Nobody's Saying Much About Cuba
The controversy over Elian Gonzalez, the Cuban boy who survived the sinking of a small boat carrying Cuban refugees to Florida in 1999, reminded me of the US Left's attachment to the Castro regime, which had apparently gone undiminished over four decades. At the time, it struck me as an incongruous artifact from the late 1950s. I asked Chrome AI Mode, "Why did US intellectuals like C Wright Mills support Castro?" It answered, C. Wright Mills and other US intellectuals supported the 1959 Cuban Revolution, viewing it as a, non-Stalinist, anti-imperialist, and "New Left" alternative to both US corporate capitalism and Soviet bureaucratic communism. Mills believed the revolution represented a "human socialism" emerging from the Third World, not from existing Communist parties. It appears that this fantasy of the Castro regime persisted within the US Left despite the clear movement of the revolution toward Marxism-Leninism from the start : ...