HIPSTERS AND APPARATCHIKS

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Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. devoted much of his memoir on the Kennedy administration, A Thousand Days (1965), to reconstructing the dilemma that Castro's socialist Cuba posed for Washington in 1961. Starting in the early pages of the book's chapter "The Hour of Euphoria," Schlesinger endorsed a certain historical narrative of the communist radicalization of the Cuban Revolution, one based mainly on a reading of the work of historians such as Theodore Draper and Hugh Thomas, who argued that the young Cuban leadership had rationally and deliberately chosen to reformulate its ideology, transforming the nationalist democratic ideal that had led it to power in January 1959 into a communist socialism allied with the Soviet bloc.

Schlesinger incorporates into the "euphoria" unleashed by Kennedy's arrival in the White House the enthusiasm that the Cuban Revolution had awakened in national public opinion. Since 1957, when the New York Times began to publish Herbert L. Matthews's series on the guerrilla movement in the Sierra Maestra, Castro had come to be perceived in the United States as the young leader of a new Latin American Left, one that was nationalist and even socialist but also liberal and democratic. In Washington, this leftism was associated with Latin American political leaders who had promoted the Alliance for Progress, such as Lázaro Cárdenas in Mexico, Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre in Peru, Rómulo Betancourt in Venezuela, and José Figueres in Costa Rica.

At the end of the 1950s, opinion in both popular and political classes in the United States had come to reject the Batista regime. As Schlesinger recalls, Kennedy himself christened Castro as a member of "Bolívar's legacy" in the President's own account of his campaign, The Strategy of Peace (1960). Schlesinger testifies that he met Castro in person at the Harvard Faculty Club in Cambridge during the latter's triumphal visit to the United States in April 1959. Attempting to account for the bearded young revolutionary's popularity among American university students, Schlesinger observes, "They saw in him, I think, the hipster who in the era of the Organization Man had joyfully defied the system, summoned a dozen friends and overturned a government of wicked old men."

As Schlesinger writes, Cuba's shift toward communism produced an adverse reaction in the United States. Within a year, Castro ceased to be exalted as a hero and instead came to be viewed as an enemy of the United States. When Kennedy authorized the plan for the Bay of Pigs invasion that had been drawn up under the Eisenhower administration, the event would become the primary stumbling block of his presidential term. In his exhaustive account of this episode, Schlesinger blames the CIA and the leaders of the Cuban exile community for the disaster and naturally exculpates his own boss, President Kennedy. But he goes still further, also reproaching intellectuals and groups that had expressed solidarity with Havana in the spring of 1961, such as C. Wright Mills, Jean Paul Sartre, Norman Mailer, and the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, the last of which had organized prorevolutionary marches in San Francisco and Union Square on April 21 and 22.

The present chapter of this book could in fact be read as a counterpoint between the vision of the Cuban Revolution held by Thomas Draper, to which Schlesinger subscribes, and that of Mills and Sartre, whom Schlesinger erroneously characterizes as favoring the establishment of communism in Cuba. The ideological confrontations of the period and the criticisms levied by Mills, Mailer, and others against the Kennedy administration's Cuba policies caused Schlesinger to lose sight of the fact that the New York intellectuals, from the outset, were not defenders of the Cuban Revolution's shift toward communism but objectors to Washington's Cold War policies. This misunderstanding was common to liberals and Democrats of the period, but among anticommunists of the Republican Right, it assumed the form of a rigid stereotype.

Between 1959 and 1962, public opinion in New York was a key scenario for the ideological radicalization of the Cuban Revolution and for the design of a new and audacious geopolitical strategy on the part of its young leaders. Not only was New York the headquarters of major national print, television, and radio organizations, such as the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, CBS, and NBC, but the United Nations headquarters in Manhattan was also the site of frequent gatherings of international heads of state, including the Cuban leaders. Castro and Guevara became central figures in the New York spectacle of world politics during the 1960s.

In the pages that follow, I will seek to reconstruct the process by which the image of the Cuban Revolution shifted in New York public opinion. Robert A. Rutland, a historian of American journalism, refers to this shift when he writes that "Cuba, under Fidel Castro, turned from friend to enemy, with shocking suddenness." Rutland rigidly situates the shift in the fall of 1962, a moment when, in his view, the city's liberal press, which had earlier celebrated Castro's 1959 triumph and questioned Kennedy over the Bay of Pigs episode, began to portray the Cuban leadership as a threat to peace and US national security.

Subsequently, I will seek to account for a change within radical opinion as well, particularly in publications such as Dissent and the Village Voice, which resulted in a critique of the totalitarian elements of Cuban socialism, the anointing of Guevara as an icon of the New Left, and a double rejection of both US intervention in Vietnam and the Soviet Union's intervention in Czechoslovakia. Between 1963 and 1968, a period of discrete distancing between Cuba and the Soviet Union, the relation between American radicalism and the Cuban government was a complex one. While Dissent did not hesitate to qualify the Cuban regime as a dictatorship, the Village Voice identified with Guevarism as a current of the Latin American Left that both expanded and exceeded the ideas of the Cuban Revolution.

ROBIN HOOD IN THE CARIBBEAN

The triumph of the Cuban Revolution coincided with a restructuring of the American public sphere, as the newspapers of the postwar era were forced to adapt to the rise of large television and radio consortiums, which were heavily marked by the interests and languages of McCarthyism and anticommunism. The arrival in the White House of a young Democratic leadership led by John F. Kennedy produced what Christopher B. Daly refers to as a "rocking [of] the establishment." In this context, frictions grew between the formation of a "liberal arc" that supported the new administration and a powerful rightist sector that pressured the White House and threatened Democratic-leaning...