C. Wright Mills and the Cuban Revolution

An Exercise in the Art of Sociological Imagination

A. Javier Treviño

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781469633107, 9781469633091
• eBook ISBN: 9781469633114
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: Social Sciences

In C. Wright Mills and the Cuban Revolution, A. Javier Treviño reconsiders the opinions, perspectives, and insights of the Cubans that Mills interviewed during his visit to the island in 1960. On returning to the United States, the esteemed and controversial sociologist wrote a small paperback on much of what he had heard and seen, which he published as Listen, Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba. Those interviews — now transcribed and translated — are interwoven here with extensive annotations to explain and contextualize their content. Readers will be able to “hear” Mills as an expert interviewer and ascertain how he used what he learned from his informants. Treviño also recounts the experiences of four central figures whose lives became inextricably intertwined during that fateful summer of 1960: C. Wright Mills, Fidel Castro, Juan Arcocha, and Jean-Paul Sartre. The singular event that compelled their biographies to intersect at a decisive moment in the history of Cold War geopolitics — with its attendant animosities and intrigues — was the Cuban Revolution.

CHAPTER ONE

The Cuban Summer of C. Wright Mills

On encountering the numerous writings and communications by C. Wright Mills on the Cuban Revolution, the unwary reader could be forgiven for thinking that Mills had spent many long years immersed in its study. Quite the contrary; from the time Cuba first came to Mills’s political awareness—when he began clipping newspaper articles about the situation on the island—until his death—by which time he had published Listen, Yankee and delivered many talks on the subject—was only a two-year period. Shortly after the victory of the Revolution, Mills had frequently been questioned in Latin America about his and his country’s stand on the new government of Fidel Castro: “Until the summer of 1960, I had never been in Cuba, or even thought about it much. In fact, the previous fall, when I was in Brazil, and in the spring of 1960, when I was in Mexico for several months, I was embarrassed not to have any firm attitude towards the Cuban revolution. For in both Rio de Janeiro and Mexico City, Cuba was of course a major topic of discussion. But I did not know what was happening there, much less what I might think about it, and I was then busy with other studies.”1

The impassioned interest of Latin American intellectuals and journalists on the subject, which seemed fundamental in Latin American life, kindled Mills’s desire to go to the Caribbean island and write about its revolution in the making. Indeed, of the three Western revolutions of the twentieth century, the Mexican (1910), the Russian (1917), and the Cuban (1959), only the latter was temporally accessible to Mills. And while Mills was not a political journalist in the manner of John Reed, he nonetheless wanted to report on—wanted to understand—the social forces that had produced the Cuban Revolution, and that were still in operation. And so after intensive preparation, he journeyed to the Caribbean that summer of 1960 to be an authentic witness to the incipient Cuban experiment.

Preparing for Cuba

Prior to his Cuban sojourn, Mills’s two principal Latin American concerns had been Mexico, where he had spent several months in early 1960 teaching a seminar in Marxism at the National University of Mexico, and before that, Puerto Rico, where he had visited in the late 1940s when researching his study on Puerto Rican migrants.2 Indeed, according to historian Rafael Rojas, the central referent of Spanish and U.S. colonialism in Listen, Yankee had its origins, in large part, in the Puerto Rican project.3 But, in truth, Mills’s first foray into the Latino/Latin American cultural scene was not with Puerto Ricans but with Mexican Americans. Mills, whose parents had lived in South Texas during the 1930s, believed he had a grasp on the character structure of Mexican American youth and based this understanding on three or four years of experience he had with the nightlife of Mexican Americans in San Antonio, Texas.4

In any event, Mills now read deliberately all he could on one small island in Latin America—Cuba—and began to discover that something very interesting was happening there. Because, at the time, there were only a few books he could consult for information on the Cuban revolutionary project and to guide his investigations, it is worth briefly considering the three volumes that Mills read in preparation for his trip.

The first of these, Castro, Cuba, and Justice, by the renowned Chicago Sun-Times correspondent Ray Brennan, who devoted four months to researching the book, is a journalistic account sympathetic to the 26th of July Movement’s insurgence against Batista. Brennan spent many weeks with Castro in Havana, in Santiago, in the Sierra Maestra, and later in New York. Highly adulatory of the rebel leader, Brennan praises his “courage, deep loyalty to friends, almost limitless endurance of hardships and sacrifices, his love of freedom, and his revolutionary spirit.” Written somewhat like a factual novel, with liberal use of contemporaneous American colloquialisms, Brennan creates dialogue that very likely happened, but probably not in the exact words in which he presents it. The book gives highly readable accounts of various participants in the armed struggle—both Fidelistas and Batistianos—with whom Brennan spoke. A graphic, lurid chapter on the various tortures and atrocities perpetrated by the Batista regime against insurgents and ordinary citizens was likely included to justify the relentless firing-squad shootings of Batista war criminals that followed the victory of the Revolution and to underscore the notion of “justice” in the book’s title—a notion that was quickly beginning to take on an ominous overtone to many North Americans as the summary trials and mass executions continued. Perhaps of most help to Mills were those questions of immediate relevance that Brennan posed about the bourgeoning revolution: What kind of man is Castro, really? Is there a danger of his becoming another Batista? How much communistic influence, if any, is he up against? How much did the Communists contribute to winning the war? What is going to happen to American business interests in Cuba? Will it ever be possible to build a stable Cuban economy on the foundation of ruination left by the Batista administration?

Another book that Mills consulted was Fidel Castro: Rebel-Liberator or Dictator? Written by Latin America correspondent Jules Dubois, who covered the civil war for the Chicago Tribune, it chronicles the insurrection and revolutionary events on the Cuban island up to March 1959. Perhaps more than any other journalist writing about the Revolution, Dubois (who may have been an asset for the Central Intelligence Agency) had the most impeccable credentials, coupled with a fearlessness that allowed him access to central actors and events denied other correspondents. For example, in 1957 he interviewed, in their hideouts, first, Armando Hart, the most hunted urban guerrilla in Havana at the time, and later, Vilma Espín, organizer of the women’s underground resistance movement. Dubois had spoken with many of the top guerrilla fighters, including several times with Raúl Castro, and was the reporter to be granted the first exclusive postvictory interview with Fidel Castro. He also interviewed Fulgencio Batista, was eyewitness to many of the historical events in the making of the Revolution, and was presumably well acquainted with Ché Guevara’s father in Argentina. Dubois’s book, which may be regarded as a sort of biography of Fidel Castro, reads much like a war correspondent’s dispatches from the front. It was assembled fast, in twenty days, and published fast, a few days thereafter. Though the book was largely sympathetic to Castro and the early Revolution, shortly after its publication Dubois became fiercely anti-Castro, and by November 1960 he was writing editorials highly disparaging of Mills and Listen, Yankee.

But the volume that Mills judged to the best of the lot, and that provided him with the most recent account of events (it reports on developments up to May 1960), was Leo Huberman and Paul M. Sweezy’s Cuba: The Anatomy of a Revolution. In a preliminary draft of Listen, Yankee Mills wrote of the Huberman and Sweezy work: “It is a good book, and I have drawn upon it for details as well as for more general viewpoints.”5

Contrary to Brennan and Dubois—who as journalists embedded with the insurrectionists and rebels reported on the actions of individuals—Huberman and Sweezy, as economic analysts, scrutinized more closely the nascent revolutionary society. By further contrast, Mills, as sociologist, considered both the character structure (the conduct patterns, self-images, and aspirations) of the individuals with whom he had discussions, as well as the social structure (the norms, values, and institutions) of the new Cuban society.

In any event, Huberman and Sweezy, coeditors of the important socialist magazine Monthly Review, which they cofounded in 1949, were both acclaimed socialists and readily admit that “we ourselves, as veterans of the left-wing movement, felt thoroughly at home in the intellectual and moral atmosphere of the Cuban Revolution, much more so than we do in that of the ‘affluent society.’ ”6 Moreover, they characterize the new regime as socialist and speculate that it would remain so, given the government’s increasing nationalization of various industries.

Of particular relevance to Mills’s pre-arrival preparation is that Huberman and Sweezy raise several questions that he may have been inspired to further pursue with his interviewees: Are the Communists working themselves into a position from which they can take over control of the revolutionary regime? As the momentum of the Revolution dies down, will there be a need for a cohesive political apparatus as an intermediary between leadership and masses? Will the 26th of July Movement become a genuine political party? In addition, the authors also provided an agenda of sorts that could have inspired Mills in his research: interviewing top government officials such as Armando Hart, Enrique Oltuski, and Ché Guevara, and visiting the Camilo Cienfuegos School City.

Huberman and Sweezy had previously met the Cuban Ambassador to the UN, Raúl Roa Kourí, at the Monthly Review bookshop in New York City. Impressed by their sincere interest in the Revolution’s progress, Roa Kourí urged Ché Guevara to invite the economists to Cuba.7 The pair spent several weeks on the island during the spring of 1960 researching their book. Later, in the autumn, they returned to the Caribbean nation for several weeks in order to prepare a second edition that included an updated epilogue. Thus, they were in Cuba just shortly before and then shortly after Mills’s arrival in the summer. They were compelled to return to the island, given that the stages and phases of the revolutionary process were morphing quickly, too quickly, to properly do justice to any attempt at characterizing it: “In fact, hardly anything about it is the same—its personnel, its organization, its aims, even the personality of its leaders have all undergone more or less radical changes. Fidel Castro has learned much and changed accordingly in the brief period of less than a year and a half.”8 This situation of social events moving at astonishing speed was one that Mills, qua sociologist, could hardly resist: he needed to analyze the Revolution’s dynamic course of syncopated evolution, to comprehend the improvisational qualities of a going revolution.9

Revolutionary Transformations and Cold War Events

Irving Louis Horowitz is correct in stating that “Mills was reacting to the first years of a revolution whose structure had not yet crystallized.”10 But what exactly were those major transformations, those pivotal social and economic reforms in the revolutionary process that were taking place at the time Mills was on the island that would solidify Cuba’s social structure? Working from Huberman and Sweezy’s before-and-after comparative impressions, two interrelated developments are salient.

The first is that the process of nationalization—of expropriating foreign and domestic enterprises and putting them in the hands of the Revolutionary government—was speeding up, entering its advanced stages. Indeed, just a few days before Mills arrived in the country, the new regime had suddenly seized a large part of U.S. corporate holdings on the island, notably, the electric power company, the telephone company, the oil refineries, and all of the sugar mills. The great nationalization wave crested in late October, when Castro expropriated all foreign enterprises operating in Cuba, including 166 U.S.-owned companies. All this was in reprisal against U.S. economic aggression intended to cripple the island’s economy; first by having U.S.-owned Cuban oil companies—namely, Esso, Texaco, and Shell—refuse to refine oil imported into Cuba and then by drastically reducing the sugar quota, the amount of sugar the United States would import from Cuba. In an escalating series of moves and countermoves between Havana and Washington, the Eisenhower administration had placed an embargo on exports to the Cuban island except for medicines, medical supplies, and foodstuffs. The following year the petulant tug-of-war that led to the severing of all relations between the two countries could be assessed as follows: “If the United States is now alarmed by the ‘radicalization’ of the Cuban Revolution, it has itself to thank; for most of the radical measures of the Castro regime have been taken in direct reaction to threats from Washington.”11

The other defining change, stemming in no small measure from the process of nationalization, was the formation of a significant and identifiable counterrevolutionary sentiment expressed by the landlords whose income had been cut, the landowners whose estates had been expropriated, the bankers and business owners whose profits had been curtailed, and the professional and civic leaders who had lost their political clout. They amounted to a considerable and growing number of dissidents and defectors. Inside Cuba, this counterrevolutionary drift was not a coordinated movement and therefore of no real threat to the regime. Outside the country, however, it was a different matter; indeed, the Cuban exile community in Miami was already plotting a comeback. They were being incited and abetted by the U.S. government to attack and encroach on the island. Thus, at least as indicated by the audiotapes, Mills spent more time discussing counterrevolutionary plots with his interviewees—of an impending invasion of Cuba by the United States—than he did the expropriation of U.S.-owned properties. But he and his interviewees had justifiable cause for concern, and apparently so did Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, who, only a few weeks before, in a speech made in Moscow, had warned the United States that “Soviet artillerymen can support the Cuban people with their rocket fire, should the aggressive forces in the Pentagon dare to start intervention against Cuba.” What is more, Mills well understood the dynamics of counterrevolution, which he and Hans Gerth had defined as “the organized and successful endeavor of previous ruling groups to re-establish themselves in power in the name of the old or newly wrought legitimations.”12 The Cubans who had defected and who had taken ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Announcement Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Chronology of Events
• Map
• Introduction
• Chapter One: The Cuban Summer of C. Wright Mills
• Chapter Two: Insurrection, Revolution, Invasion
• Chapter Three: Mills on Individuals, Intellectuals, and Interviewing
• Chapter Four: Recorded Interviews with Cuban Officials
• Chapter Five: Recorded Interviews with Cuban Citizens
• Chapter Six: Fellow-Traveling with Fidel
• Chapter Seven: The Book That Sold Half a Million Copies
• Chapter Eight: Confronting the Enemy
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• A Note on the Interviews
• Biographical Notes
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Series Page