1968 - Mark Kurlansky [102]
Castro warned in his March speech that he might not continue his hospitality, pointing out that while he allowed the planes to return, planes and vessels stolen to flee to the United States were never returned to Cuba.
The regime’s enemies in the United States had grown further entrenched. Alabama governor George Wallace, in his 1968 independent run for president, once again vilified Herbert Matthews for his interview with Fidel. Although the defeat at the Bay of Pigs appeared to demonstrate in irrefutable fashion that popular support in Cuba was on the side of the revolution and not with them, this did not silence the more extreme factions of the anti-Castro exiles, Cubans from the old dictatorship who were not particularly interested in the majority point of view. In the years since the failed invasion, they had become even more violent. In the spring of 1968, a group of Cuban exiles began attacking nations that maintained relations with Cuba, which in fact included the majority of nations in the world. The French tourism office in Manhattan, the Mexican consulate in Newark, travel agencies in Los Angeles, a Polish ship in Miami, and a British ship in New Orleans were among the targets of simple homemade bombs. An officer in a New York City bomb squad said, “It’s lucky there aren’t more of this particular kind of nut around because there is nothing tougher than trying to stop them.” But in fact, many were caught through obvious slipups, such as leaving fingerprints. In December, U.S. district judge William O. Mehrtensin, sentencing nine Cubans—including a ten-year term for Orlando Bosch, a pediatrician and father of five—said, “These acts of terrorism are stupid. I cannot reasonably see any way to fight communism in this manner.”
Fidel’s admirers loved him as much as his enemies hated him. To the youth of the New Left in 1968—Americans, Western Europeans, Latin Americans—Cuba was the most exciting country in the world. Castro seemed to share their reservations about the Soviets. While the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe confronted their economic crisis by experimenting with free enterprise, Cuba, in the purist tradition of Mao, was going in the opposite direction. Todd Gitlin of the American SDS wrote, “Here apparently was the model of a revolution led by students, not by a Communist Party—indeed, in many ways against it.” The world’s youth wanted to see Cuba, and the Cubans wanted to show them their showcase of socialism. Such a bold experiment, so close to the United States, for all its faults, even with its milk shortage and executions, was impressive. Ginsberg, too, even after being deported, was impressed. The fierce opposition from the United States always gave the little sugarcane island a heroic aspect.
American SDS’s official position on Cuba and other third world revolutions was called “critical support.” When Todd Gitlin joined an SDS trip to Cuba in the beginning of 1968, like LeRoi Jones and Allen Ginsberg before him, he was determined not to be seduced by the excitement. He wrote, “I knew all about the terrible and laughable history of Westerners (Lincoln Steffens, George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Sidney and Beatrice Webb) making their pilgrimages to the East and trapping themselves in apologies; it wasn’t going to happen to me.” And so he steeled himself against the revolution’s many charms with a list of questions about civil liberties, democracy, and the right of dissent.
Che images at the Cultural Congress in Havana in January 1968.
(Photo by Fred Mayer/Magnum Photos)
The trip began, as many of them did, traveling by way of Mexico City to circumvent U.S. travel restrictions. The Mexican government openly differed with the United States on Cuba and refused to cut off relations with its historically close Spanish Caribbean neighbor. But unbeknownst to the young Americans who traveled through Mexico City, the Mexican president, Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, had a paranoid fear of the Cuban revolution and carefully noted passenger lists on Havana-bound flights to record the Mexicans on board.