Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [149]
I do not know what Fidel made of this strange influx of Europeans. He was presumably more at ease with Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, a moustached outdoor-looking figure recently expelled from both Bolivia and for good measure Peru, who was telling the Cubans ‘in a Spanish comprehensible only to an Italian’ that ‘his function as a European publisher was at an end, and he now saw himself wholly as an anti-imperialist combatant’.11 Fortunately the publishing house he had founded in 1955, equally distinguished in politics and literature, first to publish both Boris Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago and Lampedusa’s The Leopard, still flourishes. I cannot remember whether I met him on that occasion, though I had known this intense young multi-millionaire slightly since the early 1950s when he was an impassioned Communist Party activist and financier of CP culture. I remember a summery conversation with him in his office in Milan in the nerve-racking period of the international communist crisis of 1956–7, about where the movement could or should go, between phone calls arranging a weekend with a girl in some castle on the Adriatic coast. It must have been just when he was leaving the Party. His dissidence was to take him into the underworld of armed revolutionary struggle. As a teenager he had fought with the communist partisans for revolution, against fascism and against all his family and the super-rich Milan bourgeoisie stood for. The spirit of Che Guevara revived these memories. Soon after 1968 he went underground – or as far underground as a rich and socially prominent international headline-maker can go – and was killed in 1972, in obscure circumstances while attempting to blow up a high-tension pylon in Segregate, in the Milan hinterland.
Whether Fidel himself knew the charming young French-Canadian intellectuals who failed to convince me that their plan to create a new Sierra Maestra in the forests of Quebec would advance the cause of world revolution, I do not know. I suspect that someone in Cuba did. I tried to phone the most intelligent and agreeable of them repeatedly a couple of years later when I found myself in Montreal. There was no answer. Such was my lack of rapport with the spirit of the times that it only struck me much later that he must have been one of the terrorists of the nationalist Front de la Liberation du Québec who kidnapped the British Trade Commissioner and strangled a Quebec minister, perhaps one of those allowed a safe exit to Cuba in return for the British diplomat. But those were the days when even the ultras of ethnolinguistic nationalism, such as the early Basque ETA, presented themselves in the garb of international revolution.
II
For a moment in the late 1960s the young, or at least the children of the old middle classes and the new masses rising to middle-class status through the explosion in higher education, felt they were living the revolution, whether by a simple collective private exit from the world of power, parents and past or by the constant, accumulating, almost orgasmic excitement of political or apparently political action, or gestures that took the place of action. The mood of the political young during ‘that hectic spring and summer’ of 1968 was recognizably revolutionary, but incomprehensible to old lefties of my generation, and not only because the situation was plainly not revolutionary in any realistic sense. Let me quote Sheila Rowbotham, who has described it with wonderful perception:
Personal feelings removed themselves from the foreground. My sexual encounters were snatched in between meetings and somehow the customary emotions didn