks. At a university gathering, one Cuban student offered: “It’s not
absolutely possible to speak of the new man without speaking of a new society. The man
of the 21st century that is now in formation will be necessarily a collective result, not in
the sense that it will lack valuable individuality but in the wider and generous sense
which understands that educators need to be educated and that man always carries the
stamp of his time.”406
Che as international spectacle was not lost to Cuban public figures. Novelist
Edmundo Desnoes soberly acknowledged Che as the instant conflation of the
mythological and historical: “If France brought forth Napoleon, the Soviet Union Lenin,
404
Che Guevara, “On Revolutionary Medicine,” in John Gerassi, ed., Venceremos! The Speeches and
Writings of Ernesto Che Guevara (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968), 113.
405
“Che era el hombre universal de nuestro tiempo” Casa de las Américas (Jan.-Feb. 1968): 13.
406
“Declaraciones de los Estudiantes Cubanos,” Revolución y cultura, Supplement, Feb. 15, 1969, 130-134.
226
the United States Superman, India Gandhi, Great Britain the gentleman, China Mao,
Spain Don Quijote, and Vietnam, Uncle Ho (tío Ho)—our America has produced Che.
So we enter the saturated iconographic world of contemporary history.” Desnoes
lamented the celebrity status of Che but was interested in the extent to which his image
was reproduced.407 Desnoes had been influenced by structuralist readings of
photography, images that signified. He noted that photos were ideologically-charged
documents and suggested that Castro and other leaders in Look, Life, Holiday, Time were
reminiscent of the striking images of Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa during the
Mexican revolution. For Desnoes, revolution in Latin America brought a distinctly
hemispheric appeal in documentary photography, images which captivated a world
audience.408
407
Edmundo Desnoes, “El Che y los ojos del mundo,” Cuba internacional (April 1970): 15-25.
Edmundo Desnoes, “La imagen fotográfica del subdesarrollallo,” Casa de las Américas (Jan/Feb 1966):
63-80.
408
227
Figure 4.3: Cover of Cuba internacional (April 1971) that reveals Cuba’s promotion of Che as an
international visual icon. The center reads, “The image of Che: many uses and only one
revolutionary meaning”.
228
Cuban culture, then, became debated and developed as it was commodified and
exported. Fidel and Che became revolutionary icons, “Venceremos” and “New Man”
part of a controversial global lexicon and bedrock of the Third World international.
Revolution in the 1960s needed more than ideology, so that debates over culture joined
the transnational circulation of images, texts, and discourses. The cultural terrain
provided another important pillar in Cuba’s socialist development and entered the mass
circulation of the postmodern market.
Revolutionary Culture; or, the Postmodern Logic of “Guantanamera”
Figures in the art and entertainment world found Cuba’s political redesign
amenable for new thinking on culture in a revolutionary society. Cuban leaders posited
revolution as necessary and nurturing for cultural development in the decolonizing world.
Minister of Education Armando Hart made it clear that revolution brought a new cultural
apparatus that replaced “bourgeois interests.” Now the objective was to “create the
conditions of social organization, environment, and of popular consciousness, so that new
cultural forms, products of the present process towards a socialist society, are manifested
in all of their force, and proceed with the incorporation of new expressive forms in our
cultural legacy.” Culture was viewed as epiphenomenal of economic processes; different
class relations and state planning meant changes in production, distribution, and
exchange. These were to constitute and be constitutive of cultural proclivities that led to
new aesthetics and tastes and the reorganization of cultural industries.409
Casa de las Américas was a cultural salon, museum, and international publication
that showcased artists, politicians, and philosophers who appeared in conferences,
409
Armando Hart, “Palabras al Congreso Nacional de Cultura,” Casa de la Américas (March-June 1963):
3-6.
229
performances, and essays under its auspices. Directed by former July 26th soldier,
Haydeé Santamaría, Casa created a global cultural space for revolutionary creativity,
which privileged the avant-garde as well as the multiple realities of the Third World. It
focused on Cuban arts and letters as well as inter-American exchange. Roberto
Fernández Retamar edited its journal, Casa de las Américas, which published Latin
American and Caribbean writers and provided a venue that facilitated intellectual debate.
Among invited guests were filmmaker Maya Deren and writers Simone de Beauvoir and
Jean Paul Sartre. Casa was also the leading sponsor of FPCC trips.410 Cuban aesthetes
prided themselves on establishing Casa as another arm of the revolutionary project and
notable presence on the international cultural scene.
The journal Casa de las Américas debated literature and art with an emphasis on
Marxist-Leninist analysis and revolutionary theory. Throughout its pages the Cuban
revolution was portrayed as necessary for social and cultural development around the
world, particularly in Latin America and the Third World. One Casa contributor called
the Cuban revolution “a profound transformation, fundamental and structural of socioeconomic character.” In addition to being “authentic” and innovative, its reach was
importantly hemispheric, with “all of its tasks [having an] irreversible repercussion on the
economy, society, institutions, the cultural, and the historical development of its people
and also of America, including the United States.”411 Casa’s audience spanned from
India to Italy, with Cuba at the critical juncture in a global rethinking of the humanistic
enterprise. The ideas and theories of Louis Althusser and Saul Landau were debated
410
Cynthia Young, “Havana up in Harlem,” Science and Society, 65, no. 1 (2001): 19-21; Young, Soul
Power, 23-25.
411
Luís Emiro Valencia, “Realidad y perspectivas de la revolución Cubana,” Casa de las Américas (Jan.Feb. 1961): 2-7.
230
transnationally.412 In one Casa article, Argentine writer Julio Cortázar confirmed the
importance of revolution in fictional endeavors: “It is evident that the possibilities
revolution offers a storyteller are almost infinite. The city, the country, struggle, work,
the distinct psychological types, the ideological and character conflicts; all is exacerbated
by the desire to act, express one’s self, and to communicate like you hadn’t been able to
before.”413
Another publication, Revolución y cultura, also raised questions about art and
politics and the role of the intellectual. The creative enterprise was to have been liberated
by Cuba’s communist transformation. One writer put it thusly: “Our revolution has
vigorously stimulated artistic creation and has understood the problems of culture in the
broadest sense of the term.” The cultural was viewed paramount in struggles against
imperialism and neocolonialism. José Martí retained massive importance in these new
endeavors: “We believe, with Martí, fighting on behalf of culture is, in the first place,
fighting on behalf of national liberation. But we don’t believe that with national
liberation the struggle stops and we know that the ideological debate must be kept open
during the stage of achieved sovereignty in order to overcome the dead weight left by
colonial ideology.”414
Cubans hosted international conferences to discuss the definitions and broader
implications of revolutionary culture. In January 1968, Havana convened the first
Cultural Congress to “plan, discuss, and propose solutions to the problems of the Third
World,” which included attention to “the relation between culture and national
412
“Teoría, Práctica teórica y formación teórica. Ideología y lucha ideological,” Casa de las Américas
(Jan/Feb 1966): 5-31.
413
Julio Cortázar, “Algunos aspectos del cuento,” Casa de las Américas (Nov. 1962-Feb. 1963): 12.
414
“Revolución y cultura: un medio para un fin,” Revolución y cultura, Oct. 1, 1967, 4-5.
231
independence.” 415 In memoriam of Che’s passing, the year 1968 marked the “Year of
the Heroic Guerilla,” and President Osvaldo Dorticós presented an inaugural speech that
urged the pursuit of “cultural freedom” in revolutionary society in the face of the ongoing
“imperialist threat” of the United States. Dorticós stressed the importance of cultural
development in what he and others referred to as the “so-called underdeveloped world.”
Third World liberation, he argued, needed to be embraced in cultural terms:
Here in this Congress, all the phenomena of cultural colonialism and
neocolonialism will be weighed. Of course, we could enumerate and describe
what is already known: the different ways and means, the old and new techniques,
the ultramodern procedures by which imperialism increasingly sharpens the effort
of cultural colonization or neocolonization of which it was a victim in a singularly
profound manner in the last years of its pre-revolutionary stage.416
On the Cuban organizing committee sat poet Nicolás Guillén, ballet choreographer Alicia
Alonso, novelist Edmundo Desnoes, and painter Wilfredo Lam. Attendees talked about
the importance of Ho Chi Minh and Ben Bella, as well and literature, philosophy, and
artistic development of the non-industrialized world. Various “commissions” discussed
these issues under the titles Culture and National Independence and Culture and MassMedia. In its Final Resolutions, the Congress stated that cultural imperialism remained
endemic to neocolonialism, and that “the vortex of the revolutionary struggles has moved
to the Third World.” The new “vanguard” was now located in Africa, Asia, and Latin
America, which replaced preference for European, U.S., and even Soviet models for
culture and society.417
Journals such as Casa de las Américas remained a politically aligned vehicle for
the Latin American avant-garde, in contrast to, say, Mundo Nuevo, another widely-read
415
Cuba (Feb. 1968): 4.
Cultural Congress of Havana: Meetings of Intellectuals from all the World on Problems of Asia, Africa
and Latin America (Havana: Instituto del Libro, 1968), n.p.
417
Ibid.
416
232
publication of Latin American letters. Founded in 1966 in Paris, France, Mundo Nuevo
claimed to be apolitical but was financed by the Ford Foundation and the CIA-supported
Congress of Cultural Freedom in the United States. Though similar in artistic voice,
Casa de las Américas and Mundo Nuevo were means for decidedly different political
ends. This relationship revived Depression-era debates that viewed art as an
ideologically-charged weapon.418
The axis of culture, therefore, was again inseparable from the battle of hearts and
minds in the broader Cold War confrontation. To counter Havana’s prescriptions, a
special report by the OAS rendered the Cultural Congress of 1968 as yet another example
of anti-U.S. activity. Published by the Pan American Union in Washington, D.C., the
report surmised the following:
Fidel Castro is trying, by every means at his command, to give himself and his
country a dominant role within the international communist movement; he is
omitting no personal effort, no sacrifice by the Cuban people, in carrying on a
policy characterized chiefly by the exportation of violent communist revolution to
the countries of the Hemisphere, and the holding of international communist
events of a subversive nature.
U.S. officials viewed the Congress as another instance of communist propaganda that
threatened U.S. interests. The authors were leery of how “revitalizing the revolutionary
conscience” meant the creation of what they repeatedly called “so-called ‘intellectuals.’”
To discredit the conference, the writers referred to “intellectuals” in scare quotes and
418
For a discussion on Casa de las Américas and Mundo Nuevo, see Russell Cobb, “Our Men in Paris?
Mundo Nuevo, the Cuban Revolution, and the Politics of Cultural Freedom,” PhD DISS, University of
Texas at Austin, 2007.
233
delivered widespread criticism for the 1,400 in attendance who discussed issues that had
“no cultural content whatsoever.”419
The report reveals that delegates in attendance included Ralph Featherstone of
SNCC, blues/folk singer Barbara Dane, and writers Julio Cortázar, Perry Anderson,
Arnold Wesker, and Aime Cesaire.420 While on an SDS trip, Todd Gitlin attended the
Cultural Congress. He recalled the “international bash bringing together luminaries from
First, Second, and Third Worlds,” as well as topics on “cultural imperialism” and the
“importance of literary freedoms.” Gitlin, too, was mesmerized by the intense
atmosphere: “Mostly I saw energy, amazing commitment. Ordinary people seemed both
mobilized and relaxed; it was that famous Latin revolution-with-a-beat.” It was “as if the
surrealist (and countercultural) dream of the interpenetration of art and life had come to
power.”421
Gitlin had the chance to talk with British historian Eric Hobsbawm who was also
in attendance. Hobsbawm saw the Cultural Congress as an important contribution to
international socialism and drew connections between Old and New Lefts, seeing
commonalities between the 1968 Congress and the 1937 International Congress of
Writers for the Defense of Culture. In that moment, artists David Siqueiros (who also
attended the 1968 Congress), Langston Hughes, Pablo Neruda, Nicolas Guillén, and
others discussed anti-fascism and democracy and the relevance of arts and letters at the
peak of the Spanish Civil War. Hobsbawm believed that Havana in the sixties resembled
the mood of the thirties but with an important difference:
419
Organization of American States, Special Consultative Committee on Security: Against the Subversive
Action of International Communism, Cultural Congress of Havana (Washington, D.C.: Pan American
Union, 1968), 1, 2, 5.
420
Ibid., 32, 58, 59, 64.
421
Gitlin, Sixties, 274-281.
234
In the 1960s, it has become evident, at least in large parts of the world, that the
defence of intellectual freedom can be combined with resistance to another, and at
present, greater, danger. As Fascism united the intellectuals in the 1930s, so the
United States united them at Havana, though one notes with relief that nobody
even tried to pretend that the two are or were analogous.
Though one might add, however, that some did make the two analogous, with leftwing
critics making rhetorical comparisons between the presidencies of Johnson and Nixon
and fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Still, Hobsbawm was interested in discussions on
the international movement against the war in Vietnam, liberation of the Third World,
and the U.S. civil rights movement. He also noted that Cuba’s environment appeared
particular fecund for cultural development: “The free and flourishing state of cultural
activities at present, the admirable social and educational achievements and the endearing
excursions into anti-materialist utopia, can hardly fail to appeal to intellectuals.” Like
others, Hobsbawm was preoccupied with the issue of cultural nationalism in the face of
foreign pressure: “Perhaps the most interesting [theme] was the problem of developing a
genuinely autochthonous culture in underdeveloped countries; interesting both for the
acute analyses of the process of cultural penetration under colonialism and neocolonialism it produced, and the very general rejection of the simple nationalist-populist
response to it.”422 Such questions of culture and nationalism struck at the heart of
postcolonial arguments by those who identified with Third World politics.
Cuban leaders took the onus to explore multiple avenues of revolutionary culture.
This meant revamping cultural institutions and inserting the idea of culture in national
discourse and in the international dissemination of Cuban media. Hobsbawm’s allusion
to the thirties was a parallel made by others. Many discussions resembled leftwing
422
Arnold Wesker Papers, HRC, Box 287, Folder 4, E.J. Hobsbawm, “The Cultural Congress of Havana,”
Times Literary Supplement, Jan. 25, 1968, 79-80.
235
concerns about culture in the 1930s, when “revolutionary art” was located in relation to
the position of the artist within the dialectic of historical materialism, when the “author as
producer” could potentially intervene in the production and distribution of one’s own
creative trade. It was through revolution that the artist was conceived able to represent
interests not of a social class but of the combined interests of a classless society. This
period produced notable thinkers of the contemporary canon of Marxist cultural studies to
the likes of Georg Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, Theodor Adorno, and Walter Benjamin. As
we have seen, this generation situated “culture” in different ways, as a weapon against
fascism, elite and popular expressions, and national traditions to be celebrated (or feared)
worldwide. The proliferation of conversations about art, education, and music and their
connection to the means of production, economic exchange, and use value augured well
for political concerns in the 1960s. But the sixties bore political impulses towards
thinking about culture in different terms: underdevelopment and modernization, North
and South, and East and West offered a cartographic lexicon in which issues of
decolonization and liberation in Africa, Latin America, and Asia stood opposed to
Western prescriptions for cultural development.423
Cuban tastemakers put forward that great art comes from class struggle, which in
the end would escape ideological restrictions. One critic expressed this sentiment when
he wrote:
Through the domination over the old oppressed classes, through the dominion of
the proletariat and of the working classes, farmers, and other alienated sectors of
the population, socialism liquidates inequality among classes, because it
eliminates classes in a communist society. From there emerges, for the first time,
the possibility that one day the artist represents the interests not of a social class
but of the joined interests of society, the possibility that art becomes truly free, a
423
I discuss these developments further in the following chapter.
236
profound expression which man craves, sometimes without noticing the object of
his craving.424
New paths in art and aesthetics, then, were not meant to simply reproduce the
“revolutionary line.” Contrary to their critics, Cuban officials claimed that they did not
want to mirror earlier Soviet prescriptions of socialist realism but rather to offer a space
for the avant-garde and revolutionary creativity that revealed the imaginations and
realities of the global south.
And socialism was considered the best political structure by which to nourish this
creative process. U.S. artists were drawn to the ethics and form of Cuba’s revolutionary
society. Beat poets, folk singers, and abstract painters sought new inspiration and
potential in Havana’s electric atmosphere. Such artists were welcome to the vibrant
scene provided their public views found commonality with the state’s political vision.
Cuba beckoned bohemians from the USA, which drove a thorn deeper in the State
Department’s side while reinforcing the image of Havana as a welcoming place for the
nouveau. Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti remembered meeting Pablo Neruda and Fidel
Castro and described the “fantastic throbbing atmosphere” and the “revolutionary
euphoria” in Havana. Ferlinghetti was overwhelmed with the sight of Fidelistas and the
enthusiastic and robust welcoming Neruda enjoyed, a preeminent Latin American poet
celebrated by national leaders.425
In addition to poets and poetry, U.S. consumption of Cuba’s revolution included
the stage. Terrence McNally’s ¡Cuba Sí! is a one-act play that opened in Provincetown,
424
Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, “Problemas del arte en la revolución,” Revolución y cultura, Oct. 1, 1967, 9.
“Legendary Beat Generation Bookseller and Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights Books on the
50th Anniversary of Jack Kerouac's "On The Road", Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" and Poetry As Insurgent Art,
”Interview with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Democracy Now, September 3, 2007,
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/03/138216 (Accessed October 18, 2007).
425
237
Massachusetts in 1968, which featured actors Viveca Lindfors, Martin Cassidy, and
Adele Mailer, former wife of the esteemed but unstable writer who made headlines when
he stabbed her with a penknife in 1960. Lindfors played the female lead, “Cuba,” a
cigar-smoking revolutionary who has bunkered down in Central Park, hoping to start a
revolution in the United States—Cuba’s own invasion and occupation of Manhattan. The
other main character, interpreted by Cassidy, is a New York Times reporter (who remains
nameless) sent to interview Cuba, a figure likely inspired by the real-life Times reporter,
Herbert Matthews. The piece also suggests real-life inspiration from Castro’s highly
publicized trip to New York City to attend the United Nations meeting in 1960, when he
threatened to sleep in Central Park or the U.N. garden if not admitted to the exclusive
Hotel Shelbourne.
In ¡Cuba Sí! the character Cuba has little patience for Yankee gringos and a
penchant for violence. Her foul mouth and outspoken political voice come across in a
mix of broken English and Spanish. In the beginning she kills women spies (various
“Marías”) who come to poison her. Her thoughts and actions make the reporter uneasy.
He is stupefied at Cuba’s ability to kill on a whim and her radically different social
views. ¡Cuba Sí! is meant to be a humorous satire that interrogates U.S. fascination with
the Cuban revolution and suggests a cognitive-dissonance between the political idealism
and media production of Cuban resistance. As part of the postmodern rendering of
revolution, the play comments on itself with a self-reflexivity that mocks both Cuba’s
revolution and uncritical praise for U.S. democracy. The character Cuba embodies
revolution as a utopian if deluded fantasy in contrast to the reporter who attempts to
ground their interaction in “truth,” cynically chastising Cuba and sticking to his steadfast
238
beliefs in liberal democracy. Protagonist and antagonist are difficult to discern, as both
characters construct archetypal social and national positions in their political quibble.
They stand interwoven in a Don Quijote-esque dialogue that raises questions of reality
versus illusion and mimesis versus spectacle:
CUBA: I make you nervous?
REPORTER: Your gun does.
CUBA: I put it away.
REPORTER: Thank you!
CUBA: You’re still pretty nervous.
REPORTER: You’ve made me tense. Political writing isn’t my thing. I told you
I usually interview theatrical personalities.
CUBA: I’m not a theatrical personality?
REPORTER: No. Yes. I don’t know.
CUBA: Why don’t you know Greta Garbo?
REPORTER: I JUST DON’T. I’M SORRY, OKAY?
CUBA: Okay.
REPORTER: YOU KNOW NOT EVERYBODY IN THE
WORLD CARES ABOUT YOU AND YOUR STINKING REVOLUTION.
THERE ARE OTHER THINGS. LIKE REALITY, LADY.
Cuba responds that conditions in New York City and throughout the U.S. “stink.” She
expects her actions to produce a revolution in Central Park, in the heart of New York
City—the U.S. capital of commodity and the stage:
REPORTER: Actually, I don’t think you have much to worry about. They’ll
probably let you stay here indefinitely. At least through spring.
CUBA: No one lets me stay here. This is a guerrilla camp.
REPORTER: It’s a tourist attraction.
CUBA: You’re the only tourist here, buster.
At a time when Cubans touted the New Man, McNally makes the patria feminine, which
sets up the male-female juxtaposition in the one-act disagreement. The scenes make for a
kind of gender cross-dressing, with Cuba the masculinized female figure, a gun-toting,
foul-mouthed revolutionary, as well as a feminized male subject, the hesitant and nervous
reporter who is a writer not a fighter.
239
But the mixed-gender play also leads to the problematic rendering of Cuba as an
eroticized object, a throwback to the neocolonialist script of desire. Passersby become
spectators who eventually sexually taunt Cuba. Cuba is emasculated, presented as libido
as New York onlookers make fun of her, yell sexual innuendos, and throw eggs. She is
reduced to an oddity, a freak, and a fetishized object of a tourist gaze. In an unsettling
moment of desperation to convert spectators to her cause, Cuba herself makes sexually
suggestive offers in order to recruit male supporters:
CUBA: You! Are you a man who looks about him and says this will not do? Yes?
Then you are Cuba’s lover!
REPORTER: That guy’s looking for a john.
CUBA: And you! Mister! A man who is not indifferent when there is hunger and
despair. Si? Si! I call you my lover!
REPORTER: You’re losing him to the Good Humor man.
CUBA: Amigo! Wait! I know you! A man who says politics belong to the people
and not the fools and crooks! Come back then! You too are Cuba’s lover!
REPORTER: Sounds like Cuba’s a whore.
An allegorical reading suggests a cynical disregard for the Cuban revolution and its
apologists. McNally frames U.S. attraction to Cuban politics as lustful desire, impulsive
but not a durable commitment. Cuba as the embodiment of nation is reduced to the
familiar erotic object of U.S. fascination, which metaphorically mitigates the nation’s
political viability as Cuba the character shifts from a masculinized to a feminized self.
Unable to win people over with political and moral reason, Cuba resorts to using her
body, which recasts Cubans as hypersexual people available for the sexual whims and
cravings of U.S. subjects.
If McNally parodies and generalizes Cuban politics and people, he also criticizes
a one-dimensional United States, providing another example of the neocolonial
ambivalence or “slippage.” McNally’s reporter symbolizes mainstream U.S. opinion and
240
a general lack of critical engagement with politics by the public. Like other members of
the public, the reporter is another passive observer who views social causes as tourist
attractions instead of matters of political import. Furthermore, like Cuba, the reporter is
inflexible and unchanging in his attitude. Rather than exhibiting journalist objectivity, he
questions Cuba’s ideas and doubts her chance for success. He symbolizes media
interests, the formulators of “truth” on behalf of financial and state entities. The reporter
explains that “Americans are happy,” or “at least content.” His concluding monologues
rings with democratic triumphalism: “We’re a country that’s pretty well satisfied with
itself. And with good reason. Sure we’ve got problems, but we’re big enough to absorb
them and we’re big enough to settle them. Peacefully. We’re so big about it we can even
absorb you. We’ll let you speak your piece…” His declaration awkwardly devolves into
racist simplifications and generalizations:
Now I can understand revolutions where you come from. I think the heat causes
most of them. Everyone gets itchy in the summertime. Only you’ve got it all
year long. Some people think air conditioning in Harlem would settle our racial
problems. They’re being facetious, of course…okay, another smile now…but
still, when did you last hear of trouble in a place like Maine? Revolutions are for
humid little countries with dictators. America’s a big air-conditioned democracy.
McNally constructs the typical U.S. subject as arrogant, racist, and unremittingly of the
First World. Through the reporter’s position, McNally imparts cynicism towards U.S.
complacency and superficiality. Throughout the reporter’s soliloquy a flash of a bulb is
produced off-stage to indicate photographs by onlookers. The flash in effect calls
attention to the trivial quality of U.S. political expression. The flash (occurring when
Cuba is asked by the reporter to smile) evokes the staged and constructed quality of U.S.
ideals, which are produced and distributed via media outlets, here represented by a Times
reporter who is accustomed to interviewing “theatrical personalities.” Cuba is to smile
241
like other North Americans in a society of picture-perfect quality. Stardom trumps
political efficacy. It is in this postmodern moment that nothing appears grounded in the
“real”; all political work and social ideas are produced for consumption. In her display,
Cuba is turned into commodity for the United States, a scene of entertainment brokered
in the world of entertainment. But the postmodern comment also produces a Brechtian
intervention that creates a public both on stage and in the audience. As the actors on
stage taunt Cuba, playgoers in effect watch versions of themselves, thereby collapsing the
division between the mimetic and “real” and forcing the audience’s participation in the
allegory of U.S. empire.426
The Cuban revolution also became embedded in the artistic unconscious of other
dramaturges. English playwright Arnold Wesker was inspired by his trip to Cuba in
1964, which led to the world premier of his play The Four Seasons in Havana in 1968.
Four Seasons drives an impact precisely because it is seemingly devoid of political
content, a trait not normally found in other Wesker creations. It is primarily a story about
a failing relationship. Two characters, Adam and Beatrice, are in an empty home,
emotionally trapped in their romantic woes. Each season brings a different phase in their
bitter romance over a year’s time. Ultimately, the play is about the fragility of human
emotions and the difficulty of love, as the two only communicate with one another in
terms of grief and scorn. While revolution lies nowhere in the immediate scope of the
play, Wesker did have in mind political relevance when he wrote it, believing that love
was the necessary pretext for praxis. The role of art, he submitted, was to expose
individual human suffering and transcend it to the benefit of social causes: “If
426
Terrence McNally, ¡Cuba Sí! Bringing it All Back Home, Last Gasps: Three Plays (New York:
Dramatists Play Service, Inc., 1969), 7-18.
242
compassion and teaching the possibility of change are two of the many effects of art, a
third is this: to remind and reassure people that they are not alive not only in their
attempts to make a better world but in their private pains and confusions also.”
Therefore, political art could be poetic and personal, not only intellectual or obviously
didactic: “Deny plays such as this as a part of socialist literature and you alienate all men
and women who need to know and be comforted by the knowledge that they are not alone
in their private pain. You can urge mankind to no action by intimidating it with you
eternal condemnation of its frailties. The Four Seasons was written because I believe the
absence of love diminishes and distorts all action.”427 A self-declared “activist,” Wesker
was committed to what he called “a movement of aggressive romanticism.” For Wesker,
human bonds formed the essence of revolutionary metaphysics, and Cuba concretized
these connections, for it was “on [its] way to becoming a beautiful society.”428
The Cuban revolution moved through stage, screen, and streets as it imbibed U.S.
arts and letters. In doing so, it became part of the global folk music explosion during the
1960s. Robert Cantwell has written about the youth culture that ushered in a folk revival
at the height of Cold War anxiety. Between 1958 and 1964 performers such as Pete
Seeger and Bob Dylan emerged in the wake of blacklisting and red baiting as a musical
mix of political commentary, amusement, and nostalgia played on ukuleles, banjos and
guitars. Cantwell says of this generation that folk sprang forth “with its ideological and
cultural connections largely suppressed, abandoned, forgotten, or lost[.] [I]t welled up
with all the vitality of a cultural symbol eager for rediscovery.” Culturally, the
427
Four Seasons in Penguin Plays, New English Dramatists (1966) 188-189. HRC, Arnold Wesker Papers,
Box 33, Folder 4,
428
Article from Japan Times Weekly, Nov. 9, 1968, 13. HRC, Arnold Wesker Papers, Box 6, Folder 6.
243
“invention of folk” holds aesthetic and existential import deeply rooted in U.S. history, or
as he eloquently writes:
It provides immediate relief from the sense of oppressive change emanating from
vast, remote, and often inconceivable historical forces, and from an
accompanying sense of personal disorientation, diminution, or fragmentation: the
imagination may be set free into a completed familiar world that we can be
materially associated with residual social formations we incorporate into the
historical and cultural narratives already available to rationalize such change, in
whatever dimension it occurs. [It is] social theater in which we develop the
protocols for negotiating relations among groups and classes, as well as our own
transition from one state, condition, or membership to another, discovering
ourselves contrastively as we invent the “folk,” experiencing ourselves reflexively
as we emulate them.
In the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and in the prelude to the Cuban Missile
Crisis, folk revivalism provided a “social theater” to ground, orient, and resuscitate trust
among its players and listeners. If humans were abundantly frail and humanity
exhaustively disillusioned, folk could validate and remove the remorse through its
“pastoralism, antiquarianism, [and] the picturesque.” Cantwell points out that “like other
romanticisms…folk revivalism has both an epistemological and a political force
undergirding its superstructure of fantasy, dream, and wish.” 429
This epistemological and political force continued after Cantwell’s bookend for
his study. The major upheavals of the sixties were rendered in folkways, and the music
became a way to grapple with and inflame the turbulence of the period. It grew
internationally and intertwined with Cuban music and politics. Bob Dylan, Judy Collins,
and Pete Seeger were among singers who gravitated towards the topic of Cuba in their
criticisms of U.S. policy.430 After the death of Che Guevara, Collins composed “Che,” a
paean for the martyred revolutionary that yearns to offer an emotional musical eulogy but
429
Robert Cantwell, When We were Good: The Folk Revival (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1996), 8, 54-55.
430
“Bob Dylan and the NECLC,” http://www.corliss-lamont.org/dylan.htm (Accessed October 2, 2007).
244
comes up short in its campy and overdramatic orchestral arrangement. The seven-minute
dirge proceeds slow and steady with classical accompaniment that includes harp, timpani,
French horns, trumpet, double bass, and a snare drum that interjects intermittently in
march-like rhythms to underscore the military aspect of Che’s life. The words tell of
Che’s death and legacy:
One morning in Bolivia
The leader of the partisans and two of his companions
Were forced to flee the mountains for their lives
Through green and dusty villages they sped along the little roads
The peasants smiled and shouted as they hurried by
Jesús called out to every one “Don't think that we are leaving
They only try to frighten us with guns, we shall return.”
Che is a messianic figure, referred to as “Jesús,” whose sacrifices for the common person
and ideals are to be upheld by his followers after his death. Eventually a chorus enters,
the song slowly building a crescendo to a harp strumming arpeggiated chords while
maintaining the same adagio tempo:
Continue with your work, continue with your talk.
You have it in your hands to own your lives, to own your lands.
There is no one who can show you the road you should be on.
They only tell you they can show you and then tomorrow they are gone.
In recreating the political prophet’s wake, Collins underscores the religious symbolism:
The smell of oil and incense fill the room in this adobe hut
Where on the table lies the body of a man.
His face is pale and young, his beard is dark and curled.
Pennies hold his eyelids from the evening light.
People from the village those who knew him, those who killed him
Stand inside the door, their hands are restless and empty.
They watch the priest make silent crosses in the air
And pray to God inside their hearts for their own souls.431
By the song’s end, the chorus continues but with new instruments such as bongos and
guitar now providing an upbeat and folksy background to the orchestral score. While not
431
Judy Collins, “Che,” True Stories and Other Dreams, Elektra/Wea, CD Edition 1973.
245
one of Collins’s most revered songs, “Che” becomes part of the topology of revolutionary
Cuba that entered the U.S. countercultural field and presented another evocation (albeit
schlocky) of Che lore.
The U.S.-Cuban connection also produced an extremely popular song in the
modern folk era that emerged from a musical connection between countries that predated
the 1960s. In what follows I will focus on the piece “Guantanamera” not only to show
how the folk revival brought international fame to Cuba’s most famous traditional song,
but also to demonstrate how its history and popularity are indicative of the globalized
market of postmodern culture in which we find ourselves today. Guantanamera’s
trajectory as a produced and consumed musical artifact spans the period of this study, and
is illustrative of the ways in which a cultural text becomes at once nostalgia and tradition
during what Fredric Jameson has called the cultural logic of late capitalism. The song’s
conflictual evolution reflects processes of dehistoricization and reappropriation of
narratives, images, and sounds, which are part and parcel of the postmodern textual
repackaging. As such, “Guantanamera” becomes a fascinating cultural form that defines
and defies our postmodern moment.
The story of the song’s global emergence involves several episodes. The term
“Guantanamera” literally means a woman from Guantánamo, once a municipality of
Cuba until 1976, when it became a province, and where, since 1898, the United States
has maintained a military base. Musically, the song stems from nineteenth-century AfroCuban agrarian traditions that produced the well-known contemporary Cuban style son.
The modern form of “Guantanamera” is also said to have been influenced by the Spanish
guajira, effectively making the song a guajira-son that Cuban Creole culture generated.
246
The guajira-son combines musical elements that put bucolic subject matter to the slow
rhythm of guitar or tres, with son providing the harmonic progression and rhythm.432
The song’s modern incarnation is the product of several artists. During the 1930s,
Cuban musician Joseíto Fernandez made popular “Guajira Guantanamera” with the
melody that is recognized today. Fernández was born in Havana in 1908 and grew in
popularity during the explosion of sextets that played boleros, guarachas, and rumbas in
the 1920s and 1930s. Enthusiasm for the song flourished in subsequent years during
Havana’s radio boom, with stations such as CMQ airing Fernández’s song on the show
“El Suceso del Día” (Today’s Events).433 It was at this time, too, that music crossed the
Florida Straits as Cubans devoured jazz standards and Cuban charts entered clubs and
ballrooms in Harlem, Chicago, and Kansas City. This circulation of artists and music
grew commensurately with radio and recording industries.
Still, the song did not gain international notoriety until it was recorded by the
Sandpipers, who issued their version of Guantanamera on an album of the same name
that reached number thirteen on the record charts while the song hit number nine in
September 1966. But perhaps most importantly, the Sandpipers credited the words and
music to Pete Seeger, Héctor Angulo, and José Martí.434 Seeger has enjoyed the status of
living legend in folk music circles. Since his early radical days with the Communist
Party to his famous recordings with the Almanac Singers and the Weavers, Seeger has
shown himself, in the words of Robert Cantwell, “an idealistic and embarrassed young
432
María Argelia Vizcaíno, “Aspectos de la Guantanamera,” La página de José Martí,
http://www.josemarti.org/jose_marti/guantanamera/mariaargeliaguan/guantanameraparte1-1.htm (Accessed
January 28, 2008); Iraida Sánchez Oliva and Santiago Moreaux Jardines, La Guantanamera (Havana:
Editorial José Martí, 1999) 17-18.
433
Cristobal Díaz Ayala, Música Cubana: Areyto a la nueva trova, 3rd ed. (Miami, FL: Ediciones
Universal, 1993), 144-170. Sánchez and Moreaux, La Guantanamera, 34-39; Víctor Pérez-Galdós Ortiz,
Joseíto Fernández y su guajira Guantanamera (Havana: Editora Política, 1999), 6-7, 12-18.
434
“Guantanamera,” Sandpipers, Guantanamera, A&M, LP Edition, 1966.
247
aristocrat urgently reinventing himself out of the epoch’s peculiar coalescence of music
and politics.” Seeger was a strong force in the publication Sing Out and in 1961
proclaimed himself committed to “a theory of cultural guerrilla tactics.” He is often
noted for his antiestablishment, if sometimes hokey, artistry, which included his beloved
“Guantanamera.” Seeger’s account of how the song became known to him begins at
Camp Woodland in the Catskills in 1961 or 1962 (accounts vary). There he met Cuban
musician Héctor Angulo, who, following his teacher, Julián Orbón, had put some verses
of José Martí’s Versos sencillos [Simple Verses] to the music and melody made popular
by Joseíto Fernández.435 Seeger learned this version of “Guantanamera” from Angulo,
and outside of Cuba it quickly became a song synonymous with Seeger’s name.
According to Seeger, it has remained one of his most performed songs worldwide, having
played it throughout 40 countries including once in Hanoi in 1972 for Cuban sailors as
they danced in a Conga line, and at Mike Gold’s funeral in 1967 because it had been one
of Gold’s favorites.436
“Guantanamera” appeared on Seeger’s We Shall Overcome album, a live
recording of a concert performed at New York City’s Carnegie Hall on June 8, 1963.
The following version is taken from Headlines and Footnotes from a performance at the
1963 Newport Folk Festival during which Seeger accompanies himself on guitar. This is
the version often played by Seeger and others who bear his influence. Like many
435
Martí’s Versos sencillos include 46 poems published in 1891 and remained some of the last poetry he
published in his life.
436
Robert Cantwell, When we were Good: The Folk Revival (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1996), 120, 260-269, 272. On the life of Seeger, see Cantwell, Ch. 7; José Martí, Letras fieras (Havana:
Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1981), 345-68; Pete Seeger, Where have all the Flowers Gone: A Singer’s
Stories, Songs, Seeds, Robberies, ed., Peter Blood (Bethlehem, PA: Sing Out Corp., 1993), 128-130; Oliva
and Jardines, La Guantanamera, 30-31, 51, 56-58.
248
renditions, Seeger interrupts the singing to translate the lyrics into English and to the get
the audience to sing along, a trademark for which he is famous.
Guantanamera, guajira Guantanamera
Guantanamera, guajira Guantanamera
Yo soy un hombre sincero
De donde crece la palma
Y antes de morirme quiero
Echar mis versos del alma
Chorus
Mi verso es de un verde claro
Y de un carmín encendido
Mi verso es un ciervo herido
Que busca en el monte amparo
Chorus
Con los pobres de la tierra
Quiero yo mi suerte echar
El arroyo de la sierra
Me complace más que el mar
Chorus
[I am a truthful man
From the land of the palm trees
And before dying
I want to share these poems of my soul
My verses are of light green
And my verses are also of flaming crimson
My verses are like a wounded fawn
Seeking refuge in the forest, in the mountains
With the poor people of this earth
I want to share my fate
The stream of the mountain
Pleases me more than the sea]437
437
Pete Seeger, “Guantanamera,” Headlines and Footnotes: A Collection of Topical Songs, Smithsonian
Folkways Recordings, CD Edition, 1999. Seeger’s translation.
249
Cubans had learned of Seeger’s version via a radio program under the direction of Estela
Bravo, a U.S. journalist and documentary filmmaker living in Havana. Bravo was
instrumental in forming the first Encuentro de la Canción Protesta [Meeting of Protest
Singing] in 1967, convoked by Casa de las Américas in which performers from 18
countries congregated, including Barbara Dane from the United States.438 U.S. folk
music influenced Cuba’s Nueva Trova movement, with musicians such as Silvio
Rodriguez and Pablo Milanés playing music inspired by Bob Dylan and Arlo Guthrie but
in distinctly Cuban styles. The new trovadores varied widely in their music and
messages, but by and large their songs remained another cultural avenue by which to
affirm Cuban national identity while challenging some social conventions of the
communist state.439 This type of interaction brought about a trip to Cuba by Seeger in
1971 as part of the dissident itinerary of the period that included North Vietnam and
China. He flew to Havana via Spain and received a warm welcome. Although he
remained somewhat frustrated by the lack of contact with everyday Cubans, Seeger was
able to spend a couple of hours cutting sugar cane.440 On the trip he met Fernández,
where they formed perhaps a bittersweet friendship. Seeger was impressed by Cuba’s
investment in schools and social programs. It was the first of several trips he would
make in future years.441
There have been, however, disagreements surrounding the origin and
reproduction of “Guantanamera” involving issues of copyright, ownership, and
438
Oliva and Jardines, La Guantanamera, 67-68.
Robin D. Moore, Music and Revolution: Cultural Change in Socialist Cuba (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2006); Ayala, Música Cubana, 301; Oliva and Jardines, La Guantanamera, 54-55.
440
David King Dunaway, How Can I Keep From Singing: Pete Seeger (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981),
297.
441
Lionel Martin, “Pete Seeger: El cantante de la libertad,” Cuba internacional (May 1971): 50-53; Oliva
and Jardines, La Guantanamera, 59-60.
439
250
authenticity. These are problems that arise in the modern global market, where areas of
economics, jurisprudence, and aesthetics have undergone major changes in the era of late
capitalism. Peter Manuel has written on the contentious history of “Guantanamera,”
calling the song part of the “schizophonic” international music market. Manuel notes that
while Fernández is now credited with popularizing the music in modern form, he enjoyed
little of the financial benefits or notoriety until shortly before his death in 1979. Seeger’s
first trip to Cuba included making amends with Fernández, and, by extension, the Cuban
people. Seeger and Orbón remained the primary authors outside of Cuba until 1975.
Fernández apparently remained embittered, believing Seeger had stolen his song. This
resulted in lawsuits between Orbón and Seeger and other musicians claiming intellectual
property rights.442 Obviously troubled by the issue of remuneration, Seeger later
maintained that while Orbón lived in New York he received a share of the royalties.
Seeger also pledged to send money to Cuba for Angulo, Fernández’s family, and the José
Martí National Library. The issue of financial compensation was further complicated by
the U.S. economic embargo, with U.S.-based businesses (including music and recording
industries) hampered in their ability to send money to Cuba.443
In Cuba, the topic has remained a contentious one. Cuban historians and
musicologists having “corrected” history by elevating Fernández’s importance and
crediting him with musical authorship of the song. “Guantanamera,” then, becomes
another nationalist text and terrain of struggle in Cuba. The verses of Martí set to music
are reclaimed by Cubans, yet another reminder of Cuba’s ongoing struggle for
442
Peter Manuel, “The Saga of a Song: Authorship and Ownership in the Case of ‘Guantanamera,’” Latin
American Music Review 27:2 (Fall 2006): 121, 124-126.
443
Pete Seeger, Where have all the Flowers Gone: A Singer’s Stories, Songs, Seeds, Robberies, ed., Peter
Blood (Bethlehem, PA: Sing Out Corp., 1993), 128-130.
251
independence from neocolonial aggression, in this case the financial and legal direction
of the United States. “Guantanamera” still stands as a symbol for Cubanidad around the
world, a cultural expression appropriated and distributed by Cubans, but whose meaning
and history become varied and divisive in the unregulated global flow of goods and ideas.
But it is via this international communication system that Cubans are also ostensibly able
to set the record straight, though no one person, country, or institution can determine the
myriad appropriations and meanings of any text, nor control the circulation of such
artifacts.444 The song’s debate, however, also exemplifies the disproportionate weight the
United States enjoys in determining international law and popular culture interests. Part
of the “Americanization” of the globe includes the production and marketing of music,
which includes a legal system that cedes copyright control to hyperproductive nations in
the First World. Ultimately, Seeger was forced into the position of artistic diplomat,
acknowledging the importance of Fernández and making financial adjustments to provide
credit and money where they were due.
But the curious journey of Guantanamera’s success does not end here. I want to
show yet another link in the song’s signifying chain by bringing this discussion to a more
recent moment, to the popular remake by rap/hip-hop artist Wyclef Jean. Including Jean
in this analysis brings the postmodern moment to a head, demonstrating how twentiethcentury market forces and the postmodern psyche reveal a new stage in commodification
and exchange, as well as in tastes, aesthetics, and representations. Fredric Jameson has
referred to the notion of postmodernity as an elision, erasure, or “repression” of history
by which we attend to variations, interruptions, and breaks rather than totality or systemic
wholes (as in modernism). Jameson’s postmodernity often stresses the problematic
444
Oliva and Jardines, La Guantanamera (Havana: Editorial José Martí, 1999).
252
triumph of the world market and the commodification and “Americanization” of global
culture. Postmodernity is linked to the economic lineaments of late capitalism, whereby
the “rewriting of all familiar things in new terms” and “reshuffling of canonical feelings
and values” constitute a new structure of feeling that functions in tandem with market
fluctuation, transnational corporations, and national interests.445
Wyclef Jean’s “Guantanamera” offers such an instance of rewriting and elision.
The song begins with Cuban salsa queen Celia Cruz speaking in Spanish: “Hola, soy
Celia Cruz y estoy aquí con Wyclef, celebrando Carnival. Azúcar!” (Hi! I’m Celia Cruz
and I’m here with Wyclef celebrating Carnival. Azúcar!). She begins singing the
traditional chorus of “Guantanamera” in salsa form (for which she was famous). Jean
then interrupts the Cruz line and, accompanied by a bass groove and a modern digital
mix, says “That was then, this is now.” What follows in a hip-hop/son version of
“Guantanamera” that begins in call and response:
Welcome to the Carnival
The arrival
I’m in Spanish Harlem!
Oahh-eee-ohh!
Boogie Down Bronx!
Oahh-eee-ohh!
Manhattan!
Oahh-eee-ohh!
Back to Staten!
Oahh-eee-ohh!
Jean’s version turns into both a community celebration and an enticement of bodily
desire. He raps while an old man sings the old-school “Guantanamera” chorus in the
background. The partnership of intergenerational manhood is the aural backdrop for the
visual scene of physical attraction between Jean and a young Cuban woman in a bar:
445
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1991), ix-x, xiv.
253
Hey yo I'm standing at the bar with a Cuban cigar
Hey, yo, I think she's eyeing me from afar
Yo, I wrote this in Haiti, overlooking Cuba
I asked her what's her name, she said, “Guantanamera”
Remind me of an old Latin song my uncle used to play
On his old forty-five when he used to be alive
She went from a young girl, to a grown woman
Like a Virgin, so she sex with no average man
Peep the figure, move like a caterpillar
Fly like a butterfly, let your soul feel her glide
Pac Woman better yet Space Invader
If your name was Chun-Li, we'd be playin’ Street Fighter
Penny for your thoughts, a nickel for your kiss
A dime if you tell me that you love me
Ricardo Ortíz has analyzed the pan-American nature of Jean’s version, pointing out the
geographical intersection of New York, Cuba, and Haiti. Cruz, Jean, and Martí (thought
barely present in Jean’s song) represent exile identity, all three stripped of national
belonging (like the song itself) and now situated the postnational domain of the
Caribbean diaspora. Ortíz properly identifies the “heterogeneously transcultural and
transnational space” of New York City as the fertile ground and stage for this
postnational text, where he notes Martí lived for several years and where Cruz lived for
much of her life and where she is interred.446 The pan-Caribbean identification with New
York City is the result of its location as the unofficial capital of the Caribbean diaspora.
Jean’s remake opens with “welcome to the Carnival” and appeared on his 1997 album
Carnival, a term that invokes the pre-Lenten celebration that in many Caribbean nations
and other diasporic locales incorporates African-derived religious and folk traditions into
modern street festivals. With Martí’s erasure, Jean and Cruz are bonded in their black
Caribbean exile status, Jean a Haitian immigrant and founder of the group The Fugees
446
Ricardo L. Ortíz, “On (Our) American Ground: Caribbean-Latino-Diasporic Cultural Production and the
Postnational ‘Guantananamera,’” Social Text 94 Vol. 26, No. 1 (Spring 2008): 4-9.
254
(from “refugee”) and Cruz a Cuban exile from an earlier generation.447 The routes and
roots of Jean’s version in essence brings full circle “Guantanamera” to the original
diasporic context, a journey that begins with Afro-Cuban roots in Cuban fields to its
returns via the Africana experience in the carnival context of New York City. The
porousness and decentering of exile and return are grounded in ties to the Black Atlantic
and the shared experience of modern music making, a bonded racial, cultural, and
geographic identity that finds balance amid the jarring realities of postnational physical
and metaphysical displacement.
As a Haitian immigrant living in New York City, Jean constructs the Cuban
subject from an outsider’s perspective yet suggests a common regional identity through
the Caribbean connection and the allusion to Carnival. He pays homage to the song’s
history (“an old Latin song my uncle used to play”) while positioning a masculine gaze
(with cigar in hand) towards the representative Cuban female character. Video games
refer to the woman’s potent attractiveness, and she is curiously racialized Asian in the
allusion to Chun-Li, a female fighting character in the game Street Fighter. Eventually,
we hear the woman’s voice sing some of Martí’s verses in Spanish, which sets up a
flirtatious dialogue between the woman singing and Jean’s spoken rejoinders. The aural
fraternity between Jean and the old male singer is broken by the entrance of Cruz’s voice,
which couples with a young female voice perceived to be that of the woman in the video:
(Woman) Soy una mujer, sincera
(Jean)
Do you speak English?
(Woman) De donde crece la palma
(Jean)
Can I buy you a drink?
(Woman with Celia Cruz) Soy una mujer sincera
(Jean) Uh-huh uh-huh uh-huh
(Women) De donde crece la palma
447
I thank Jason Mellard for this point.
255
(Jean) You’re killin’ me
(Women) Y antes de morir, yo quiero cantar mis versos del alma
(Jean) Te quiero mama, te quiero!
[Chorus]
One may surmise that the potential sexual conquest of the “mujer sincera” is interrupted
by the chaperone and figuratively maternal presence of Cruz. The lustful interlude
between the young woman and Jean is further broken by the entrance of fellow Fugee
Lauryn Hill, whose subsequent verse indicates that the object of Jean’s desire is no more
than an elegant prostitute (and that she is not really “una mujer sincera”). Hill’s rhymes
reveal that the Cuban woman is “a rose in Spanish Harlem” (a variant of the Yellow Rose
of Texas) who “makes stakes at a faster rate than she fornicates.” She is the “Goddess of
Black Venus” and not even pure Cuban, for while her “parents came from Cuba” she is
“part Mexican, pure sweet, dimes fell to her feet.” In the end the woman is gauged a
“gentle flower, fertility was her power Sweet persona, Venus Flytrap primadonna.”
The presence of Cruz and Hill dissolves the potential sexual encounter between
Jean and the woman of Cuban-Mexican descent, who is reduced to an upscale prostitute
who deceives men. By ostracizing the woman of mixed nation (and mixed race?), there
is simultaneously a reinstatement of racial bond shared by Cruz, Hill, and Jean. Jean is
shown to have strayed by his attraction to a successful seductress who conquers men
through her beauty and racial privilege of her non-black Latina existence. Jean creates a
scenario in which it is incumbent on the black female figures of Cruz and Hill to
intervene to bring him back around, and to prevent him from entering into a romantic
deal that would have betrayed his heart, racial identity, and pocketbook.448
448
Wyclef Jean, “Guantanamera,” The Carnival, Sony, CD Edition, 1997.
256
The music video of “Guantanamera” makes the above points stronger in visual
form. The video opens with a scene from a street carnival celebration along with Celia
Cruz’s introduction. Much of the visual narrative alternates between images of the street
carnival and the bar scene where Jean is pursuing the young woman while threatened by
thugs and gangsters in suits toting guitar cases that become machine guns (visual quotes
from Antonio Banderas in Desperado [1995]). Though an intervention, in the end, Hill’s
rap does not subvert the power differentials based on sex and class. Jean’s business
success as a hip-hop mogul and the robust sexualization of women, common themes that
permeate the popular music industry, remain entrenched, if light-hearted. These motifs
have remained profitable across the medium, including other Jean creations such as “Hips
Don’t Lie,” produced in collaboration with Colombian pop star Shakira.449
In moving from the realm of nationalist text to folksy pastoral and finally to
postnational pop, “Guantanamera” proves a worthwhile case study of Jameson’s
postmodern logic. Tracing the Fernández-Seeger-Jean circuitry of the song affords us an
example of the “pastiche” or “schizophrenic” nature of postmodern creations, and an
instance in which old texts are incorporated in their original into the substance of the
new. Jameson has noted that schizophrenia refers to a perpetual break in the signifying
chain. The shift in referents, in this case Martí’s lyrics or Fernández’s music, began with
the song’s surge in popularity in Cuba due to technological and industrial changes in the
closing stages of modernism. What was the varied interpretation of “Guantanamera”
became standardized in Cuba in the 1930s by the modern music market. Its exodus,
transformation, and popularization by Seeger in turn changed the song and its
449
Wyclef Jean, “Guantanamera,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jLA3Z9Z9Ow (Accessed February
13, 2008).
257
significance in Cuba in the post-1959 nationalist period, a case of a cultural text’s exile
and return. Cuban songmakers took the new form and made it their own, ensuring that
the story of its origin remained tied to Cuba and the figure of Martí prominently upheld.
Thus the trajectory of “Guantanamera” also presents a case study in which a
cultural text is able to morph in meaning and form in different spatial-temporal contexts.
Seeger’s folk impulse that was part of the New Left’s counterculture was itself a product
of folk genres that originated beyond U.S. borders. Jean’s visual and musical remake
stretched the geographic significance even further, making “Guantanamera” into a
multicultural anthem of New York City with pan-Caribbean undertones. Radically
distinct appropriative functions are able to produce immense popularity because they are
enabled by varying tastes, canons, and consumer habits. Seeger always made sure that
Martí was part of his “Guantanamera” performance, the Cuban patriot’s poems and
politics always appearing in Seeger’s sharing of the song. Jean’s version, by contrast,
strips the historical relevance of Martí, the referent replaced by Cruz and the young
Cuban (Mexican) who stand as feminine signifiers for the Cuban context. But by this
point, the chain of meaning is decidedly delinked, the music and lyrics decontextualized
and reappropriated as part of a global culture that promotes what Jameson calls the
“imitation of dead styles.” In effect, there is no “original” or “authentic”
“Guantanamera,” but postmodernity’s preoccupation with nostalgia, what Jameson refers
to as the “allegorical processing of the past,” necessarily constructs the illusion of one.
Seeger recreated the sense of bucolic innocence and peasant fraternity in his rendition of
the song in service to the folk aesthetic, whereas Jean’s processing of the past served a
new identity and tradition forged on the multiracial, transnational streets of New York
258
City that paid homage to descendants of the diaspora. While Cruz authenticates the song
as “Cuban,” Jean’s version is decidedly modern and polysemic, which ultimately allows
it to be ratified as “pop” and embraced by a diverse international audience. The
reconfiguration of “high” and “mass” culture also provides a new class dynamic
throughout the song’s journey. Postmodernity’s spatial and temporal flexibility ensure
commodity (re)production and consumption in the transnational circuitry of capital. It is
precisely late capitalism’s economic engineering that creates and distributes
“Guantanamera” as nostalgia, effectively securing it as part of a global usable past.450
Pete Seeger traveled to Cuba again in 1999 to accept the Felix Varela Medal
(Cuba's highest honor for "his humanistic and artistic work in defense of the environment
and against racism").451 The erstwhile acrimony was, at least publicly, laid to rest, and
“Guantanamera” continued to be remade in various niches of global culture, including
film, television, and novels. Jean’s gesture to polycultural New York City was itself the
product of the remapping of race and nation that emerged from 1960s. Cuba again
figured prominently in debates over black cultural politics. The next chapter focuses on
themes of race and revolution in the post-1959 period, in a cultural formation that
interrogated matters of identity and national development among people now defined as
part of the “Third World.”
450
451
Jameson, Postmodernism, 2-3, 17-19, 26-31, 287.
Oliva and Jardines, La Guantanamera, 55.
259
Chapter 5
Race and Revolution in the Post-Bandung Global Moment
Negroes know what is happening in Korea because the same thing is happening to our
people in Africa. It has to do with gold, and oil, and tin and other natural resources that
the people of Korea, Africa and the West Indies and all other colonial people…have the
right to do with as they choose. But the same men who own the cotton plantations in the
South are determined to seize the riches of Korea and keep them.
Paul Robeson452
See, when I went to Cuba, it was like a revelation to me. Suddenly, there I was in Cuba
and, at first, I didn’t understand that that was real stuff, that people actually could make
a revolution, that you could actually seize countries. There I was down there with a
whole lot of young dudes my own age who were walking around with guns—they just did
it. It blew my mind; I was never the same.
Amiri Baraka453
Among Americans, particularly Afro-Americans, the issue can be a burning one. They
look to Cuba both for perfection and weaknesses; the truth tends to get lost in the shuffle.
For the truth about Cuban race relations has several, co-existing levels, like an ancient
city where archaeologists uncover one settlement only to dig deeper and find another—
and beneath that, yet another. The visitor can easily make the mistake of concluding that
any one of the levels represents all there is to know.
Elizabeth Sutherland (Martínez)454
Paul Robeson continued his anticolonial activism of the 1930s with opposition to
U.S. involvement in Korea in 1950. He and others believed Africans and Koreans were
subjected to the same forces of colonialism at the hands of white governments and
business interests. His reasoning formed racial connections between Africa, Asia, and
the Americas, effectively broadening opposition against U.S. financial and military
initiatives during the Cold War.
Cuba’s revolutionary fervor also attracted LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka) to the
island. In July 1960, he and civil rights renegades Robert F. Williams, Julian Mayfield,
452
“‘Hands off Korea’—Robeson, Davis Tell Rally,” Daily Worker, July 6, 1950, quoted in Vijay Prashad,
Everyone was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asia Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity (Boston: Beacon
Press, 2001), 113.
453
Kimberly W. Benston, “Amiri Baraka: An Interview,” Boundary 2 (Winter 1978): 306-07.
454
Elizabeth Sutherland, The Youngest Revolution: A Personal Report on Cuba (New York: Dial Press,
1969), 138.
260
Harold Cruse, and Mae Mallory participated in an excursion led by the Fair Play for Cuba
Committee (FPCC) and hosted under Havana’s “Operation Truth.”455 For left-leaning
African Americans coming of age in the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education, Cuba
became the political embodiment of a new anti-racist vision; many were eager to see if
revolution could rid a society of segregation and economic disparity. Their reactions
appeared in serials such as the Chicago Defender, Jet, Baltimore Afro-American, and
FPCC bulletins. Williams became well-known in Cuba, where he published ideas about
black nationalism in the Crusader and delivered jazz music and political commentary to
the United States via his shortwave broadcast, Radio Free Dixie. African-American
interest in Cuba grew exponentially after Fidel Castro’s famous refusal to stay at the
overpriced Hotel Shelburne, opting instead for the Hotel Theresa in Harlem while
attending a conference at the United Nations. Castro received an enormous welcome of
some 2,000 strong and made time for photographs with Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser,
India’s Jawaharlal Nehru, Nation of Islam leader Malcolm X, leader of the Nation of
Islam, and other representative figures of what was increasingly referred to as the “Third
World.”456
455
Operation Truth was an initiative that invited journalists and publicists (some of whom were FPCC
members) from across the Americas to assess Cuba’s revolution under the pretext of transparency. It
included Castro’s diplomatic trip to the U.S. in April 1959. These were part of the broader strategy of
bringing international legitimacy to Cuba’s revolutionary government while combating criticism in the
United States. See de la Fuente, A Nation for All, 296; Aleksandr Fursenko and T. Neftali, “One Hell of a
Gamble”: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958-1964 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), 5, 8.
456
Besenia Rodriguez, “Beyond Nation: The Formation of a Tricontinental Discourse,” PhD diss., Yale
University, 2006, 151-156; de la Fuente, A Nation for All: Race, 296-299; Tyson, Radio Free Dixie, 232235; Van Gosse, “The African-American Press Greets the Cuban Revolution,” in L. Brock and D.
Castañeda Fuertes (eds.), Between Race and Empire, 266-280. The term “Third World” had been offered
by French demographer Alfred Sauvy, who in 1952 used it to describe the some 800 million people who
were in the process of shedding the shackles of colonialism. Between 1945 and 2007, 80 former colonies
would win independence, most of which emerged between 1947 and 1970. The current total of what the
U.N. refers to as “Non-Self-Governing Territories” number sixteen. United Nations, “History,”
http://www.un.org/Depts/dpi/decolonization/history.htm (accessed Nov. 9, 2007).
261
This chapter examines the ways in which the 1959 Cuban revolution was
instrumental in the formation of the Third World as a people, a culture, and a political
project.457 Cuban politics forcefully appeared in Third World movements in the United
States, well after the revolution’s cachet had faded from U.S. popular culture following
the failed Bay of Pigs invasion and Cuban Missile Crisis, and while the New Left began
to splinter and fray. Cuba influenced the black power politics of Stokely Carmichael and
the feminist humanism of Angela Davis, and played a vital role in the emergence of a
U.S. Third World Left that turned to revolution in Cuba and China for alliance and
inspiration. As various ethnic nationalisms in the United States coalesced around the
liberation of the oppressed and challenged Western culture, the Cuban revolution helped
generate a broad-based identification with Third World nationalism, which animated
domestic and international campaigns for social change.
What I refer to as the “post-Bandung global moment” bore new aesthetics and
ethics in decolonized regions, which yielded a discursive cartography that privileged the
ideas, history, politics, and cultures of nations and groups in spaces of
“underdevelopment.” This moment can be thought of as the confluence of changing
political affiliations and subjectivities, a new global “structure of feeling” in Raymond
Williams’ parlance, that emerged transnationally in the aftermath of the Afro-Asian
conference in Bandung, Indonesia, which made matters of race, economics, and nationbuilding high priorities among a more migratory, politicized, and visible Global South.
During the following decade figures such as Fidel Castro and Malcolm X became
internationally recognized in a shared discourse among radicals who identified
457
I borrow the notion of the Third World as a “political project” from Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations:
A People's History of the Third World (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007).
262
themselves with struggles of the Third World. It was a discursive cartography that
privileged Maoism and the avant-garde of industrializing nations, articulated and
mobilized by the routes and roots of liberation movements that sought an epistemological
and ontological alternative to the Cold War consensus proffered by the First World.
While the 1955 conference did not directly spark world clamor for revolution, it became
a foundational predecessor to “tricontinentalism” that formed the building blocks of
Cuba’s international vision. Tricontinentalism proved a top priority for Cuban leaders
and taste-makers who wanted to establish a geopolitical and moral alternative that united
Asian, African, and Latin American peoples against the U.S.-led West and its sordid
prescriptions for economic development, modernization and governance.
Havana offered a model of liberation to be followed internationally, with Cubans
creating new cultural industries that informed debates over revolution and resistance in
the United States. This was a cultural formation in which new political programs and
cultural proclivities yielded alliances, tastes, and aesthetics that focused on national
liberation by the coalitional work of non-white people. Cuba offered a model and beacon
to Third World liberation movements and energized ideas about anti-capitalism, antiimperialism, and anti-racism that operated transnationally. As Elizabeth Sutherland
pointed out, these political sojourns produced numerous accounts of Cuban “race
relations.” Equally important was how the Cuban state used race and U.S. civil rights
clashes as fodder for its own national program. Cuba’s tricontinental proffered a model
of liberation to be followed, and the state employed a new cultural engine that shaped
debates over revolution and resistance in the United States as radicals wrestled with
projections of gender, racial nationalism, and Third World identity.
263
This chapter charts the generational connections and disjunctions between African
American writers of the 1930s and the 1960s, stressing the importance of the 1959
revolution in the work of young black radicals during the later period. It also analyzes
Cuban politics around the formation of the tricontinental, revealing how these
developments informed contested definitions of black nationalism, gender, and
revolutionary politics in Third World culture and identity. I end by scrutinizing the
significant, if disproportional, weight afforded to Che Guevara in leftwing discourse,
exploring how his location in the U.S.-Cuban dialogic might illuminate contemporary
conversations on theorizing the transnational.
Learning from Scottsboro
Many from the former New Negro-Old Left bloc changed course during the Cold
War amid anticommunist purges and the multiplication of FBI filing cabinets. In the left
interregnum, disaffected African American writers echoed Richard Wright’s famous
dictum that communism was a “God that failed,” so that disillusionment with left politics
affected the pens of Ralph Ellison, George Padmore, and Langston Hughes. Padmore
had been a leading communist figure and acting editor of Negro Worker until his
dismissal from the party in 1933. By 1956, he was recognized for his work on PanAfricanism, ideas that jelled between the pages of his Pan-Africanism or Communism?458
Richard Wright provided the book’s Foreword, which defended black nationalism while
warning against the perils of communism. Wright viewed both the Soviet Union and the
United States as political systems derived from white prerogative. Alternatively, an anticommunist Pan-Africanism could develop a tenable path to liberation. Only through
458
Von Eschen, Race Against Empire, 12-13, 52-53.
264
such a racial alliance, he believed, could blacks around the world defeat racism.
Dismissing communists of color as merely “political pawns of Soviet power politics,”
Wright argued that identifying with the African diaspora presented a necessary front for
civil rights change, in the vein of Martin Delany, Marcus Garvey, and W.E.B. Du Bois.
In his book, Padmore seconded these assertions and promoted the decolonization of
Africa while fending off charges that such work was necessarily communist. In the
heightened state of alert, black leaders carried a heavier burden to prove that their
political goals were not part of the “Red Menace,” since civil rights initiatives often were
equated to communist conspiracy in the public mind. Pan-Africanism or Communism?,
in fact, stood as a stark anti-communist warning to U.S. policymakers that liberation of
Africa must be taken seriously, lest the newly emerging African states side with the
Soviet Union.459
Manning Johnson was another who shared Padmore’s and Wright’s communist
journey and later recantation. In 1935, Johnson accompanied the American Commission
to Cuba led by Clifford Odets as the group’s Secretary and one of the representatives of
the Sub-Commission on the Conditions of Negroes in Cuba. A leading figure in the
CPUSA and strident union organizer, Johnson broke from the party and changed his
political tune after World War II. His Color, Communism, and Common Sense (1958)
offered a caustic attack on “red baiting” and staunch revocation of his prior communist
loyalty. Like Padmore’s Pan-Africanism and Ellison’s Invisible Man, it joined the
growing literature that excoriated the false hope of communism and lamented the
political gullibility of African Americans.
459
Richard Wright, Foreword to George Padmore’s Pan-Africanism or Communism? The Coming Struggle
for Africa (London: Dobson Books, 1956), 11-14.
265
The booklet was distributed by American Opinion, a rightwing serial published by
the Alliance, Inc. The introduction to Johnson’s work was written by Archibald
Roosevelt, son of President Theodore and uncle to Kermit Jr., the CIA official who
orchestrated the removal of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953.
Archibald Roosevelt was an outspoken member of the John Birch Society and president
of the Alliance Inc., a group known for its invectives against mainstream civil rights
organizations. In his introduction, Roosevelt casts Johnson as one who had been typical
of those “Negroes brought up in a religious home” but one who still “fell under the spell
of the communist propaganda.” It was Johnson’s Christian upbringing, however, that
“made him revolt at the obscene immorality of the Communist Party” and Johnson’s
intelligence that “made him see through the stupidity of the communist doctrine, and see
that he should strive to be a first class Negro instead of an imitation of a third class white
man.”460 Johnson emerges, then, as a tried-and-true spokesman for born-again black
capitalists who defend the Free World against the Soviet threat.
Following Roosevelt’s summation, the story that Johnson tells is one of political
disillusionment and regret that comes with praising false idols. Old Left groups such as
the American Negro Labor Congress and National Negro Commission, he insists, were
merely pawns that took “direct orders from Moscow.” Believing that the “Red
Conspiracy” meant a state of godlessness, Johnson repented by rediscovering his
Christian roots in tandem with the virtues of capitalism, effectively linking religious
doxology to exaltation of the markets. Johnson is indignant about what he saw as the
communist conspiracy to infiltrate the “Negro Church” and also critical of white leaders
460
Archibald Roosevelt, Introduction to Manning Johnson, Color, Communism, and Common Sense (New
York: Alliance, Inc, 1958), 3-5.
266
in the Party who overshadowed black voices. Johnson writes that the Comintern used
African Americans for their own pursuits. Former black comrades James W. Ford, Harry
Haywood, and Otto Hall (all “Negro Reds”) are reduced to “lickspittles” and “Uncle
Toms” due to their communist affiliation. Even the N.A.A.C.P. remains suspect: “The
main danger and handicap to the Negro is not the Southern school, but the persecution
and hate complex the N.A.A.C.P. and the reds are trying to create.” Firebrand liberals
are labeled “communist,” the “modern-day carpet baggers” who descend into the south in
order to convert god-fearing, free market African Americans: “Like a witch stirring her
brew the ‘missionaries’ stir up all the sectional and racial bitterness that arose in the wake
of the Civil War and Reconstruction.” George Washington Carver and Booker T.
Washington, by contrast, are considered by Johnson black leaders worthy of emulation.461
Johnson’s criticism of communist whites who used blacks as a race card for
political purposes was certainly ironic, for one could argue that Johnson was similarly
used by Roosevelt and the Alliance Inc. for their own political needs. In producing the
booklet’s introduction, Roosevelt stood as the white authority that framed the meaning
and importance of Johnson’s subsequent testimony. Color, Communism, and Common
Sense remained part of Cold War literature in which white-majority institutions (and
publishing presses) encouraged and funded public opinion by African Americans that
branded civil rights activists and organizations “communist” in order to serve political
agendas that effectively kept blacks at the back of the bus.
If many of the Scottsboro generation were in retreat, however, a younger cohort
of black intellectuals, artists, and leaders were charging forward, optimistic about the
possibilities of social change. During the period in which Padmore and Manning released
461
Johnson, Color, Communism, and Common Sense, 6-19, 27, 44-48, 50-58.
267
their invectives, Cuba’s revolution was bringing the promise of social equality based on
the fruits of collective insurgency. The specter of improvement along racial lines sparked
African American pilgrimages to the island following the 1959 victory. Adam Clayton
Powell, William Worthy, and Julian Mayfield were among those who experienced
revolutionary Cuba. Their favorable reactions included Mayfield’s gleeful proclamation
that Cuba had discovered a “solution to the race problem.”462
LeRoi Jones was also profoundly affected by his Cuban. His 1960 trip was a
watershed moment in the political development. Jones delivered his impressions of Cuba
in the widely-circulated “Cuba Libre,” first published in the November/December 1960
issue of Evergreen Review. “Cuba Libre” placed the reader in the frenetic environment
of thousands of fidelistas chanting “Cuba Sí, Yanqui No” while on a pilgrimage to
Santiago de Cuba, where the year prior Fidel Castro and the July 26th Movement had
declared victory. The 25-year old Jones was openly overwhelmed by the brouhaha,
which stirred up questions about political efficacy in his home country: “What was it, a
circus? That wild mad crowd. Social ideas? Could there be that much excitement
generated through all the people? Damn, that people still can move. Not us, but people.
It’s gone out of us forever. ‘Cuba, Sí, Yanqui No.’”463
The Beat poet remembered that the idea of revolution had been “one of those
inconceivably ‘romantic’ and/or hopeless ideas that we Norteamericanos have been
taught since public school to hold up to the cold light of ‘reason.’” Indeed, Jones reduced
the political impulse among young people in the United States to faddishness: “The
rebels among us have become merely people like myself who grow beards and will not
462
463
Quoted in Rodriguez, “Beyond Nation,” 155.
LeRoi Jones, Cuba Libre (New York: Fair Play for Cuba Committee, 1961), 3, 5.
268
participate in politics. A bland revolt. Drugs, juvenile delinquency, complete isolation
from the vapid mores of the country—a few current ways out.” By contrast, Jones
believed that Cuba represented the “real deal” but later remembered Fidel as part of
postmodern spectacle: “I had been fascinated by the headlines from Cuba. I had been
raised on Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood and the endless hero-actors fighting against injustice
and leading the people to victory over the tyrants. The Cuban thing seemed a case of
classic Hollywood proportions.” The katabasis of the young Jones concluded by finding
Cubans part of the “new peoples” (Asians, Africans, Latin Americans) who were
determined to craft their own model of development without U.S. interference.464
Jones’s Cuba trip also produced “Betancourt,” a poem reportedly inspired by a
Mexican Communist who had reduced Jones to “a petit bourgeois poet.” Her jabs at his
political apathy distressed him and yielded the first lines of the poem, which read:
What are
influences?
A green truck
wet & glowing, séance
of ourselves, elegy for the sea
at night, my flesh
a woman’s, at the fingertips
soft white increased coolness
from the dark
sea.
The subsequent stanzas evoke images of an erotic escapade with racial undertones,
devoid of obvious political content. But more important is that between the verses of
“Betancourt” and the prose of “Cuba Libre” lay a Jones in transition from apolitical Beat
to Third World revolutionary, from Jones the editor of Yugen magazine to Amiri Baraka
464
Jones, Cuba Libre, 15; Amiri Baraka, The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka (New York:
Freundlich Books, 1984), 161, quoted in Cynthia Young, “Havana up in Harlem”, 23-24.
269
a leading figure in the Black Arts Movement. The Cuban experience did not single
handedly change Jones’s political compass, but it remained a powerful ingredient in his
evolution as an artist and political thinker.465
Baraka remained indebted to Depression-era aesthetes, recognizing the
importance of Harlem in his own artistic development:
I would be closer to what you would call a Du Boisian now than anybody else.
And all those great black writers like Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, the
whole Harlem Renaissance group, with their checks and balances, their ups and
downs. It’s people like Langston [Hughes] and Sterling [Brown] and Margaret
Walker, Lorraine Hansberry, Jimmy Baldwin. Those, to me, are the greats.
Baraka remembered Langston Hughes as a writer he “grew up with,” and it was Hughes
who gave Baraka early mentorship. “Langston Hughes pulled my coat first...The first
poem I ever had in that magazine, which was ‘Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide
Note,’ Langston sent me a postcard, in green ink, that said, ‘Hail, LeRoi from Harlem. I
understand you’re colored.’” Baraka credited Hughes with introducing him to the work of
Federico García Lorca, Jacque Roumain, and Nicolás Guillén; the legacy of the
Scottsboro generation imbibed the new zeitgeist, forming a new canon and catalog of
influences.466
Harlemites of the past also moved Baraka to frame his politics within the cultural
logic of diaspora in which Africa and Cuba were linked in the racial cartography. On his
shift to Pan-Africanism, Baraka recalled that
Cuba was the trigger for all of that. The Africa thing had been developed
previous to that, but the Cuba thing popped the whole thing open, because once I
465
Cynthia Young provides ample evidence for this argument as well. See her Soul Power, 31-37.
Benston, “Amiri Baraka: An Interview, 307; “Betancourt,” in Paul Vangelisti, ed., Transbluesency: The
Selected Poems of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones (1961-1995) (New York: Marsilio Publishers, 1995), 37-41;
Jones, Cuba Libre, 4-5.
466
Van Gosse, “Home Rules: An Interview with Amiri Baraka,” Radical History Review Issue 87 (fall
2003): 114, 118, 125.
270
went there and then got the whole feeling of the whole international
correspondence, of motives and actions and ideologies, I was changed, you know?
In a deep way. Because I had been inherently trying to get political, but that was
the stroke, because it showed me that there was a whole world that was in
motion.467
The Cuban revolution informed Pan-African identity in its location of transcontinental
significance as well as its critique of imperialism. Cuba’s revolution nurtured these
connections by representing a “black nation” trenchantly assertive in its own liberation
and one that took race seriously in political discourse. In the years following the AfroAsian Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, Cuba’s state apparatus aggressively pursued a
position of leadership in the decolonised world, which placed race front and center in
campaigns of revolution and liberation in its formulation of the tricontinental.
Cuba in the Post-Bandung Global Moment
In April 1955, leaders from 29 African and Asian countries gathered in Bandung,
Indonesia, to concentrate on the problems of uneven economic development, war, human
rights, nuclear proliferation, colonialism, and global racism. In the wake of Dien Bien
Phu, but before the liberation of Algiers, the Afro-Asian Conference created a staging
ground for non-aligned nations to seek an alternative order to the bivalent East-West and
to narrow the gap between the North and South. Attendees discussed topics on
decolonization not addressed by the United States or the Soviet Union and their allies.468
The member states were bonded, in part, by the sense of a shared postcolonial
condition. Indonesia’s President Sukarno opened the conference with following:
All of us, I am certain, are united by more important things than those which
superficially divide us. We are united, for instance, by a common detestation of
colonialism in whatever form it appears. We are united by a common detestation
467
468
Ibid., 115.
George McTurnan Kahin, The Asian-African Conference (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1956).
271
of racialism. And we are united by a common determination to preserve and
stabilize peace in the world.
Sukarno later used American revolutionary rhetoric to place the goals of Bandung in a
U.S. cultural vernacular: “On the eighteenth day of April, one thousand seven hundred
and seventy five, just one hundred and eighty years ago, Paul Revere rode at midnight
through the New England countryside, warning of the approach of British troops and of
the opening of the American War of Independence, the first successful anti-colonial war
in history.” Such revolutionary rhetoric made the goals of the Global South equal to
those of the West, suggesting common political aspirations and revolutionary origins, and
pressuring a response by U.S. leaders.469
Later U.N. General Assembly leader and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist from
the Philippines, Carlos P. Rómulo, readily made a racial correlation when he noted the
lack of “white nations” at the conference. He offered links between racism, colonialism,
and underdevelopment, and posted several criticisms directed towards the United States
on behalf of Asian states. These included ire for earlier U.S. support of colonialism, lack
of aid to poorer nations (the absence of an Asian version of the Marshall Plan), and
doubts about the “American way of life.” Rómulo argued that the United States needed
to acknowledge the historical richness of pan-Asian culture: “Our way of life—which we
have had for 2,000 years—may not offer the prosperity of the 200-year old United States,
but there is something in maturity that cannot be bought with dollars or achieved with
chewing gum, hot dogs, and comic strips.” America’s way of life, after all, was
connected to its imperial suggestions for development abroad. Rather than categorically
implement U.S.-style democracy, Rómulo insisted, the U.S. needed to listen, learn, and
469
“Speech by President Soekarno at the Opening of the Asian-African Conference, April 18, 1955,” in
McTurnan Kahin, The Asian-African Conference, 43-44.
272
adapt, for what worked in Europe may not necessarily work in Asia or Africa. Similar to
the civilizational debates of the thirties, questions of continentalism continued in the later
moment but with stronger rhetoric and political organization emerging from the “darker
nations.” Continental ethnocentrism could work both ways; monolithic constructions of
Africa and Asia by Third World leaders now combated prescriptions of cultural uplift by
the United States and Europe.470
Nearly eleven years later, leaders in Havana positioned Cuba as the torch bearer
of the post-Bandung world. In January 1966, Cuba organized a meeting of the
Organization of Solidarity of African, Asian, and Latin American Peoples (OSPAAAL).
It brought 483 delegates from 82 countries to Havana, with the mission of the inaugural
conference “to increase the anti-imperialist battle on the three continents.” The
conference praised the work of Stokely Carmichael and Amílcar Cabral, and publicized
revolution as the hope for humanity.471 Representatives discussed national liberation in
Africa, Asia, and Latin America around issues of economics and imperialism, with sharp
rebuke pointed at U.S. involvement in Vietnam and the spread of U.S-inspired capitalism.
The gathering proposed to resuscitate the spirit of Bandung in aligning Third World
nations against the forces of colonialism and imperialism. “At the front of this complex
and dangerous situation,” the program outlined, “the new states of Asia and Africa feel,
as a political imperative, the necessity to unite their efforts and solidarity in the common
defense of their independence in the cultural and economic development of their peoples
in front of the threat from the distorted foreign influence…” OSPAAAL attendees
remained indebted to Bandung, because it “signaled a capital moment in the awakening
470
Carlos P. Rómulo, The Meaning of Bandung (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1956), 2,
42-45; Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations.
471
“A dos años de la primera conferencia Tricontinental,” Tricontinental (Jan-Feb 1968): 3-12.
273
of consciousness of Afro-Asian peoples and represented the coronation of the solidarity
movement that germinated and came into bloom in the era of struggle for national
liberation and independence…”472
While Bandung remained an important antecedent, Cuban hosts concentrated on
expanding the bicontinental framework to encompass the tricontinental. OSPAAAL
highlighted the importance of Latin America in the Third World and positioned Cuba as
the leader of revolutionary thinking and action. Cuban elites agreed that “in Asia, Africa,
and Latin America the Cuban Revolution has captured the heart and imagination of the
exploited classes, and the triumph of January 1, 1959, the culmination of the heroic
process initiated with the assault on the Moncada fortress on July 26th 1953, is a historical
event charged with significance for all liberation movements.” Cuba was a model to be
followed, observed, and emulated. “Solidarity with Cuba,” wrote one Cuban journalist,
“is the best defense the people have, particularly in Latin America, in their fight against
today’s enemy of progress and liberty, North American imperialism.”473
Tricontinenalism became fundamental to Havana’s geopolitical strategy and
rhetorical leverage in the international arena. It offered an alternate political program and
list of economic remedies that differed from those presented by NATO and the
International Monetary Fund. The counterdiscourse challenged modernization strategies
and anticommunist politics prescribed by the “Free World,” and projected a language of
liberation and nationhood for the deterritorialized and decolonized. In one of his last
official communiqués in 1967, Che Guevara situated Vietnam as a benchmark for the
Third World but maintained the America of José Martí stood at the helm of this
472
“Antecedentes y objetivos del movimiento de solidaridad de los pueblos de Africa, Asia, y América
Latina,” Cuba socialista (Feb. 1966): 45-46.
473
“Cuba: Una respuesta adecuada en América Latina,” Tricontinental (July 1968): 3, 5.
274
resistance, with Cuba its captain: “America, a forgotten continent in the last liberation
struggles, is now beginning to make itself heard through the Tricontinental and, in the
voice of the vanguard of its people, the Cuban Revolution will today have a task of much
greater relevance: creating a Second or a Third Vietnam…of the world.” 474 Che and
other Cuban officials proselytized tricontinentalism in speeches and conferences in an
effort to build solidarity among African, Asian, and Latin American peoples towards the
common goal of defeating U.S. imperialism.475
This authority was derived, in part, from the assertion that Cuba was now a nation
where racism officially ceased to exist.476 “Third World” was also read “non-white,” in
such a way that Cuban prestige depended on the image that all Cubans lived under
socially-equal conditions, irrespective of race and without class. Social barriers were said
to have been eviscerated with the vanquish of the bourgeoisie in 1959; socialism had
caused institutionalized racism to disappear naturally. The revolution, many maintained,
had “eliminated from Cuban life the odious and humiliating spectacle of discrimination
by color of skin.”477 The world witnessed that Afro-Cubans now had access to public
spaces heretofore reserved for whites. Night clubs and beaches were now desegregated,
and Afro-Cubans enjoyed state-supported educations and occupied higher professional
positions. Antonio Maceo and Nicolás Guillén became celebrated Afro-Cuban heroes,
and the ordinary black subject was elevated to popular memory and now appeared in
mainstream historical accounts.
474
Che Guevara, “Message to the Tricontinental: ‘Create two, three…many Vietnams,’” in
Gerassi,Venceremos, 420.
475
Che Guevara, “On Our Common Aspiration—The Death of Imperialism and the Birth of a Moral
World,” in Gerassi, Venceremos, 378.
476
de la Fuente, A Nation for All, 4.
477
José Felipe Carneado, “La discriminación racial en Cuba no volverá jamás,” Cuba socialista (Jan.
1962): 53-67.
275
Racial equality became part and parcel of Cuba’s tricontinental framework, race
and revolution the building blocks of Cuban foreign policy. The Cuban government now
sent medicine and soldiers to armies and governments in Africa that shared Havana’s
political vision. Algeria, Zanzibar, Zaire, Guinea-Bissau, and Angola are but a sample of
countries that received Cuban aid in national struggles.478 Cuba’s investment in Africa
resonated among African Americans whose attention to African politics shaped their
work in the United States. The anticolonial movements of the 1930s had survived the
State Department raking of W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and others, so that the
campaigns for Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia in 1935 had transmogrified into support for
Patrice Lumumba’s Congo in 1960. Liberation movements in Africa provided Cuba with
further ideological and political strength in their global aspirations.479
In addition to money, medicine, and military materiel, Cuba exported the
revolutionary trappings of literature and media dedicated to socialist intellectualism, art,
and revolution. Joining Casa de las Américas was Tricontinental, an international
magazine that published articles on Cuban foreign policy as well as revolutionary
literature of the “developing world.” Published in Spanish, Arabic, French, English, it
reached worldwide distribution and served to unite opposition against the United States
and its allies. Subscribers would find articles on North Vietnamese resistance against the
United States, vignettes on class struggle in India, and support for Palestinian and Syrian
478
Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959-1976 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
479
James H. Meriwether, Proudly We Can Be Africans: Black Americans and Africa, 1935-1961 (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
276
confrontations against Israel. Readers would learn from an up-and-coming Yasser Arafat
that Palestinians “have great confidence in our friends in Cuba.”480
To strengthen claims that Cuba was socially advanced, Cuban cultural workers
focused on the treacherous civil rights movement in the United States, covering racial
strife in Montgomery, Greensboro, and Selma. The Cuban cultural record showcased
events from the U.S. Civil War to the Watts rebellion, as well as the words of Martin
Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, James Weldon Johnson, W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Laurence
Dunbar, and James Baldwin. One could read LeRoi Jones describing racial tokenism in
the United States or Julian Mayfield’s account of the standoff between Robert F.
Williams and authorities in Monroe, North Carolina.481 Readers encountered news on
racial violence in the United States, “from Little Rock to Urban Rebellions,” as well as
the coalitional work of the Black Panthers, Brown Berets, and Young Lords. Following
the explosion of ethnic and racial radicalism in the United States, Cubans published
excerpts from Stokely Carmichael’s and Charles Hamilton’s book, Black Power (1967),
as well as an address by H. Rap Brown of SNCC. At New York City’s Village Theater,
Brown talked about “Vietnam and Black America” in which he connected war in
Vietnam with the oppression of blacks around the world.482
480
“Indochina: La respuesta efectiva a la agresión Yanqui,” Tricontinental (July-Aug. 1970): 9-19; “India y
la lucha de las clases,” Tricontinental (Feb. 1970): 25-37; Osvaldo Ortega, “Palestina: La revolución del
pueblo,” Tricontinental (Sept. 1971): 35.
481
José Luis González, “Los primeros novelistas negros norte-americanos,” Casa de las Américas, (MayAug. 1966): 98-114; W.E.B. Du Bois, “Los combates espirituales de los negros de Norteamérica,” trans. by
Regina de Marcos, Casa de las Américas (May-Aug 1966), 142-6; LeRoi Jones, “Tokenismo: 300 Años
por Cinco Centavos,” trans. José Rodríguez Feo, Casa de la Américas (Jan-Feb 1962): 114-25; Julian
Mayfield, “El ‘secuestro’ de Monroe,” trans. José Rodríguez Feo, Casa de la Américas (Jan-Feb 1962),
107-14.
482
“USA: de Little Rock a las rebeliones urbanas,” Tricontinental (Jan. 1970): 7-16; Claude Julien,
“Malcolm X y los Black Muslims,” Revolución y cultura, April 15, 1968, 16-29; H. Rap Brown, “Viet-nam
y la Norteamericana Negra,” Revolución y cultura, April 15, 1968, 111-117.
277
African Americans were deemed a crucial element in what one Cuban writer
called “the awakening of the Third World that began in Bandung and that culminates in
Havana.” Cuban elites called “on the Afro-American masses to strengthen their united
action” and promised that Cuba was “fully conscious of the importance of their struggle,
since they fight Yankee imperialism from within while [Cubans] dismember it from
afar.”483 Exposing racism in the United States was a political imperative for Cuba’s
geopolitical strategy and served to build national cohesion. Projecting the U.S. as
immoral and hypocritical in its democratic experiment exposed an obvious sore spot on
Uncle Sam’s record of liberty and prosperity, such that April 1961 brought news of the
failed Bay of Pigs invasion as well as recent racial terror by the KKK in Houston and
memories of Emmett Till (Fig. 5.1).484 Cuban cultural producers devoted themselves to
the exposure of America’s turbulent second reconstruction, whereas Cuba, by contrast,
could offer a societal antidote that made strides where the U.S. lagged.
As Amiri Baraka confirmed, Cuba evinced a connection to Africa in a way not
felt in the United States. After 1959, Cubans, too, read C.L.R. James’s thoughts on
“Black Power” as well as expressions of “Africa in America” that showcased black
Atlantic philosophers Nicolás Guillén, Aimé Césaire, Jacque Roumain, and Frantz Fanon.
The turn to “Afroamerica” was important in popular discourse, and many African
American sojourners were impressed with the participation of Afro-Cubans in more
social capacities.
483
Lisandro Otero, “Racismo, segregación y poder negro en Estados Unidos,” Revolución y cultura, April
15, 1968, 2- 4; “Estados Unidos: Confrontaciones armadas,” Tricontinental (Oct. 1969): 32.
484
Fulton D. Namyte, “El siniestro Ku-Klux-Klan,” INRA (April 1961): 40-3.
278
Figure 5.1: Cuban publications showed racial violence in the United States, which included "The
Sinister Ku Klux Klan." These images suggested that Cubans could rest assured that they lived in a
racially-tolerant state where such violence did not exist. From INRA (April 1961).
279
However, still important to Cuban nationalism was the notion of racial and
cultural hybridity, such that the mulatto remained a powerful trope for the Cuban nation
as it had since the days of José Martí. The mixture of black and white, African and
European, made one Cuban writer affirm that “the mulatto sentiment of homeland will
also determine the Cuban ethnic liberation not only in the racial sense, but also in the
national.” Cubans were to be mindful of European and African cultural antecedents but
also to remember, “we are not Africa, like we are not Europeans: we are America, our
America.”485
African Americans who visited Cuba testified to the ills of U.S. democracy and
posited Cuba as a place free from racial turbulence. In one interview Ralph Featherstone
of SNCC talked at length about new directions in “Poder Negro” (Black Power) and
confirmed Cuba’s accomplishments: “Cuba is the only liberated zone in the Western
Hemisphere. The Cuban revolution represents a victory for oppressed peoples of all parts
of the world. It’s a miracle that it exists only 90 miles from the heart of imperialism.”486
Cuban national poet Nicolás Guillén interviewed notable dissidents such as Waldo Frank
and Robert F. Williams, both of whom believed that Cuba’s revolution was making
strides in establishing racial equality on the island. Frank and Williams also challenged
U.S.-centric claims to “America,” with Williams referring to people of the U.S. as
“United States Americans” in line with distinctions made by Latin Americans.487
485
C.L.R. James, “Poder Negro,” Casa de las Américas (May-June, 1968): 2-15; “Africa en América,”
Casa de las Américas (May-Aug. 1966): 3-4; Elías Entralgo, “La mulatización Cubana,” Casa de las
Américas (May-Aug. 1966): 76-80.
486
Lionel Martin, “Featherstone: Para el gobierno Americano todo el tercer mundo es negro,” Cuba (Feb.
1968): 42.
487
Guillén, “Waldo Frank en La Habana,” Hoy Oct. 5, 1960, in Nicolás Guillén, Prosa de prisa, II:330332; Williams quoted in Rodriguez, “Beyond Nation,” 163, 166.
280
Featherstone, Frank, and Williams were eager to see a country that had rid itself
from segregation. Cuban officials corroborated this assertion. At an OAS meeting in
Punta del Este, Uruguay in 1961, Che Guevara spoke about equality in modern Cuba:
It took many steps to affirm human dignity, one of the first having been the
abolition of racial discrimination—because racial discrimination did exist in our
country, fellow delegates, in a more subtle form, but it did exist. The beaches on
our island formerly could not be used by the Negro or the poor, because they
belonged to private clubs and because the tourists who came from other places did
not like to go swimming with Negroes. Our hotels, the large hotels of Havana,
built by foreign companies, did not permit Negroes to sleep in them, because the
tourists from other countries did not like Negroes. That is what our country was
like.488
Such statements appeared in lectures, publications, speeches, and on the screen. The
notion of a racially-equal Cuba emerged in multiple cultural forays across the island as
well. In 1961, the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC)
released the film Realengo 18 with black actors depicting the armed peasant struggle
against the U.S.-backed Cuban government in the 1930s. Also popular was Miguel
Barnet’s Biografía de un cimarrón (1966), a book that told the story of 105-year-old exslave Esteban Montejo and his life of struggle first against slavery and later against Spain
in the War of Independence. Both Realengo and Biografía proved that Cuban heroes
could be any race and of any class standing. Such guarantees were also made on the
airways via the OSPAAAL Radio Show, which broadcast to different parts of the world
and provided another avenue to connect the world to Havana’s political vision. As Watts
erupted and Black Studies departments emerged on U.S. campuses, Cuba was remaking
488
Che Guevara, “On Growth and Imperialism,” Inter-American and Social Council of the Organization of
American States in Punta del Este, Uruguay, August 8, 1961, in Gerassi, Venceremos!, 163.
281
its own usable past with new statistics, narratives, and policy initiatives that substantiated
the belief that Cubans were now color blind (Fig. 5.2).489
489
de la Fuente, A Nation for All, 288; “Programación Radial de la OSPAAAL, Tricontinental (July 1968):
49.
282
Figure 5.2: Ripping up apartheid in South Africa. Tricontinental’s readers could feel part of the
international community that sought to destroy the racist legacies of colonialism. From
Tricontinental (Sept.-Oct. 1971).
283
All of this begs the question: Were conditions better for Afro-Cubans after 1959?
For many, they were not. While the new nationalism trumpeted claims to racelessness
and racial equality, revolution did not make racism disappear into the Cuban ether.
Institutionalized racism was by and large dismantled, historically-entrenched racist social
norms continued in unmediated ways, with university attendance, government positions,
and media professions occupied mostly by white applicants. Race continued to be a
determining factor in power and privilege. Economically, black Cubans labored
disproportionately to make ends meet, and culturally Afro-Cuban religions such as
Santería, Abakuá, and Palo Monte were, along with Catholicism and Protestantism,
banned in favor of a secular socialist state. Moreover, extensive desegregation
campaigns made many whites uncomfortable with the prospect of sharing social spaces
with blacks, which contributed to anti-Castro white flight from the island. White
privilege continued to dominate the lives of everyday Afro-Cubans, so that despite
gaining in areas such as sports and music, black Cubans still encountered racism in
matters of work, marriage, and standards of beauty. And despite Afro-Cubans’
indispensable contributions to the anti-Batista resistance, most of the revolutionary
heroes such as Che, Fidel, and Camilo Cienfuegos were white.490
The contradictions were not lost to all U.S. visitors. Harold Cruse fondly
remembered his Cuban trip but was suspicious of the lack of Afro-Cubans in the upper
echelons of the governing party.491 Elizabeth Sutherland’s book, The Youngest
Revolution, exposed conversations with several black Cubans who attested that racism
490
Pedro Pérez Sarduy and Jean Stubbs, “Introduction: The rite of social communion,” in Pedro Pérez
Sarduy and Jean Stubbs, eds., AfroCuba: An Anthology of Cuban Writing on Race, Politics and Culture
(Melbourne, Australia: Ocean Press, 1993), 6, 9-11; Sutherland, Youngest Revolution, 149-168; de la
Fuente, A Nation for All, 260-285.
491
Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1967) 356-7.
284
remained a very “subtle thing.” One respondent challenged the father of Cuban
patriotism José Martí himself, saying in the end Martí’s thinking on racial integration was
merely a blueprint for assimilation.492 While revolution brought more opportunities for
Afro-Cubans, it also produced a discursive space that erased racism, so that voicing
criticism against racial inequality became a crime against the state. Robert F. Williams
found this brand of censorship problematic, causing him and his wife to seek greener
pastures in China and North Vietnam.493
Still, radical political pilgrims from the United States tended to offer favorable
reports on Cuba’s social reorganization. While Sutherland interviewed Cubans of color
who saw little improvement, she also located those who believed that new opportunities
existed to exhibit one’s racial pride. In Havana, one respondent found a speech by
Stokely Carmichael in 1967 inspirational if surprising in its criticism of Abraham
Lincoln, for most Cubans believed Lincoln to be the uncontested champion of the African
American masses. Sutherland witnessed an anniversary celebration of the Watts
rebellion in which some 60,000 Cubans showed up to celebrate the “Day of Solidarity
with Black People of the United States.” A photo insert by Leroy Lucas portrayed an
array of images of Afro-Cuban men in settings that would have struck a U.S. audience.
One photograph revealed a young black man reading in a library while another showed a
male dancer in a leotard rehearsing in a ballet studio. The spotlight on black Cubans
participating in a variety of quotidian activities related to work, leisure, and creativity, in
492
493
Sutherland, Youngest Revolution, 149-154.
Tyson, Radio Free Dixie.
285
spheres usually reserved for whites, suggested that Cuba provided social opportunities for
its black citizens in a way the United States did not.494
‘Ser como el Che’: Cuba, Postcolonial Identity, and the U.S. Third World Left
The “reality” of Cuba’s complex racial landscape, therefore, did not preclude its
symbolic power in the radical imagination of the north. As Cubans challenged the U.S.
democratic creed and promoted their country as the panacea to the social ills that plagued
U.S. towns and cities, Cuba remained a political Mecca for Yankee dissidents. Cuba’s
catalog of images and representations also contributed to the creation of a U.S. Third
World Left. According to cultural historian Cynthia Young,
The U. S. Third World Left was forged in the interstices between the New Left
and Civil Rights, between the Counterculture and the Black Arts movement,
between domestic rebellion and international revolution. A generation of AfricanAmerican, U. S. Latino/a, and U. S. Asian artists, intellectuals and activists
created cultural, material and ideological links to the Third World as a mode
through which to contest U.S. economic, racial and cultural arrangements.495
Out of the coalitional work by people of color and the global uprisings in Prague, Paris,
and Mexico City emerged an international language of dissent that criticized U.S. empire,
global racism, political repression, and poverty. These included transnational debates
over race, culture, and identity of the marginalized and oppressed. Cuba’s
tricontinentalism remained part of contested definitions of black nationalism and helped
fuel the emergence of a left humanism in which an identification with anti-capitalism,
anti-imperialism, and anti-racism broke myths of cultural, racial, and national
authenticity.496 Cuba established an international forum for questions of non-white
494
Sutherland, Youngest Revolution, 149-154, Photo Insert.
Young, “Havana up in Harlem,” 14.
496
Here I draw from Besenia Rodriguez’s notion of tricontinentalism, which signified a political alignment
of U.S. activists who employed anti-essentialist definitions of race and nation in order to forge a universal
495
286
identity and class warfare, which challenged standard epistemological and ontological
assumptions of the Third World, and which remained a pivot point for U.S. activists
whose cultural politics remained distinct from the white capitalist West.
Stokely Standiford Churchill Carmichael (later Kwame Ture) found Cuba’s
tricontinental vision relevant for his identification with the African diaspora rooted in a
Zionist tradition that stressed returning to the “homeland,” which had included Martin
Delany and Marcus Garvey among its well-known adherents. SNCC’s former leader
underwent a dramatic change in political consciousness (highlighted by his controversial
utterance of “Black Power”) that ultimately positioned diaspora as a way to wage politics.
Carmichael followed a tradition of Trinidad-born thinkers that included George Padmore
and C.L.R. James, though Carmichael’s formative years were spent in New York City.
Like Du Bois and other northern black organizers, Carmichael’s first trip to the south
radicalized his racial thinking. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party movement in
1964 and the Selma march in 1965 gave Carmichael a new sense of purpose, and he later
recalled that Mississippi “taught me to really love my blackness.”497 Carmichael’s PanAfricanism guided his thinking on black “culture.” He called culture “a cohesive force”
and viewed all descendents of the African diaspora as “Africans” in search of new values,
new societies, with the ultimate goal “to stop all influence of Western culture on our
people—completely.” By the 1960s debates over black cultural politics had become, at
times, vitriolic. For Carmichael and others, viewing Africa as the primordial homeland
humanism based on anti-capitalism, anti-racism, and anti-imperialism. Rodriguez, “Beyond Nation,” ivviii.
497
Stokely Carmichael, with Ekwueme Michael Thelwell Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of
Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) (New York: Scribner, 2003) [hereafter RFR], 318.
287
continued as an essentialist construction that shaped projections of black nationalism, as
it had for Delany and Garvey, as well as Guillén and Hughes.498
At a London conference on Black Power, Cuban representatives convinced
Carmichael to visit Havana. Carmichael remembered the revolution as “a process I very
much wanted to see for myself: a colonized and exploited society transforming itself
independently according to rational, fair, and humane principles.” Indeed, his visit was a
capstone experience in his political developement:
It was an incredible moment, more than just exciting. It was eye-opening,
inspiring, and mind-blowing. I mean, here were brothers and sisters from around
the whole world, Jack, especially the “third world,” who were struggling to
liberate humanity from colonialism, economic exploitation, and the absurd and
pernicious principle that corporate profit, individual selfishness, and greed can be
an effective basis for social organization and decent human interaction.
The Cuban experience prompted Carmichael to frame the struggles of African Americans
and Latin Americans in common terms under the “American” appellation, both groups
anchored with qualifying adjectives that discursively allied them in their opposition to
U.S. whiteness. For Carmichael, both were “oppressed by the same force—capitalism
and gringo imperialism—and thus share[d] the same struggle.” The rhetorical turn
conjoined black North Americans and Latin Americans in challenging standard notions
of a white “American” identity and politics, and showed that diasporic politics and panAmericanism could align along a common counterhegemonic axis that included Selma,
Harlem, and Havana.499
Carmichael’s travel circuit included a visit to Ho Chi Minh’s North Vietnam,
where he learned of Minh’s experiences of Garveyism in Harlem. He also yearned to see
498
Stokely Carmichael, “Pan-Africanism—Land and Power” from Modern Black Nationalism (1997), ed.
Van Deberg, 213.
499
Carmichael, RFR, 582-88.
288
the Algeria of Frantz Fanon and finally, Guinea, where Carmichael (now Kwame Ture, in
homage to Kwame Nkrumah and Sékou Touré) made his final home in 1969. The chief
impetus for his move was political: “…Africans in the diaspora return home for many
different reasons. I returned home for revolution…not the ‘culture,’ not the climate, not
the vegetation, the ‘beauty’ of the landscape, or to discover my ‘identity’…but what
attracted me…was the unified spirit, the political structures, the level of organization, at
the grass roots…the ideology, the national pride and dignity and of course the
combativeness of the country in fighting against injustice.”500
Africa remained a malleable referent in black cultural politics of the 1960s, and
Cuba fortified cultural bonds to Africa in a way not experienced in the United States.
Also present at the London conference was the venerable former Trotskyist, C.L.R.
James. James proved a trans-generational figure in anticolonial activism when he
updated his foundational Black Jacobins (1938) in 1963, which included an appendix,
“From Toussaint L’Ouverture to Fidel Castro.” James now linked Cuba of 1959 to Haiti
of 1791, both revolutionary moments important due to their histories as West Indian
slave-based monoculture societies. James suggested that Castro took up the Caribbean
struggle begun by L’Ouverture, and that Cuba’s future held importance for the rest of the
Antilles: “Whatever its ultimate fate, the Cuban Revolution marks the ultimate stage of
the Caribbean quest for national identity.”501
Harold Cruse was another well-known advocate of a black cultural program free
from white norms, tastes, and industry moguls. His trip to Cuba in 1960 yielded early
reflections on the role of revolution in black arts and letters. Casa de las Américas
500
501
Carmichael, RFR, 613.
C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins, 2nd ed. rev. (New York: Vintage Books, 1963), 391.
289
published Cruse’s work on “Cuba and the North American Negro” in which he outlined a
model of black cultural nationalism in search of revolutionary authenticity. Similar to
many Cuban thinkers, Cruse viewed culture as epiphenomenal to social and economic
change, the natural extension of revolutionary transformation. Cuba’s radical redesign of
the cultural industries elevated the status of Afro-Cubans, which boded well for Cruse’s
nationalist desire: “…I’m a black American and I intensely feel an ethnic affinity with
the Afro-Cuban ingredient of the Cuban social conglomerate. It’s this African heritage in
the Western hemisphere that has always been the reason of my creative activities in New
York City where I have spent the majority of my life.” Like Langston Hughes, Cruse
saw Cuba as a way “to look towards Africa for some inspiration in the arts.” Black
creativity in the United States, Cruse lamented, had been exiled to Europe. Conversely,
Cuba’s revolution stood as a cultural awakening, and Cruse hoped the black bourgeoisie
in the United States would challenge the NAACP and black artists to rise up against
white-majority institutions. Cruse returned from Cuba invigorated with the prospect of
“an intercultural plan of action that seeks to establish contacts among black Cuban and
American writers, painters, dancers, and composers.”502
These early ruminations developed into his larger exegesis on black culture, The
Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967). Looking for the “essence of Negro culture,”
Cruse desired a union between black intellectuals and the “Negro masses” in order to reestablish a sui generis cultural tradition reminiscent of the Harlem Renaissance. Cruse
favored an approach that blended the integrationist strategies of Frederick Douglass with
the separatist prescriptions of Martin Delany. The figure that best represented this
synthesis in his estimation was Du Bois and his leadership in the Pan-African congresses.
502
Harold Cruse, “Cuba y el negro Norteamericano,” Casa de las Américas (Aug.-Sept 1960): 65-67.
290
Important for any African American cultural program was an economic base that
controlled the cultural industries, so that writers, filmmakers, and musicians would be
produced and distributed by fellow African Americans. Cruse regretted that integration
had led to the “cultural negation” of black America with its “whitened” cultural
expressions. He noted that cultural regeneration could not be accomplished via the
tactics of black revolutionaries like Robert F. Williams. Cruse claimed such strategies
overzealous, their penchant for violence futile. Rather than the Revolutionary Action
Movement or Black Panther Party, Cruse advocated change via state and constitutional
mechanisms in the vein of Thurgood Marshall and other civil rights elites from the days
of Rosa Parks.503
This brand of black nationalist desire, however, was not without its exclusionary
principles. The fight against “gringo imperialism” often promoted a form of resistance
that glorified projections of masculinity. Cuban manhood became a dominant image
associated with racial politics in the United States, the “New Man” a trope that signified
the ideal Cuban citizen and optimum Third World revolutionary. It produced the belief
that the new man was “simple, politically and scientifically responsible, with an
unbreakable conscience of his patriotic and human duties,” and that “the formation of the
new man is the central concern of the Cuban revolution and its leader, Commandant Fidel
Castro.” Huey Newton called the optimal soldier “an exceptional man” who combined
military might with intelligence and a sense of justice, in line with Che’s formulation of
the theory-minded guerrilla fighter (Fig. 5.3).504
503
Cruse, Crisis, 4-6, 13, 38, 85.
For more on the revolution’s impact on U.S. manhood, see Gosse, Where the Boys Are. Interview with
Huey Newton, “Poder Negro y lucha revolucionaria,” Tricontinental (Nov. 1968): 5-12; “A dos años de la
primera conferencia Tricontinental,” Tricontinental (Jan.-Feb. 1968): 18.
504
291
Projections of Cuban manhood not only provided an appealing alternative to
young white middle-class men’s sense of disaffection in the postwar period, but it also
became part of the catalog of representations associated with oppositional politics by
people of color in the United States. African Americans reiterated praise for Guinea’s
Sékou Touré, Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, and Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, for they were
examples of leaders who inspired brazen effrontery to the white West. Their popularity
also lent credence to the assertion that national liberation was a male-dominated affair.
292
Figure 5.3: Huey Newton, leader of the "Panteras Negras." From Tricontinental (March-April 1969).
293
Fidel Castro entered the pantheon of manly Third World leaders. Eldridge
Cleaver’s bestselling book, Soul on Ice (1968), was, among other things, a treatise on
masculinity, in which Castro, Mao, and Ben Bella represented non-white male heroes
who could effectively thwart a James Bond or Lyndon Johnson.505 These connections
stemmed from a racial politics that made “blackness” or “brownness” more than a
phenotypic signifier but a political mindset from which to wage social change. Vijay
Prashad has written that in the United States “black” was a political color, which could
explain Stokely Carmichael’s quip that Fidel Castro was “one of the blackest men in
America.”506 While whites remained part of this movement, whiteness, along with
imperialism and capitalism, were deemed social barriers that continued to dominate the
subaltern psychologically, territorially, and economically. Castro’s maverick anti-U.S.
stance, therefore, commanded attention in African American political discourse, which
brought comparisons between Fidel and black public figures. Cleaver likened Castro’s
military acumen to Mohammed Ali’s robust boxing credentials, calling Ali the “black
Fidel Castro of boxing” who defeated his opponents as Castro did at the Bay of Pigs. “If
the Bay of Pigs can be seen as a straight right hand to the psychological jaw of white
America, then Las Vegas was a perfect left hook to the gut.” Echoing Carmichael’s
commensuration of African and Latin Americans, Cleaver suggested that Ali and Castro
stood as a heavyweight duo united in their confrontation of white political structures.
What Castro did on the battlefield, Ali did in the ring; violent resistance depended on
505
Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (New York: Dell Publishing, 1968), 82.
Walter Rodney, The Groundings with my Brothers (London: Bogle-L’Ouverture, 1969), 31, quoted in
Vijay Prashad, Everyone was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asia Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity
(Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 51-2.
506
294
manliness and multiracialism, which could conquer opponents while it reinforced nonwhite heterosexual manhood.
Tricontinental brotherhood, therefore, could be quite explicit in its misogynistic
attitudes towards women and disparagement of male homosexuals. Cleaver suggested
that writer James Baldwin represented the negation of the black male revolutionary,
whitened and weak due to his attraction to “bourgeois culture” and (white) men.
Baldwin, Wright, and other black homosexuals were rendered “impotent” and “castrated”
in Cleaver’s book, stripped of their masculinity. This intersection of class and sexuality
echoed Cuban popular discourse, which dodged the topic homosexuality while it
remained abundantly critical of bourgeois tastes. The case of Cuba therefore ratified the
imagined community constructed by Cleaver and other male leaders of the Third World
Left that limited women and omitted homosexuals from the discursive domain of
revolutionary politics.507
In Cuba, women were deemed central to the revolution’s success, but equality
between the sexes was not achieved to the degree it was promoted. Like racism, sexism
was said to have been eliminated under socialism. Some norms did reflect new equal
footing between men and women. Lower income women now enjoyed access to a
greater range of jobs, and beginning in the early 1970s men were designated by law
equally responsible for care of children and home. But many pre-revolutionary gender
roles remained intact, so that women were still expected to take charge of domestic duties
while attending to work outside the home in service to state and society.508
507
Cleaver, Soul, 92-3, 101-03, 188-92.
Muriel Nazzari, “The “Woman Question” in Cuba: An Analysis of Material Constraints on Its
Solution,” Signs, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Winter, 1983):246-63.
508
295
Amid the variable realities of Cuba’s gendered terrain was the move by certain
members of the Third World international to challenge such patriarchal projections of
power. Early displays of what would become major markers of third-wave feminism
debunked claims to male revolutionary authenticity, and in doing so reshaped the mold of
Cuban tricontinentalism as well. Representatives from the fourth Venceremos Brigade,
for example, wanted to “join hands with our Cuban brothers and sisters in the struggle
against U.S. imperialism and for the construction of a society of the new man and new
woman.”509 Elizabeth Sutherland Martínez and Angela Davis were examples of left
figures that made race and revolution more inclusive of women. An influential leader in
California’s Chicana/o movement, Sutherland (later Martínez) traveled to Cuba with
SNCC in 1967. For her, race and gender were inextricably linked in her vision of Third
World revolution:
How, in the case of Third World countries, can you overcome huge economic
problems at the fastest speed possible, without falling back on old incentives of
material self-interest? How, in the case of Cuba, can you change men’s attitudes
towards women, women’s attitudes towards themselves, white attitudes towards
black, and black attitudes towards blackness? How, in short, do you change what
is commonly called “human nature?”
Sutherland’s model of socialist society included equal contributions by both men and
women. The most urgent challenges to the revolution fell along lines of “class, race, and
sex.” She challenged Cuba’s concept of the New Man, saying it was effective in the
early days of the revolution but now needed to change.
Cuba’s “battle against the mini-skirt” offered such an example. Deemed
counterrevolutionary, Cuban authorities banned women from wearing clothing deemed
inappropriate, a measure that symbolized another revocation of imperialist
509
“The Political Purpose of La Brigada Venceremos,” Brigada Venceremos Bulletin, May 1971, 14. My
emphasis.
296
commodification (which also included British rock ’n roll, U.S. comic strips, and
chewing gum). Sutherland, however, remained ambivalent, for the mini-skirt issue also
revealed deeper cultural expectations about manhood and revolution. Seeing dress as an
extension of political voice, Sutherland was skeptical of limiting such female expression
in Cuba. It proved that the political inclusion of women in the body politic did not
always translate to personal choices of self-expression. The new state politics continued
to be mapped on women’s bodies, the voices of women often second in the era of the
New Man.
Still, Sutherland believed Cuba had made strides in the advancement of women,
especially compared to its earlier condition as a “non-industrialized society.” Leading
women in Cuban history included Ana Betancourt in the War of Independence and
Haydée Santamaría and Melba Hernández’s in the 1953-1959 revolution. Sutherland
admired Vilma Espín, who led the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC), which jumped in
membership from 90,000 in 1960 to 750,000 in 1967. Sutherland also commended staterun daycares that allowed women to work outside the home, and she noted that women
were able to receive free educations not only in Cuba but in Moscow, which enabled
more professional opportunities. Sutherland concluded that “the landscape of
Revolutionary Cuba was not a man’s world. No longer were women the janitors,
caretakers, and consumers of the society, but its producers and organizers.” Yet she
begrudgingly concluded that the New Man continued to overshadow the New Woman,
for “machismo still had a firm grip.”510
Angela Davis also questioned androcentrism in her revolutionary resistance and
found Cuba an inspiring environment. Davis’s political consciousness evolved from her
510
Sutherland, Youngest Revolution, 97-100, 128-29, 170-190.
297
upbringing in Birmingham, where her mother had participated in the Scottsboro
campaign, to her later training in Frankfurt philosophy under Herbert Marcuse while an
undergraduate at Brandeis. Davis spent much of the sixties abroad, which included a trip
to Paris where she breathed the air of Algerian independence. In 1968 she joined the
Che-Lumumba Club, the black cell of the Communist Party in Los Angeles. By age
thirty Davis had written her memoirs to date, some of which were composed in Cuba as a
special invitee of the government in 1973. These included a 1969 trip to Cuba with a
communist delegation that went to celebrate the inauguration of the 10 million ton goal.
She, too, proclaimed Cuba’s experiment a success: “They were finished with the politics
of class and race, done with the acid bile of outdoing one’s neighbor for the sake of
materially rising above him.” Davis remembered her trip as “the great climax in my
life…politically I felt infinitely more mature, and it seemed that the Cubans’ limitless
revolutionary enthusiasm left a permanent mark on my existence.”511
In 1970 Davis appeared on the FBI’s Top Ten Wanted list for her distant
association with the kidnapping and killing of Judge Harold Haley in a failed prisoner
escape (one of the weapons used were registered in her name). While in prison, the fight
to Free Angela Davis quickly became the Scottsboro case of the 1970s (Fig. 5.4). Cubans
participated in the global campaign, believing the Davis case symbolized “the clear and
just revolutionary battle within the United States, particularly the struggle of the AfroAmericans for a full and dignified life.” Davis’s activism placed women in the center of
tricontinental dissent, and her efforts made radical women active participants in, rather
than passive recipients of, political gains won by oppositional work. The voices of
511
Angela Davis, An Autobiography (New York: Random House, 1975), 62, 79, 133-145, 188-9, 203-04,
216.
298
activist women of color were heard in Cuba, where calls to celebrate “La Mujer”
(Woman), tribute poems to Angela Davis, and essays on Afro-Puerto Rican feminism in
the Young Lords Party appeared in Cuban publications and expanded the reach of
revolutionary rhetoric (Fig. 5.5).512
Figure 5.4: Cuban publications supported the campaign to "Save Angela Davis." This image comes
from the French issue of Tricontinental, February 1972.
512
“Angela Davis habla desde la cárcel,” Tricontinental (June 1971): 17-23; “De Angela Davis a los presos
políticos mexicanos,” Tricontinental (Sept. 1971): 4; Ernesto González Bernejo, “Salvar a Angela,”
Tricontinental (Feb. 1972): 28-31; René Depestre, “Para celebrar la violencia de Angela Davis,” trans. by
Roberto Fernández Retamar Casa de las Américas (March-June 1971): 35-6; “Los Young Lords,”
Tricontinental (Feb. 1971): 18-31; Ema Herrera, “Las Mujeres,” Casa de las Américas (Sept-Oct 1970):
188-192; Ana Ramos, “La mujer y la revolución en Cuba,” Casa de las Américas (March-June 1971): 5672.
299
The Davis case focused Cuban attention on political imprisonment in the United States.
Cubans became familiar with George Jackson, read his book Soledad Brothers, and
mourned his assassination in prison, which spurred comparisons between U.S. prisons
and “Dachau.” The Cuban state also savored the ability to not only provide ideological
support for U.S. dissidents but also to furnish a safe haven for those who appeared on
Washington watch lists. Angela Davis, Huey Newton, Elaine Brown, Assata Shakur, and
Bill Brent are but a sample of African Americans who found Cuba’s political climate
therapeutic.513
513
“Desde Dachau, USA” Tricontinental (Nov. 1971): 23-24; “George Jackson: Cartas de Soledad,”
Tricontinental (Jan. 1971): 16-25. On the Revolutionary Action Movement and Civil Rights, see Robin
D.G. Kelley, “Stormy Weather: Reconstructing Black (Inter)Nationalism in the Cold War Era, in Eddie S.
Glaude, Jr., ed., Is it Nation Time? Contemporary Essays on Black Power and Black Nationalism (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2002), 67-90. For more about Black Panthers in Cuba, see William Lee
Brent, Long Time Gone: A Black Panther's True-Life Story of His Hijacking and Twenty-Five Years in
Cuba (New York: Times Books, 1996); Elaine Brown, A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story (New
York : Pantheon Books, 1992), 230, 383-84; “On Criticism of Cuba,” The Black Panther, Dec. 27, 1969, in
Philip S. Foner, ed., The Black Panthers Speak (New York: J.B. Lippincott, 1970), 37-38.
300
Figure 5.5: Cover of Tricontinental (Feb. 1971)
301
In addition to the contestation of gender, race, and culture, Cuba also figured in
the renegotiation of “identity” in a postcolonial framework, which also struck at the U.S.
Left’s remaking. The post-Bandung era produced new thinking on the relationship
between class, race, and subaltern subjectivity. Perhaps no figure was more instrumental
in theorizing about the new Third World consciousness than the Martinique-born
psychiatrist, Frantz Fanon. His Wretched of the Earth sought to exhibit and destroy the
inner psychic workings of the Manichean colonial world. Published in French in 1961
and available to a U.S.-English speaking audience in 1963, Fanon became a leading
spokesperson for subaltern freedom fighters. His work towards Algerian independence
fit numerous socio-political contexts. Fanon set out to outline the interdependence of
racism and colonialism, stressing that decolonization of the mind was equally important
to—and indeed necessary for—autonomy in economics, politics, and social organization.
Psychological violence wrought by the colonizer on the colonized had produced a state of
living death through subjugation, dispossession, and repression at the hands of European
countries. Surviving and changing this system meant resistance to it by colonial subjects
via a liberated consciousness. For Fanon, decolonization was significant because it
meant the existential fulfillment and national liberation for the global have-nots.
For Fanon, more important than physical violence against the oppressor was the
native’s violent break from the colonized self: “To blow the colonial world to
smithereens is henceforth a clear image within the grasp and imagination of every
colonized subject.” Decolonization meant a new vision in which the last could replace
the first in areas of economy, governance, and cultural values. “In order to assimilate the
culture of the oppressor and venture into his fold,” Fanon lamented, “the colonized
302
subject has had to pawn some of his own intellectual possessions.” Reclaiming these
possessions was the first step in taking back land, labor, and leadership.
Fanon was not only concerned with the colonial subject but with the harm
wrought by colonialism as a whole. Fanon’s book ends by addressing how colonialism
destroys the psyches of both colonizer and colonized. If colonialism brought daily havoc
to the colonized, it also engendered a host of mental disorders in the colonizer. Fanon
inverted white European traditions of mental health and illness by psychoanalyzing and
diagnosing the settlers themselves. His results showed that both groups suffered from
psychoses, with police inspectors and military men also susceptible to the trauma of
colonialism.514 Fanon’s earlier work, Black Skin, White Masks, had revealed the
interconnectedness of the have and have-nots on the subject of racism, again with the
conclusion that both whites and blacks suffered mental afflictions due to racial animosity
within the broader colonial system. Though the basis of Fanonian thought was the
individual psyche (and almost always male), the social hurdle to overcome was always
economic, so that fiscal equality and egalitarian humanism went hand in hand.515
Cuban intellectuals joined Frantz Fanon, Amílcar Cabral, and Aimé Césaire in
theorizing revolution and the postcolonial psyche.516 Haitian exile and co-founder of
Casa de las Américas, René Depestre, held that any durable alternative to Western
assimilation meant a rejection of the tastes and values of the white bourgeoisie. Depestre
warned against “tío-tomism” (Uncle Tom-ism) and held that identity was the basis of
cultural regeneration of the developing world, something able to be observed in the
Cuban context:
514
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2004 [1963]), 13, 181-233.
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967).
516
“Frantz Fanon: El hombre de la violencia,” Tricontinental (Dec. 1967): 21-23.
515
303
In Cuba the revolution is on the road to create the conditions of a true cultural
mutation of human beings due to the revolutionary power that transformed the
socioeconomic structures of the colonial past, carrying the people towards a
socio-cultural process of liberation. The power is in search for a synthesis
between social liberation and emancipation of the cultural faculties of man.
Depestre echoed Fanon when he argued that Cuban “emancipation” was the
transformation towards a broader form of humanism: “For the first time in the history of
the Americas, a real decolonizing power, a power replete with imagination and audacity,
is given the job to structure vigorously the potential of an identity founded on equality,
dignity, and beauty of all men… Revolutionary creativity guarantees the sociopsychological liberation of blacks and whites within a process of cultural integration that
unifies and improves each day the ethnic layers of a country and humanizes interracial
relations.”517
Such psychology fit within the larger post-war expansion of the mental health
field that imbricated competing definitions of the healthy self and social collective.
Subjects from all walks of life constituted important investigative terrain for social
scientists in the era of Panthers, Yippies, and Feminists. The psychosocial contours of
countercultural activism swelled with the likes and dislikes of particular “types” and
“groups.” Debates over identity operated globally and harnessed the attention of
decolonization workers as well, which ultimately breathed psychological life into the
Third World political project.
Cuban tricontinental politics informed this formation of left humanism. The U.S.
Third World Left saw Cuban society as part of the global conglomerate that minimized
monolithic claims to race-based nationalism. This was the universalist framework in
517
René Depestre, “Los Fundamentos socioculturales de nuestra identidad,” Casa de las Américas, (JanFeb 1970): 26-34.
304
which Angela Davis posited her hope “that more people—Black, Brown, Red, Yellow
and white—might be inspired to join our growing community of struggle.”518 Stokely
Carmichael remembered being “inspired by the humanistic idealism of [Cuba’s]
revolution.”519 The Cuban experience became a way to challenge notions of racial,
national, and cultural singularity in favor of a universalism that did away with established
social boundaries. Increasingly, the polyvalence of racial and cultural positions frustrated
essentialist claims to “authentic” black or African consciousness.
Even Harold Cruse reconsidered the black nationalist imaginary when he
concluded Crisis of the Negro Intellectual with the observation that by the end of his life
Malcolm X had shied away from the term “black nationalism,” for all of the Third World,
Africa included, was not “black.”520 Huey Newton, too, warned against cultural
nationalism in the revolutionary enterprise, saying that cultural nationalists were
susceptible to fall into reactionary thinking. Newton and others of the Third World Left
rejected afro-centrism and the myth of black cultural purity. In Newton’s estimation,
Back to Africa movements and the like inscribed a racial essentialism that jeopardized
the Third World political project.521
It was amid this humanistic discourse that the Cuban revolution attracted Yankee
dissidents later in the decade. The destruction of “alienation” and “anxiety,” it turned
out, could be fortified by the national liberation of others. Members of the Venceremos
Brigades saw themselves as “a group of people who want to express solidarity with the
Cuban revolution and the Third World struggles around the world, as well as the
518
Davis, Autobiography, x.
Carmichael, RFR, 584.
520
Cruse, Crisis, 408-09.
521
Interview with Huey Newton, “Poder Negro y lucha revolucionaria,” Tricontinental (Nov. 1968): 5-12.
519
305
struggles in the U.S.” At the heart of the new global campaign was the notion of
reciprocity. “We know,” wrote one Brigader, “that in their struggles to liberate
themselves, our revolutionary brothers and sisters in the third world are in fact liberating
us.” Putting one’s self in the other energized domestic campaigns in the United States as
well as expanded the global struggle towards a common set of ideals that crossed borders:
Colored people are waging a struggle everywhere in the world, just as they are
within the United States. The realities of underdevelopment are reflected not only
in Asia, Africa and Latin America but also in urban and rural areas of North
America. We affirm that the common economic, cultural, and racial exploitation
of our brothers and sisters of the Third World has put them in the vanguard of the
struggle for liberation and development of mankind.522
Such identification produced a political self not confined to any one nation, race, or
culture. It hinted towards what is now commonly conceived of as a post-/trans-national,
globalized world, where various national, racial, and cultural classifications are
understood to be unstable, unbordered, and polyvalent.
Such defiance of borders and boundaries, I believe, bears relevance for further
thinking on transnationalism. Transnational studies have deemphasized the nation-state
as the critical lens through which to view cultural activity, opting instead for paradigms
that evaluate expressions beyond designations of “Mexican,” “Haitian,” or “Chinese.”
This has prompted a rejection of the “comparative” framework in favor of models that
limn cultural and political pursuits in their contested and hybrid forms as they cross
national borders and defy essentialist classifications.523 Under the new rubric, the “Third
World” becomes a social location rather than geographic coordinate. Many have pointed
out that people can exist in First or Third World conditions irrespective of national origin.
522
“The Political Purpose of La Brigada Venceremos,” 14.
Seigel, “Beyond Compare,” 62-90 and Seigel’s Uneven Encounters: Making Race and Nation in Brazil
and the United States (Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming); Joseph, et al., Close Encounters of
Empire.
523
306
Regimes of privilege and repression operate within the broader global flow of people and
capital, so that women of color in the United States, for instance, can share political
claims and existential predicaments with others of the Global South.524 This model is
useful for displaying historical cases of racial solidarity and projects of global activism,
as in the present discussion, when the Third World Left redefined its humanistic
enterprise within the international form of political engagement. It was an ideological
framework in which those who fought for Algerian independence identified with those
who marched on Washington. Cuban politics concretized these alliances. Che Guevara
stood as the quintessential figure in this formation, for to which “nation” did Che belong?
Argentine-born, Cuban adopted, and one who spent the last years of his life fighting for
nationalist movements in Congo, Angola, and Bolivia, Che was a borderless freedom
fighter whose symbolic power lay in his statelessness. While he identified with the
America of José Martí, his political vision encompassed the tricontinental.
But the case of Cuba also illustrates a point in this transnational hermeneutic that
demands further thinking. While Cuba’s tricontinentalism crafted a multiracial,
multicultural, and multinational community, it was at the same time a state discourse,
which employed the transnational dynamic towards nationalist ends. If Che was a
postnational figure, he was also a soldier who fought under the pretext of obtaining
statehood for colonized or occupied populations. Nation-state status and national
cohesion for Angolans, for instance, was to be the fruit of coalitional work. Cuba
promoted a cartography of resistance that crossed borders and cultures in order to bolster
524
Chandra Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham :
Duke University Press, 2003), 44-8. M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on
Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).
307
its own project of nation building. The nation-less/multi-national sensibilities of
tricontinentalism were central to the sustenance of Havana’s preservation. Cuba had to
bear an enormous political cross in the western hemisphere by maintaining its glacial
anti-U.S. position. In promoting itself as a Third World model to be followed, Cuban
elites could serve the twin purposes of exporting their revolutionary program while
undergirding domestic consensus. Paradoxically, national cohesion in Cuba depended on
the nationlessness of the tricontinental, so that Cubans could feel proud of their
Cubanidad as their cultural and political reach extended well beyond their borders.
The image of Che captured the imaginations of radicals as one who embodied the
perfect balance of theory and praxis talked about by left evangelicals. His maxims
influenced a generation that sought the overcoming of political alienation through direct
action, revolutionary change through personal sacrifice. Che called violence the
“midwife of new societies,” and like Frantz Fanon, he believed it an effective means
towards achieving national liberation.525 And Che-ismo spread, his image cast in the
minds (and on the would-be clothing) of supporters around the world. His death in 1967
became part of Cuba’s revolutionary mystique, sparking campaigns to “be like Che.”526
Che’s political philosophy and theories of resistance appeared in marches in Los Angeles
and Chicago and on the campuses of Columbia and Berkeley. Mark Rudd, founding
member of the Weathermen, found Che extremely inspirational. Rudd remembered
becoming a “foquista” while participating on an SDS trip to Cuba in 1968. He was
instantly struck by the “cult of Che,” and believed foco theory could be applied to
525
Che Guevara, “Guerrilla Warfare: A Method,” in Gerassi, Venceremos, 271.
José Llanusa, “Hacer Hombres como el Che,” Revolución y cultura, Nov. 30, 1967, 18-20;
“Repercusión mundial de la muerte del Che,” Tricontinenal (Nov. 1967): 6-20. For additional Cuban
coverage of Che, see the Jan/Feb 1968 issue of Casa de las Américas.
526
308
demonstrations and grassroots activism. He and other college students could identify
with Che’s personal journey. They, too, were sons and daughters middle- and upperclass professionals who yearned for a practical education in social change rather than
classroom pedantry.527
It is also important to note that this transnational dialogue was not without its
controversies. Doubts towards Cuba’s revolutionary veracity have abounded, with
revolution now viewed more a commodity than a tenable political solution. Early on
Mark Rudd lamented that Che’s celebrity status diluted his political power. Che’s
iconographic status unveiled the tension between Left political praxis and countercultural faddism, when Che could be reduced to what Rudd called a “revolutionary
romantic.” The Cuban revolution has lived its later years as both revolutionary promise
and postmodern spectacle, something determined by geopolitics and global markets.528
The idea of revolution still poses multiple and contradictory imaginings that draw debates
over cultural and political appropriation, and remain as problematic today for grassroots
organising as they did for New Left members in the 1960s.
Furthermore, as with today’s global movements, the Left’s transnational work
was also beset by the very divisions they sought to erase. People who lived in the First
World could claim identification with those in the Third, but the converse was not always
true. It became problematic to compare even low-income college students in the United
States with the billions who lived a daily subaltern existence mired in extreme poverty,
disease, and hunger. U.S. Leftists maintained a privileged position when they understood
527
Sina Rahmani, “Anti-imperialism and Its Discontents: An Interview with Mark Rudd, Founding
Member of the Weather Underground,” Radical History Review Issue 95 (Spring 2006): 117-118.
528
Francisco Portela, “Entrevista a Mark Rudd,” Revolución y cultura, Aug. 15, 1968, 113-17; Marc Lacey,
“A Communist He Was, but Today, Che Sells”, New York Times, Oct. 9, 2007, 4.
309
their social predicaments to be commensurate with those in poor nations. The realities of
the Third World, therefore, tested the limits of this discourse, for assuming a shared
experience between inhabitants of New York City and New Delhi, or between black and
white, also produced a range of cynical denials and coalitional backlash.
There were also divisions within movements, which seeped into the U.S.-Cuban
dialogic. Black power politics, for example, suffered from internecine feuding among
members of the Black Panther Party, SNCC, and RAM. The on-and-off rift between
Stokely Carmichael and Eldridge Cleaver entered the Cuban popular mindset when Black
Panther bickering produced Carmichael’s resignation from Party and criticism towards
Panther politics. Casa de las Américas published Cleaver’s irate rejoinder that called
Carmichael a “sell out” to the “bourgeois” interests, mocked Carmichael’s choice to
move to Africa, and doubted his revolutionary veracity.529 Cubans took sides in such
matters, to the degree that Carmichael lost status among Cuban elites who at one point
suspected him of CIA activity.530 Cleaver’s own disaffection with radical politics was
even more puzzling when he renounced his Panther politics, became a born-again
Christian and avowed anti-communist, and ran for a Republican senate seat in
California.531
Questions of race and revolution manifested themselves in contradictory and
multiple ways, and remained inextricable from the development of Cuban identity and
politics in the post-1959 period. On the one hand, Cuba could reinforce claims of black
nationalism and diasporic politics that focused on Afro-centric culture. One the other,
529
Eldridge Cleaver, “Carta Abierta a Stokely Carmichael,” Casa de las Américas (Jan-Feb 1970): 59-62.
Carmichael, RFR, 696-7.
531
CNN News, “‘He was a Symbol:’ Eldridge Cleaver Dies at 62,”
http://www.cnn.com/US/9805/01/cleaver.late.obit/ (accessed December 1, 2007).
530
310
however, the issue of Cuba undergirded the emergence of a left humanism that
diminished or erased certain social categories including race-based nationalisms. For
Cuban policymakers, racism was a malady that ran rampant beyond Cuba’s borders, most
obviously in the United States, which unveiled yet another flaw in the myth of U.S.
exceptionalism. To be sure, Cubanidad continued to be constructed in opposition to
monolithic notions of the United States, an insoluble antinomy that made ideas about
identity, culture, and politics still beholden to the historically constituted relationship
between Cuba and its northern neighbor. The terms had changed, however; rather than
aping U.S. culture, Cuban citizens now officially opposed it. Anti-Yankee discourse
became a matter of policy, the United States an enemy to be constantly combated.
Nevertheless, battered and broken though it may have been, this cultural interconnectivity
endured amid distinct political and social realities and under differing ideological
assumptions. But it was the history of this interconnectivity that facilitated the cultural
circuitry of radical politics. Tricontinentalism sculpted new expressions and directions in
Left thinking in the United States as people, ideas, and cultural texts continued to cross
borders. It meant North American dissidents could participate in Third World liberation
spurred by the engine of Cuban politics.
Despite such fissures, transnational social causes continue to evolve, enabled by
an ever increasing network of global communication, capital, and populations in transit.
There remain human concerns that cannot be solved in national frameworks alone, and
people continue to identify with problems and programs that break standard classificatory
systems that have historically governed our modern age. One of our tasks, therefore, is to
find new critical frameworks to describe and historicize such interactions among
311
disparate groups and to engage with their myriad ideological and cultural proclivities,
something beyond the epistemological constraints that still define and determine
Western/Northern scholarship.
In the end, the Ten Million Ton Harvest failed, dashing the hopes of Cubans and
spreading disillusionment abroad. Climate and problems with technology were the
reported culprits, but in May 1970, in an aberrant moment of somber resignation, Castro
himself took blame: “This battle the people did not lose, we the leaders lost it, the
administrative apparatus.” Despite Castro and Cuban leaders admitting defeat, the
harvest was quite a feat, with Cubans and allies cutting 63% more cane than average any
previous year.532 It was also billed an international victory, with brigade volunteers at
one point numbering 1,418 from around the world, 903 of whom were from the United
States.533 The U.S.-Cuban dialogic persisted in the various cultural streams, which bore
political consequences for policymakers in Washington, D.C. and Havana.
Accompanying military and economic fortitude was the battle for hearts and minds in the
Cold War project. Policy decisions between the U.S. and Cuba also adhered to broader
assumptions about hearth and home, as well as religion and family. These cultural
intersections form the subject of the next chapter.
532
Cuba internacional (July 1970): 53; Intentaremos un Nuevo asalto,” Cuba internacional (August 1970):
34-35.
533
Domingo del Pino, “Fiesta de la solidaridad,” Cuba internacional (Oct. 1970): 58-61.
312
Chapter 6
Middlebrow Modernization: Cuban Refugees, Catholicism, and
Domestic Containment
I conceived of my job of helping Cuban refugees, and in particular, Cuban
children, as an opportunity given to me by Divine Providence to combat
communism...my contact with the CIA, especially before the Bay of Pigs fiasco,
confirmed that I was involved in a holy war for God and country.
Monsignor Bryan O. Walsh534
Miami and its Cuban refugee situation are in the spotlight of the nation, and, in
fact, of the world. Our ability in Dade County, Mr. Chairman, to accept those
refugees and to provide for their successful integration into our society can serve
either as a showcase for democracy, or, if we are unsuccessful, as a propaganda
tool for our enemies. We really have no choice.
Seymour Samet, Executive Director
Greater Miami Chapter, American Jewish
Committee535
The U.S. eagle cannot allow itself to be hen-pecked, and hope to lead.
Thomas Freeman536
With Castro’s victory more imminent, the topic of revolution entered the
government halls of Washington, D.C., generating widely-felt skepticism regarding his
leadership. Even before the triumph on January 1, 1959, State Department officials were
worried about the future of U.S.-Cuban relations, and rightly so, for it only took one year
for those relations to fall apart. This volatile set of events has produced a familiar story
534
Brian O. Walsh (sic), “Un Católico Americano mira a la Iglesia Católica en Cuba,” in Razón y pasión:
Veinticinco años de estudios Cubanos, Leonel Autario de la Cuesta and María Cristina Herrera, eds.
(Miami, FL: Ediciones Universal, 1996), 26.
535
“Cuban Refugee Problem,” Hearings before the Subcommittee to Investigate Problems Connected with
Refugees and Escapees of the Committee on the Judiciary,” United States Senate 87th Congress, Dec. 7,
1961, in Carlos Cortés, Cuban Refugee Programs (New York: Arno Press, 1980), 288.
536
Thomas Freeman, The Crisis in Cuba (Derby, CT: Monarch Books, 1963), 153.
313
of the failed U.S.-Cuban diplomatic settlement, Bay of Pigs invasion, and the nearapocalyptic Cuban Missile Crisis, which has left an exhaustive record by U.S. scholars
concerning Castro’s successful rise to power and the futile attempts of U.S. leaders to
remove him. Largely devoid of Cuban sources, these U.S.-based works tend to highlight
Castro’s tenacious and iconoclastic charisma, as well as the Kennedy-CIA stumble in the
Bay of Pigs and later presidential redemption during the missile crisis. But above all
these authors seek to answer the question: How did Cuba “get away”? 537
This chapter charts a different course by focusing on culture in the fraught
relations between Washington and Havana. It seeks not to explain what went wrong or
right for U.S. or Cuban leaders, but analyzes discursive developments and policy
decisions within broader understandings of Cold War logics. As the chapter’s epigraphs
suggest, the antagonism between Cuba and the United States was inflected by debates
over gender, religion, and home and their connection to national desires and strategic
interests. Popular U.S. conceptions of Cuba’s revolution intersected themes of religion
and exile in their shifting stands on domesticity and gender roles during the long twilight
struggle. These preoccupations appeared in middlebrow reflections of revolution, which
showed both anxiety and hope for the United States’ position in the world propelled by a
steadfast investment in modernization.
Modernization and Cold War assumptions played a major role in the melding of
U.S. domestic and foreign identifications, which converged over the issue of Cuban
refugees. First-wave exiles in Miami, Florida, remade the local culture while
537
Sample texts include, Jorge I. Domínguez, Cuba: Order and Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1978); Paterson, Contesting Castro; Fursenko and Neftali, “One Hell of a Gamble”;
Graham Allison and P. Zelikow, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, 2nd Ed. (New
York: Longman, 1999).
314
contributing to the national directive of keeping communism at bay. Viewing both state
and civil responses to revolution at various analytical levels unveils the tension and
interconnectedness between the local and national, private and public space, and state and
home in the navigation between translocal and transnational processes and their
accompanying discursive and cultural lineaments.
Picking apart these thematic threads generates additional nuances in the CubaU.S. political rivalry, including the ways populations in transition processed it on an
everyday basis. This examination is fashioned by other works that probe wider cultural
concerns in the interpretation, mediation, and creation of political rhetoric and
government decisions. I emphasize the changing perceptions on manhood and
womanhood in this period and trace their impact on decision making and citizen
engagement. It follows the work of diplomatic historians who have complicated
traditional Hawks vs. Doves debates by expanding the interpretive framework beyond
Manichean schemata. By locating broader social contexts and deeper historical
precedents, we may better explain the common sense understandings of political
directives in a particular moment of national crisis.538
Following the conceptual framework of this dissertation, the crossing of borders
produced “readings” of revolution laden with political purpose by (trans)national
subjects. Exile, religion, gender, and modernization become part of narrations of
nationhood in their advancement of Cold War strategies in Havana and Washington.
538
A sample of works include Emily Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and
Cultural Expansion, 1890-1945 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982); Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound:
American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988); Kristin Hoganson, Fighting for
American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine Wars (New
Have, CT: Yale University Press, 1998); and Mary Renda, Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the
Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915-1940 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).
315
These expressions functioned amid both distinct and complementary cultural
considerations, which formed part of competing political claims in the early years of
Cuba’s revolutionary triumph. They were processed through social lenses of race, class,
nation, and gender, and were revealed in images, language, and aesthetics of popular
literature and policy in both nations. Rather than view these subject positions in their
discrete realms, in this chapter they overlap, showing the multiple webs of cultural
meaning for how everyday people shape and respond to policy decisions and political
predicaments.
I begin this chapter by outlining several major principles of modernization and
their role in shaping U.S. foreign policy after World War II. I use the framework of
modernization to analyze middlebrow representations of Cold War culture in both
gestures of U.S. triumphalism and in anti-U.S. discourse in Cuba. Following the work of
Christina Klein, this discussion illustrates the ways in which middlebrow tastes proved a
mighty cultural distiller of ideas about social and political development in both countries.
I focus on Operation Pedro Pan and the heated debate over Cuban refugees, which stoked
the coals of the incendiary political conflict between Cuba and the United States,
providing a case in which family, religion, and the state appeared in competing
ideological positions in both nations. Children held rhetorical power in the Cold War and
were imbricated with definitions of womanhood and manhood as well as conditions of
exile in measurements of national prosperity. The Catholic Church stood in the center of
this political development. As Cuba spurned Catholic leaders in its revolutionary
consolidation, Catholic leaders in Miami worked with the U.S. State Department to bring
Cuban families to the United States. I conclude this chapter by bringing this case up to
316
the present moment, showing that while the Cold War has faded, its discursive apparatus
has remained intact in the production of Cuban-American history and the sustenance of
the binational confrontation.
Revolution and Modernization
In Cuba, World War II sparked a renewed nationalist spirit spurred by economic
growth under the presidency of Fulgencio Batista. While the revolutionary energy of the
1930s did not entirely disappear, Cuba’s support of the Allies in the war against fascism
coupled with prosperity in certain sectors muted the shared frustration of the decade
prior. By the mid-1950s, however, a revolutionary discontent resurged after a decade of
governmental corruption under presidents Ramón Grau San Martín and Carlos Prío
Socarrás. This, combined with an excessive foreign presence of corporate directors,
entertainment moguls and the mob, and widening social disparities between rural and
country residents, made Cubans more emboldened and united in their opposition to the
now dictator Batista, who on March 10, 1952, had presented President Prío with a coup
d’etat that put the military strongman in power once again.
Historians generally point to Batista’s fatal flaw of granting a general amnesty in
1955 to those who participated in the attack on the Moncada Barracks, which effectively
released Fidel Castro and a small number of followers who fled to Mexico and began
planning their part in a Cuban resistance movement that was gaining momentum. That
year the FBI opened a file on Castro after his seven-week fundraising tour of the United
States.539 The money helped widen the rebellion across the island, as more resources
flowed into the rural Sierra and urban Llano forces from Cuban exiles and foreign
539
Paterson, Contesting Castro, 15.
317
supporters. A new national mood under the leadership of José Antonio Echeverría, Frank
País, Fidel Castro, Vilma Espín, Che Guevara, and others ensured that 1959 would
remain wholly distinct from 1933.
Economic and social factors were central to the dissolution of the Cuban state.
Anti-U.S. feelings accumulated, as Yankee businesses and services became icons of
domination rather than collaboration. In 1959 the value of U.S. investments in Cuba—
roughly $1 billion—was second only to Venezuela in Latin America; U.S. capital
controlled 90% of Cuban mines, 80% of public utilities, 50% of the Railroad, and 40% of
the sugar industry (a percentage drop from previous years). In 1958, the U.S. consumed
roughly two-thirds of Cuba’s exports and 75% of Cuba’s imports came from the U.S.
without tariff. Wall Street still controlled much of the island’s financial avenues, and
U.S. commodities abounded—from Coke, RCA Victor, and Corn Flakes, to Hollywood
movies, jazz clubs, and casinos. Increasingly, Cuban discontent pointed northward,
especially as Washington continued its support of Batista.540
The Eisenhower administration displayed its approval of the dictator by sending
Vice President Nixon to Havana for Batista’s inauguration in February 1955. For the
most part, Eisenhower left the Cuban issue to lower-level officials, with matters such as
the Hungarian crisis, Guatemala, and the Suez Canal higher on the priority list. His only
major public response to the revolution came when M-26-7 forces kidnapped a group of
U.S. citizens, who were later released. U.S. leaders and Batistianos tried to discredit
Castro and his supporters by framing them as part of the “communist element” but in the
end could produce no credible evidence. Washington politicians became worried about
540
Felix Masud-Piloto, With Open Arms: Cuban Migration to the United States (Totowa, NJ: Rowman &
Littlefield, 1988), 20; Paterson, Contesting Castro, 35-36.
318
public opinion in Cuba, Latin America, and the United States where more people were
uneasy about their tax dollars aiding dictatorship. Favoring Batista became more
untenable as reports of political repression, suspension of constitutional liberties,
censorship, and torture made headlines, so that in 1958 the U.S. pulled its support for
Batista despite lone pleas by U.S. ambassador Earl Smith. With credible elections
nowhere on the horizon and tensions high in Latin America (reflected by Nixon’s hostile
reception on his South American tour), the U.S. government decided to change course.541
On January 6, 1959, the United States recognized Cuba’s new government and
shortly thereafter appointed Philip Bonsal the new ambassador to Havana. Manuel
Urrutia stood as Cuba’s new President and José Miró Cardona its Prime Minister, though
both would resign in an inaugural year of revolutionary consolidation that included
executions, forced exile, and numerous replacements in Cuba’s upper echelons. In the
end, Fidel Castro became the ultimate decision maker in Cuba, with detractors and
potential competition successfully eliminated.542
Initial widespread U.S. public support for the revolution quickly faded; by the
election of 1960, Cuba had become a source of national anxiety. In several instances
throughout the four televised debates, Kennedy and Nixon employed Cuba as the poster
country for what was wrong with U.S. foreign policy and indicative of the potential
havoc the “red menace” could wreak throughout the world. In the fourth debate, Senator
Kennedy wanted to know if
by 1965 or 1970 will there be other Cubas in Latin America? …Will the Congo
go Communist? Will other countries? Are we doing enough in that area? And
what about Asia? Is India going to win the economic struggle or is China going
541
542
Paterson, Contesting Castro, 25, 105-07, 127-28, 131-33, 164-66.
Welch, Response to Revolution, 29.
319
to win it? Who will dominate Asia in the next 5 or 10 years? Communism? The
Chinese? Or will freedom?543
On several occasions Nixon was forced to answer for what were perceived as the White
House’s responsibility for the “loss of Cuba,” which may have rekindled frustration with
the “loss” of China ten years prior. Nixon denied that Cuba was “lost” but rather that the
administration was “following the right course,” which meant that “the Cuban people get
a chance to realize their aspirations of progress through freedom and that they get that
with our cooperation with the Organization of American States.” Nixon supported a
multilateral quarantine of Cuba by the OAS and assured that the Guantánamo naval base
would remain a U.S. possession.544 But to his detriment, Nixon appeared soft compared
to Kennedy’s hawkish approach towards Cuba. The Vice President feared violation of
OAS and UN treaties and critical reprisal from the international community. Nixon had
personally experienced public hostility in Latin America when he faced countless taunts,
jeers, and even an onslaught of spittle by protesters on his goodwill tour through South
America in 1958. With low popularity in the region, Nixon believed that the reputation
of the United States would further decline should Washington force Castro from power
unilaterally. He hoped for a repeat of Guatemala in the form of a “spontaneous uprising”
by the Cuban people, though he neglected to mention the CIA’s key role in the fall of
Arbenz.545
543
Commission on Presidential Debates, “October 21, 1960, The Fourth Kennedy-Nixon Presidential
Debate,”
http://www.debates.org/pages/trans60d.html (Accessed March 3, 2008).
544
Commission on Presidential Debates, “October 7, 1960 the Second Kennedy-Nixon Presidential
Debate,”
http://www.debates.org/pages/trans60b.html (Accessed March 1, 2008).
545
Commission on Presidential Debates, “October 21, 1960, The Fourth Kennedy-Nixon Presidential
Debate,”
http://www.debates.org/pages/trans60d.html (Accessed March 3, 2008).
320
Cuba became a hot issue because it challenged the United States’ position in the
world. Kennedy charged that U.S. prestige had been lowered, and that a Castro-led Cuba
meant that Soviet interests would continue to encroach across the Americas. Kennedy
admitted that upon traveling to Havana in 1957 he “[was] warned of Castro [and] the
Communist influences around Castro,” and that Castro’s rise to power was the result of a
do-nothing approach by Eisenhower’s presidency. JFK had changed his tone, for earlier
he heralded Castro as “part of the legacy of Bolivar.”546 Now Kennedy stressed the
importance of toppling the leader and expressed dismay that the Soviet Union was
broadcasting Spanish-language radio programs throughout the region: “we don't have a
single program sponsored by our government to Cuba—to tell them our story, to tell
them that we are their friends, that we want them to be free again.” JFK may not have
known that Eisenhower had authorized a CIA program to bring down Castro or about the
Agency’s clandestine radio broadcasts already on the air telling “our story.” To the
declassified world, the United States was at risk of losing the contest against
communism, which forced the Massachusetts Senator to ask, “Which system,
Communism or freedom, will triumph in the next five or ten years? […] Is our strength
and prestige rising? Do people want to be identified with us? Do they want to follow
United States leadership?” Kennedy and other U.S. leaders worried that Cuba
represented a red link in a Third World chain that would unite republics in Africa, Asia,
and Latin America in the Soviet orbit if left unchecked.547
546
Quoted in Masud-Piloto, Open Arms, 20.
Commission on Presidential Debates, “October 21, 1960, The Fourth Kennedy-Nixon Presidential
Debate,”
http://www.debates.org/pages/trans60d.html (Accessed March 3, 2008).
547
321
Embedded in debates over Cuba were ideas about U.S. modernizing objectives
and their ties to the country’s global interests. Cuba became part of the broader Cold
War discourse in what Michael Latham has referred to as the “ideology of
modernization.” Modernization, Latham shows, worked as a shared set of assumptions,
arguments, and evidence for market and social development that policymakers and
technocrats asserted laid the foundation for global stability. Under this thinking, growth
in areas of social science and economics purported an empirical and objective approach
in their evaluation of foreign governments and recommended solutions to weak markets
and political turmoil. While operating under the pretext of global beneficence, Latham
illustrates that these knowledge systems actually worked according to underlying norms
and cultural biases that favored the geopolitical and financial interests of the United
States and its allies. Academics-turned-policymakers such as Walt Rostow, Lucian Pye,
and David Lerner worked with models of social and economic engineering that charted
the evolution from “traditional” to “modern” societies and adapted them to the
framework of the nation-state, with the U.S. posited as the benchmark of advancement.
According to Latham, modernizationists could “define their nation’s historic
accomplishments, identify the deficiencies of an ‘emerging world,’ and allow them to
respond to the needs of the state in time of crisis.”548
U.S. policymakers wanted to shrink the Soviet and Chinese spheres of influence
and therefore were interested in the hearts and minds of the “periphery.” As Cuba was
continually billed a “loss,” leaders did not want other Third World nations of the
“emerging world” under Soviet or Chinese domain. Modernizationists could cast Asian,
548
Michael E. Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation Building” in the
Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 3-4, 30.
322
Latin American, and African subjects as non-white members of primitive or atavistic
societies that were at high risk for bad governmental design and dire daily livability. It
was this mode of thinking framed within a paternalist, triumphalist discourse that
Bandung delegates and Third World nationalists wanted to counter. At stake were not
only national growth and global governance but human worth and dignity. These
tensions appeared in policy initiatives and matters of diplomacy. Despite U.S.-led First
World desires to keep “rational” political decisions separate from social valuations, other
global actors did not separate racial and cultural views from policy. U.S. culturalist
perceptions of India, for instance, hurt ties between Washington and New Delhi, so that
Jawaharlal Nehru and other Indian leaders did not hide their disapproval and even disgust
for U.S. ethnocentric biases when dealing with the U.S. diplomatically.549
U.S. leaders approached the topic of Cuba using this pattern of political thinking.
Cuba under Castro posed a threat, in part, because it symbolized a model of development
that defied Walt Rostow’s Stages of Economic Growth and ran counter to the “American
way of life.” This fundamental gap in worldviews was made evident in April 1959 when
Castro met with U.S. officials in Washington whose opinions resembled attitudes towards
Cubans from times past. Castro was one of the first heads-of-state met by acting
Secretary of State Christian Herter, who remarked that Castro was “very much like a
child in many ways” and “quite immature regarding the problems of government.”550
This echoed Nixon’s famous opinion that Castro was “either incredibly naïve about
549
Andrew J. Rotter, Comrades at Odds: The United States and India, 1947-1964 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2000).
550
Quoted in Welch, Response to Revolution, 35.
323
communism or under communist discipline—my guess is the former.” Nixon also
quipped that he talked to Fidel like a “Dutch uncle.”551
It is difficult to ascertain the degree to which such guiding assumptions have
affected diplomatic relations between the U.S. and other states. As this dissertation has
shown, infantilization and feminization of Cuba had been part of the discursive building
blocks of U.S.-Cuban relations since the nineteenth century. Renouncing such portrayals
factored heavily into Cuba’s revolution, which became a revolt against the long
entrenched history of U.S. superlative posturing. Such attitudes may have hastened
Havana’s association with Moscow, for this alliance was far from preordained. In 1959
the U.S.S.R. reacted to Cuba’s revolution cautiously, withholding its support for Castro
and purchasing less sugar than previous years under Batista. This changed when Soviet
ambassador Anastas Mikoyan traveled to Cuba in February 1960 and secured a sugar
trade agreement between the U.S.S.R. and Cuba. As Washington broke diplomatic and
commercial ties with Havana and adopted a course to remove Castro, Cuban leaders
answered with more agreements with Moscow and the declaration that Cuba was now a
socialist state.552
One might also argue, however, that such cultural perceptions have disrupted but
perhaps never entirely stopped U.S. political objectives since 1945. In 1948 the U.S.
secured influence in Latin America by helping to create the Organization of American
States, a new conglomerate of hemispheric governance that would strengthen commercial
ties and prevent Soviet penetration in the region. It was under the OAS umbrella that
Kennedy pursued his Alliance for Progress, a policy born out of the crossroads of
551
552
Quoted in Paterson, Contesting Castro, 257.
Welch, Response to Revolution, 49; Masud-Piloto, Open Arms, 24-29.
324
common security and economic growth, and excerpted from the modernization script.
Alliance for Progress promised to court Latin American republics by restructuring
investment and loans. Framed as an opportunity for self-growth and political stability, in
the end Alliance resulted in furthering entrenching Latin American economies in the U.S.
financial orbit. The Alliance charter was discussed at the OAS meeting in Punta del Este,
Uruguay, in 1961. Cuban representative Che Guevara was highly critical of the proposal,
accusing the U.S. of “trying to pull somebody’s leg.” The Cuban delegation saw it as
another initiative that would sustain underdevelopment rather than change the economic
system that brought inequality in the first place. Cuba advocated structural and
institutional reform, trade regulation, and even distribution and development rather than
loans and temporary fiscal subsidies. In the end the measure passed, which secured $20
Billion for American republics over ten years. Cuba was promptly ejected from the OAS
the following year.553
Modernization ideology also produced U.S. strategies for counterinsurgency in
regions deemed threatening to its national interests. Guatemala, Iran, and Vietnam were
venues chosen for new military and CIA operations that would bring changes in foreign
governments via a hidden U.S. hand. In was in this climate that on March 17, 1960,
President Eisenhower approved measures for the CIA to orchestrate the removal and
replacement of Fidel Castro. In a briefing to Congress in 1961, Director Allen Dulles
disclosed to members of the Armed Services Committee details of a covert program
structured under the categories “Military,” “Political,” and “Propaganda.” A seasoned
officer from the Guatemala operation in 1954, David Atlee Phillips headed the
553
Latham, Modernization, 82-83; Che Guevara, “On Growth and Imperialism,” Inter-American and Social
Council of the Organization of American States in Punta del Este, Uruguay, August 8, 1961, in Gerassi,
Venceremos, 165-66.
325
Propaganda arm of the Cuban operation, which held a budget of $4.4 Million its first year
but would increase to more than $46 million, due mostly to the Bay of Pigs invasion.
The catalog of tactics used against Cuba involved transnational operations throughout the
Americas. These included the use of short- and medium-wave radio broadcasts such as
Radio Swan. Named for its transmission point from Swan Island off the coast of
Honduras, Radio Swan was similar to other programs run by the State Department and
Pentagon against the U.S.S.R and Eastern Europe. Cloaked as a private business venture
owned by the Gibraltar Steamship Company, with the World Wide Broadcasting System
supplying advertisements and tapes of shows, by May 1960 the station was in operation,
broadcasting music, programs, and advertisements. Anti-Castro messages spread rumors
and encouraged Cubans to rise up against their government. Though Cuban defenses
were able to jam Swan’s frequency in Havana, the signal reached the multitudes in Cuba
and elsewhere in the Caribbean and Latin America. The New York Times reported that
the 50,000 watt station located 100 miles from Honduras and 400 miles from Cuba was in
use against “communist propaganda” but that the State Department knew nothing about
it.554
The extensive anti-Castro activity included the cultural trappings of films, comic
books, newspapers such as Avance, and lecture tours in Latin America by public
intellectuals who argued that Cuba was in the wrong hands. The CIA also enjoyed
assistance from the Catholic Church in Cuba. Director Allen Dulles believed that Cuban
Catholics were helpful with CIA operations and quite influential among the middle-class
anti-Castro contingent. Overall, Dulles and other officials thought such efforts against
554
Latham, Modernization, 54; “American Radio in the Caribbean Counters Red Campaign in Cuba,” New
York Times, Sept. 9, 1960, 1, 2; Crespo and Marrawi, Operación, 90-92.
326
Cuba effective, but that the real blemish on the Agency’s record remained the failed Bay
of Pigs invasion. Declassified CIA reports and memoranda denounce the execution of
the operation. The 1,500 Cuban exiles trained in Guatemala and Nicaragua accomplished
little against the robust Cuban military that anticipated their arrival. Poor planning and
miscalculations regarding materiel and Cuban public opinion contributed to the failure.
CIA criticism took on a First World tone when it blamed the poor performance of
the invading force in excoriations that reflected racist and culturalist thinking revealed in
modernization’s language. In one correspondence, General C.P. Cabell noted the Cuban
exiles’ “high degree of efficiency, under Latin standards” but that there had been
problems: “[W]e run into, particularly there, the normal Latin characteristics of lack of
precision and determination and all, and their ability to get through on a given mission
and to do the things that they are supposed to do leaves much to be desired.” Cabell’s
tone changed only slightly when he offered that the soldiers were not “street bums.”
Other CIA leaders warned against such logic. Inspector General Lyman
Kirkpatrick issued a 200-page report on why the U.S. failed and expressed
disappointment in U.S. self-aggrandizement. In addition to criticizing poor planning and
the Cuban project “taking a life of its own,” Kirkpatrick noted that bullying was in part to
blame, with some Cubans being “treated like dirt” by U.S. officers. Kirkpatrick warned
that ethnocentrism would harm U.S. global interests, concluding: “There does not seem
to be much excuse for not being able to work with Cubans. If this nationality is so
difficult, how can the Agency possibly succeed with the natives of Black Africa or
Southeast Asia?” Such treatment would hamper the war against communism, especially
if others were treated as “incompetent children.”
327
Anticommunism was the guiding rationale that made clandestine tactics urgent.
U.S. officials believed people easily manipulable by Chinese and Soviet brainwashing
techniques. A CIA memo to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover from the mid-1950s reported
on the nature of brainwashing by “communist elements.” Everyday U.S. residents could
become “involuntarily re-educated” in a surreptitious manner via secret and simple
psychological techniques, which ultimately risked the fall of the United States. CIA and
FBI information networks were meant to combat communist subversion but in doing so
also constructed and arguably exaggerated the threat itself. Modernization efficiency
could diagnose the problem and prescribe an antidote, but in doing so became
haphazardly totalizing in its trajectory. As federal agencies investigated, assessed, and
proposed actions and solutions at home and abroad, their work became a self-fulfilling
prophesy. The rationale and execution of missions was based on evidence produced for
an already-conceived-of result. Threat validated the use of force but followed a wellestablished script. State agencies did not single-handedly manufacture Cold War anxiety
in the United States but stood as institutions whose knowledge systems were part of a
broader consensus that was ratified and acted upon by Washington decision makers.
Their maneuvers, however, depended on other social networks and cultural industries of
the period that bore similar preoccupations.555
555
María de los Angeles Torres, The Lost Apple: Operation Pedro Pan, Cuban Children in the U.S., and
the Promise of a Better Future (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003), 180. The CIA information comes from
declassified files accessible online. See “Trying to Counter Castro: Working the Cuban Beat,” Jan. 1,
1991, 35-42; “Proposed Operations against Cuba,” March 11, 1961, pp. 1-12; March 15, 1961, pp. 1-8;
April 12, 1961, pp. 1-6; “Propaganda,” March 16, 1960, p. 1; “Brief History of Radio Swan,” May 18,
1961; “Brainwashing,” April 25, 1956; “Excerpts from Verbatim Transcript of Briefing of CIA
Subcommittee of House Armed Services Committee,” March 10, 1961, pp. 3-5; and “Inspector General’s
Survey of the Cuban Operation and Associated Documents,” October 1961, pp. 95-97. All at
http://www.foia.cia.gov (Accessed March 3, 2008).
328
Middlebrow Modernization: Family, Tourism, and Containment
Modernization themes fit in a U.S. cultural catalog that stressed Cold War
prerogatives of domesticity, leisure, and liturgy. Governance, technology, and defense, it
turned out, needed processing in private space as well as public, religious life as well as
secular, and on the road. The famous “kitchen debates” between Vice President Nixon
and Soviet Premier Khrushchev in 1959 at Moscow displayed the disputative theatrics of
technological superiority in the home. They showed that political concerns over
economy and geopolitical interests were intensely felt in local community networks and
daily life. Elaine Tyler May has written that interest in the nuclear family grew in the
nuclear age. The idea of home, she writes, “seemed to offer a secure private nest
removed from the dangers of the outside world.” It provided a space for material
abundance and familial fulfillment, which could effectively contain communism. The
sphere of domesticity was anchored by the Cold War emotive charge, “domestic
containment” securing the home and family. This rationale spawned gender claims that
women in the U.S. outdid their Soviet counterparts in areas of femininity. Soviet women
were viewed as working too hard without the convenience of modern technology (unlike
U.S. homemakers). Modernization arguments entered domestic spaces and made the link
between missiles and mothers part of the Cold War cultural logic.556
This logic was processed in the U.S. middlebrow imagination. Christina Klein
has observed that middlebrow culture emerged during the 1920s but grew in usage in the
1950s to indicate a strand of society that rejected highbrow avant-garde such as
existential art from Europe on the one hand, and lowbrow literature such as pulp fiction
and comic strips on the other. She notes that middlebrow adherents did not see
556
Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound, 3, 13-14, 18-19,
329
themselves as isolationist or sentimental, as they are sometimes regarded, but as a
bourgeoning middle class with modern culture capital of international proportions. It was
a cultural sensibility that aimed at “alleviating a national sense of provinciality,” which
made middlebrow a form of cosmopolitanism. This formation fused middle-class
ideological interests with a register of aesthetics that purportedly represented mainstream
values. 557 “Middlebrow universalism” was at the same time an “aesthetic of political
commitment”: periodicals such as Reader’s Digest and Saturday Review, musicals by
Rodgers and Hammerstein, paintings by Norman Rockwell, and U.S. foreign concerns
revealed what Klein calls the “global imaginary of integration.”558
Modernization and Cold War domesticity were imbricated value systems that
made child well-being a measurement of national strength. It was in this era that U.S.
interest in Asia created programs of sponsorship and adoption of children in Korea and
China, which became part and parcel of U.S. nation-building pursuits. Mutual
understanding between populations meant assuming responsibility for East Asian
children that could either eclipse or justify U.S. military engagement in the region. U.S.
citizens viewed themselves as saving the children of the “undeveloped” world. Rather
than the machinations of a self-interested empire, these constructs evoked the United
States as a benevolent nation pursuing the betterment of all peoples which entailed
amicable understanding as well as economic and military investment. Adoption and
sponsorship were deemed necessary to bridge civilizational divides, so that organizations
such as the Christian Children’s Fund and Pearl Buck’s Welcome House were
557
558
See Klein, Cold War Orientalism, 64-65.
Klein, Cold War Orientalism, 19.
330
humanitarian contributions to the Pacific Rim. Ideally, these imperatives could save
children from communism while expanding the girth of the U.S. sphere of influence.
Just as Asia became an outgrowth of U.S. charity, Latin America was viewed as a
region in need of Uncle Sam’s generosity and assistance.559 In July 1961, Life released a
cover story on Flavio da Silva, who at the age of 12 had been rescued from a favela in
Rio de Janeiro. The story and accompanying photographs consisted of before-and-after
pictures of Flavio, from his anemic state in Brazil to his full recovery in a Denver
hospital. Flavio’s success story proved that the United States could—and indeed needed
to—save the world’s children. Having met Flavio while on assignment in Brazil,
acclaimed Life photographer Gordon Parks helped facilitate Flavio’s transplantation. Life
bestowed upon Parks a patriotic prestige that shifted the photographer’s notability from
behind the lens to in front of it. Readers could be proud that “the compassion of
Americans brings a new life for Flavio.” Donning new clothes, toys, and a smile in the
Colorado suburbs, Flavio is seen enjoying his new life with his family in a middle-class
home. His mother, we are told, will no longer have to do the hard work of a laundress
but will “have time and strength to keep house in order.” U.S. modernity will save time
and energy in order that Flavio’s mother and other women may be more productive in the
home and thus secure the family against the dangers of the world. The “American
dream” is posted as both real and regal, bestowed upon the privileged few such as Flavio,
who stands as the young face that emerges successfully from underdevelopment. These
559
Christina Klein, “Family Ties and Political Obligation: The Discourse of Adoption and the Cold War
Commitment to Asia,” in Christian Appy, Cold War Constructions, 35-66; Klein, Cold War, Ch. 4, 144152.
331
stories stressed that everyday U.S. residents needed to participate in such community
events in the name of global integration and national prestige.560
U.S. journalists narrated stories of Cuban children who were part of the global
population that needed saving. The popular press stressed that Cuban children were in
harm’s way under Castro. The New York Times urgently declared that Cuban parents did
not want their children “communist indoctrinated” under the revolution’s educational
programs. Readers learned that “the Castro regime is bending every effort to capture the
minds of youth” and that authorities paraded Cuban children in front of their imprisoned
parents in order to extract information from them.561 Such news spurred national
mobilization against the Cuban government and caused grassroots groups to act in the
United States. A meeting in Washington by the Cuban Women’s Anti-communist
Organization ended with a request for toys for Cuban refugee children. María Alba of
Miami said that Christmas 1960 brought Castro’s denunciations of Santa Claus when the
Cuban leader was reported to have claimed, “Santa Claus was an American, a very cold
American, who would not bother to pay any Christmas Eve visits to Cuban refugee
children.” Alba’s organization collected toys and clothes for 3,600 refugee children in
1959, with the goal amount increasing to 23,000 in 1960.562
Pleas to help Cuban children emerged within an epistemology of modernization
that sanctioned truths by certain global authorities in the realms of economics, politics,
and social development. Indices of Gross National Product, life expectancy, and
technological innovation presumed to translate to family and home, so that the United
560
“Flavio’s Rescue,” Life, July 21, 1961, 24-35.
R. Hart Phillips, “‘Castro Freed Cuba from U.S.’ is ‘Correct’ Answer in Havana,” New York Times, June
8, 1960, 12; C.P. Trussell, “Abuse of Parents Charged to Cuba,” New York Times, December 8, 1961, 24.
562
“Cubans in U.S. Seek Toys for Refugees,” New York Times, Nov. 29, 1961, 25.
561
332
States and other First World nations became self-ratified experts in matters of governance
as well as familial well-being. Ruby Hart Phillips, writer at large in Cuba since 1931,
was still writing about Cuba in the 1950s and 1960s. Hart Phillips published Cuban
Sideshow in 1935, a book on Cuban politics and history that explained the predicament of
the 1933 revolution. She updated her appraisal in 1959 with Cuba: Island of Paradox. A
Saturday Review critic commended the book and provided an excerpt that reflected the
long-standing opinion that Cubans were incapable of self-governance. Though the 1959
revolution was challenging these perceptions, Hart Phillips offered that “[Cubans] are a
people possessed of responsibility that liberty requires, yet are seemingly devoid of the
sense of responsibility that liberty requires. Cubans are like a flock of ducks attempting
to perform the feats of eagles.” The postwar morphology from the “civilizational” to the
“cultural” constructed the Second and Third Worlds as lesser cultural and racial entities
than the U.S.-led First World. It was a totalizing and essentializing epistemology that
viewed Cubans and others in “developing” nations dependent on the United States and
others of the NATO bloc in the domain of politics and society.563
In this light, the figure of Fidel Castro appeared in middlebrow publications that
oscillated between mocking ambivalence and outright condemnation. Immediately
following the revolutionary triumph, Castro appeared on the cover of Life magazine in an
issue that illustrated in graphic detail the execution of Batista’s former civic and military
leaders. Images included photographs of a jubilant Cuban population as well as graphic
depictions of the firing wall, which provided admiration for Castro while it sparked
563
Saturday Review, July 25, 1959, 2, 21.
333
ethical questions of judicial due process and concern for state mandated killings.564 In
short order, portrayals of Castro took on a decidedly derogatory tone. Depictions of the
comandante as both hero and villain generated vituperations and parody as Time and Life
became outspoken critics of Cuba and Castro. On June 2, 1961, Castro again appeared
on the cover of Life in an artistic rendering that showed the bearded leader bearing tooth
discoloration followed by a headline, “The Crisis in Our Hemisphere.” The cover’s
caption read: “The messianic eyes of Fidel Castro, hypnotic and hungry for power
summon up a new and nightmarish danger for the U.S.” This article was the first of a
series warning that Castro-inspired communism threatened to disrupt the tranquility of
the western hemisphere and U.S. supremacy in the region, with the implication that
everything Good Neighboring had worked to achieve could be undone by Castro and
others of his ilk.565 Time followed suit with a cover story eulogizing the Monroe
Doctrine in light of the Latin American “crisis.” It lamented that U.S. oversight of the
hemisphere remained under duress as long as Cuba stood as a proxy for the U.S.S.R.566
Just as Castro appeared tyrannical and monstrous, however, he was also
envisioned juvenile and innocuous. Time said Castro “exhibit[ed] the views and
comprehensions of a college radical.” U.S. paternalist discourse continued as another
Time cover showed caricatures of problematic national leaders following Khrushchev,
with a shrunken Fidel Castro running alongside of him. All are wearing baseball
uniforms that say “East Side Rockets.” Castro is drawn childish or dwarf-like, a small
564
Life, “Dynamic Boss Takes Over a U.S. Neighbor,” Jan. 12, 1959, 10-19; “Liberator’s Triumphal March
through an Ecstatic Island,” Life, 32; “The Killing in Cuba—and a Moral Issue,” Life, Jan. 26, 1959, 22-23.
565
“Crisis in Latin America,” Life, June 2, 1961, 81.
566
Welch, Response to Revolution, 170.
334
and emasculated adult running along side Khrushchev competing for the leader’s
attention.567
The ambivalent renderings of Castro as quixotic monster pointed to a nationwide
doubt concerning Washington’s effectiveness in containing Cuba. Concerned that their
politicians seemed unable to solve the “crisis” in the hemisphere, middlebrow brokers
sought to uplift the national mood by concentrating on Cuban exile experiences in the
United States. Rallying around local initiatives meant that civilians could pick up the
slack where its government lagged. Life suggested domestic redress when it covered the
failed Bay of Pigs invasion while offering vignettes on Cuban refugees in the United
States. One photo exposé showed a Christian anti-communist group gathering in Key
West displaying signs which read: “Liberty and Democracy”; “American for the
Americans”; and “Yankees yes, Russians No.” An adjacent photo illustrated the success
of a local Cuban children’s shelter.568 Covering both the Bay of Pigs and exile life in the
same breath vindicated the humiliation of defeat by showing a U.S. that was united in its
anti-communist cause. Thus, when Life offered derision in the article, “A Failure That
We Must Recoup: ‘Hell of a Beating’ in Cuba,” U.S. citizens could still be proud that
they were working to help pro-U.S. Cubans, and that Uncle Sam’s history included
venerable works such as assisting Cuba in its independence from Spain.569
The turn to domestic responsibility prompted Reader’s Digest to display an
advertisement for International Rescue Committee (IRC) that solicited aid for Cuban
refugees. The ad stated that “Thousands of refugees in our country—families, friends
567
Time, “Cuba: The First 100 Days,” April 20, 1959; Time, October 3, 1960, Cover.
“‘Secret’ Cuban Revolt Comes Out in the Open,” Life, April 14, 1961, 28-33.
569
Keith Wheeler, “A Failure that we must Recoup: ‘Hell of a Beating’ in Cuba,” Life, April 28, 1961, 1725.
568
335
and compatriots of the ill-fated Cuban freedom fighters—deserve our friendship and
compassion as they mourn their dead and pray for loved ones still deprived of liberty.”
The appeal by the IRC on behalf of the Cuban Refugee Emergency Appeal desired to
give “victims of communism…a chance to become self-supporting.”570 The shift to selfsufficiency was axiomatic in modernization thinking and long considered a core U.S.
value. Advertisements in Saturday Review extolled developmental assistance by
corporations such as United Fruit Company, showing its contribution to the economy,
education, and overall well-being in Latin America, similar to a Coke or Exxon
corporation today.571
Tourist literature prior to 1959 proved another middlebrow expression that
projected U.S. values onto a one-dimensional, univocal Cuba. As we have seen, Cuba
served as a discursive canvas onto which U.S. cultural assumptions about race, class, and
other social distinctions between North and South, East and West, and First and Third
Worlds were inscribed. Defining ideal U.S. “Americanness” in contradistinction to static
Cuban subjects continued a construct that affirmed a sense of national purpose and global
superiority for U.S. citizens. But these distinctions were not simply derisive or critical.
On the contrary: they reinscribed themes of beneficence and altruism, a good
neighborliness that emphasized fraternity and common identity. These projections
posited populations that were different yet the same, part of the neocolonial discourse that
enunciated not simply a series of dialectical binaries but signs rife with mixed messages
and interpretations, couched in a language of shared Pan-Americanity while undergirding
570
Dickey Chapelle, “‘Remember the 26th of July,’” Reader’s Digest, April 1959: 50-56, 233-256; Dickey
Chapelle, “Cuba—One Year After,” Reader’s Digest (Jan. 1960): 67-74; Reader’s Digest (Aug. 1961):
253.
571
Saturday Review, July 25, 1959, 2, 21.
336
cultural, political, and racial differences. It suggested that pre-revolutionary Cuba was a
locale of serene mystique and hospitable environs yet one that benefited from U.S.
intervention and assistance.
The Pan American Union (PAU) endured as a publisher of tourist guides and
evolved to accommodate a 1950’s traveling public. U.S. tourism surged in the 1950s,
part of the new conspicuous consumption abroad that amounted to $2.3 Billion in
1959.572 PAU publications continued as an inter-American vehicle to promote friendly
relations through commercial exchange as they enticed U.S. residents to experience the
tropical allure of Cuba. Increasingly, U.S. homes contained bookshelves lined with
Cuban guidebooks, pamphlets, and catalogs in which the island appeared virtually
unaltered as a place of innate hospitality, posh tastes, and attractive scenery, with Cubans
an upbeat and fun-loving people who welcomed foreigners. An opening to Cuba (1955)
offered: “World-famous for its sugar, tobacco, rum—and rumbas—this little island
republic, roughly the size of the state of Virginia, possesses a rare combination of scenic
beauty, natural resources and almost six million gay, freedom-loving Cubans.” What
follows is the familiar history of Cuba founded by Columbus, shackled by Spanish
colonialism, freed by a U.S.-led alliance, and beset by corruption and political instability
in its brief history as a sovereign republic. Readers are told that the indigenous Taínos
surprisingly “welcomed the first white men to their island in 1492.” Cuba’s abbreviated
history included the divisive elements of slavery and war between England and Spain,
with no mention of the problematic relationship with the United States. Rather, like
previous narratives, the U.S. is cast in the role of economic patrician and military savior.
The popular account circumvented U.S. financial, military, and political oversight of the
572
Klein, Cold War, 107.
337
island save its assistance in the War of Independence and subsequent occupation, framed
as brief episodes necessary to hasten democracy to Cuba.573
Another PAU release, Visit Cuba (1957), was published while revolution was
underway but still invited U.S. vacationers to experience the “gay, happy land with a
perpetual holiday air.” Cuba remained a paradisiacal mélange of rum, cigars, and rumba.
With revolution palpable, the guidebook allayed fears that Cuba might be an antidemocratic place by declaring Cuba’s 1940 constitution assured U.S.-inspired freedoms:
“Cuba is an independent and sovereign nation, organized as a unitary and democratic
republic for the enjoyment of political liberty, social justice, individual and collective
welfare and human solidarity.” Throughout the pages are images of modernity and
security; there is no mention of political unrest, only beauty and relaxation. North
American travelers could take flights on Pan Am, Braniff, National, or Delta, and upon
arriving would enjoy the convenience of upscale stores and banks while escaping to
exotic fishing locales and beaches.574
These depictions reinforced assumptions and networks that privileged the U.S.
subject, but it is important to acknowledge that such signs and narratives also depended
on the participation of Cubans in their creation and dissemination. Cuban elites belonged
to what postcolonial scholars have identified as the “comprador class,” or those members
of a national bourgeoisie who determine power relations and financial resources in a
given locale. Populations of the “colonized” or “developing” world are now shown to
vary significantly within and across national economies, as exclusivity and privilege are
part of a global prestige that crosses borders. Rather than passive victims, (neo)colonized
573
574
Pan American Union, Cuba (Washington, DC: Pan American Union, 1955), 3, 6, 16-17.
Pan American Union, Visit Cuba (Washington, DC: Pan American Union, 1957), 1, 6.
338
subjects become instrumental in various “contact zones” that are products of complex
cultural, social, economic, and political processes, which do not neatly conform to
national boundaries or subjectivities. The U.S.-Cuban commercial relationship suggests
a muddling of erstwhile binaries (settler/native, colonizer/colonized) in a tangled cultural
web of neocolonial desire and its contestation.575
Because tourism was a major moneymaker in Cuba’s economy, for instance, the
Cuban Tourist Commission (CTC) represented a government organization that
encouraged the construction of Cuba as an idyllic getaway for well-to-do tourists.
Tourism was a transnational enterprise that depended on collaboration between Miami
and Havana. Travel Cuba (Fig. 6.1, 1955) was published by a Florida corporation but
sponsored by the CTC. The CTC reported $50 million spent by 230,000 North American
visitors to the island in 1953. Eager for foreign income, it assured that “the Cuban people
have been thoroughly indoctrinated in the arts and niceties of tourist accommodation, in
order to insure that everyone visiting the country will be properly entertained as a friend
as well as a customer.” The invitation reminded readers that Cuban harbors were open to
U.S. pleasure boats and its roads to Yankee driver’s licenses. Northern tourists
maintained a privileged status, able to report trouble directly to the Commission, which
held jurisdiction over the tourist division of the National Police Department.
The transnational language of tourism suggested an extension of the U.S. imperial
project authorized by historical mandate. Throughout Travel Cuba’s pages were
accounts by travelers such as Warren H. Pierce, who wrote that the travel impulse was
something endemic to U.S. residents and that “quite naturally the American tourists have
575
Bhabha, Location of Culture; Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation
(New York: Routledge, 1992); Fanon, Wretched of the Earth.
339
yearned for new worlds to conquer.” Pierce’s testimony begins with allusions to Daniel
Boone and Lewis and Clark (miswritten as “Meriwether and Lewis”) who represented
prototypical “American” travelers that forged a link between vacationers and explorers,
with the implication that modern tourists continue expansionist expeditions of times past.
Cuba is again remade into the right mix of exoticism and backyard comfort: “Cuba is
delightfully and completely foreign,” Pierce tells us, “yet Cuba’s ties with the United
States are so close, Americanos are so warmly regarded, and the Cuban Tourist
Commission so well organized that your lack of Spanish and your unfamiliarity with the
country are no handicap whatever to your enjoyment.” Here tourism is performed against
the backdrop of nationalizing the frontier; the yearning for heading west is resuscitated
by going south, making Cuba familiarly foreign in a domestic sense.576
Such depictions conformed to a middlebrow aesthetic that formed part of postwar
popular culture. Cuba appealed to white middleclass consumers who enjoyed more
spending power and still carried the pride of World War II heroism. The cover of a 1954
Cuban tourist brochure published by the Cuban Tourist Commission, Cuba: Ideal
Vacation Land, shows an illustration of a young man in a fedora taking a picture of his
blonde wife with the Havana Capitol in the background (Fig. 6.2). The brochure
rehashes the standard history that foregrounds the European beginning with Columbus
and concludes with the intervention and occupation by the United States, after which
“Cuba has achieved great progress.” The guide assures that Cuba is a “photographer’s
paradise” in a “distinctly foreign atmosphere coupled with all modern advantages and
conveniences,” which include “fiestas,” fishing, hunting, and trips to the beach. It is the
576
Travel Cuba (St. Petersberg, FL: Florida Speaks Corp., 1955), 4, 5, 11. I borrow the phrase “foreign in
a domestic sense” from Christina Duffy Burnett and B. Marshall, eds., Foreign in a Domestic Sense:
Puerto Rico, American Expansion, and the Constitution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001).
340
foreign-in-a-domestic-sense quality that attracted U.S. tourists to such exotica as well as
to high-brow clubs such as the Lawn Tennis Club and an assortment of women’s
associations. Visitors were promised access to premier cabarets such as the Tropicana
and Sans Souci, and to the best restaurants, for “Cubans, like the French, are lovers of
good food and good drinks.” Cuba is rendered in terms of a European birth and
maintained by foreign influence, making it a natural spot for elite tastes and a refined
palate, replete with boutiques and beautiful beaches. Cuba could be both rustic and
cosmopolitan, and remained, from the images in this vein of literature, white.577
577
Instituto Cubano del Turismo, Cuba: Ideal Vacation Land, 1953-1954 (Havana: Editora de Libros y
Folletos, 1953-1954), 3, 11-13, 17, 79; Havana Arrivals (Havana: Cuban Hotel Association, 1952).
341
Figure 6.1: Drawings and photographs from Travel Cuba (1955). Cuban and U.S. companies
endorsed Cuba as an exotic and fun paradise for North American consumers.
342
Figure 6.2: Cover of Cuba: Ideal Vacation Land (1953-1954)
343
Religion and Refugees: Operation Pedro Pan
Middlebrow modernization provided underlying principles that shared the goal of
preventing the growth of communism. This meant, among other expectations, accepting
those fleeing communist or potentially-communist countries. The Cuban revolution
brought a dramatic surge of refugees to the United States. As Cuba became the leading
avatar of the “Red Menace” in the western hemisphere, Castro what McCarthyists feared
(and perhaps obliquely helped produce), the absorption of Cuban exiles was paramount in
the anticommunist cause that sifted throughout U.S. towns, cities, and neighborhoods,
and took shape in literature, film, sports, and grassroots movements.
The Ten Years War spurred the first major wave of exiles, so that by 1869,
100,000 people of Cuban origin lived in the United States. These new residents remade
New York City, Philadelphia, Boston, and communities throughout southern Florida.
Ybor City was named for Vicente Martínez Ybor, a Spanish cigar manufacturer who
helped established the Tampa district in 1885. The cigar making industry changed
Florida’s landscape, with Tampa, Miami, and Key West growing into locales defined by
Cuban influence.578
Thus, when in 1959 Cubans began arriving in Miami en masse they entered into a
region that had been shaped by long-standing Cuban ties. The anticommunist newcomers
factored into the material and discursive landscape of the Cold War project. New
alliances between organizations and institutions sought to vanquish the ever-present and
protean Soviet threat in a competition that involved politics, economics, and God. The
Cuban Refugee Program and Operation Pedro Pan/Cuban Children’s Program were
initiatives that combined civilian and governmental forces to facilitate the arrival of
578
Masud-Piloto, Open Arms, 7-11.
344
émigrés. These were plans that operated at multiple levels of government—municipal,
state, and federal—and showed that the U.S. democratic division between church and
state could dissolve on behalf of nation-building and national security.
In November 1960 the White House sent Tracy S. Voorhees to look into the
“Cuban refugee situation.” Voorhees had headed the Hungarian Refugee Program at
Camp Kilmer, New Jersey, between 1956 and 1957, and he used this model for
processing Cuban refugees. In his final report submitted just before Kennedy took the
oath of office, Voorhees reported approximately 1,000 refugees arriving to the United
States from Cuba each week. This began a trend that saw some 80,000 Cubans enter the
U.S. between 1959 and 1962, which would rise between 1965 and 1973 when an
additional 273,000 Cubans migrated. These remained the two largest waves until 1980,
when 125,000 Cuban exiles touched U.S. soil as part of the Mariel Boatlift. Voorhees
remarked that the Cuban refugee situation was both “a national responsibility and a
national opportunity,” a recurring mantra invoked by policymakers when discussing
refugees. He called upon U.S. residents to assimilate Cubans, framing the matter as a
Cold War imperative and alluding to the example of Hungary four years prior. To help
facilitate this process, Eisenhower approved $1 million for the Cuban Refugee Program
which created the Cuban Refugee Emergency Center in Miami. This began the effort to
assure that all entering Cubans would receive some form of immediate assistance. The
refugee “problem,” as it was often referred, was meant to require a temporary solution.
Once the revolutionary government was toppled, Cuban exiles—including
unaccompanied children—would return home.579
579
E.M. Ressler, N. Boothby, D.J. Steinbock, Unaccompanied Children: Care and Protection in Wars,
National Disasters, and Refugee Movements (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 51; Tracy S.
345
The Cuban Children’s Program (CCP), popularly known as “Operation Pedro
Pan” (OPP), was a section of the Cuban Refugee Program. OPP referred to the logistics
of transporting Cuban children to the United States while the CCP officially dealt with
the shelter, education, and overall well-being of unaccompanied minors once they
arrived. OPP began in November 1960 and ended with the Cuban Missile Crisis in
October 1962, while the CCP lasted until June 1981. Monsignor Bryan Walsh stood as
the central figure in the program. In 1955 Walsh joined Miami’s Catholic Welfare
Bureau (later Catholic Service Bureau). He had worked with Voorhees on the Hungarian
program, so it was not unusual when the American Chamber of Commerce in Havana
approached him about helping Cuban children leave the island.580 He recommended to
Voorhees and other government officials that the CCP operate under the auspices of the
Catholic Welfare Bureau, making the case that child welfare, anticommunism, and
religion went hand in hand.581 A special foster care program was put in place for
unaccompanied children overseen by Miami welfare agencies and a conglomeration of
religious affiliations including the Catholic Welfare Bureau, Children’s Service Bureau,
and the Jewish Family and Children’s Service. Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish groups
would combine with municipal, state, and federal organizations to provide services to
children. Religion became another cultural marker believed to make the transition easier
for minors. Reports stated that 7,000 Cuban Jews (adults and children) had gone into
exile by 1962. Ninety-five percent of children fleeing unaccompanied were Catholic, and
it was assumed that young people of Protestant faith would feel more welcome by the
Voorhees, “Report to the President of the United States on the Cuban Refugee Problem,” Jan. 18, 1961, in
Carlos E. Cortés, ed., Cuban Refugee Programs (New York: Arno Press, 1980), 1-14.
580
de los Angeles Torres, Lost Apple, 65.
581
Crespo and Marrawi, Operación, 128-31.
346
Children’s Service Bureau. First-wave juveniles were mostly from middle-class and
well-to-do families, with boys outnumbering girls 3 to 1.582
Another key figure in OPP was James Baker, former headmaster of Ruston
Academy, an elite U.S. school in Havana. U.S. educational organizations in Havana
produced teachers and school officials who were part of the anti-Batista resistance,
including plans to help Cuban children flee.583 Baker and others acquired student visas
from the U.S. embassy in Havana. Walsh and Baker corresponded via U.S. diplomatic
pouch facilitated by the State Department, and on December 26, 1960, Operation Peter
Pan delivered the first few minors to Miami, a number which grew to 14,048 over the
course of two years. 584
After January 1961, bureaucratic difficulties arose regarding U.S. visas, since they
could no longer be obtained in Havana without a U.S. embassy. State Department
officials suggested that Walsh petition for visa waivers on the basis that children needed
to leave Cuba in order to avoid communist indoctrination. Under this plan, British
officials would assist the Catholic Church in Jamaica, still a British colony at the time, so
that children could now travel to Miami via Kingston on visas issued from the British
Embassy in Havana on KLM airlines with the help of the Dutch embassy. Children
would acquire visa waivers in Havana or Kingston for entry into the United States. In the
name of security, the FBI kept track of 16-18 year-old refugees to ensure that they were
not spies, but ultimately J. Edgar Hoover approved of the program, musing “we ought in
582
R. Hart Phillips, “14,072 Children Sent Out of Cuba,” New York Times, March 9, 1963, 2; Triay,
Fleeing Castro, 54; Walsh, “Cuban Refugee Children,” 386, 388.
583
de los Angeles Torres, Lost Apple, 78-83.
584
Monsignor Bryan Walsh, “Cuban Refugee Children,” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World
Affairs (July-Oct. 1971): 378-415; Triay, Fleeing Castro, 15-17.
347
this country to see if we can’t place these young people into schools and indoctrinate
them with democracy.”585
The successful orchestration of Operation Peter Pan grew from a transnational,
legal improvisation that involved multiple governmental entities. It was a program made
possible under a colonial legacy in which the United States, Britain, Spain, and Holland
stood as state powers able to hold juridical and economic sway in the transplantation of
Cuban children. It demonstrated how U.S. and European nations could
disproportionately affect outcomes in sovereign or semi-sovereign states, substantiating
claims by critics that postcoloniality was really neocoloniality, an altered inter-state
system that ultimately sustained quasi-colonial relations in areas of economy, politics,
and even cultural norms. It was this continued fiscal, political, and military arrangement
that had evolved through the course of modernity, and one which Bandung states wanted
to end.
As Cuba’s refugee letting continued unabated, President Kennedy increased
allocations to the Cuban Refugee Program to $4 million and placed the responsibility of
the Cuban refugees in the Department of Health, Education, and Social Welfare under
Secretary Abraham Ribicoff. The CRP received $38.5M in 1962 and $56M in 1963, with
further federal funds available under the Mutual Security Act, which authorized the
president to offer up to $150 Million in aid to people leaving communist countries. In
June 1962, Congress set aside $70 Million for the world’s refugees under the Migration
and Refugee Assistance Act, of which $14 Million went to unaccompanied Cuban
children. This insured that Cuban exiles would enjoy unique privileges among
585
Of the over 14,000 children, 7,500 were distributed in 35 states under 95 different child welfare
agencies. Walsh, “Cuban Refugee Children,” 378-415; Crespo and Marrawi, Operación, 141-144; Triay,
Fleeing Castro, 23-25; de los Angeles Torres, Lost Apple, 67, 77-78, quote on page 78.
348
immigrants. Government provisions included food, money and transportation for
resettlement, assistance with jobs, health services, and educational opportunities. Many
of these advantages persist today, as Cubans still pose a special case in immigration law
and reap benefits in the United States not afforded to other groups.586
In addition to government sponsorship, schools, churches, and
counterrevolutionary work in Cuba helped with OPP’s success. Anti-Castro Cubans
assisted with obtaining exit papers for children and providing money for airplane tickets.
This line of work included forging visa waivers, doctoring passports, and spreading antiCastro messages in collaboration with Radio Swan, which included anti-revolutionary
literature and telephone campaigns. Leopoldina and Ramón Grau were influential
members of the opposition. Known as Polita and Mongo respectively, the Graus were
niece and nephew of former Cuban president Ramón Grau San Martín. Polita joined the
anti-Batista resistance during the 1950s but then shifted her energy against Castro after
1959 while Mongo participated in assassination attempts on the Cuban leader. Both
worked on OPP and were eventually arrested and imprisoned in 1965 for their subversive
activities.587
What prompted Cuban parents to send their children? Many were afraid that
their kids would become military conscripts (as early as age 15 for boys) and forced into
a long, drawn out civil war and/or a fight against the U.S., for it was not certain if a
Castro-led Cuba would hold. Furthermore, the extensive anti-Castro propaganda
586
Crespo and Marrawi, Operación, 168, 173; John W. Finney, “President Orders Cuba Refugee Aid,” New
York Times, Feb. 4, 1961, 1, 2 Triay, Fleeing Castro, 46; Masud-Piloto, Open Arms, 53; John F. Thomas,
U.S.A. as a Country of First Asylum, International Migration (1965), in Cortés, Cuban Refugee Programs,
6-7, 12-13.
587
Triay, Fleeing Castro, 32-34, 38-41; Crespo and Marrawi, Operación, 92-96; de los Angeles Torres,
Lost Apple, 128-136.
349
campaign created a great deal of panic and misinformation, exacerbating fears in Cuban
parents. As the Unidad Revolucionaria, a CIA umbrella organization, and Radio Swan
spread false rumors on the island, parents believed that the Cuban government would take
away their children and brainwash them with communism. One popular rumor
concerned patria potestad, which referred to the rights parents have over their children.
Reports circulated that the revolutionary government would take children at age three and
put them in state-run facilities and cut off access to their parents. This news inspired
drastic actions, such as one instance in which fifty mothers in Bayamo signed a pact to
commit filicide rather than turn their children over to the state.588
Cuban parents also recalled the Spanish Civil War when children were evacuated
from Spain to the U.S.S.R., France, and Mexico. Other child exoduses included the
1,000 Hungarian children who were resettled in the U.S. after the 1956 Soviet invasion,
and the much more extensive Kindertransport that assisted children out of Nazi Germany.
Cuban parents stayed behind because many thought that the revolution would be shortlived. Some remained to fight in the underground resistance, while others wanted to
protect their property. Working with the U.S. government in Cuba proved risky,
however; not only was such work considered treasonous, but those who sent their
children were beholden to demands by U.S. officials lest harm befall their children in the
United States. Still others remained because they could not secure visas, while their
children could. It was hoped that families would reunite in the United States at a later
time or in a post-Castro Cuba.589
588
Triay, Fleeing Castro, 2-9; Crespo and Marrawi, Operación, 92-96.
de los Angeles Torres, Lost Apple, 4, 61; Masud-Piloto, Open Arms, 39; Walsh, “Cuban Refugee
Children,” 381-384.
589
350
Anticommunist logic and religious commitment united this diverse group of
policymakers, anti-Castro forces, and church leaders. It was an intersection in which
politics and spiritual beliefs collapsed the hallowed ideal of separation of church and state
in the Cold War crisis. Anticommunist religiosity was broadly practiced, not seen as
contradictory to, but rather securing, the founding principles of the U.S. democratic
creed. Thus, James Baker later remembered:
I felt very happy and thought that my government was doing incredible
work…how they were financing the program of Monsignor Walsh. I felt that way
because we had Communism 90 miles away, and here people were arriving from
there with their problems, and as a democracy we had the responsibility to help
them.590
The commitment to refugees was seen as the twin fulfillment of national and religious
duty. Monsignor Bryan Walsh illuminated this connection:
I was more than willing to accept the consequences of my act if I could save 200
children from communism. I thought about the thousands of Spanish children
who had been sent to the Soviet Union in 1939 and I told the State Department of
the United States: Let them come. Some months later hundreds of priests and
religious followers began coming to Miami and then I saw all of this in the
context of the Marxist war against religion…I saw my job as helping the Cuban
refugees, and, in particular, the Cuban children, as an opportunity given to me by
Divine Providence to combat communism.591
Writers for Christian Century (whose editorial board at one time included Martin Luther
King, Jr.) warned against totalitarianism in Cuba and expressed concern over the growing
Cuban exile community. They applauded Christian U.S. groups such as the Church
World Service, which worked on relocating refugees and encouraged U.S. residents to
open their homes to Cuban children in cities and towns. The topic of Cuba allowed
590
Crespo and Marrawi, Operación, 172.
Walsh, “Un católico,” in Razón y pasión: Veinticinco años de estudios cubanos, quoted in Crespo and
Marrawi, Operación, 137.
591
351
believers a way to express faith in both God and country, an opportunity to fight
communism while fulfilling their Christian duties of hospitality and service.592
U.S. and Cuban opponents of the revolution found fault with a government rooted
in anti-religiosity. Ruby Hart Phillips reported a showdown between pro-Castro
supporters and anticommunist clergy at a cathedral in Santiago de Cuba where preaching
deemed “counterrevolutionary” was met with protests and demonstrations that
interrupted church services. Increasingly, Catholic leaders were accused of espionage
and aiding the anti-Castro struggle. Bishop Eduardo Boza Masdival of the Havana
Archdiocese and Father Francisco Viera were charged with colluding with the CIA, an
accusation that landed many Catholic figures in exile. Time quoted Archbishop Pérez
Serantes’s subversive quip that Cuba must choose: “Rome or Moscow.” The Luce
publication also reported on the rumored patria potestad decree and Bayamo filicide pact
by Cuban mothers. CIA propaganda made Cuban Catholics leery of revolution. One
Radio Swan emission said that the “new law of Fidel” would put priests and nuns under
the service of the state as government-regulated employees. Minister of Education
Armando Hart would be “the Pope” and all religious ceremonies based on communist
theory.593
An article in Christian Century warned that “religion was on the wane” in Cuba.
What followed was the familiar history that began with Columbus’s encounter with “the
592
Robert J. Alexander, “Light and Shadow in Castro’s Cuba,” Christian Century [CC], May 25, 1960,
632-634; Everett C. Parker, “Miami’s Real-life Drama,” CC, Oct. 11, 1961, 1209-1212; no author,
“Refugee Cuban Children Need Homes, CC, April 4, 1962, 417-418; no author, “Chicagoans Welcome
Refugees from Cuba,” CC, April 4, 1962, 418.
593
R. Hart Phillips, “Cuban Cathedral Invaded by Mobs,” New York Times, Nov. 14, 1960, 1, 5; “Havana
Steps Up Attacks on Church,” New York Times, Sept. 13, 1961, 1, 23; “The Awakening Church,” Time,
Nov. 28, 1960, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,871833,00.html (accessed August 5,
2008); “And Now the Children?” Time, Oct. 6, 1961,
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,827800,00.html (accessed August 5, 2008); Crespo and
Marrawi, Operación, 92-96.
352
most beautiful island eyes have seen,” after which the reader learns that Cuba’s religious
history has included a mix of Catholicism, Protestantism, and African animism. The
author stipulates that lamentably religion has occupied a secondary role in Cuban culture,
and that despite missionary work, Cuba’s history has progressed for the most part
secularly. The absence of dominant religious values, the writer insinuates, reinforced
Cuba as “a beautiful but violent land,” a description that rehashed the familiar duality of
beauty and savagery, seduction and violence.594
Some writers for Christian Century, however, expressed optimism for Cuba’s
revolution. Carleton Beals defended the spate of executions and believed communism to
be of little significance. He commended the Cuban government’s termination of
gambling and corruption.595 More than not, though, U.S. cultural critics found fault with
the Cuban revolution. Guardians of hearth and home saw the exile matter, particularly
children, as a national duty and measure of defense. One unfortunate result was that
Operation Pedro Pan resulted in lengthy separation periods from parents, some even
permanent. After the missile crisis, the first exile wave subsided, but Cubans continued
to arrive via boat or improvised rafts. In 1965, Castro opened the borders so that Cubans
could reunite with their families in the U.S. Except for men of military age, the
Camarioca boatlift from Cuba and U.S. “Freedom Flights” allowed for additional
migration. The Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966 made for a shorter path to citizenship for
594
David White, “Cuba: Beautiful and Violent,” CC, Jan. 21, 1959, 74-76.
Carleton Beals, “Cuba in Revolution,” CC, Feb. 4, 1959, 130-132; “Cost of Cuban Dictatorship,” CC,
Feb. 11, 1959, 165-167; “Cuba’s Revolution: The First Year,” CC, March 9, 1960, 284-286.
595
353
Cuban refugees. The relocation that was meant to be temporary became permanent;
“refugees” were now “émigrés.”596
Cuban Response
With threats from within and without, pro-revolution Cubans mobilized to show
that the revolution was a victory for domestic concerns. The war for hearts and minds
included a contest of hearth and home. Evidence suggests that counterrevolutionary
propaganda was effective, for it forced the Cuban government into a position that sought
to reassure families of their security. Elizabeth Sutherland remembered that the state
induced Cubans to send their children to the new day nurseries in order to debunk
“enemy propaganda [that] painted pictures of babes snatched from the hearth forever, or
daughters losing their virginity in the absence of parental control.”597
Cuba responded to plots such as Radio Swan by publicly denouncing rumors and
initiating a series of federal initiatives. One sweeping measure was Operation Family,
which retroactively legalized thousands of marriages and put children of these unions into
a codified family structure. Operation Marriage, Operation Civil Registry, and Operation
Collective Baptism also legitimized the family structure. Law 797 authorized the
Minister of Justice to register births and to perform marriages for a portion of the
estimated 400,000 couples who were living in extramarital unions, while Law 884
allowed parents to register their older children at 1 year of age. Between June 1960 and
June 1961 the offices of civil registry enlisted 500,000 birth certificates, effectively
giving legal rights and responsibilities to their parents. In a country of now 6 million, the
massive registration campaign solidified familial bonds and officially placed children
596
Masud-Piloto, Open Arms, 57-62; Kathlyn Gay, Leaving Cuba; de los Angeles Torres, Lost Apple, 208210.
597
Elizabeth Sutherland, The Youngest Revolution, 14.
354
under their parents’ domain. This expanded rights held under patria potestad, so that the
Cuban state actually did the opposite of what the rumors alleged. Hence the popular
magazine Bohemia showed priests taking care of the Cuban public, baptizing “not
children of privilege but those who did not inherit fortune from yesterday’s Cuba, a Cuba
which will soon disappear.” An article in Revolución carped that “the enemies of Cuba,
financed by imperialism, do not hesitate to launch the circulation of the worst lies in
order to damage the prestige of the Revolutionary Government and its work.” Children
were now counted as citizens of the state with their care securely fixed under parental
jurisdiction. Such measures effectively renounced charges that the government was
abducting and brainwashing children, and widened and reinforced the sense of belonging
by Cuban citizens, which helped ensure national preservation by future generations. Now
all Cubans could feel part of the patria, unlike the counterrevolutionary “gusanos”
[worms] who were fleeing north. As in the United States, the Cuban family unit
functioned in a protective capacity. It supplied important stability both home and nation
from “imperialist” enemies such as the United States. 598
Castro himself announced that Cuba would never “make any law that separates
children from their families.” Quite the contrary, the revolution provided conditions for
bountiful creation. In one of his characteristic didactic anecdotes, he thundered:
Go and see a farmer’s little girl, go and see a guajira. You will see that [the
farmer] has 10 or 12 children; go and see a working woman and you will see that
she has seven or eight children, and you will see that these women sacrifice
themselves, and that they’re not worried about such things, and they provide for
their children; and they have a child almost every year. Of course, those who
have fewer children are those who belong to the aristocracy. They have one or
598
“Patria potestad y ensenanza privada,” Revolución, Oct. 28, 1960, 1, 6; “Crearán oficinas del registro
civil,” Revolución Oct. 4, 1960, 3; “Serán unidas en matrimonio cuatrocientas mil parejas,” Revolución,
Nov. 22, 1960, 13; Ricardo Solano, “Operación bautizo colectivo,” Bohemia, Sept. 17, 1961, 14-15; Crespo
and Marrawi, Operación, 99-106.
355
two, but those who have many children are the real revolutionary class, the class
that is with the revolution: the workers and the farmers.599
Castro’s message of be fruitful and multiply proposed to remedy the increasing exodus of
Cubans. Officials undoubtedly felt pressure to stabilize and grow a population in order to
sustain the vision of the future. The revolution needed ample workers and soldiers; fewer
children risked eventual economic constraints. Having too few children, therefore, was
framed as catering to “aristocratic” or “bourgeois” interests. Since “exploitative capitalist
society [was] the enemy of motherhood [and] enemy of children,” Cuba’s proposed
classless society stressed familial well-being over individual financial interests, which
once again placed the role of women as nurturers and caregivers ahead of their location in
political positions of power.600
In another speech, Castro took the opportunity to discuss family, children, and the
revolution. The battle was now between “workers” and “capitalist parasites,” with the
bourgeois clergy and CIA in collusion against the revolution. Castro called the rumors
surrounding patria potestad “the most impudent fiction that the counterrevolution has
invented.” The Prime Minister noted that the revolution was not for the “children of
multimillionaires,” the “malcriados” [spoiled brats] who want to live “pretty.” Rather,
the revolution was for “workers and the children of workers.” Calling the U.S. State
Department “fascist” and the Catholic clergy “falangist,” Castro says no socialist
revolution has wanted to separate families. Castro praised working women and the
planning of 300 círculos infantiles which would accommodate 30-35,000 children.
Castro asserted that Cuban institutions now represented socialist advancement, in contrast
599
Fidel Castro Ruz, “Otra vez Fidel Castro se dirige a los artistas,” Obra revolucionaria, Sept. 27, 1961,
18.
600
Ibid., 23.
356
to the perilous versions of capitalist modernity, with “exploitative capitalist society…the
enemy of motherhood, enemy of children.” Citing the 500,000 children who were not in
school before the revolution, the leader yielded another indictment against the United
States for the poor conditions in Cuba due to social, economic, and political neglect. Prerevolutionary Cuba was deemed vastly inferior to post-1959 society. According to
Castro and other officials, in the past, children and mothers lacked patriarchal protection,
and the wide disparity of wealth, malnourishment, lack of education, childhood
prostitution, parasites and other afflictions, particularly in rural areas, were all the result
of a Cuban “bourgeoisie” that catered to U.S. desires. Castro accused capitalism of
fostering sexual improprieties, charging that previously Cubans of influence
sold our children of humble families to the tourist who would come for alcohol
and entertainment, selling the little girls of workers, the little girls of workers and
farmers to the marines who came to entertain themselves. That is what they did:
prostitute the little girls from modest families.601
Thus, liberation from capitalism and U.S. imperialism/neocolonialism signified the
liberation of Cuban women and girls from Yankee men. The New Man, trope for the
patria and epitomized by the paternal figure of the bearded, cigar-smoking Fidel Castro,
successfully rescued and now defended Cuban women. Here stood the dual imagery of
the corpus as the male or female body and the political body of the nation-state. Cuba as
New Man (patria) was viewed as successfully having thwarted the imperial-physical
transgression of mother/daughter Cuba by the United States. Rape and prostitution were
symptoms of a neocolonial/imperial aggression tolerated and enabled under effeminate
bourgeois leadership but dismantled by manly revolution. Even more pressing than
military engagement was the revolution’s war of representations and ideas, which
601
Fidel Castro Ruz, “Otra vez Fidel Castro se dirige a los artistas,” Obra revolucionaria, Sept. 27, 1961,
9-24.
357
countered depictions of Cuba as a fun-loving, tropical brothel with signs of work,
soldiery, and unabated masculinity. Revolutionary discourse imposed interventions that
debunked notions of a fetishized Cuban subject. Countering the eroticization of Cuba
was a new andocentric revolutionary image, which could overthrow articulations of
Cuban disempowerment with new projections of manhood. The New Man could now
safely secure Cuban women and families.
In the United States, manly leadership was a theme that drifted through the 1960
presidential debates as well. Nixon suggested that the president needed to be a role
model for children, a father figure for the country:
One thing I've noted as I've traveled around the country are the tremendous
number [sic] of children who come out to see the presidential candidates. I see
mothers holding their babies up, so that they can see a man who might be
president of the United States…It makes you realize that whoever is president is
going to be a man that all the children of America will either look up to, or will
look down to…And I only hope that, should I win this election, that I could
approach President Eisenhower in maintaining the dignity of the office; in seeing
to it that whenever any mother or father talks to his child, he can look at the man
in the White House and, whatever he may think of his policies, he will say: “Well,
there is a man who maintains the kind of standards personally that I would want
my child to follow.602
Proper presidential manhood not only meant a combative spirit to keep enemies at bay
but one that could head a household and provide for the country’s children. The
president needed to lead with inspiration as well as insure domestic stability. Numerous
ideological trajectories projected national power and a head-of-state’s effectiveness upon
children. Young people held iconographic import, and the Soviet Union, China, and the
U.S. all made children part of political claims of the state. Child well-being was
highlighted in the confrontation between Cuba and the United States but was part of a
602
Commission on Presidential Debates, “October 13, 1960, The Third Kennedy-Nixon Presidential
Debate,” http://www.debates.org/pages/trans60c.html (Accessed March 3, 2008).
358
Cold War heterosexual and paternalist discourse that clashed over which nation—which
model of social organization—would adequately provide for future generations. It
centered on the question: Which male leader could successfully raise the nation’s
children and secure its wives?603
Castro echoed claims by Cuban cultural workers who depicted pre-revolutionary
society as one of child neglect. Only after 1959, they argued, did much-needed advances
in healthcare and education help children and their families. Media outlets showed
images of children as state beneficiaries. A socialist revolution would provide where
capitalism failed. Cuban magazines paid tribute to daycares and foster homes, which
produced a deluge of photos and stories of children flourishing under national programs.
One photo from the photo magazine INRA showed a young girl in a foster home crib with
a caption that read “A sweet little girl resting peacefully in her crib. From now on she
will have no difficulties. She will not lack what is necessary for a healthy and happy life”
(Fig. 6.3). In contrast to U.S. claims to modernization, Cubans could rest assured that
medical and educational professionals were taking care of the population under the
island’s new social vision. April 1961 brought stories of the Bay of Pigs victory along
with reports on programs of social welfare. One success story was the creation of
Círculos Infantiles, daycares which offered kids “all the attention necessary for the best
physical and educational formation” while their mothers could work or attend classes.
The year 1961 was officially dubbed the “Year of Education,” which resulted in 300
Círculos for children age 45 days to 6 years old. This provided relief for mothers who
603
de los Angeles Torres, Lost Apple, 33-45; Julia L. Mickenberg, Learning from the Left: Children’s
Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press,
2006), 16-18, 125-126, 132-135.
359
worked while their children were cared for under the direction of the Federation of Cuban
Women.604
It was within this gender discourse that Cuban femininity also took on a different
form. Cuban women now assumed the social function of worker, mother, and soldier of
the state. Women occupied the twin spaces of nation and home, laboring in dual
capacities in public and private spaces, while defending the patria. New social practices
produced images of women in factories and hospitals, living rooms and kitchens, and in
military locations wearing combat fatigues. The cover of one Cuba issue showed three
attractively made-up women posing in an olive green garb holding military weapons with
the caption, “Muchachas de uniforme” [Ladies in Uniform, Fig. 6.4].
604
“Hogar Granma: Una realidad del aire puro y sol,” INRA (Jan. 1961), 4-9; INRA (Feb. 1961), 58-59;
Ana Pardo, “Forjaremos una infancia feliz: Los Círculos Infantiles” INRA, April 1961, 4-9.
360
Figure 6.3: Photo from INRA (Jan. 1961), illustrating that the revolutionary state will care for Cuban
children, irrespective of race.
361
Figure 6.4: Photo from "Muchachas de uniforme” (Cuba, April 1962). Women of the revolution
were expected to be militant while retaining seductive characteristics of femininity.
362
The ideal Cuban woman was expected to be maternal and feminine but also vigilant and
militant. Cuban womanhood meant the ability to defend Cuba yet remain faithful to
standard conceptions of femininity and beauty that dominated the matte print world.605
As both caregivers and soldiers, Cuban women strengthened the national will in
pronatalist projections of citizenship. Like the New Man, women could now realize their
full female potential, their “nature” enhanced by federal funding and social redesign.606
These social changes brought new gendered accounts of Cuban history. Head of
the Federation of Cuban Women, Vilma Espín, submitted that women had proved crucial
in the wars of independence, particularly in “guerras familiares” [wars for the family]. A
central figure in M-26-7, Espín believed that women had achieved rights under
revolutionary struggle, which she viewed equally important to those won by AfroCubans. As in other social areas, Cuban officials believed that economic restructuring
also brought about gender equality. Unlike conditions under “colonial Spain” and the
“neocolonial United States,” only after 1959, Espín said, were blacks and women in both
city and rural settings liberated, because capitalism could never provide equitable
conditions. She referred to the “double oppression” of black women, a term scarcely
treated in Cuba’s era of the New Man. Women were active agents of revolutionary
liberation, and according to Espín, now enjoyed equal pay for equal work and state
provisions such as círculos infantiles and jardines del niño. Black women had been
“freed” as well, with schools and jobs of all types now available to women of all races.
In Cuba, Espín argued, equality between the sexes was superior to that of any other
American country, including the U.S. and Canada, she maintained. Under revolution,
605
Cuba, (April 1962): Cover; INRA (Jan. 1962): Cover; Leopoldo Paz, “Apredieron a vencer,” Cuba (May
1962): 42-45.
606
Alexis Rivas, “Campesinas enfermeras,” INRA, (Jan. 1962), 70-73.
363
women, like men, were now free from “slavery, misery, unemployment, [and]
ignorance.” Reaffirming the dual duties of home and country, Cuban women were
expected to defend Cuba and “if it is required, die in defense of our threatened
homeland.” In “defending the revolution,” she continued, “the Cuban woman also fights
in defense of peace, which guarantees the security and future of her children.” In her
praiseful review, however, Espín remained tacit on what feminist critics would point out:
that Cuban women were still expected to be subservient under male-dominated
institutions, and that revolution actually did little to dissolve patriarchy.607
In addition to home and family, education changed dramatically in Cuba. The
social redesign rewrote curricula and pedagogy that complemented the new national
vision. Following measures such as the nationalization of property and industry, land
reform, cessation of private clubs and professional associations, private schools were
closed and replaced by a state-run school system. Literacy campaigns along with
vocational and trade opportunities injected Martí, Marx, Lenin, and sui generis
tricontinental thinking in Cuba’s educational apparatus. School children would now learn
such popular poems: I swear to you, Uncle Sam / That one day in Algiers or Siam / As is
done with the dead, / we will bury close together / the dollar and the Ku Klux Klan//.608
Government leaders maintained that Cuba’s institutions of learning were
infinitely better than the ones they replaced. Minister of Education Armando Hart said
that Cuba led Latin America in the areas of teaching and education. He provided the
whopping statistic that 79% more kids attended elementary school since 1959 and praised
607
Vilma Espín, “La Mujer en la Revolución Cubana,” Cuba socialista, (Dec. 1961): 59-67; Nazzari, “The
‘Woman Question’ in Cuba,” 246-63.
608
Quoted in Conde, 24; “And Now the Children?” Time, Oct. 6, 1961,
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,827800,00.html (accessed August 5, 2008)
364
the establishment of adult education and schools in rural and urban settings. As he
explained: “[W]e have seen in the case of our revolution [that] the participation of the
popular sectors in the educational sphere has been decisive for its success. Boosting the
participation of local communities in the functioning of the school is the only way to
democratize it and connect it to society.” Like other leaders, Hart maintained that
education under capitalism was inferior since it was based on individual competition
rather than the benefit of the whole.609
Making a Melting Pot
Despite insurances posted by the revolution, Cubans continued to emigrate.
When Cuban refugees arrived to U.S. shores, they continued a precedent of resettlement
that grew during the postwar era. The Displaced Persons Act of 1948 had allowed
300,000 people to become permanent residents of the United States, and the 1953
Refugee Relief Act permitted another 180,000 to cross U.S. borders, 39,000 of whom
came after the Hungarian uprising in 1956. The Cuban Refugee Program’s Director,
John Thomas, noted that the Cuban program was the first time in history that the United
States became a “country of first asylum” for large numbers of refugees. The CRP
contained about 100 federal staff who mostly worked in Washington and Miami. Federal
guidelines defined “refugee” as a Cuban national who left after January 1, 1959. He or
she was classified as a parolee under the Immigration and Nationalization Act; an alien
granted indefinite voluntary departure; or a permanent resident of the United States. Any
refugee could be denied assistance if he or she was deemed “inimical to the interests of
the United States.” Initially, the status of “parolee” or “indefinite voluntary departure”
609
Armando Hart, “La revolución y los problemas de la educación,” Cuba socialista, (Dec. 1961): 33-58.
365
meant that Cubans could not apply for citizenship, classifications that described 89% of
the refugees. Permanent residents—the remaining 11%--could file for citizenship.610
This gave Cubans certain rights and responsibilities as privileged temporary
guests while reaffirming the expectation to return once conditions in Cuba were deemed
amenable. Yet Cuba’s revolution endured and exile continued, causing President
Johnson to sign the Cuban Adjustment Act (Public Law 89-732) in 1966, which allowed
qualifying refugees to adjust their immigration status from “parolee” or “alien” to
permanent resident after one year of residence in the United States.611 This followed the
sweeping changes of the 1965 Immigration Act which caused a surge in immigrants with
origins from nearly every continent, most notably Asia.
Between 1959 and 1961, the case of Cuba inspired Washington planning that
joined the national urgency to integrate Cubans in U.S. towns and cities. Miami-Dade
County became a local proxy for federal debates and Cold War preoccupations.612 In a
letter to Congress, President Kennedy announced the political importance of accepting
the world’s refugees:
From the earliest days of our history the United States has been a refuge for the
oppressed and it is proper that we now, as descendants of refugees and
immigrants, continue our long humanitarian tradition of helping those who are
forced to flee to maintain their lives as individual, self-sufficient human beings in
freedom, self-respect, dignity and health. It is, moreover, decidedly in the
political interests of the United States that we maintain and continue to enhance
our prestige and leadership in this respect.613
610
John F. Thomas, “Cuban Refugee Program,” Welfare in Review, Vol. 1, No. 3, 1963, in Cortés, Cuban
Refugee Programs, 2-6.
611
John F. Thomas, “Cuban Refugees in the United States,” International Migration Review, Vol. 1, No. 2,
1967, in Cortés, Cuban Refugee Programs, 55. For a copy of the Cuban Adjustment Act, see
http://www.state.gov/www/regions/wha/cuba/publiclaw_89-732.html (accessed August 2, 2008).
612
“Cuban Refugee Problems,” Dec. 6, 1961, in Cortés, Cuban Refugee Program, 3-4.
613
“Cuban Refugee Problems,” Dec. 7, 1961, in Cortés, Cuban Refugee Program, 252. For the full text,
see John F. Kennedy, “Letter to the President of the Senate and to the Speaker of the House Proposing
Reorganization and Reenactment of Refugee Aid Legislation,” July 21, 1961,
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/print.php?pid=8252 (accessed August 7, 2008).
366
The Cuban Refugee Program was significant because it depended on a network of
government, welfare, and grassroots agencies. It was a partnership that depended on
transnational and translocal networks and was unique in its collaboration between church
groups and federal institutions, perhaps encouraged by the Catholic common
denominator in Miami and the JFK White House.
The nationwide visibility of Cuban refugees strengthened the melting pot image
of the United States. Cubans increased Latino populations in U.S. towns and cities and
represented crucial elements in the country’s postwar liberal vision of multiculturalism.
In 1961 the topic of Cuban exiles reached a Senate Subcommittee, where Chairman
Thomas Hart opened with Rooseveltian rhetoric: “A government which is our near
neighbor, a nation with whom we have had most intimate relations, has come under the
direct control of a man who now admits his communist ideology.” As the U.S. and Cuba
became the Hatfields and McCoys, Senators followed the national zeitgeist by placing a
priority on receiving Cuban refugees in the name of anticommunism. The panel heard
testimony by Dr. José Miró Cardona, the revolution’s first Prime Minister who resigned
after just 39 days. He thanked Washington leaders on behalf of “Cubans who have been
forced to flee the communist hell of persecution”; called the U.S. “a great nation for the
Christian”; and commended fellow Cuban exiles “who have decided not to submit
themselves to the Soviet empire established in the land of Jose Marti (sic).”614
Dr. Cardona and others testified that Cubans needed to stay together and close to
Cuba if they were to return as a cohesive post-Castro force. Many policymakers agreed
614
“Cuban Refugee Problem,” Hearings before the Subcommittee to Investigate Problems Connected with
Refugees and Escapees of the Committee on the Judiciary,” United States Senate 87th Congress, Dec. 6,
1961, in Cortés, Cuban Refugee Programs, 3-4.
367
that keeping exiles in a close-knit community would keep their ties to Cuba strong and
would ensure their collective adaptation to the U.S. political mindset. In a communiqué
to Congress, James Baker of the Ruston Academy was convinced that U.S. residents
needed to “counteract brainwashing” and “educate for democracy,” while Miami Mayor
Robert King High suggested that Miami was a natural place for Cubans, and that the U.S.
needed to accept Cuban children lest their parents send them to the U.S.S.R.615
Opinions on resettlement changed, however, as Miami’s growing population
caused a strain on local resources. Transcripts of the hearings reveal a tension between
welcoming refugees as anticommunist crusaders on the one hand and viewing them as a
new welfare problem on the other. Race played a role in the civic strife. Like other
urban cities, Miami was in the midst of major changes in the social order brought about
by the civil rights movement. Cubans inflected local racial understandings and
community debates in unique ways. Low-income African Americans now competed with
Cubans for jobs and benefits. Cubans worked for less pay and in industries not covered
by minimum wage laws, and exiles received more monthly aid than black citizens on
federal assistance. Further, claims to a bivalent racial divide were complicated by a
Cuban population that was often accepted in white spaces where blacks were not
permitted. Although Miami was nominally desegregating along with other southern
cities, and despite the small portion of Afro-Cuban refugees (a percentage that would
increase in the future), most Cubans fell outside of or in between perceived categories of
615
“Cuban Refugee Problem,” Dec. 6, 1961, in Cortés, Cuban Refugee Programs, 7-8, 35-36, 45-48.
368
“black” and “white,” which situated them in a liminal space that further frustrated the
wedge between understood markers of blackness and whiteness.616
One witness puzzled over why “Cubans, regardless of their pigmentation, are
accepted into our white schools while Negroes must continue for the most part to attend
traditionally segregated schools.” In the years of lunch counter sit-ins and Freedom
Rides the Miami NAACP complained about Cubans taking jobs from African Americans,
and charged that roughly 10,000 Cuban children enrolled in grades 1-12 were integrated
into Dade County schools while Miami blacks were not. Employment also proved a
divisive racial issue. Executive Director of the Greater Miami Urban League, Daniel
Lang, accused the federal government of showing preference to Cuban refugees over
African Americans, citing Dade County’s 150,000 black citizens in unskilled positions
who lacked the opportunities now awarded to Cuban nationals.617
While Cubans enjoyed some privileges not afforded to many U.S. citizens, they
also received blame for higher crime rates and civic unrest. One authority exclaimed that
refugees brought “delinquent behavior” and increased gang violence. Miamians
expressed fears that Cubans would “take over” their community just like Puerto Ricans
did New York City. In Miami, Puerto Ricans were lumped with Cubans and Haitians in
the broader xenophobic discourse of cultural pathology but remained distinct because of
citizenship rights.618 Seymour Samet, Executive Director of Greater Miami Chapter,
616
“Cuban Refugee Problem,” Dec. 6, 1961, in Cortés, Cuban Refugee Programs, 52-53; “Cuban Refugee
Problem,” Dec. 7, 1961, in Cortés, Cuban Refugee Programs, 274-281.
617
Masud-Piloto, Open Arms, 62-63; “Cuban Refugee Problem,” Dec. 7, 1961, in Cortés, Cuban Refugee
Programs, 91, 129-33, 286.
618
“Cuban Refugee Problems,” Hearings before the Subcommittee to Investigate Problems Connected with
Refugees and Escapees of the Committee on the Judiciary,” United States Senate 87th Congress, Dec. 7,
1961, in Cortés, Cuban Refugee Program, 113-114, 138, 290.
369
American Jewish Committee, talked about “integration friction” and “juvenile
delinquency”:
Such activity at its worst is likely to be the work of only a small number of
Cubans. However, mass media reports of those incidents will quickly be picked
up by the uninformed as a convenient means of explaining the existence of all
crime in Miami. American gangs of teenagers and young adults will form to
retaliate. Negroes will fight Cubans; Cubans will attack Americans; Fidelistas
will step up their incidents against the anti-Fidelistas. It has all happened before
in other cities, at other times, with other minorities, but for the most part for
similar reasons. Antiforeign attitudes, and the failure of a community to use the
insight of human relations experience to dissipate these hostilities, warn us of the
coming developments.619
If Samet painted a dystopian picture, Monsignor Bryan Walsh was even more somber
about nativist backlash, saying that anti-Haitian and anti-Cuban hostilities conflicted with
his sense of pro-refugee Christian ethics. He testified that proportionally Miami’s crime
rate had actually declined since the massive migration wave.620
In spite of the local conflict, members of Congress positioned the refugee matter
in a way that emphasized the U.S. as a tolerant country, a place of cultural and racial
plurality. The successful absorption of Cubans into U.S. towns and cities was on display
before an international audience that critically questioned the United States’ civil rights
record.621 Testimony from William Johnson, Chief of Police of Grand Rapids, Michigan,
attested to the success of resettlement. U.S. pluralism meant that Cubans were made to
feel at home despite Grand Rapids’s mostly “Nordic and Slavic background” and, he
added, were a welcomed change from the town’s small Mexican population. According
619
“Cuban Refugee Problem,” in Cortés Cuban Refugee Programs, 287.
Monsignor Bryan O. Walsh, “Let’s Welcome the Refugees,” in Immigrants and Refugees: The
Caribbean and South Florida (Miami, FL: Caribbean Center, Florida International University), 1, 8-9;
“Cuban Refugee Problems,” Dec. 7, 1961, in Cortés, Cuban Refugee Program, 226.
621
Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2000).
620
370
to Johnson, unlike Mexicans, Cubans were model “Latin” foreigners. Kansas City’s
mayor agreed by reiterating that Cubans were thriving in America’s heartland.622
As Miami was in the process of becoming “Little Havana,” religious
organizations such as the Church World Service (CWS) continued to work on
resettlement, moving some 7,500 Cuban refugees out of Miami by the end of 1962. The
CWS chartered flights to cities all over the U.S., including Denver, Kansas City, and Fort
Worth.623 Resettlement took the work of governors, mayors, federal officials, and relief
agencies. By August 1963, 168,000 refugees had registered at the Cuban Refugee Center
in Miami, and a total of 67,000 had resettled in more than 1,600 communities in the U.S.,
Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, and 23 Latin American and European countries. By 1964,
175,000 of 200,000 Cubans had filed at Miami’s refugee center.624
Memory and the Production of Hyphenated History
Seeking a cosmopolitanism that avoided provinciality and isolationism, U.S.
residents followed the Cold War global imaginary by showing that integration was a
domestic priority and one of the core tenets of U.S. Americanness. The refugee matter
raised questions about legal and social definition of citizen, refugee, and immigrant as it
recast the function of Cubans in a new hybrid of national imaginaries. Through their
transnational journeys, émigrés became variable markers of class, nation, and race as they
underwent dramatic changes in subjectivity. Popular thinking held that Cubans could
eventually become “American” if they lived in the United States long enough, yet these
definitions would never remain separate from a sense of Cubanidad that also crossed the
622
“Cuban Refugee Problem,” Dec. 3, 1962, in Cortés, Cuban Refugee Programs, 386-98.
Ibid., 350-53.
624
John F. Thomas, U.S.A. as a Country of First Asylum, International Migration (1965), in Cortés, Cuban
Refugee Programs, 6.
623
371
Florida Straits. Exiles had to negotiate disparate cultural locations, thereby revealing the
ways in which “culture” becomes a fluid location, a polyvalent entity that purported to
make “nation” and “culture” synonymous while it simultaneously challenged nationalcultural shibboleths. Stories of Cuban (non)assimilation enunciated different cultural
logics interspersed in the trans-nation, which have become consecrated narratives in the
production of Cuban-American history.
The personal stories and political inclinations of Pedro Pan children, many who
grew to occupy the professional-managerial class of business, law, medicine, and
academia (including those who helped form Latin American and Caribbean Studies
departments), have shaped U.S. perceptions of Cuba and the dominant narrative of exile
experience. María de los Angeles Torres describes the importance of this narrative based
on a cohesive identity:
The Cuban community in the United States is held together by the powerful
collective belief that we had no choice but to flee the island. There is no stronger
proof of this than the fact that parents, fearful of the Communist government, sent
their children abroad, alone. In effect, we, the children in exile, became living
evidence of the terrible turn of events on the island. Leaving Cuba was a heroic
deed. Living in exile was a patriotic sacrifice, and dying in exile was nearly
elevated to an act of martyrdom.625
Popular depictions of first-generation Cuban-Americans show a cohesive and powerful
conservative political bloc based in Miami, whose organization and influence have
helped perpetuate what modern-day critics say are anachronistic U.S. policies towards the
island. Testimonies by first-wavers, particularly by those who arrived as children, have
fostered a collective memory of Cuban-America that has harnessed the political work and
popular support of “Miami Cubans.” This imagined community has thrived due to the
broader Cold War (and post-Cold War) consensus, which has depended on editors,
625
de los Angeles Torres, Lost Apple, 9-10.
372
publishing houses, and a diverse readership that ratify these narratives as part of the wellestablished U.S. literary tradition of the immigrant experience, the negotiated and
unstable hybridic realm of “here” and “there” in which newcomers wrangle with and
ultimately accept a U.S. cultural space that changes and is changed by groups seeking
various freedoms. The immigrant pact is well-known in this canon. It consists of various
trade-offs: a hard life of labor, sacrifice, criminalization, and loss of the culturally
familiar in exchange for economic, political, religious, and/or corporeal freedom—all
part of the new “American way of life.”
Narratives of Cuban exile are texts of Cold War memory, imbued with ideologies
and aesthetics that have suggested a blueprint for the Cuban-American experience. Pedro
Pan produced accounts of children as innocent pawns in the global East/West struggle,
victims in the quest for global supremacy. As children were seen as templates ripe for
the inscription of political and cultural values, their stories from adulthood bring
recollections of fear and loss, anxiety and insecurity, as well as a resigned acceptance that
ultimately led to success in a new place.626
More often than not, however, these transformations contain accounts of trauma.
One recurring memory shared by OPP participants was the frightening time spent waiting
inside a transparent glass holding room in the Havana airport, known as la pecera
[fishbowl], where children saw their relatives through the glass for the last time while
waiting to board the airplane.627 After arriving to the United States, most young people
had a difficult time in refugee centers and foster homes. María Vidal de Haymes
recounted her family’s encounter with financial struggle, discrimination, and frustration
626
627
Conde, Operation Pedro Pan, xi.
Triay, Fleeing Castro, 72-74.
373
with English. They left under the pretext of patria potestad and rumors of indoctrination.
Her brothers were sent to Nebraska to a facility for Cuban youth and were reunited with
María and her family who arrived by a ship sponsored by the Red Cross.628
These transitions were mediated by cultural forms such as films, television, and
the field of popular amusement. The disorientation of transplantation was connected to
dominant images and ideas that emerged from entertainment industries. One Pedro Pan
member recalled going to Denver sure she would encounter cowboys and Indians, since
Denver was not that far from Kansas or Oklahoma. As a blonde, blue-eyed girl, she was
“petrified” that Indians would scalp her upon her arrival. Such irrationalities were part of
the fear children had of going to unfamiliar places but also based on racial and cultural
expectations cultivated in Cuba by Hollywood and other harbingers of U.S. culture. The
same woman remembered encountering stereotypes at an orphanage when nuns told other
children that all Cubans were “wild” and “black” and “didn’t know how to wear shoes.”
As adults, many remembered horrible stories of getting slapped by nuns at Catholic
shelters and cases of sexual impropriety by other children, making physical and sexual
abuse at the hands of authorities and foster families a heinous component of exile.629
Yet memories of transition were also favorable. One man remembered landing in
Marshalltown, Iowa, where as a boy he thrived in sports, theater, and other events that
attracted the attention of the entire community.630 Such experiences supported the image
628
María Vidal de Haymes, “Operation Pedro Pan: One Family’s Journey to the U.S.,” in Keith M. Kilty
and Elizabeth A. Segal, eds., Poverty and Inequality in the Latin America-U.S. Borderlands: Implications
of U.S. Interventions (New York: Hayworth Press, Inc., 2004), 119-123.
629
Conde, Operation Pedro Pan, 129-130, 155-159; de los Angeles Torres, Lost Apple, 157-177. Other
books that contain OPP anecdotes are María Cristina García’s Havana USA: Cuban Exiles and Cuban
Americans in South Florida, 1959-1994 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996) and Kathlyn
Gay’s Leaving Cuba: From Operation Pedro Pan to Elián (Brookfield, CT: Twenty-First Century Books,
2000).
630
Conde, Operation Pedro Pan, 146-150.
374
the U.S. State Department was hoping to promote. The U.S. Information Agency (USIA)
commissioned David Susskind for a documentary on Pedro Pan, The Lost Apple. Named
after a Cuban nursery rhyme, The Lost Apple showed assimilation by Cuban children
through the motifs of anticommunist desire and loss of child innocence. The film was
released in 1962 and showed the difficulty, but ultimate success of, the children’s journey
and new sense of home.631
If the U.S. government wanted to promote the achievability of assimilation, the
actual adjustment process for children told another story. Authorities from the early
1960s still gravitated towards framing culture in national and racial terms. According to
professionals, one solution to homesickness was “rapid orientation to American ways,”
which included English classes.632 Local authorities believed that ties to cultural markers
such as diet, language, religion would hasten the assimilation process. By contrast, many
still held that “race” determined (rather than was determined by) national-cultural
proclivities and a powerful marker of cultural difference that hampered adaptability.
Some children were interracially matched with foster parents, including one child of
Afro-Cuban and Chinese descent who was put in the care of a white family. Agency
officials found this type of placement problematic.633 While these unions substantiated
claims that the United States was a pluralistic society, evaluations of the assimilation
process exacerbated stereotypes. Some white families noted “gregarines, noisiness, [and]
volubility” of Cubans, which foster parents found burdensome at first. Their relief came,
however, when “gradually the children took on American ways and became more relaxed
631
de los Angeles Torres, Lost Apple, 3, 179-82; Triay, Fleeing Castro, 78-79.
“Cuban Children Helped in Florida,” New York Times, May 27, 1962, 41.
633
Kathryn Close, “Cuban Children Away from Home,” Children (1963) in Cortés, Cuban Refugee
Programs, 6-9.
632
375
in their new mode of life, and, in turn, the foster parents learned how to appreciate the
spontaneity and charm of the Cuban children.” Relief agency officials were also
reassured to find that in the United States “very few Cuban girls became pregnant out of
wedlock.” Unlike Cuba, young women in the U.S. often went out without chaperone,
which authorities feared would lead to a rise in teen-age births among refugee
adolescents.634
The narration of cultural negotiation has included autobiographical fiction, which
adds another layer to the Cuban-American document. Like their non-fiction counterparts,
the fictive realm of Peter Pan emerged out of the Cold War ideological catalog as a genre
predicated on didactic purpose, showing the necessary—if difficult—adaptation to the
United States. María Armengol Acierno’s Children of Flight Pedro Pan (1994) is a
children’s story about Maria from Camagüey who, in 1961, is sent with her brother Jose
to the United States. For ten-year-old Maria, Miami is the proverbial Bethlehem. She is
overwhelmed with joy upon receiving a nativity scene on her first Christmas in the
United States. Complications arise, however, when Jose (who like his sister is nonwhite) experiences racism, something the children had not felt in Cuba. For Maria and
Jose, part of assimilating meant having to adapt to different race and class distinctions,
losing the privilege they enjoyed in Cuba. Well-to-do Cuban children such as Maria and
Jose were now “welfare kids,” racialized “black” and thus inhabiting a lower rung on the
social ladder in the United States. The siblings undergo this process of resignification but
grow to accept their status, made easier by a happy ending in which the children are
reunited with their parents in the United States.
634
United States Children’s Bureau, “Cuba’s Children in Exile,” (1967), in Cortés, Cuban Refugee
Programs, 8-9.
376
Children of Flight Pedro Pan is an example of historical fiction, but one which
consists of metaphors and allusions that make allegory the content of history. A mix of
the “real” and “fictive,” the biblical eponyms (Mary and Joseph) add symbolism to an
event that is itself a conflation of fantasy and policy: Peter Pan. A postscript by Professor
Robert M. Levine provides a broad history of Cuban-U.S. relations, thereby
corroborating that the story is grounded in fact, a peculiar addition to a book intended for
8-12 year-olds, but one which adds a didactic quality and reaffirms the necessity of Cold
War events such as Peter Pan.635
Cuban-American memory illumines ideas about “Americanness” and Cubanidad
in a diffuse cultural contact zone that unveils how the functioning of intersecting
imaginaries defies monolithic notions of nationhood. These stories are part of the transnation and offer disjunctive representations of nation that differ from, say, figures such
as I Love Lucy star Desi Arnaz. Whereas Arnaz evinced a transplanted Cuban “essence,”
comedic and light for cultural consumption, Peter Pan children symbolize the fractured
and fragmented nature of Americanized Cubanidad. Joining post-1965 immigrant
narratology, Cuban migration experiences have focused and embraced models of cultural
hybridity. These paradigms have been scrutinized in the poststructural deconstruction of
the proverbial hyphen, now shown under the duress of perpetual resignification and the
impossibility of reconciling two halves of any conceivable cultural whole. The
consideration of Cuban-America was an acknowledgement that “Cuba”—like any
national-cultural construct—could not be ossified, even if one remained in Miami.
Models of culture that stress relational processes and non-essentialism help explain the
635
María Armengol Acierno, Children of Flight Pedro Pan (New York: Silver Moon Press, 1994).
377
difficult adaptation process nearly all children faced and the varied evocations and
interpretations of Cuban-America.
Conclusion
Although often seen as unified, the views and opinions of Cuban-Americans
represent a wider array of experiences and more diverse political opinions than are
presented in the public sphere. There are those, for instance, who came of age in the
1960s and 1970s who report that they fit neither in Cuban-American family circles nor
the liberal university environment where they received their educations. Permanently
branded “Cuban exile” could mean a pervasive sense of not belonging. During the
heyday of New Left radicalism, émigré participation in progressive left movements was
not always welcomed in groups that fought for civil rights, women’s liberation, and the
war on poverty. The radical views of first- or second-generation Cuban Americans often
differed from their families’, since many adults of the first generation clung to
conservative anticommunist politics. As a college student, María de los Angeles Torres
applied to the Venceremos Brigades but was rejected because Cuban exiles were not
allowed to become members. Others remembered going to Cuba in the 1970s as part of
the Antonio Maceo Brigades, a group for Cuban Americans who wanted to connect with
their roots and help with social projects on the island. They returned to an exile
community in the United States highly critical of their actions.636
Cuban exile life and Cold War politics have continued to remake U.S.
communities and national debates. Between 1959 and 1980, 800,000 Cubans (18,000 of
whom were unaccompanied children) arrived on U.S. shores.637 The Mariel boatlift of
636
637
de los Angeles Torres, Lost Apple, 217-21; Masud-Piloto, Open Arms, 73-74.
Ressler, Boothby, Steinbock, Unaccompanied Children, 51; Masud-Piloto, Open Arms, 1.
378
1980 and Balsero wave of 1994 added 160,000 to the exile population. The 2000 U.S.
Census reported that 1.2 million out of a U.S. Hispanic/Latino population of 35 million
were of Cuban origin.638 In the post-Cold War, the Cuban case still offers an exceptional
example in U.S. foreign policy and immigration law. Though governments and treaties
with other nations have changed since 1989, Cuba and the United States seemed locked
in conflict, which continues to afford Cuban immigrants disproportional amounts of aid
compared to other newcomers to the United States.
It is a stalemate in which the motif of childhood continues to hold rhetorical
power in the ongoing rancor. Reminiscences of Pedro Pan appeared in 1999 when sixyear-old Elián González was found by two fishermen on Thanksgiving Day. Elian’s
mother and ten fellow Cubans drowned, leaving him the lone survivor. U.S. Immigration
and Naturalization Services initially placed Elián in custody of his great uncle Lázaro but
eventually ordered the boy’s return to his father in Cuba, a decision upheld by a U.S.
court of appeals and enforced by the U.S. Justice Department under the direction of
Attorney General Janet Reno (a one-time prosecutor in Dade County).
The Elián event garnered international attention as a political showdown that
resuscitated Cold War passion, another standoff between Cuban Americans in Miami and
Fidel Castro. The Miami Cuban community mobilized to keep Elián in the United States.
Elián’s crossing was elevated to biblical proportions, the boy’s miraculous survival
divinely produced and requests not to remove Elián during Holy Week granted.639
Elián’s father, Juan Miguel González, refused offers that included $2 million and
638
“The Hispanic Population, Census 2000 Brief,” http://www.census.gov/prod/2001pubs/c2kbr01-3.pdf ,
p. 3 (Accessed June 2, 2008).
639
Karen DeYoung, “Court Order Sought for Elian's Return To Father: 6-Year-Old Being Held Illegally,
Government Says,” Washington Post, April 15, 2000, A05.
379
valuable possessions if Elián were to remain in the United States. One church reportedly
offered Elián $4 million to stay with Uncle Sam. Miami residents protested and
boycotted in an effort to change the federal government’s decision to return the boy to
Cuba. Demonstrators in Havana also claimed rights over the child. Whereas all fought
for “interests of the boy,” the struggle stood inextricably linked to ideology, moral
prudence, and national prestige. Cold War precedent made the dispute international and
perhaps inevitable. The cause by Cuban-Americans spoke directly to the ongoing
legitimacy of one’s own exile existence; letting Elián return in a sense meant obviating
one’s own displacement. To accept Elian’s return threatened the Cuban exile’s raison
d’etre and made more painful the memory of detachment, undercutting the collective’s
sense of dislocation and strong political sense of transplanted Cubanidad.640
But the Elián case also illustrated that Cold War policy had changed in the United
States, at least in the Executive Branch. Kennedy’s mandate of accepting the world’s
refugees had lost some of its bravado when President Clinton responded that he wanted
Elián’s fate decided in accordance with U.S. immigration legal codes and in an outcome
that provided the least trauma for the child. While members of the Republican-led
Congress debated passing a special bill to grant Elián citizenship, and the boy’s two
grandmothers made a plea before the legislature for his return, Clinton was not sure that
the United States should be the global broker of domestic oversight it once was:
Let me just say for the moment, if you take [Elián’s case] out of the combustible,
emotional nature of our relationship with Cuba and particularly the Cuban
American community in South Florida's relationship with Cuba, and you think
about the issue, one of the things that I think we all need to think about is this
could happen again. I mean, this sort of thing could happen again because you
have so many people coming to our shores from all these different countries, and
640
Sandy Grady, “Elian Belongs to his Dad: He’s Become a Victim of Bad U.S. Policy,” Philadelphia
Daily News, Jan. 12, 2000.
380
then shifting governments, shifting policies within countries. And what we do
need is an analysis of whether we have the tools to maximize the chance that the
kids involved and the families involved will be treated fairly, based on the merits
of, particularly, the best interests of the child. And I think, again -- I'm happy to
talk to anybody about this and really try to think this through. I'm just trying to
minimize the politics of it, because I think if you take this one decision out of
context, it's not just Cuba and it's not just this little boy, there are likely to be a lot
of these things in the future as immigration flows increases, upheavals increase
elsewhere, and as we know more and more about what goes on in other countries.
This is something that ought to be thought about…I suppose I have tended to
think of this child more from a point of view of a parent than anything else…this
poor kid has already lost his mother, and whatever happens, I'm sure he's going to
carry certain burdens into his early adolescence that most of us did not carry. And
somehow, whatever happens, I just hope it turns out to be best for him. He's a
beautiful child.641
In the end, Clinton sided with his Attorney General in a legal decision that seemed to
choose family over politics, a position that put Clinton at odds with Cuban-Americans in
Miami, congressional members, and even Vice President Al Gore. It was a decision that
some would conclude led to Al Gore’s loss of Florida in the 2000 election.642
Castro made the symbolic connection no less important. Elián’s return made the
boy a cause célèbre, and he received a hero’s welcome. In a follow-up story in 2005, the
BBC reported that Elián was happy living in Cuba but still felt resentment towards the
way his family in Miami tried to turn him against his father. Now an eleven-year old,
Elián called Castro not only his “friend” but viewed him “as a father.” The rhetoric of
the patria-familial was rekindled, with Cuba the rightful state protector, Elián’s father the
rightful guardian, and Castro the metonymic embodiment of both. Elián declared his
641
William J. Clinton, “Remarks on the Fiscal Year 2001 Federal Budget and an Exchange with
Reporters,” Jan. 25, 2000, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/print.php?pid=58706 (accessed August 5,
2008).
642
Interview with Dan Rather CBS News, White House Press Release, April 6, 2000,
http://www.clintonfoundation.org/legacy/040600-president-interviewed-by-dan-rather-cbs-news.htm
(Accessed June 2, 2008).
381
satisfaction, which promptly caused Cuban-American detractors to dismiss his claims to
contentment as mere “brainwashing” by the Cuban government.643
643
“Elian Interview Sparks Miami Row,” BBC News, September 30, 2005,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4299294.stm (Accessed June 3, 2008).
382
Conclusion
It has been my argument that historical agency is no less effective because it rides
on the disjunctive or displaced circulation of rumour and panic. Would such an
ambivalent borderline of hybridity prevent us from specifying a political strategy
or identifying a historical event? On the contrary, it would enhance our
understanding of certain forms of political struggle.
Homi Bhabha644
History shows that there is a hidden heritage of militancy which comes and goes,
but never completely dies. It undergoes transformations and permutations from
century to century, but the lessons learned by one generation, even though
through defeat, are passed on to the next. In the 1960s many of the song
traditions of the 1930s have seen new life as never before—in the freedom songs
of the South and in the topical songs of many a campus.
Pete Seeger645
Never again will a mother’s broken heart or a soul’s shame return to any decent
Cuban.
Speech by President of Council of the State and Ministers of Cuba,
General Raúl Castro Ruz, January 1, 2009646
In his speech commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the 1959 Cuban
revolution, President Raúl Castro told a crowd gathered in Santiago that Cubans had
“transformed dreams into realities” in the face of danger and threat over five decades of
collective resistance. Castro quoted his older brother, Fidel, who in his first speech in
Havana on January 8, 1959, had proclaimed: “Tyranny has been defeated. The joy is
immense. However, there is still much to do. We must not deceive ourselves by
believing that what lies ahead will be easy; in fact what lies ahead may be more
difficult.” Raúl Castro drew on familiar themes of the past to suggest that Cuba’s
644
Bhabha, Location of Culture, 297.
Seeger, Incomplete Folksinger, 76-77.
646
Raúl Castro Ruz, “¡Jamás regresará el dolor al corazón de las madres ni la verüenza al alma de cada
Cubano honesto!” Digital Granma Internacional, Jan. 1, 2009,
http://www.granma.cu/espanol/2009/enero/juev1/jamas.html (Accessed Jan. 2, 2009).
645
383
revolutionary future still required work for its ideals to become fully realized. The Cuban
president pronounced that it was in 1959 when Cubans finally reached political autonomy
after 60 years of “North American imperialism.” Castro reminded his listeners of the
1898 U.S. occupation, 1933 revolution, and the defeat of Batista’s dictatorship in 1959.
The canonized figures of José Martí, Julio Antonio Mella, and Nicolás Guillén
reappeared in this familiar narrative, with Castro citing verses from Guillén’s “Tengo,” a
poem from 1964 that celebrated equality under revolution and freedom from material
excess and U.S. control.647
By contrast, Pete Seeger’s words expressed both lament for a dream deferred and
hope for something brighter to come. In many ways, Seeger was standing at the end of
two eras that his life had traversed. It was a precipice on which many were struggling to
resuscitate an increasingly defunct New Left, but one that also caused Seeger and others
to wonder optimistically when a new broad based movement of dissent would emerge.
To strike the death knell of the New Left was a hasty move, since Seeger himself had
lived through the hey day and fall of the Old Left, both its champion and victim during its
Cold War purging. Cuba offered Seeger both artistic and political inspiration, his
international fame enhanced courtesy of “Guantanamera” and the country’s social system
seeming to have embraced the common person’s experience of which he so often sang.
In its fifty-year history the 1959 Cuban revolution has persisted as a saleable and
contested phenomenon with multiple and contradictory imaginings still fueling debates
over cultural and political appropriation. Today the portrayals of the Cuban revolution
continue to take shape in a variety of cultural contexts, from Venezuelan President Hugo
647
Castro, “¡Jamás regresará.”
384
Chávez brandishing a Cuban baseball hat in front of thousands of supporters, to images
of Che and Fidel peppered across dorm room walls around the United States. 648
The 1959 Cuban revolution has changed, adapted, and endured despite continued
international pressure, most intensely from the United States, as well as profound internal
dissent marked by the continued exodus of Cuban citizens. In subsequent years, Cuba
continued to maintain an aggressive foreign policy dedicated to exporting revolution in
the form of medicine and munitions, most notably to Angola during the 1970s where tens
of thousands of Cuban soldiers fought for Angolan independence from Portugal. With
the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Cuba had to revamp its policies and procedures,
temporarily legalizing, for example, the dollar. Today, the revolutionary mandate
continues in places such as Bolivia and Venezuela, where medical assistance is
exchanged for oil. Throughout these adjustments, Cuban officials have scarcely
reconsidered the revolution’s fundamental raison d’etre and accompanying government
structure, which has made its participants and onlookers view the revolution with both
sweetness and sorrow, bringing criticism and admiration for its continued exceptionalism
and defiance of other countries’ political norms. Political exile and the U.S. embargo
have contributed to generations of family separation and human crisis, yet Cuba remains
an intense curiosity and international phenomenon.
This dissertation has argued that the period from 1930-1970 brought new political
meaning to U.S.-Cuban relations, connections and disjunctions written in the twin
developments of postcoloniality and postmodernism. This was a period in which
revolution in Cuba assumed multiple meanings on the international stage, eventually
earning fame and criticism as well as a disproportional presence in the marketplace of
648
Marc Lacey, ‘A Communist He Was, but Today, Che Sells’, New York Times, Oct. 9, 2007, p. 4.
385
ideas and representations. For the U.S. public, constructions of Cuba were in many ways
a debate over issues of resistance, revolution, liberation, and occupation in the United
States. Through revolution, Cubans attempted to excise a part of their psychic and
national identities connected to U.S. markets and popular culture. By 1959, the selfimaging that mirrored and mimicked U.S. ways imploded and issued an explosive
rejection of economic, political, and cultural domination. Yet the two countries remain
linked via the very historical processes that have fashioned both their collaboration and
antagonism. Modern Cubanidad in fact still depends on a construction of Cuba in
constant opposition to a monolithic United States, an irresolvable antinomy that makes
ideas about identity, culture, and politics still beholden to the historically-constituted
relationship between both nations. While the terms have changed, this cultural
interconnectivity has remained fused via populations in transit and the transnational
market. This study has attempted to provide a new critical framework to describe and
historicize both acrimonious and fraternal interactions that function according to varying
ideological and cultural domains, something beyond the epistemological constraints that
still define and determine Western/Northern scholarship. While this dissertation has
focused on the contested relationship between Cubans and U.S. citizens, it also has
explored broader ideas about the interlocking nature of nationalism, history, and culture.
It is on these issues that I would like to express some final thoughts.
First, I have argued that nation and nationalism were central to projections of
empire and resistance not as static constructions but as subjectivities riddled with
contestation. Cuba functioned as both canvas and gateway for changing politics and
nation building projects during two interconnected periods of political distress and artistic
386
invention. Nationalist compulsions intersected with other subject positions to produce
new forms of political belonging, at times conceived as part of the nation-state, and
elsewhere as something beyond or beside nationalist desire. Locating this brand of U.S.Cuban exchange depends on the transnational turn that has taken place in the fields of
history and area studies, a turn that has evolved in our modern era of globalization. The
blurring of national borders and boundaries in the international movement of labor and
finance has also produced a rereading of political and social processes that now
complicate standard portrayals of nation-centered history. Langston Hughes, Che
Guevara, Carleton Beals, Pablo de la Torriente Brau, and others remained faithful to
national pride but also shared a way of thinking that made their work and ideas
transcendent of national classifications. Their transnational formation reflects a type of
cultural production that lies beyond any single state or national citizenry.
However, their multinational sensibilities also contained unequal vectors of
power that shaped this brand of intercultural work. Cubans who distanced themselves
from their Yankee sympathizers did so because their revolutionary politics depended on a
categorical renunciation of Uncle Sam. Although revolution could bolster alliances
between disparate groups, power differentials remained, a product of earlier scripts of
empire in a neocolonial discourse that ratified First World authority even while it sought
to destroy it. Left literature and tourist publications, therefore, could signal common
imperial tropes while they simultaneously claimed empire’s dissolution. U.S. and Cuban
cultural workers from across the political spectrum did not exist outside a framework of
First/Third Worldliness but positioned themselves within different domains of
assumptions regarding masculine/feminine, superior/inferior, modern/primitive, and
387
rational/irrational. Che, Stokely Carmichael, Vilma Espín, and Regino Pedroso offered
claims about race, class, and gender that were unique to their social locations, yet which
were also connected to discursive traditions rooted in a longer history of modernity.
Second, this study has sought to emphasize the political nature of historicism.
U.S. and Cuban histories have included scholarly appraisals that reinforce exceptionalism
in their respective national contexts. It is now commonplace to understand the writing of
history as connected to norms and beliefs of dominant social forces, the negotiation of
utterances and silences a function of power and knowledge. Many U.S.-centered studies
since the Cold War have reinscribed imperial/neocolonial desire in their purportedly
objective historical assessment of Cuban politics and people, while official Cuban
histories have remained similarly triumphal and univocal for over fifty years. But the
production of national history requires the incorporation of marginal voices as well.
Homi Bhabha, in commenting on the history of minorities and diasporic peoples, reminds
us that history in written from a position of constant hybridity. Narrating experiences
from the margins can give voice to what Michel-Rolph Trouillot has labeled “silences,”
which challenge dominant narratives on new terms and with new demands. The present
study of U.S. and Cuban ways of writing history show the ideological and polysemic
nature of historical writing, demonstrating how, for example, one’s liberation may be
another’s occupation. “Being obliged to forget,” Bhabha writes, “becomes the basis for
remembering the nation, peopling it anew, imagining the possibility of other contending
and liberating forms of cultural identification.”649
649
Bhabha, Location of Culture, 231; Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the
Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997).
388
It is from the margins that Cuba’s political rupture produced new ways of
rendering the past. Castro’s M-26-7 declared victory in Santiago, Cuba, in 1959, where
sixty-one years earlier the United States army negotiated an armistice with Spain, with
Cuban leaders barred from the meetings. The choice of Santiago symbolized not only a
break from neocolonial aggression but also a corrective measure in historical memory, so
that the defeat of Batista’s forces and the inauguration of a new social order were cast as
liberation from both a Yankee past and present. Revolution meant a reformulation of the
past through the celebration of certain punctuated moments of Cuban patriotism. Cubans
now venerated those who resisted the colonial and imperial enterprise, including José
Martí, Nicolás Guillén, Esteban Montejo, and even U.S. heroes such as Abraham Lincoln
and Henry David Thoreau.650 The revolutionary state evolved tethered to a new historical
narrative, which highlighted certain characters and events in what is now a canonized
history that itself has become a mode of domination in Cuba. Transnational history
provides a hyphenated approach to uncovering such ruptures and silences in order to
reveal the inter-national and diasporic contours of historical production. Attention to
multinational sources and historiographies creates a new synthesis of local, national, and
international accounts using multiple frameworks of analysis.
My third concluding point is that focusing on “culture” expands the critical
possibilities in academic discussions of people, institutions, traditions, politics,
knowledge, art, and history. Using culture as a theoretical guide demonstrates the ways
in which conflict and collaboration occur in the myriad expressions of human creativity,
from films and novels, to religious traditions and sporting events. In this dissertation I
650
Saul Landau, “Reflexiones sobre los exiliados Cubanos” (trans. by José Rodriguez Feo), Casa de las
Américas (Sept.-Dec. 1963): 87-92; “La mansa idea revolucionaria de Thoreau,” Casa de las Américas
(June-July 1960): 4-5.
389
have attempted to show the contours of political division through an interrogation of
literature, photographs, music, state institutions, and other elements of culture. The form
and function of such texts and organizations reveal Bhabha’s concept of culture’s
slippery inbetweeness, especially the varied sensibilities of both material and discursive
practices. Putting “culture” at the center remains unrelentingly frustrating and
invigorating, for it shows the constant flux of human creativity and innovation, something
that cannot be mathematically measured or scientifically arrived at. This slipperiness,
however, also allows for an analysis of allegiances and actions on different analytical
planes. As this project shows, Manuel Marsal, Angela Davis, Che Guevara, and Sumner
Welles worked according to various discursive cartographies—Havana and Harlem;
Cuba and the United States; and Pan-America and the Third World. These spaces bore
differing ideas about masculinity and femininity, race and racism, and literary and
aesthetic forms, which reflected attitudes and traditions that united or divided populations
along various axes of affiliations. Grasping culture’s conceptual fluidity means
understanding the melding of cultural politics and aesthetic ideologies in a particular
space and time, which tosses asunder the notion of static, quantifiable allegiances and
rationales in nation-bound systems of understanding. Protest bulletins of the Venceremos
Brigades, African Zionism, and televised debates between Nixon and Kennedy reveal
that arrangements of class, race, and gender are subjectivities which do not always neatly
conform to established categories of analysis or classificatory principles.
This dissertation also suggests that analyzing the cultural contours of political
antagonism remains frustrating, for it demonstrates that at some level we cannot quantify
conflict. Numbers and models help set successful benchmarks for human labor and
390
military occupation, but how do we quantify emotional suffering or racial antipathy?
Matters of dominance and resistance also depend on psychology, identity, beliefs, and the
like. Notions of dignity and group worth are not only functions of GDP and technological
innovation. We can see the cultural nature of political division in the recent wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan. The unraveling of the Iraqi and Afghani occupations was something
not entirely determinable by Pentagon software. The turmoil and resistance faced by
coalition forces in Iraq, for instance, was not only a function of debaathification and
imperial intervention but the toppling of heritage and tradition, for in the midst of the
foreign invasion stood Baghdadis who watched their fellow countrymen sack and loot
manuscripts, plates, vases, and other artifacts that had existed for millennia. Any
semblance of the Iraqi nation—of Iraqi culture—was eviscerated by the disembowelment
of museums and archives with the undermanned and ill-equipped coalition forces
standing by.651
In making sense of Iraqi and Afghan resistance, the U.S. government has looked
once again to culture to help accomplish its mission. One such measure has been the
implementation of cultural relativism from Fort Bragg to Baghdad, evidenced by the use
of anthropologists in “Human Terrain Teams” created by the Pentagon to help assist with
military operations. The 1930s focus on culture to defeat fascism continues today, as
linguists, medics, and social scientists are considered paramount in zones of conflict.652
Culture is once again vilified as the reason for such conflict (Middle East vs. West) while
it is simultaneously trumpeted as its solution (cultural relativism). In fact, parallels
651
John F. Burns, “A Nation at War: Looting; Pillagers Strip Iraqi Museum of its Treasure,” New York
Times, April 13, 2003.
652
David Rohde, “Army Enlists Anthropology in War Zones,” New York Times, Oct. 5, 2007; Margaret
Wertheim, “Virtual Camp Trains Soldiers in Arabic, and More,” New York Times, July 6, 2004.
391
between the war against fascism and the war against terrorism abound, causing one
modern-day commentator to urge leaders to remember the work of cultural
anthropologist Ruth Benedict. Benedict worked for the Office of War Information in
Japan in 1945 (just before the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) in an effort to
understand “Japanese Behavior Patterns.” Such understanding, it was hoped, would
assist in an allied victory. Field notes supplemented bombing campaigns, a strategy that
has resurfaced with suggestions that today’s academic patriots are needed to bridge
civilizational divides of a contemporary nature.653 Such assumptions continue
modernization logic that deems First World/Western rationale the panacea for problems
preordained by, and inherent to, cultural difference brought about by a civilizational
“other.”
As conflict is written in the language of cultural difference, deconstructing
cultural logic may afford us ways of explaining resistance, rebellion, and revolution that
complement economic, social, and political factors. The elusive non-tangibles of dignity,
tradition, and morality play a major role in the narration of nation. The lived experience
of community, autonomy, and survivability stems from elements that defy objective
measurements and algorithms. Thus, in some ways this study asks if it might be better to
position poetry as a forethought of policy, not an afterthought, because it is this mode of
language that emerges from the cultural rhizomes of folklore, tradition, and ancestry,
which produces the pre-meaning of modern conflict as well as possibilities for
collaboration.
Transnationalism is an attractive methodological alternative because it seeks to go
beyond the comparative to flush out from the crevices the pathways of transit in which
653
Alexander Stille, “Experts Can Help Rebuild a Country,” New York Times, July 19, 2003.
392
codes of food, language, dress, and ideas about government, art, and moral conduct are
negotiated in the liminal spaces of cultural translation. Following Walter Benjamin and
Rudolf Pannwitz, Bhabha has commented on the wily nature of cultural translation and
transition. Hybridity, he notes, is the basis for cultural identification and gives it its
performative agency. The goal is not to put the other in terms of one’s self but one’s self
in terms of the other, or quoting Pannwitz: “not to turn Hindi, Greek, English into
German [but] instead to turn German into Hindi, Greek, English.” As Brent Hayes
Edwards suggests in his work on translating diaspora, navigating between nations and
formations of identity can be inspiring as well as problematic in generating understanding
across cultural fields. However, looking to the cultural workers who have brought down
barriers in order to make new social realities, it is my belief that through the difficult
work of cultural translation we may enhance our understanding of reciprocity and
coexistence.654
The Cuban revolution continues to inspire kitsch, ire, and inspiration, making an
appraisal of its significance especially timely in contemporary politics. My hope is that
we may better conceptualize the rich and contentious history of U.S.-Cuban cultural
interaction through an interrogation of the transnational exchange that revolution
inspired. It is an example of how transnational scholarship—a collage of overlapping
histories, cartographies, and cultural significations—can help elucidate a more complex
analysis of artistic and political development across the Americas.
654
Bhabha, Location of Culture, 325-326; Edwards, Practice of Diaspora.
393
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Vita
John Andrew Gronbeck-Tedesco was born in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, on March
9, 1976, the son of John Tedesco and Susan Gronbeck (later hyphenated). After
completing high school in 1994 at Lawrence High School in Lawrence, Kansas, he
received his B.A. in American Studies and Spanish from the University of Iowa in Iowa
City, Iowa, in 1998. Following a period of working as an English teacher and studying
flamenco percussion in Seville and Madrid, Spain, he began his Master’s degree in
American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin in 2002, and pursued his doctoral
degree in earnest beginning in 2004. He remains active in musical groups and
community organizations, and cherishes his time as a researcher, writer, and teacher.
Permanent Address:
1655 Illinois St., Lawrence, KS 66044, United States
This dissertation was typed by the author.
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