1968 - Mark Kurlansky [99]
The trip to Cuba became a kind of hajj, an obligatory journey that all leftists had to make at least once in their life. Writers went to discuss culture, activists to see the revolution, youth to cut cane and “do their share.”
One of the less successful visits was by Allen Ginsberg, though even he was favorably impressed with what he found. He wrote of his arrival in early 1965, “Marxist Historical Revolutionary/futility with Wagnerian overtones/lifted my heart.” He was put up, as all the American guests were in those days, at the Havana Riviera, which had a state-of-the-architecture fifties facade. A little footbridge crossed a pond to enter the not very high high-rise hotel with vistas of Havana harbor over the curved shoreline drive, the Malecón, where wild waves broke away and splashed over the wall onto the pavement. From his luxury room he thought, as many had before, that “being treated as a guest is a subtle form of brainwashing.” His first night there, he met three young gay poets who told him of police persecution of homosexuals, beats, and bearded longhairs—unless, of course, they were bearded Fidelistas. They asked Ginsberg to complain to the government, which he did, only to be reassured by officials that it was an incident from the past. Ginsberg, having been persecuted by numerous secret police, including the FBI, remained skeptical.
He quickly developed a following among young poets, who would show up at his readings and be prevented from entering until Ginsberg insisted. Interviewed by a Cuban reporter, he was asked what he would say to Castro if they could meet. Ginsberg had three points: He would ask him about the police persecution of homosexuals, then he would ask him why marijuana was not legal in Cuba, and last he would propose that opponents of the regime, rather than being executed, be fed hallucinogenic mushrooms and then be given jobs operating the elevators at the Havana Riviera.
“I just shot my mouth off,” the poet later said. “I just continued talking there as I would here in terms of being anti-authoritarian. But my basic feeling there was sympathetic to the revolution.”
The revolution quickly tired of his mouth. Haydée Santamaría told him that he could discuss drugs and homosexuality with high officials, but they could not have him spreading these ideas to the general population. “We have work to do and cannot afford these extra luxuries that impede the senses,” she said of his ideas about free drugs. Like other visitors, Ginsberg remained impressed with the Cuban experiment in building a new society. But the Cubans were not impressed with Ginsberg. The knock on the door finally came at 8:00 A.M. on a morning after he had been out at parties most of the night. A government official with three uniformed guards told him to pack and put him on the next outbound plane, which happened to be going to Czechoslovakia, another country from which he would soon be expelled.
The early months of 1968 were a revolutionary high point for Cuba. The trials of pro-Soviet officials at the beginning of the year appeared to represent a distancing from the Soviet Union, though it was not to last long. Castro seemed more interested in China than in Russia, which, from the point of view of the New Left, was the correct choice.
In 1968 China was in the middle of a wrenching process known officially as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. It had been launched by Communist Party chairman Mao Zedong in 1966 to force out elements that he felt were undermining both his authority and the ideology of the revolution. It quickly turned into a power struggle between the Party chairman and the more moderate leaders in government. China too had its 1968 generation, the first Chinese born and raised in the revolution, and as in the rest of the world, they leaned to