1968 - Mark Kurlansky [103]
The SDS trip was timed to coincide with a weeklong international cultural congress. British historian Eric Hobsbawm reported on the week for the Times Literary Supplement: “Cuba was, of course, an ideal setting for such a Congress. It is not only an embattled and heroic country, though as Castro himself observed, a long way second to Vietnam, but a remarkably attractive one, if only because it is visibly one of the rare states in the world whose population actually likes and trusts its government.” Among the luminaries at the conference were novelist Julio Cortázar and muralist David Siqueiros. A rumor circulated that Siqueiros had been recognized as one of the plotters in the Trotsky assassination by an angry Trotskyist who kicked him in the shin.
The SDS group was put up in the Havana Libre, the former Havana Hilton, completed just before the revolution. This sterile, modern hotel was one of the first and last true high-rises built in Havana. The young radicals were comfortable there, eating crab and shrimp cocktails with Cuba libres. They visited factories, which admittedly they rarely did in the United States, and training programs, and a farm where field hands actually sang on their way to work. Gitlin tried to stay skeptical but said, “Mostly I saw energy, amazing commitment. Ordinary people seemed both mobilized and relaxed.” It was an extraordinary combination to see a people energized by a young revolution, inspired by a charismatic leader, and yet with the calm, the music, the sensuality, the good humor, and the accessibility of Caribbean culture. Gitlin, Tom Hayden, other SDS leaders, and David Dellinger were there analyzing the revolution in between conversations about what to do in Chicago during the Democratic convention coming up in the summer.
Gitlin returned to the United States still full of reservations but impressed enough with his experience that he began to arrange other Cuban trips for SDS members. SDS was growing rapidly on college campuses and by 1968 had nearly one hundred thousand members.
Mark Rudd was in the first group to go on one of Gitlin’s SDS-organized trips to Cuba. They were put up at the Riviera, the not quite high-rise over the footbridge by the bay. But they objected to the luxury and arranged to be moved to student housing in the abandoned mansions of the neighborhood. Everywhere they went in this year of the heroic guerrillero, they saw Che’s portrait—on walls, in stores, in homes. Traveling by bus in the countryside, they looked down into a valley and saw Che’s portrait, several acres large, fashioned in white rock and red earth. Rudd knew the teachings of Che: “The duty of every revolutionary is to make a revolution.” He longed to be a revolutionary, to be “a man like Che.” Soon he would be back on his Ivy League campus. He was eager to get back.
CHAPTER 11
APRIL
MOTHERFUCKERS
NEVER EXPLAIN WHAT YOU ARE DOING. This wastes a good deal of time and rarely gets through. Show them through your action, if they don’t understand it, fuck ’em, maybe you’ll hook them with the next action.
—ABBIE HOFFMAN, Revolution for the Hell of It, 1968
I SENSED IN MARK an embryo of fanaticism that made me feel slightly irrelevant in his presence.” That is what Tom Hayden wrote about meeting Mark Rudd when he was twenty-nine years old and Rudd a twenty-year-old Columbia student.
In 1968 there was an expression, “Don’t trust anyone over thirty.” It was a cliché ironically offered as advice by Charlton Heston to young, rebellious chimpanzees in the 1968 Hollywood hit Planet of the Apes. In another 1968 movie, Wild in the Streets, a dictatorship by young people rounds up everyone over thirty-five and imprisons them in concentration camps, where they are kept helplessly high on LSD. The film was made by the over-thirty crowd, the same ones who insisted that youth trust no one over thirty. Twenty-year-olds never expressed such a ridiculous sentiment. In 1968, Abbie Hoffman turned thirty-two, as did Black Panther