LRB, Vol. 43 No. 3 · 4 February 2021
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But I wanted a crocodile
Thomas Meaney
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Ten Days in Harlem: Fidel Castro and the Making of the 1960s
bySimon Hall
<https://www-lrb-co-uk.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/search-results?search=Simon%20Hall>.
/Faber, 276 pp., £17.99, September 2020,978 0 571 35306 4/
It would hardly be possible, Eric Hobsbawm once said, to imagine rebels
better designed to appeal to the New Left than Castro and his comrades.
Despite occasional sneers from Third World elders (Nasser dismissed them
as ‘a bunch of Errol Flynns’), Western liberals were just as infatuated
as radicals. The/New York Times/published an admiring three-part profile
of Castro from his hideout in the Sierra Maestra in 1957, when he was
still a revolutionary newt. Two years later, after his forces swept
through the lowland cities, triggering a series of popularly assisted
uprisings that shattered the sclerotic regime of Fulgencio Batista,
adulation came from all quarters: letters of congratulation
fromUScongressmen, rights requests from Hollywood, invitations to ‘Dr
Castro’ to address Ivy League undergraduates. ‘My staff and I were all
Fidelistas,’ the Cuba desk officer of theCIArecalled.
In the wake of his triumph, Castro scrambled to attract Washington’s
benediction. Three months after his forces took Havana, he travelled to
New York at the invitation of a group of American newspaper editors.
There he engaged a Madison AvenuePRfirm, appeared on/Meet the Press,/fed
peanuts to the elephants at the Bronx Zoo, and played with
schoolchildren wearing black paper beards. ‘Castro Declares Regime is
Free of Red Influence,’ a satisfied/New York Times/declared. At a
conference at Princeton organised byR.R.Palmer, the historian of
bourgeois revolutions, Castro reassured his audience that his revolution
would take its cue from 1776 rather than 1789 or 1917 (there is some
dispute as to whether Hannah Arendt was in the audience, nodding with
approval). The Cuban revolution, Castro said, owed its success to the
excesses of Batista’s secret police – twenty thousand extrajudicial
killings in the 1950s alone – and to the fact that the Fidelistas ‘had
not preached class war’. Although the Cuban revolution marked
socialism’s first breakthrough in the Americas, it was tempting from the
outset to treat it as a latecomer among the liberal revolutions of the
previous century, on whose leaders – Garibaldi, Bolívar, Martí – Castro
self-consciously modelled himself.
Castro’s early reforms had a puritanical edge. The regime shut down
brothels and casinos. Out of some lingering attachment to bourgeois
morals, Castro insisted that all the guerrilla boyfriends and
girlfriends of the Sierra Maestra get married. But the most popular and
significant reform had to do with land. The impetus for land reform, as
the historian Sara Kozameh has shown, came as much from Cuban peasants
as from the revolutionaries themselves, who had to manage a delicate
anti-Batista coalition of the rural poor – for whom Castro’s encampments
often provided their first taste of the state (doctors, teachers,
schools) – and small landowners, who supported Castro with material
resources and even invested in revolutionary securities. The
revolution’s Fundamental Law limited all holdings to four hundred
hectares, with the rest to be expropriated by the state and compensated
with twenty-year bonds. As a temporary measure, no land could now be
purchased by non-Cubans. All this was too much for the Eisenhower
administration. Though it had barely lifted a finger on Batista’s
behalf, Washington kept close tabs on the negotiations
betweenUScorporations and the new regime. It hardly mattered that during
a visit to Tokyo shortly after the revolution, Che Guevara, the central
banker of the new government, had been inspired by the much more
extensive land reforms Washington had imposed on postwar Japan, which
limited land to one hectare per person.
For Eisenhower, the conqueror of Europe, upstart radicals in Central
America and the Caribbean were flies to be swatted. Jacobo Árbenz in
Guatemala had set anti-communist alarm bells ringing in 1952 when his
Decree 900 had limited holdings to ninety hectares. But Castro was also
preceded by the Bolivian example. The left-wing revolutionary government
of Paz Estenssoro – once looked on even less favourably than Árbenz by
Washington – had managed to persuade the Eisenhower administration that
its nationalising agenda was harmonious withUSregional hegemony. Castro
was not willing to bend that far. Within six months of recognising his
government, the Eisenhower administration drew up plans to undermine it.
It banned trade with Cuba in 1960, and theCIAbegan to assist Cuban
exiles who were using biplanes to bomb Cuban sugar refineries. But the
sabotage campaign only hardened Cuban resolve and increased Castro’s
international recognition. Outside Cuba, theUS-backed detonation in 1960
of the French freighter/La Coubre/, which was delivering arms in Havana
harbour (a hundred people were killed), is mostly forgotten. The image
Alberto Korda snapped at the scene of the bereted Che Guevara providing
emergency medical aid is hard to avoid.
Simon Hall’s/Ten Days in Harlem/is a lively account of Castro’s charm
offensive in September 1960 when he visited New York again, this time to
address the United Nations General Assembly. It was a sensitive moment
for all concerned: Castro’s revolution was just starting to establish
itself, theUNwas digesting seventeen new members – the ‘Year of Africa’
– and was mired in the Congo crisis, while Eisenhower showed no sign of
being able to handle the civil rights protests taking place across
theUS. ‘For Fidel,’ Hall writes, ‘the opportunity to add to America’s
discomfort was far too good to pass up.’ But Castro himself endured a
series of discomforts during the trip. Already apprised of Washington’s
plot to eliminate him, he was jittery on the jet-prop airliner to New
York, which he half-expected to be intercepted byUSfighters. ‘If I were
theCIA,’ he told his entourage, ‘I’d shoot down the plane at sea and
report the whole thing as an accident.’ (He need not have conjectured:
that sort of attack would come in 1976, when Cuban exiles backed by
Washington bombed the airliner carrying the Cuban fencing team, the
first major terrorist attack on a passenger plane and the largest
airborne act of terror in the Americas until 9/11.)
The Cubans got off to a rough start in New York. Accommodation in the
city was scarce. Castro had brought his hammock in case the delegation
needed to camp in Central Park. Within 24 hours of checking into the
Hotel Shelburne on Lexington Avenue, the owner, who had heard rumours
that the Cuban delegates were plucking and cooking chickens in their
rooms, demanded a $10,000 security deposit. Furious, Castro gave a news
conference and suggested theUNheadquarters should be moved somewhere
else (one point of agreement with Eisenhower), and that he would sleep
in Central Park after all. When reporters asked Castro if he wasn’t
worried about thieves in the park, he replied with mock astonishment:
‘How can there be thieves in this country? Don’t the workers earn decent
salaries?’ The Cubans moved to the Hotel Theresa in Harlem, a hotspot
favoured by the interwar jazz scene, whose glory days seemed long gone.
It turned out to be such a brilliant publicity move that Hall has to
beat back the myth that the whole drama was choreographed by the Cubans
in advance.
To cheers of ‘Viva Castro! Viva Cuba!’ the delegation took up position
at the Theresa, which became a kind of opposition headquarters during
theUNsession. Malcolm X was the first black leader to pay court to
Castro, interviewing him on his bed and after thirty minutes declaring
him ‘the only white person I have really liked’. But racial politics in
Cuba would become a sore point for many of the black nationalists who
visited Cuba in the course of the following decade. Some Afro-Cubans had
identified with the non-white Batista, while others criticised Castro’s
closing down of black associations, such as the National Federation of
Negro Societies. The case of the Afro-Cuban filmmaker Guillén Landrián,
whose documentaries were fêted in the Eastern Bloc but who was
persecuted at home for holding the Cuban revolution to its ideals, was
only one unhappy instance of the regime’s sensitivity to criticism. But
while Castro’s regime lacked anything like affirmative action and
stumbled in the face of everyday racism, officially declaring in 1962
that racial divisions had been overcome, it delivered on literacy,
housing and political consciousness. In the international arena, Cuba
was like a mighty ant, carrying several multiples of its weight in the
fight against white supremacy. Across Africa, tens of thousands of Cuban
soldiers helped to secure anti-colonial gains, most dramatically the
defeat of the South African forces at Cuito Cuanavale in southern
Angola, which jump-started the disintegration of apartheid. It was no
surprise when Nelson Mandela made one of his first trips as president to
Havana.
New York City has long been used as a propaganda venue for outspoken
critics of America, who figure that they are unlikely to be assassinated
in the vicinity of Wall Street and Rockefeller Centre. In 2006, Hugo
Chávez delivered free heating oil to the South Bronx and ostentatiously
paid off the debts of Hispanic NGOs in the city. For Castro in the
1960s, Harlem was a useful place to expose American injustice. He made a
point of inviting the hotel’s mostly black staff to dinner and
introducing them to dignitaries. The egalitarian spectacle became a
press sensation, and the city’s dissident intelligentsia – Allen
Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka,I.F.Stone – flocked to the Theresa’s ballroom,
with Henri Cartier-Bresson on hand to capture it all. Other Third World
leaders in New York that week could only complain of stolen limelight.
Kwame Nkrumah, who had worked in a soap factory in Harlem in his
twenties, found himself relegated to second fiddle in the press. One of
the best moments in Hall’s account comes when Nasser goes to Harlem to
visit the Cubans. When he presents Castro with a silver tea set, Castro
asks whether he couldn’t give him a crocodile instead. Nasser explains
that there are precisely four crocodiles in the whole of Egypt, all
housed at the Cairo Zoo. For days afterwards, Hall reports, Nasser could
be heard to mutter: ‘A crocodile...a crocodile.’
/Ten Days in Harlem/doesn’t stint on piquant detail, and Hall has good
grounds for stressing the psychological aspects of Castro’s exchanges:
in later years he chose to send Cuban troops in support of those
revolutionary leaders he got along with – Ben Bella, Agostinho Neto,
Amílcar Cabral, Mengistu Haile Mariam. But there are also times when
Hall lapses into the mode of the Kodak-carousel left, picking out scenes
for colour rather than significance. Historians can be paparazzi late to
the scene. Though Hall gives it somewhat short shrift, the centrepiece
of Castro’s week in New York was the four-and-a-half-hour speech he
delivered to theUNGeneral Assembly. There, Castro not only linked Cuba
to the rest of the decolonising world, stressing that as far as he was
concerned he was declaring Cuba’s independence fromUScorporate
monopolies; he also walked the Cold War tightrope, joking that, when it
came to expropriations, ‘We were not 100 per cent communist yet...We
were just becoming slightly pink.’ As Hall suggests, this was a turning
point for theUN, which would soon no longer be a clearing house for
theUS’s global mission, but a persistent source of embarrassment for
Washington. In December 1960, at the request of Harold Macmillan,
theUSwould go some way towards squandering its already dubious
anti-colonial image when it joined South Africa and Portugal in
abstaining on the General Assembly’s resolution calling for ‘a speedy
and unconditional end’ to colonialism ‘in all its forms and manifestations’.
The extreme length of Castro’s speeches is a puzzle. He compulsively
worked them over. Angela Davis remembers him telling her that he used to
get nervous before delivering them. Part of it may have been to do with
the methodical patience he learned during his two years in the mountain
fastness of the Sierra Maestra. It was also the place where Castro, who
worshipped Martí’s verses and read Gabriel García Márquez’s first
drafts, wrote his own poetry. In the early years he still had to explain
his revolution to the world – and to himself – and to defend its
shifting agenda against a relentless counter-narrative spun out of
Miami, Washington and Pretoria. In some sense, it may be better to think
of Castro’s long speeches as monumental feats of compression, in which
he synthesised vast quantities of information about the global
anti-imperial struggle for his spectators, in much the same way as
Cicero extrapolated from the data of Roman tax collectors, and Burke
offered an anthropology of the American colonies. ‘Colonies do not
speak,’ he told the General Assembly, and that above all was what he
wanted to contradict. Not only Cuban matters but those of all nations
came into Castro’s critique, from the insufficient de-Nazification of
West Germany to French atrocities in Algeria. In later decades, his
speeches would become gruelling national rituals, but almost to the end
they remained a reliable point of resistance toUStriumphalism.
Castro’s exit from New York was harder than his entry. Arriving at
Idlewild Field, he discovered that his delegation’s Cuban jet-prop had
been impounded by a Brooklyn lawyer with a court order as collateral for
the seized property ofUSbusinessmen in Cuba. TheUSState Department tried
to overrule local law enforcement, but the case had to wait for a
judge’s ruling. Castro could not have asked for a better demonstration
of the fact that theUSstate was a servant of monied interests. (Sixty
years later, in 2012, there was an even more dramatic instance when
theUSnavy seized an Argentine ship in Ghanaian waters on behalf of Paul
Singer’s New York hedge fund.) The seizure of his plane left Castro with
little choice but to take the seat on a Soviet jet Khrushchev offered
him. ‘You took away our planes,’ Castro explained in broken English to
the assembled press. ‘The Soviets gave us planes...The American people
is good people. The Harlem people is wonderful people. You the reporters
are wonderful. But you are not the owners.’
‘We have driven Cuba inch by inch into alliance with the Soviet,’ Norman
Mailer wrote, ‘as deliberately and insanely as a man setting out to
cuckold himself.’ Castro never wanted to be beholden to the Soviets. He
had downplayed the role of the local Communist Party (Partido Socialista
Popular) in preparing the ground for his own revolution. But there were
only so many options for a single-crop economy of seven million people
ninety miles from the Florida coast. After Kennedy, in April 1961,
signed off on the coup Eisenhower had planned, and incompetently
executed it, nothing was going to repair relations (in the lead-up to
the Cuban Missile Crisis, Mailer proposed easing relations by sending
Ernest Hemingway to Havana as a sympathetic cultural observer).
TheUSwould spend the next half-century in a prolonged ideological
confrontation that led it to unroll endless aid and land reform
programmes, such as Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress, in order to
forestall revolutions across Latin America. Castro turned to Moscow less
out of ideological alignment than because he didn’t have much of an
ideology. As Richard Gott writes in his history of Cuba:
When the Cuban revolutionaries came to run the country they were at
a loss...First they tried one thing, then another: they imported
foreign economists; they tried import-substitution; they sought
diversification; they nationalised everything in sight; they
listened to the siren songs of those suggesting economic autarchy.
Finally they turned to the Soviet Union, the source of innumerable
advisers, much fresh technology and seemingly limitless amounts of
cash. The Russians had run a revolution for half a century. They
were the experts.
In the 1990s, after Gorbachev abruptly withdrew aid from Cuba, the
economy nearly collapsed. The state encouraged farmers to enlist draught
animals again instead of machines that were beyond repair. Castro
allowed/paladares/– small private restaurants – to open, while his
brother, Raúl, who took over the state in 2011, took a softer approach
to the black market. Washington’s chief export continues to be
amateurish intelligence operations. In the past decade, theUSAgency for
International Development has tried to foment youth insurrections in
Cuba by setting up a social media platform with built-in surveillance,
infiltrating music festivals, and co-opting some of the country’s least
talented rappers. Today Americans have returned in their original
incarnations: as investors, as tourists, and as missionaries gaining
footholds for their churches by providing clean water in the smaller
cities. Cuba no longer sends expeditionary forces around the world, but
its ‘white coat army’ of doctors has fought Covid-19 in forty countries.
‘History will absolve me,’ Castro shouted at his first trial, as a
27-year-old revolutionary whose attempt to take the Moncada Barracks had
ended in disaster. Seventy years later, it is still difficult to come to
any verdict. But Gott’s modest judgment seems sound: apart from his
African heroics, Castro’s most durable legacy may be that he left enough
of a social buffer to cushion the blow as Cuba re-enters the capitalist
world order.
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