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For many American intellectuals, how to respond to the early stages of the Cuban Revolution was the key issue of the early 1960s. Liberal cold warriors like Arthur Schlesinger Jr defended the aggressive line against the Cuban government taken by the new Kennedy administration. But leftist intellectuals railed against Washington. One of the most prominent among them, radical sociologist C. Wright Mills, argued that unlike both the developed capitalist countries and Soviet Communism, Cuba’s revolution spoke for Third World nations. Rafael Rojas’s latest book, Fighting Over Fidel: The New York Intellectuals and the Cuban Revolution, surveys these heated debates. It’s a task he’s eminently qualified for. Rojas is a prominent Cuban intellectual who has worked and lived for many years in Mexico City. He has deep roots in Cuba’s cultural establishment. His brother is the Cuban vice minister of culture and his father was for years rector of the University of Havana. Unlike other authors who write about Cuba, his work is clearly removed from the Cold War spirit. Thus, for example, he gives a respectful, even positive, description of Paul Sweezy’s and Leo Huberman’s sympathetic analysis of the Cuban Revolution that appeared in the magazine Monthly Review in 1960. And he defends C. Wright Mills and Jean Paul Sartre from the accusation, launched by Schlesinger, that they supported the birth of authoritarianism in Cuba. He even defends some Cubans who supported the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion: he responds to C. Wright Mills’s characterization of them as “soldiers of the CIA” by arguing that ousted domestic elites and others had perfectly rational and autonomous reasons to oppose the Castro government. Of course, Mills’s and Rojas’s characterizations are not really contradictory: one could argue that these Cubans had the autonomous will to become soldiers of the CIA, supporting and participating in an imperialist adventure that was indisputably controlled by an American intelligence agency. His extended survey, however, sacrifices some depth, and notwithstanding his serious research, Rojas commits several important errors. These are perhaps due to his lack of familiarity with the US left. For example, he associates Robert Williams, H. Rap Brown, and Stokely Carmichael with the Black Panther Party when in fact they had either no link or at most a brief association with the organization. He also includes Irving Howe, Lionel Trilling, and the members of the Partisan Review, and later Dissent, group, as part of the liberal left “characterized by a resolute adherence to Trotskyism and democratic socialism.” It’s a conceptual mishmash that confuses some of these personalities’ political origins with a later political projection that had little if anything to do with Trotskyism. Similarly, he misuses the term “New York intellectuals”: aside from the fact that not all of the intellectuals he discusses lived in New York, the term historically denotes a specific group of left-wing intellectuals, many of them of Jewish descent who constituted a coherent intellectual community engaged in a common debate. This is not the case for the people Rojas studies. There are also a number of minor errors, such as misnaming Theodore Draper as Thomas Draper.

Many Revolutions One of Rojas’s central contentions is that although the early 1960s left-wing debates over the Cuban Revolution were undoubtedly influenced by the Cold War, they are by no means reduceable to a simplistic pro-West versus pro-East dichotomy. The members of the independent American left of the sixties, he argues, held different positions on Cuba. What for Waldo Frank was a humanist Cuban revolution was for C. Wright Mills a Marxist revolution and for Carleton Beals a populist revolution. The pro-Soviet, Maoist, and Guevaraist socialisms debated in the Village Voice and Monthly Review represented different interpretations of Cuban socialism and marshaled different reasons to support it. Moreover, writes Rojas, the diversity of views among the left-wing intellectuals sympathetic to the Cuban Revolution reflected not only the heterogeneity of the intellectuals themselves, but also the changing, and at times experimental, nature of Cuban socialism during its first decade. The Cuban revolutions interpreted by the New York public sphere were multiple because multiple Cuban revolutions were taking place in the island. It was only when the island’s ideological debate and intellectual life came increasingly under state control and centralization — a process that started in 1961 and culminated in the early seventies when Cuba fully adopted the Soviet model — that, according to Rojas, most members of the New York left became reluctant to endorse Cuba’s new course and “were unwilling to support Cuba’s decolonization if it involved the naturalization of Marxist-Leninist dogma on the island.”