Where the Boys are: Cuba, Cold War America and the Making of a New Left
By Van Gosse
Verso, 1993. 270 pp., $49.95 (pb)
Reviewed by Phil Shannon
On January 1, 1959, the Batista-Mafia alliance that ran Cuba fell under the weight of its own corruption and unpopularity following a shove from a guerilla campaign led by Fidel Castro's bearded men in olive green. It was a real-life story that won the hearts of many young people in the US.
As Van Gosse writes, these youth "felt beleaguered and adrift" in Cold War America and responded warmly to the Cuban Revolution's example of heroic resistance to an authoritarian status quo where the dollar and social conformity ruled. Fidel Castro appeared to the rock 'n' roll generation as a "rebel with a cause", a political James Dean, a "John Wayne of the Left who could shoot his way to power" in a noble cause and yet remain uncorrupted by power.
Some of the intelligentsia rallied to the revolution as well — I.F. Stone, Norman Mailer, C. Wright Mills, James Baldwin. Beats and Bohemians like the poets Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti praised the rough and unconventional revolution on America's doorstep. US blacks including Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panthers, Stokely Carmichael and Angela Davis swung enthusiastically behind it because the revolution showed that action could overturn the inferior status of a country or a colour and because Castro's Cuba had immediately abolished the island's racial discrimination.
Even old, dissipated and non-radical Hollywood stars got bitten by the bearded Cuban bug — Errol Flynn's film Cuban Rebel Girls, though mediocre cinema, was a "sincere contribution to the Revolution" and validated Castro as a Robin Hood figure that Flynn had earlier made famous.
The revolution even had brief support from official USA. Some liberals argued that extremely corrupt and unpopular tyrants of US client states needed to be replaced to prevent those countries falling to socialist revolutions and harming corporate America. Castro, with his "carefully ambiguous manifestos" and description of the revolution as "humanist not communist", was, they thought, one such "pro-US democrat capable of carrying out social reform without damaging US business interests".
This strategy of inoculating against revolution with a little dose of reform was an "impossible expectation", says Gosse, or as Castro himself put it, it was "intelligent but utopian".
As Noam Chomsky has argued elsewhere, even a reforming nationalist regime aiming at independent economic development along basically non-socialist lines (which is what Castro had in mind originally) is a menace to US profits and a target for US wrath. With popular participation in this program swinging the nationalist project to the left by redistributing some of the wealth to the poor (which is also what happened in Cuba early on), the "threat of a good example" becomes more pronounced and the rebellious country becomes a target for slander, embargo, subversion and invasion.
Cuba and Castro got caught in this imperial logic, which also sorted out the true defenders of real social transformation from the faint-hearted Cold War liberals. From the initially admiring conservative press like Time and Readers Digest, and the US toy manufacturer which had "100,000 Fidel-cap-and-beard sets" on the go, Cuba became in a few months "a Communist beachhead" in the Caribbean and "a prison-island presided over by a frothing madman". Castro became, for those with a stake in the capitalist status quo, one of America's hated Revolutionary Monsters from Hell.
But a New Left, which the revolution had helped to germinate, was adhering around the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC). They agreed with those Protestant clerics who declared their solidarity with "what was actually taking place in Cuba — the eradication of illiteracy, the thousands of new schools, clinics and modern homes". Beat poets like Le Roi Jones shed their "world-weary hipsterish disdain" in response to revolutionary Cuba and became active on the Marxist and black Left.
FPCC, which started out as an "educational corrective to an unfair press" run by "a few journalists and stray intellectuals" soon became much more vigorous and radical with the involvement of a revitalised Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, which freed itself from the "doctrinal monolith of the Fourth International" which had judged and dismissed Castro (not without some justification) as an "unprincipled opportunist without working class support" and which had (with no justification) underestimated the anti-imperialist dynamic of the revolution.
Gosse's account of Cuba's impact on the US is valuable and told with a knack for the colourful phrase and an eye for the historical curio. He does, however, rather torture a sub-thesis that "politics stems as much from crises of identity (for example, masculine anxiety) as from consciously ideological intent and geo-political and political-economic necessity". The "political weight attached to long hair" in the US, as sons rebelled against fathers in their rejection of square-jawed, clean-shaven America, he argues, was as important as the "hard, ideologically serious politics" of anti-imperialism in the revival of a New Left.
It is a long bow he draws at times, and it comes close to snapping though there is also some political value in his pop-cultural and psycho-drama focus. The arch-conservative Senator Barry Goldwater, for example, was aware of the politics of hairiness when he summarised the Cold War liberals' abandoned hopes for the Cuban Revolution: "Castro came over the hills looking like a knight in shining armor, and turned out to be a bum without a shave".
The US still hasn't made Castro get a haircut. As Gosse argues, whatever the differences on the left concerning the political nature of Castro's Cuba, "there can be no differences among us as to intervention" which would be a victory for "naked, open, reactionary imperialism" and strengthen the rule of the capitalist "fathers" over the "sons" of rebellion everywhere.