Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [147]
Of course all of us were caught up in these great global struggles. The Third World had indeed brought the hope of revolution back to the First in the 1960s. The two great international inspirations were Cuba and Vietnam, triumphs not only of revolution, but of Davids against Goliaths, of the weak against the all-powerful. ‘The guerrilla’ – an emblematic word of the era – became the quintessential key to changing the world. Fidel Castro’s revolutionaries, recognizable by their youth, long hair, beards and rhetoric as heirs of 1848 – think of the famous image of Che Guevara – could almost have been designed to be world symbols of a new age of political romantics. It is difficult to recall, and to understand even now, the almost immediate global repercussions of what in January 1959 was after all a not unusual event in the history of one Latin American island of modest size. Small, scrawny Vietnamese on jungle trails and in paddy-fields checkmated the giant destructive force of the USA. From the moment in 1965 that President Johnson sent in his troops, even middle-aged non-utopians such as myself had not the slightest doubt about who would win. More than anything else in the 1960s, it was the grandeur, heroism and tragedy of the Vietnamese struggle which moved and mobilized the English-speaking left and linked both its generations and almost all its usually feuding sects. I met contemporaries and pupils in Grosvenor Square, demonstrating in front of the American Embassy. I went on marches with Marlene and our small children, chanting ‘Ho-Ho-Ho-Chi Minh’, like the rest. I was a declared sceptic about the Guevarist guerrilla strategy, which in any case proved uniformly disastrous (see chapter 21), but Vietnam remains engraved on both our hearts. Even at the very end of the century, the emotion was still there, and palpable in Hanoi, as Marlene and I watched a party of tiny, hard-bitten elderly men in formal suits, wearing their campaign medals, make their way under the trees to visit Ho Chi Minh’s home. They had fought for us, instead of us.
Apart from sharing in the campaigning for it, I had no particular connection with Vietnam during the war, nor did I visit it until a quarter of a century after victory, and then purely on holiday. On the other hand, like so many leftwingers who were inspired by the Cuban revolution, I visited Cuba several times in the 1960s, and thus, incidentally, saw a good cross-section of the world’s itinerant left. My first trip there was in 1960, the irresistible honeymoon period of the young revolution. I found myself coinciding and joining forces with two economist friends who represented that rare phenomenon, the old US Marxist left identified neither with the CP nor with its opponents: the tall Paul Sweezy, all slow-speaking New England Yankee, and Paul Baran. Since their embattled little journal, the Monthly Review, had kept the red flag flying in Cold War USA, they were welcomed by Castro and the ex-guerrillas of the Sierra Maestra. My own contacts came rather through a formidable CP leader with an exceptional gift for political adaptation, Carlos Rafael Rodriguez, whose insistence on making common cause with Fidel while he was in the Sierra Maestra paid off after the victory. Havana was still sufficiently close to the free-swinging paradise for shady tourists of the musical Guys and Dolls to radiate rumba and cultural tolerance, and the island looked