How Come The Left Never Updated Its Cuba Narrative?
I posted yesterday about how C Wright Mills was deeply involved in creating from the start a Castro "third way" narrative that belatedly tried to create a new revolutionary model that, while totalitarian by nature, wasn't directly tied to Stalinism. This lasted, if it was ever very effective, only until the fall of 1962, when Kennedy, always a hawk in any case, tied Castro directly to Moscow in the Cuban missile crisis. (Although the resolution of the crisis itself has subsequently been portrayed as only a partial win, if that, for Kennedy, it's generally acknowledged that the outcome resulted in Khrushchev's deposition in 1964, so winners and losers are hard to pick.) The outcome of the missile crisis in popular culture is best illustrated in Hitchcock's 1969 film Topaz . I rewatch both Vertigo and Topaz almost compulsively, in part because I now think, although it's a close case, that Topaz is Hitchcock's greatest. (Both have a peculiar devi...