C Wright Mills: Cuba As An Idea

The last time I thought much about Cuba was during the 2000 Elián González controversy, when I got the impression that there was a faction of committed leftists who in fact believed, as essentially an article of faith, that Cuba was a workers' paradise, and the boy would be far better off if the US government would return him there. It vaguely occurred to me at the time that Columbia sociologist C Wright Mills had enthusiastically embraced the Cuban revolution not long before his death in 1962.

I did a web search and came up with a 2017 article in The Jacobin, C Wright Mills's Cuban Summer, which described Mills's two-week visit to Cuba in August 1960 that formed the basis for his book Listen, Yankee. He spent three days of the visit interviewing Castro, and the photo above is of one such encounter,

I can't remember now when I read Mills's White Collar (1951), but it must have been at an earlier phase of my life, because I was much impressed by Mills's overall sneering tone over US society then. I went to Wikipedia to find a view that Mills was primarily influenced by figures like George Herbert Mead, John Dewey, Charles Sanders Peirce, and William James, while others call him a "closet Marxist" To that I would add yesterday's caveat here that if Mills was a Marxist, his understanding of Marxism-Leninism was shallow enough to overlook the fact that bourgeois sociology professors would be among the first to be rounded up in a true revolution.

By 1959, Stalinists had had a bad run in the West. Even leaving McCarthy aside, Whittaker Chambers's Witness was published in 1952; Burgess and MacLean's defection beame public in 1956, the same year as Khrushchev's Secret Speech on Stalin's cult of personality and the Hungarian uprising. The image of Marxism needed refreshing, and Castro represented an "olive green revolution", presumably not a red one.

Mills, never a detached academic, seems to have seized an opportunity. The Jacobin piece says,

For his part, Mills saw the Cuban revolutionaries as Marxists, but hoped they would embrace the ideology’s liberating and humanistic aspects. . . . the young rebels were “bereft of any rigid political dogmatism, and being of the younger political generation, they have no experience with old-left Stalinism. They are a new left.”

This of course was at best faculty-lounge wishful thinking from the start, but Mills's intent seems to have been to leverage his prestige to legitimize this narrative. The Jacobin piece notes that Mills spent only two weeks in Cuba and did not speak Spanish. It continues,

Mills’s interviewees were also apparently preselected. The Fair Play for Cuba Committee and the Cuban official Raul Roa had arranged his trip; Mills had neither the ability nor the inclination to seek out those who did not share the revolutionary government’s views. Reading through the interview transcripts, anyone who has conducted research in Cuba will have the vaguely familiar impression of being shepherded toward approved spokesmen.

The transcripts also reveal that Mills pulled lines of inquiry from his own theories — for example, the role of intellectuals, broadly defined, as revolutionary agents. At times this could result in somewhat leading questions: “Would you think that . . . a proper way to define the situation would be like the following: That one small branch of intellectuals went into the hills, including Fidel . . . That is, the Revolution was made by young intelligentsia in contact with the poor people?” Mills listened but also occasionally imposed.

. . . Mills’s premature death in 1962 spared him some of the soul-searching that other foreign intellectuals later faced over Cuba. He did not live to see Castro’s endorsement of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, nor the imprisonment of the Cuban poet Heberto Padilla in 1971. These events largely ended the romance many foreign intellectuals had with the Cuban Revolution. Whether Mills would have reacted similarly is hard to say, but by this point the New Left’s youthful phase was decidedly over.

The “socialism with heart” Mills had hoped for proved too fragile for the Cold War.

The effect of the book on its publication was widespread. The piece says,

By the time Mills died less than two years later, he was receiving nearly ten letters a day from readers all over the world, many asking, “How can you help me get to Cuba so I can help Fidel?”

It's hard to avoid the conoclusioin that Mills at best was deliberately creating a "new left", separate from Stalinism, largely from wishful thinking, dressing it up with a measure of his own academic prestige. Britannica says,

New Left currents first arose in Europe in response to the perceived moral discredit of Soviet communism following Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s “secret speech” in February 1956, which revealed the extent of political repression under Joseph Stalin’s leadership. French and British groups adopted the label New Left to denote their search for a socialist “third way,” distinct both from official communism or orthodox Marxism and from mainstream social democracy. Opposition to nuclear weapons and opposition to Cold War bipolarity (a system of international relations characterized by the existence of two superpowers) were critical rallying points for the disaffected communists, independent socialists, and young radicals who formed the New Left’s constituency. Anticolonialism and the problems of the Third World were increasingly salient, especially after the Cuban revolution of 1959.

Viewed from the post-Soviet perspective, the idea of a countervailing bipolar global axis was in reality a fantasy in itself, with the idea of New Left, "third way" independent revolution equally unrealistic. But I think it's a feature of the current left's intellectual bankruptcy that, in its continuing support of the Cuban regime, it maintains the same hard line it's had since 1960.