On Friday, September 16, 1960, an FBI informant reported that, at a recent meeting of the New York chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC), the group had been told that Fidel Castro would shortly be arriving in the city, ahead of the opening of the Fifteenth General Assembly of the United Nations, and that he wanted them to “cause as much confusion and scandal as possible” to “embarrass the United States government.” The source went on to explain that Fidel had asked the FPCC “to rent the Polo Grounds, the Yankee Stadium or some other large area where he can make a speech.” When advised that such a move would be potentially very dangerous, given the deepening animosity between Washington and Havana (the State Department had cited growing public hostility and security concerns when confining the Cuban leader to the island of Manhattan for the duration of his stay), Fidel was “alleged to have replied” that “this would be alright” as any altercation would “cause great embarrassment” to Washington.1In the event, of course, a sports arena proved entirely unnecessary: the area around 125th Street and 7th Avenue, in Harlem—together with the sleek, Corbusier-inspired General Assembly Building in Turtle Bay—served as the perfect backdrop for mischief-making on the grandest of scales.When I pitched the idea for Ten Days in Harlem to my editor, I made two claims. First, that this was an extraordinary story—anarchic, riotous, slightly madcap, and gloriously entertaining—an episode of postwar history that, as the New Yorker put it at the time, was “preposterous and unplayable, and yet all true,” a tale that “no sensible playwright would dare to compose” and that “even the most dogged critic would have a hard time recapitulating.”2 Second, this story mattered. Among other things, it offered a way to explore key developments in the Cold War—including its intersection with the politics of anticolonial nationalism—as well as helping to make sense of the deteriorating relationship between Cuba and the United States, the global dimensions of the Black freedom struggle, and the dawn of “the Sixties” as an era of global radicalism and rebellion. It is, to say the least, enormously gratifying—as well as humbling—to learn that, in the view of the talented and generous contributors to this roundtable, I seem to have made a reasonably convincing case.Having previously written a global history of a single year—1956—I was intrigued by, and drawn toward, the professional challenge of focusing on such a concentrated period of time (barely a week and a half) and working across a geographical canvas that stretched over just a few city blocks.3 That, as Adom Getachew points out, this approach ultimately served to open up, rather than limit, our perspectives on Third Worldism and the Cold War is welcome affirmation that successful microhistories can be undertaken at the temporal, as well as geographical, level—even for those of us who are attempting to write global history. And the fact that—for a few days at least—Harlem became a second center of global politics, rivalling the UN for attention and influence, serves as a useful reminder that international history is often made in informal, even unlikely, settings.Ten Days is, as Dan Matlin points out, an unapologetic work of narrative history. I have no burning desire to add to those seemingly perennial calls—typically made by well-heeled, senior scholars from the pages of America's leading newspapers—for their colleagues to write for the public, rather than (as they supposedly ordinarily do) only for each other. Historians, as we all know, have the best stories, and it is just as well that, from time to time, we choose to tell them. If nothing else, it helps to keep the journalists, commentators, television personalities, politicians, and other talented (and perhaps not-so-talented) amateurs from the gates.Central to the tale that I tried to spin, of course, were the numerous domineering—and often contrasting—personalities all vying for the limelight in the fall of 1960. These included Khrushchev, by turns bully and jester, who was predictable only in his unpredictability; Nasser, all smiles and charm, the epitome of a prosperous Cairo salesman but who, just a few years before, had shown his steel in facing down the might of the British Empire; Eisenhower—the increasingly crotchety war hero who, nearing the end of his eight-year incumbency, could still boast approval ratings approaching 60 percent; and, of course, Fidel himself—el Loco, the crazy one (and this is to say nothing of Malcolm X, Maya Angelou, Allen Ginsberg, and others). But of all the figures about whom I wrote, one of the most fascinating—and in some ways the most elusive—was Love B. Woods, the legendary owner of the Hotel Theresa. Described in the leading Cuban magazine Bohemia as an “older man, with grey hair and eyebrows, slightly hunched shoulders, and with a faint moustache on his upper lip,” Woods—a “stellar figure in Harlem”—is glimpsed occasionally, dressed smartly and in his trademark white hat, attending attentively to his guests, inspecting a freshly roasted chicken destined for Fidel's table, and smoothing over tensions with the neighbors (not all of whom welcomed the constant commotion that his high-profile guests brought in their wake). Interviewed by Prensa Latina, the Cuban news agency, Woods swatted aside concerns that he might face “repercussions” for admitting the delegation, pointing out that, “with or without Castro, we've been suffering repression since we were born.” He then went on to defend his actions: From my own experience I know the ploys that certain people here use to show their discourtesy. The first act of aggression against Castro was his confinement to Manhattan and the second was the demand for an inflated deposit in order to house him in a hotel. For that reason I decided there wouldn't be a third and I opened the doors of the Theresa to him straight away. . . . I'm happy, because I have a gentleman in my house.4Woods's own life story was extraordinary. Born on a small farm in a rural South newly “redeemed” from Republican Party rule, he ended up with a ringside seat, at the dawn of the Sixties, as Cold War intrigues unfolded in his hotel. But, as Kris Burrell points out, Woods's life is also illustrative of the wider transformations that were wrought on Harlem by migration—from both the rural South and across the Caribbean—during the early decades of the twentieth century, which did so much to turn this area of New York into the unofficial cultural and political capital of Afro-America and to shape its distinctive Black nationalist and anticolonial political tradition.That Woods, and his fellow Harlemites, offered the Cubans such a warm reception was, in many ways, unsurprising. After all, Fidel's new government had made a very public point of denouncing racism, and, on coming to power, the revolutionaries had almost immediately introduced a slew of laws designed to eliminate formal racial segregation on the island. Havana had then proceeded to invite African American delegations to visit Cuba, to see firsthand the dramatic changes underway—changes that, of course, stood in sharp contradistinction to the repeated counsels of caution and patience that emanated from the Eisenhower White House when it came to the “race question.” Moreover, as Adom Getachew has highlighted, there was a deep-rooted tradition of solidarity between Afro-Cubans and Afro-America on which Fidel and his compañeros were able to draw. Yet, as Teishan Latner points out, there were very real limits to this solidarity. Some of this, of course, became clearer only in retrospect. But, even at the time, some of the coverage in the Cuban media reflected the rather one-dimensional ways in which African Americans were viewed back in Havana: humble; oppressed; shut away, as if they had the plague; forced to live in squalid conditions and under constant threat of the nightstick and truncheon. As the leading Cuban newspaper Revolución put it, Harlem was home to “the humblest and most exploited people in New York.” But all the talk about “the suffering men of Harlem” framed African Americans as victims rather than active political, economic, and cultural agents—and key players in what revisionist historians have recently reminded us was a national, rather than simply a southern, struggle for civil rights.5Fidel's sojourn at the Theresa does not only plug civil rights activism in the “Jim Crow North” into the wider narrative of the Black freedom struggle; it also—as Getachew and Matlin have observed—connects Harlem to the emergent global anti-imperialist movement. Born, symbolically at least, during the 1955 Bandung Conference and catalyzed by the admission of more than a dozen newly independent countries to the United Nations during 1960 (the so-called Year of Africa), this movement would shape the politics of the coming decade in powerful and novel ways. The rather informal and slightly chaotic meetings that took place between Fidel and Nehru, Nasser, and Nkrumah in September 1960; the public camaraderie between the Cuban revolutionaries and leading figures from the Black freedom struggle; and the lauding of Fidel by luminaries from the wider New Left presaged more structured, organized gatherings—such as the 1961 Belgrade Conference, which officially launched the Non-Aligned Movement, and the First Tricontinental Conference, which was convened in Havana in January 1966—that would do so much to give the 1960s its distinctive character. In this framing of the—long, global—Sixties, Harlem rightfully takes its place alongside Bandung, Havana, and Algiers as a center of the global anti-imperialist movement.6Historians, driven by a professional obligation to explain and make sense of the past, can often seem rather wary of the role played by contingency in the shaping of events. And yet, as Getachew notes, many of the iconic moments from Fidel's trip were accidental and unplanned; this was a story, in other words, that lacked a “prepared script.”7 In very broad terms—the deteriorating relationship between Cuba and the United States, for instance—things would likely have turned out much the same had the Cuban prime minister decided to spend a fortnight fishing in the waterways of the Península de Zapata rather than attending the Fifteenth General Assembly. Nevertheless, the actual events that took place in New York that autumn were consequential. Fidel had departed for New York determined not only to proclaim the merits of the Cuban Revolution before the world but to stake a claim to revolutionary Cuba's role within the wider, global, anti-imperialist movement. In both these aims, he succeeded brilliantly.This was not, primarily, because of what he said—although his trenchant observation, made during his marathon address to the General Assembly, that political independence sans economic independence was no kind of independence at all, rings as true today as it did then. Instead, the real key to his success was the public performance, or spectacle, that defined his stay and that was, of course, lapped up by both the American and the international press. At almost every turn, Fidel proved adept at making powerful statements—about racial solidarity, social justice, and anti-imperialism—through seemingly simple gestures: flying in his military chief, and prominent Afro-Cuban revolutionary Juan Almeida to take an impromptu (though heavily trailed) walk around Harlem; or turning the tables on Ike when, on being excluded from an official luncheon for Latin American delegates, he treated a dozen African American employees of the Theresa to steaks and beers. There are a wonderful series of photographs of this event, in which we see an animated Fidel and his guests, seated around a table, in the hotel's coffee shop. But this intimate, fraternal lunch was not quite what it seemed. Fidel's party was seated in front of a large mirror and caught in its reflection is the phalanx of journalists—cameras and notebooks at the ready—who were on hand to capture the event for posterity. The images from Fidel's trip to New York that autumn—in particular, the highly evocative photographs of the crowds outside the Theresa, of Fidel sticking it to the Man at the United Nations, and of the Cuban leader beaming alongside, chatting animatedly with, or warmly embracing Malcolm X, Nikita Khrushchev, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Kwame Nkrumah—were worth their weight in gold (or, depending on your politics, rubles). They announced, triumphantly and unreservedly, that Fidel had arrived. Speaking before jubilant crowds in Havana, on September 28, Cuban President Osvaldo Dorticós declared that, in New York, the voice of Cuba had been heard in “resounding ways” and that Fidel had spoken “not just in the name of our people, but also . . . in the name of all the peoples of Latin America and of all the under-developed peoples of the world.” As a result of his trip to New York, Dorticós continued, Fidel could now “count on the admiration, the support and the solidarity” of all of those who were fighting against colonialism.8 To those who might point out that Dorticós was no impartial observer in all this, it is worth noting the analysis of one official from the US State Department. During his speech before the General Assembly, Fidel had, he declared, “made an effective verbal attack on the United States which impressed many delegates,” including those from the newly independent African nations.Fidel managed to steal the limelight, and a march, on some of his more flat-footed opponents through his improvised rebellion against diplomatic norms (this entire episode really does not show President Eisenhower at his best). It was a bravura performance that, while recognized at the time, has also enjoyed a long cultural afterlife. In Topaz, Alfred Hitchcock's spy thriller from 1969, a western intelligence agent, André Devereaux, infiltrates the Cuban delegation to the United Nations on the eve of the missile crisis. One memorable scene, shot on location at the Theresa (where the delegation is holed up in a show of solidarity with African Americans), features twitchy police, pugnacious Cuban security personnel, journalists desperate for a scoop, swaggering Barbudos, and young women of uncertain provenance (to say nothing of reputation) all roaming the corridors. It nicely captures the sense of improvised chaos that had characterized Fidel's actual stay in Harlem and that had been seized upon with glee—and duly embellished—by much of the American press.9 Toward the end of the movie, Devereaux is questioned by Rico Parra, the head of the Cuban delegation (and a character who is clearly modelled on Fidel). While denying any involvement in espionage, Devereaux does confess to having been outside the Theresa on the night that a top-secret document was photographed. “I did go up to Harlem to see the show you were putting on,” he explained, “And . . . it was a very good show.”