The Cuban Revolution Comes to America

Abstract

In this valuable contribution to the scholarship on the early period of the Cuban Revolution and its relationship with the United States, Simon Hall analyzes Fidel Castro's trip to New York to attend the September 1960 meeting of the United Nations. While this episode has been examined in other accounts, Hall makes us see the familiar in new ways, providing a vivid and original interpretation of a watershed moment in US–Cuba relations. Yet Hall's narrative is about much more than the Havana–Washington relationship, for Fidel's trip to the United Nations, Hall argues, catapulted the Cuban leader onto the world stage as a permanent fixture during the long era of decolonization, signaling his emergence as an insurrectionary voice from the Global South while confirming Cuba's strategic embrace of the Soviet sphere. If the trip represented a new nadir in Cuba's souring relations with Washington, it was also a new high point for the image of the Cuban Revolution among the US public. The trip made Fidel a Harlem legend, deepening the mutual awareness and sense of allyship that had begun to form between the leaders of the Cuban Revolution and figures of the Black freedom struggle, the American Left, and progressive intellectuals, suggesting that these would be the revolution's main sources of popular support from within its hostile northern neighbor.The encounters that Hall examines unfolded at a pivotal moment in Cuba's foreign relations, when much still seemed uncertain. Washington had proven unwilling to recognize the Cuban Revolution on Fidel's original terms, a vision that, while strongly nationalist and shot through with conceptions of social rights and social justice, still lay largely within the liberal tradition at the time of its triumph in January 1959. By the fall of 1960, however, the revolution was radicalizing. Cuba was at a high point of its anti-imperialist nationalism, although not yet its public turn toward communism. The Eisenhower administration had signed off on a plan of harassment and sabotage inside Cuba, but the official authorization of the Kennedy administration's Operation Mongoose was still a year away. The Cuban government had begun to nationalize some US-controlled interests, most notably the oil industry, but it had not yet nationalized much of the rest of the economy—that would come later and. with it, the further deterioration of relations with Washington. Prior to Fidel's visit to New York, Cuba's revolutionaries certainly viewed themselves as members of the emerging postcolonial bloc, whose newly independent African nations now greatly augmented the size of the UN, but Fidel himself had not yet established personal relationships with many of their heads of state. Fidel's meetings with key Global South leaders such as India's Jawaharlal Nehru, Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah, and Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser foreshadowed Cuba's later leadership of the Non-Aligned Movement and the emergence of Cuban anti-imperialism as a potent ideological and cultural force within the decolonizing world during the coming years and decades.It was Cuba's developing relationship with Nikita Khrushchev and the Soviet sphere, however, that the US State Department watched most anxiously. Just months earlier, the Havana–Moscow relationship had not seemed inevitable, and “the close relationship between Cuba and the Soviet Union,” as Hall writes, “was not preordained” (126). It was during Fidel's trip to New York that the Cuban leader would publicly allow himself to be drawn into the Soviet orbit. That this courtship occurred at a time when the ranks of the UN had been augmented dramatically by the entrance of the newly independent African nations was a reminder of the significance of the vast decolonizing world in what was sometimes presumed to be a bipolar superpower struggle. “Fidel's sojourn in New York,” as Hall puts it, “helped place the Global South—including his own Latin America—at the very centre of the Cold War” (2). The CIA-backed overthrow of Jacobo Árbenz's democratically elected progressive government in Guatemala in 1954 was a reminder that the Cold War had already come to Latin America and a cautionary tale of US intervention, one that Fidel, and Che Guevara, who had been in Guatemala at the time, did not forget. But the Cuban Revolution represented something on a different order of magnitude: the first significant challenge to American dominance in the hemisphere; and it is the early movements of these dynamics that we glimpse so compellingly in Hall's study. The triumph of the Cuban Revolution, its subsequent radicalization and the acrimonious relationship with the United States, and its alliance with Moscow would bring the Cold War to the hemisphere in a way that redefined the geopolitics of the region.Hall's study also gives readers a glimpse of Fidel Castro's early ability to outmaneuver Washington's efforts to marginalize Cuba within the world system, while signaling the revolution's alignment with the oppressed, whether in the Congo or Algeria or in the “internal colonies” of the United States. Washington's pressuring of the Organization of American States to expel Cuba in 1962 would compel Havana to break its isolation through other routes. By that time, however, Cuba had already been busy winning allies, including inside the United States. During his 1960 visit to New York, Fidel repeatedly found opportunities to express his affection for the “American people,” if not their government, a dynamic that Hall documents in rich detail. When President Eisenhower brazenly excluded the Cuban delegation from a luncheon held for eighteen Latin American nations on September 22 at the plush Waldorf-Astoria, for instance, Fidel responded by inviting a dozen workers from the Hotel Theresa to have lunch with him, delivering a pointed public-relations coup for Cuba, with Castro declaring, “[W]e are honored to lunch with the poor and humble people of Harlem” (107). This was hardly uncharacteristic behavior or speech for the Cuban leader, whose childhood comrades had been the children of rural laborers and campesinos and who was notably at ease among working people. In this case, however, the racial, class, and geopolitical symbolism of the Cuban leader in New York dining with Black hotel employees, coming at a time when segregation still ruled the United States and when Cuba aligned itself with African decolonization, was unmistakable.It is worth pausing to reflect on the way that Fidel's time in New York was portrayed at times in Cuba itself. As historian Devyn Spence Benson has shown,1 some Cuban journalists and cartoonists portrayed Black residents of Harlem paternalistically or with racially degrading caricatures of the sort that had been common in Cuba since the 1800s, revealing the distance yet to be traveled between the antiracist pronouncements of the largely white Cuban revolutionary leadership and the eradication of anti-Black attitudes on the island. Nevertheless, it is also clear that residents of Harlem, an overwhelmingly African American district that was also distinctly African diasporic in composition owing to the presence of immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa, saw the Cuban Revolution in ways that reflected their own global concerns. For many Harlemites, that concern was the upsurge of anticolonial activity abroad and the antiracist struggle at home. Cuba had made itself an ally in that struggle. Hall's account joins those of scholars such as Van Gosse, Spence Benson, and Cynthia A. Young2 in showing the agency of Black intellectuals, writers, artists, and everyday people in Harlem who embraced the Cuban Revolution on their own terms, including in ways that may have sometimes elided the nuances of Cuba's internal racial dynamics. Relishing the opportunity to greet a Global South leader who had come ready to do battle with Eisenhower's Washington—neither a friend of African decolonization nor of civil rights—Black Harlemites clearly regarded Fidel Castro and the Cuban delegation in sympathetic terms.Perhaps no episode in Hall's study illuminates this more dramatically than the warm reception that Fidel Castro received, night after night, from everyday people in Harlem. It is symbolically fitting that the first guest to visit Fidel in his hotel suite after the Cuban delegation took up residence in Harlem was Malcolm X. It has sometimes been suggested that the thousands of Harlemites who greeted Fidel at the Hotel Theresa night after night did so with such enthusiasm in large part because they were accustomed to being overlooked by both visiting foreign dignitaries and homegrown white politicians. Hall offers a more sophisticated answer, showing how the welcome that Harlemites extended to the Cuban delegation was also rooted in a specific awareness of the antiracist character and anticolonial orientation of the Cuban revolution, which had desegregated the island with bold top-down action while the American government was still appeasing powerful southern segregationists and embracing gradualism on fundamental human rights demands. As Malcolm later put it to reporters, Fidel “had denounced racial discrimination in Cuba, which is more than President Eisenhower has done in America”; had “come out against lynching” in the United States, again in contrast to Eisenhower; and “had taken a more open stand for civil rights for Black Cubans” (60). The meeting was another indication of Malcolm's keen interest in the Global South, an interest that would eventually contribute to the minister's full transformation into an internationalist in his own right, and it foreshadowed his rift with Elijah Muhammad, who chastised Malcolm after hearing of his meeting with the Cuban leader (61).It is these multifaceted and surprisingly intertwined elements of US–Cuba relations—social, cultural, diplomatic, and geopolitical—that Hall's narrative illuminates so compellingly during a pivotal moment in their early development. Deeply researched yet readable and written with sufficient explanation of events and protagonists that readers unversed in the history will be able to follow the analysis, Ten Days in Harlem is a gift to undergraduate courses, scholars, and general readers alike, who will benefit from Hall's lively account of Fidel Castro and the United States during one of the high-drama opening acts of the Sixties era.