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 o...