C. Wright Mills and the Cuban Revolution: An Exercise in the Art of Sociological Imagination

By A. Javier Treviño

In C. Wright Mills and the Cuban Revolution, A. Javier Trevino reconsiders the opinions, perspectives, and insights of the Cubans that Mills interviewed during his visit to the island in 1960. On returning to the United States, the esteemed and controversial sociologist wrote a small paperback on much of what he had heard and seen, which he published as Listen, Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba. Those interviews--now transcribed and translated--are interwoven here with extensive annotations to explain and contextualize their content. Readers will be able to "hear" Mills as an expert interviewer and ascertain how he used what he learned from his informants. Trevino also recounts the experiences of four central figures whose lives became inextricably intertwined during that fateful summer of 1960: C. Wright Mills, Fidel Castro, Juan Arcocha, and Jean-Paul Sartre. The singular event that compelled their biographies to intersect at a decisive moment in the history of Cold War geopolitics--with its attendant animosities and intrigues--was the Cuban Revolution.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Apr 5, 2017
• ISBN: 9781469633114

Book preview

C. Wright Mills and the Cuban Revolution

ENVISIONING CUBA

Louis A. Pérez Jr., editor

Envisioning Cuba publishes outstanding, innovative works in Cuban studies, drawn from diverse subjects and disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, from the colonial period through the post–Cold War era. Featuring innovative scholarship engaged with theoretical approaches and interpretive frameworks informed by social, cultural, and intellectual perspectives, the series highlights the exploration of historical and cultural circumstances and conditions related to the development of Cuban self-definition and national identity.

C. Wright Mills and the Cuban Revolution

An Exercise in the Art of Sociological Imagination

A. Javier Treviño

The University of North Carolina Press   CHAPEL HILL

© 2017 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Set in Espinosa Nova by Westchester Publishing Services

Manufactured in the United States of America

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Treviño, A. Javier, 1958– author.

Title: C. Wright Mills and the Cuban Revolution : an exercise in the art of sociological imagination / A. Javier Treviño.

Other titles: Envisioning Cuba.

Description: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, [2017] | Series: Envisioning Cuba | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016047327 | ISBN 9781469633091 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469633107 (pbk : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469633114 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Mills, C. Wright (Charles Wright), 1916–1962. Listen, Yankee. | Mills, C. Wright (Charles Wright), 1916–1962. | Cuba—History—Revolution, 1959—Interviews. | Sociologists—United States—History—20th century.

Classification: LCC HN203.5 .T74 2017 | DDC 306.097291—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016047327

Cover illustrations: Photographs by C. Wright Mills. © 2017 Nikolas Mills. All rights reserved.

Contents

Chronology of Events

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE

The Cuban Summer of C. Wright Mills

CHAPTER TWO

Insurrection, Revolution, Invasion

CHAPTER THREE

Mills on Individuals, Intellectuals, and Interviewing

CHAPTER FOUR

Recorded Interviews with Cuban Officials

CHAPTER FIVE

Recorded Interviews with Cuban Citizens

CHAPTER SIX

Fellow-Traveling with Fidel

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Book That Sold Half a Million Copies

CHAPTER EIGHT

Confronting the Enemy

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Appendix 1

Appendix 2

A Note on the Interviews

Biographical Notes

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Chronology of Events

1948

Publication of The New Men of Power: America’s Labor Leaders

1950

Publication of Puerto Rican Journey: New York’s Newest Migrants by Mills, Clarence Senior, and Rose Kohn Goldsen

September 1951

Publication of White Collar: The American Middle Classes

March 9, 1952

Fulgencio Batista seizes power in Cuba

July 26, 1953

Students led by Fidel Castro attack the Moncada barracks in Santiago de Cuba in an attempt to spark a revolt against the Batista dictatorship

September 1953

Publication of Character and Social Structure: The Psychology of Social Institutions by Gerth and Mills

October 16, 1953

Fidel Castro makes History Will Absolve Me defense speech. Castro and thirty-one Moncadistas are sentenced to the Presidio Modelo prison on the Isle of Pines.

April 1956

Publication of The Power Elite

December 2, 1956

Fidel Castro, Ernesto Ché Guevara, and eighty other guerrilla fighters disembark from the yacht Granma in Oriente province.

May 19, 1957

Robert Taber’s documentary Rebels of the Sierra Maestra: The Story of Cuba’s Jungle Fighters airs on CBS

1958

Publication of The Causes of World War Three

1959

Publication of The Sociological Imagination

January 1, 1959

Batista flees Cuba, and the 26th of July Movement, led by Fidel Castro, assumes power

May 17, 1959

The Revolutionary government implements the Agrarian Reform Law limiting the size of farms to 3,333 acres and real estate to 1,000 acres

January 1960

Robert Taber and Alan Sager found the Fair Play for Cuba Committee

January–February 1960

Planes from Florida engage in bombing and sabotage missions to Cuba

January–March 1960

Mills teaches a seminar on Marxism at the National University of Mexico

February 4–13, 1960

Soviet Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan visits Cuba to negotiate economic and trade agreements with Castro

February 22–March 20, 1960

Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir visit Cuba

March 4, 1960

French munitions freighter La Coubre explodes while being unloaded in Havana harbor

March 17, 1960

Eisenhower approves plan for the invasion of Cuba by exiles

April 20–May 20, 1960

Mills travels to the Soviet Union for the first time

July 9, 1960

Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev announces that the Soviet Union will provide Cuba with military aid in case of U.S. attack

Summer 1960

Mills meets with Ian Ballantine about publishing Listen, Yankee

August 8–24, 1960

Mills visits Cuba and interviews Cuban revolutionaries

September 9, 1960

Confidential informant T1 tells the FBI that Mills had been to Cuba and conducted interviews with Cuban officials

September 1960

Castro addresses the UN General Assembly. Stays at Theresa Hotel in Harlem and meets with Mills and others at a reception at the hotel.

October 19, 1960

The United States imposes an embargo on exports to Cuba (except for food and medicine)

October 26, 1960

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover reviews manuscript of Listen, Yankee

November 1960

Publication of Listen, Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba. John F. Kennedy is elected president. Mills delivers talk, How to Improve Relations with Cuba and South America, to an audience of Americans for Democratic Action in New York City.

December 1960

Excerpts from Listen, Yankee appear in Harper’s magazine. Mills suffers a major heart attack. The New York FBI office begins a discreet preliminary investigation of Mills.

January 1961

Lawsuit against Mills and Ballantine Books, publisher of Listen, Yankee, is filed. The Eisenhower administration severs all diplomatic relations with Cuba and bans travel to the island. Cuban government launches Literacy Campaign.

April 17, 1961

Invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs

April 24, 1961

Mills and family leave for Europe and the Soviet Union

April 27, 1961

First and second editions of the Spanish translation of Listen, Yankee—Escucha, yanqui—are issued in Mexico by the publishing house Fondo de Cultura Económica

June 1961

Mills meets with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in Paris

July 1961

Publication of the third edition of Escucha, yanqui with the update, Escucha otra vez, yanqui

December 2, 1961

Castro declares, I am a Marxist-Leninist

Late March / early April 1962

Publication of The Marxists

January 27, 1962

Mills and family return to the United States

March 20, 1962

Mills dies of heart failure

April 16, 1962

The New York FBI office submits its closing report on Mills

December 17, 2014

President Barack Obama announces the restoration of full diplomatic relations with Cuba, after fifty-five years of antagonism

C. Wright Mills and the Cuban Revolution

Introduction

The North American sociologist C. Wright Mills traveled to Cuba, once, to experience firsthand that island’s transition to a new sovereign state, some eighteen months after the triumph of its Revolution. Upon returning to the United States, Mills wrote a small paperback on much of what he had heard and seen, which he titled Listen, Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba.¹ As he explains in the opening sentence, This book reflects the mood as well as the contents of discussions and interviews with rebel soldiers and intellectuals, officials, journalists and professors in Cuba, during August, 1960.

On first reading Listen, Yankee as a graduate student and shortly before undertaking my first trip to Cuba in 1987 I wondered if I would be seeing some of the same places that Mills had visited on his trek through the island over a quarter century before. There were those out-of-the-way cities like Manzanillo and Santiago de Cuba, but also the more well-known locations of Havana and the Sierra Maestra, and the exotically named Isle of Pines. I knew from the book’s foreword—the Note to the Reader, I—that Mills had spoken with many Cubans close to events. This included discussions with most of the leaders of the Revolutionary government like Fidel Castro and Ernesto Ché Guevara. I later learned that he had gone there with a wire recorder in hand and speculated on what those interviews had revealed to him. Who exactly were the Cubans close to events with whom he spoke, other than disembodied names that he lists in the note thanking them for their generosity, patience, and time? What in particular did they tell him about their lives—their moods and wishes, their aspirations and discontents? And what about the Revolution—an event that was still very much in the making during Mills’s sojourn to the Caribbean island?

Then there was the enigmatic best-selling paperback itself—presented from the perspective of the Cuban revolutionary—that Mills wrote within a matter of weeks. Was Listen, Yankee a work in sociology? It certainly didn’t read like his previous analytical studies, White Collar and The Power Elite. Was it a polemical academic treatise like his famous volume The Sociological Imagination? Perhaps it was a manifesto of sorts, or a piece of journalism (in the pejorative sense of the term), or a political pamphlet as he liked to call it, in the tradition of The Causes of World War Three, which Mills had published a couple of years before and for which he was judged by some to be a touche-à-tout. And that audacious title; it seemed to intentionally mock North American—Yankee—readers, demanding their attention with the imperative, Listen!

Many years passed, during which time I reread Listen, Yankee in preparation for a book I was writing on Mills’s social thought. Then one pleasant Sunday afternoon in 2014, as my wife and I, over coffee and cookies with Kathryn—Mills’s younger daughter—and her husband, poured over photographs that Kathryn had taken on her recent visit to Cuba, I wondered aloud about those long-ago interviews and their recordings. A week or so later I was delighted to receive in the mail CD copies of the original audiotapes. (Later, Kathryn provided several sheets of contact strip proofs of photographs taken by Mills in Cuba, which supplied an additional wealth of information.) If there are other audio recordings of their kind, I am not aware of them. I here make them available—transcribed and translated—for the first time, with extensive annotations to explain and contextualize their content.

It is impossible to say exactly how many people Mills spoke with during the course of his two-week research expedition in Cuba. He audiotaped at least eight interviews. Though Mills spoke with many people on the island, and took copious notes on what they said, he did not record them all. This is likely the case with the highest-ranking Cuban officials. For example, Saul Landau points out that as Mills was leaving to interview Ché Guevara he took with him a notebook and a couple of cameras, but Landau does not mention the wire recorder.²

Mills interviewed and recorded people from different walks of life and social statuses, those who worked for the Revolutionary government and those who did not, the educated and the uneducated, six men and three women.

One purpose of this book is to present the opinions, perspectives, and comments of the Cubans who spoke with Mills in the summer of 1960. As such it is also important to hear Mills as an expert interviewer and ascertain how he used what he learned from his informants to write Listen, Yankee. Indeed, the interviews themselves are a study in methodology that give a glimpse into Mills’s own techniques (conscious or otherwise) of investigation: whom he interviewed, which lines of inquiry he pursued, how he managed and timed the interviews, and how he interacted with the respondents.

I have organized the book as follows. The first three chapters provide the historical and theoretical background in which to situate all of the aforementioned. Chapter 1 places Mills’s experiences in Cuba in the larger sociohistorical contemporaneous context. It not only depicts the major social and political transformations in the revolutionary process that were transpiring at the time Mills was on the island, it also considers wider global events of that summer, against the backdrop of Cold War tensions, of pertinence to Castro’s Cuba. In addition, it describes the effervescent mood that permeated the island during his visit.

Chapter 2 furnishes a sociohistorical account of those main events and turning points of the armed struggle against the tyranny of Fulgencio Batista, beginning with Fidel Castro’s first assault on the dictator’s troops in 1953. It also examines how the Revolution was being made at the time that Mills visited Cuba in 1960 as well as how the revolutionary project was threatened by the U.S.-sponsored military invasion at the Bay of Pigs in 1961. Thus, the main period in Cuban history analyzed here is roughly between 1953 and 1961.

Chapter 3 examines the conceptual and empirical methods Mills applied in understanding the Cuban revolutionaries, whose thoughts and sentiments he so eloquently and passionately expressed in Listen, Yankee. These have to do with his view of individuals as seekers of freedom, of intellectuals as agents of social change, and of interviewing as a way of discerning people’s character structure—their symbols, their self-images, their personalities.

Chapters 4 and 5, where those particular Cuban testimonies are presented, form the book’s core. They are intended to show that the Cubans Mills spoke with, and whom he presents in Listen, Yankee in composite portrait, are not anonymous, disembodied revolutionaries, but real people with particular hopes, dreams, and fears. In all cases I have reproduced the interviews either in full, or nearly in full, for two main reasons. First, they constitute the primary data on which Mills relied to compose the unique narrative—the voice of the Cuban revolutionary—which he used to great effect. Indeed, in the notes and acknowledgments to Listen, Yankee Mills makes it clear that while he relied on various materials to write the book—memoranda and statistical collections compiled from various Cuban sources, scholarly articles and books on Latin America, books on the Cuban Revolution, and historical accounts of U.S.–Cuban relations—my fundamental sources, however, are my own interviews and observations in Cuba. Additionally, since the voice of the Cuban revolutionary is an ideal type of sorts—and many passages in Listen, Yankee are, in fact, composite interviews—it is important to know what exactly Mills’s respondents said to him. All of his interviewees’ responses form a conglomerate, and Mills (with only one brief exception) does not quote them in the book. He explains in the foreword that, having been given the privilege of seeing whatever I asked to see and candid answers to all the questions I asked, I do not feel direct quotation is permissible.³ Thus, identifying the interviewees and presenting their specific words, the tone and quality of their arguments, addresses the question of who said what and how.

Similarly, Chapter 6 consists of two transcriptions of recordings that Mills made detailing his experiences and conversations with Fidel Castro. These are important not only because they offer a firsthand account of Mills’s conference with the prime minister, but because they also reveal Mills’s impressions of Castro and the revolution he was leading. Mills, who did not speak Spanish, spent three-and-a-half eighteen-hour days traveling and conversing with Castro and Juan Arcocha, who served as his translator. On at least one occasion Mills took meticulous notes of such a conversation, but did not record it; later that day he made an audio recording of those notes as he dictated them onto the recorder. I have transcribed these verbatim in Chapter 6. In addition, in that same chapter is another recording that Mills made of interactions Castro had with military men on the Isle of Pines.

Because this book is also very much a book about a book, the last two chapters tell the story of Listen, Yankee—its contents, but also its production and reception. Chapter 7 examines how the information conveyed and topics covered in the interviews led Mills to construct Listen, Yankee’s full-throated message of revolutionary cry. As a technical extension of this, and as a way of verifying the authenticity of the message Mills articulates in Listen, Yankee, in Appendix 1 selected passages from the interviews are compared with parallel passages from Listen, Yankee. Also included in Chapter 7 is a transcription of a recording Mills made of a meeting he had with the publisher, Ian Ballantine, laying out his vision of, and production plans for, Listen, Yankee. Chapter 8, the final chapter, looks at the considerable consequences this mass-market paperback had on Mills, personally and professionally. That chapter includes a transcription of a telephone conversation, tape-recorded by Mills, with a mysterious Mr. Hadley, who was likely an FBI agent assigned to investigate Mills and his ties to the Cuban revolutionaries.

Finally, as a kind of subtext, this book also recounts the experiences of four central figures whose lives became inextricably intertwined during that fateful summer of 1960. First and foremost, of course, is C. Wright Mills, the irascible, larger-than-life sociologist from Columbia University, who, until his death in 1962, garnered a surprising notoriety for writing about the early Cuban Revolution. Absolutely central to any account of the Revolution—including this one—is one of the most influential orators and leaders in the Americas, the indefatigable Fidel Castro, who made the Revolution and continued as its active guide until his retirement in 2008. There is also the indispensable and revealing Juan Arcocha, the young Cuban journalist who served as interpreter to both Mills and Castro during their discussions and Mills’s peregrinations through the island and who, in 1971, went into self-imposed exile. But there is another figure—largely in the background, but very pertinent to this record: the French existentialist philosopher and one of the twentieth century’s most emblematic intellectuals, Jean-Paul Sartre. All four of them—Mills, Castro, Arcocha, and Sartre—had different and complicated relationships with each other. But the singular event that compelled their biographies to intersect at a decisive moment in the history of Cold War geopolitics—with its attendant animosities and intrigues—was the Cuban Revolution.

Setting aside the detailed richness of Mills’s Cuba interviews, we may ask: Isn’t it the case that no matter how much notoriety Listen, Yankee garnered at the time of its publication, no matter how much of a bestseller it was and how informative it may have been to the North American public, it nonetheless lacks the conceptual substance and sociological sophistication of Mills’s earlier works and holds, in fact, only historical interest today?⁴ This is indeed the case, and so a third aim of this book is to tell the story behind the story; that is, to hear the voices and know the inner lives of the human variety that contributed to the making and the attempted unmaking of Listen, Yankee. These include the voices and inner lives of the Cuban revolutionaries, to be sure, but also of the critics, reviewers, publishers, politicians, federal agents, exiles, defectors, intellectuals, journalists, novelists, friends and foes, and of course, Mills himself.⁵ This then is a study in historical sociology, but one that quite consciously considers biography in the context of social structure. Put another way, the topic of C. Wright Mills and the Cuban Revolution provides the opportunity for engaging in an exercise in the art of sociological imagination.

CHAPTER ONE

The Cuban Summer of C. Wright Mills

On encountering the numerous writings and communications by C. Wright Mills on the Cuban Revolution, the unwary reader could be forgiven for thinking that Mills had spent many long years immersed in its study. Quite the contrary; from the time Cuba first came to Mills’s political awareness—when he began clipping newspaper articles about the situation on the island—until his death—by which time he had published Listen, Yankee and delivered many talks on the subject—was only a two-year period. Shortly after the victory of the Revolution, Mills had frequently been questioned in Latin America about his and his country’s stand on the new government of Fidel Castro: Until the summer of 1960, I had never been in Cuba, or even thought about it much. In fact, the previous fall, when I was in Brazil, and in the spring of 1960, when I was in Mexico for several months, I was embarrassed not to have any firm attitude towards the Cuban revolution. For in both Rio de Janeiro and Mexico City, Cuba was of course a major topic of discussion. But I did not know what was happening there, much less what I might think about it, and I was then busy with other studies.¹

The impassioned interest of Latin American intellectuals and journalists on the subject, which seemed fundamental in Latin American life, kindled Mills’s desire to go to the Caribbean island and write about its revolution in the making. Indeed, of the three Western revolutions of the twentieth century, the Mexican (1910), the Russian (1917), and the Cuban (1959), only the latter was temporally accessible to Mills. And while Mills was not a political journalist in the manner of John Reed, he nonetheless wanted to report on—wanted to understand—the social forces that had produced the Cuban Revolution, and that were still in operation. And so after intensive preparation, he journeyed to the Caribbean that summer of 1960 to be an authentic witness to the incipient Cuban experiment.

Preparing for Cuba

Prior to his Cuban sojourn, Mills’s two principal Latin American concerns had been Mexico, where he had spent several months in early 1960 teaching a seminar in Marxism at the National University of Mexico, and before that, Puerto Rico, where he had visited in the late 1940s when researching his study on Puerto Rican migrants.² Indeed, according to historian Rafael Rojas, the central referent of Spanish and U.S. colonialism in Listen, Yankee had its origins, in large part, in the Puerto Rican project.³ But, in truth, Mills’s first foray into the Latino/Latin American cultural scene was not with Puerto Ricans but with Mexican Americans. Mills, whose parents had lived in South Texas during the 1930s, believed he had a grasp on the character structure of Mexican American youth and based this understanding on three or four years of experience he had with the nightlife of Mexican Americans in San Antonio, Texas.⁴

In any event, Mills now read deliberately all he could on one small island in Latin America—Cuba—and began to discover that something very interesting was happening there. Because, at the time, there were only a few books he could consult for information on the Cuban revolutionary project and to guide his investigations, it is worth briefly considering the three volumes that Mills read in preparation for his trip.

The first of these, Castro, Cuba, and Justice, by the renowned Chicago Sun-Times correspondent Ray Brennan, who devoted four months to researching the book, is a journalistic account sympathetic to the 26th of July Movement’s insurgence against Batista. Brennan spent many weeks with Castro in Havana, in Santiago, in the Sierra Maestra, and later in New York. Highly adulatory of the rebel leader, Brennan praises his courage, deep loyalty to friends, almost limitless endurance of hardships and sacrifices, his love of freedom, and his revolutionary spirit. Written somewhat like a factual novel, with liberal use of contemporaneous American colloquialisms, Brennan creates dialogue that very likely happened, but probably not in the exact words in which he presents it. The book gives highly readable accounts of various participants in the armed struggle—both Fidelistas and Batistianos—with whom Brennan spoke. A graphic, lurid chapter on the various tortures and atrocities perpetrated by the Batista regime against insurgents and ordinary citizens was likely included to justify the relentless firing-squad shootings of Batista war criminals that followed the victory of the Revolution and to underscore the notion of justice in the book’s title—a notion that was quickly beginning to take on an ominous overtone to many North Americans as the summary trials and mass executions continued. Perhaps of most help to Mills were those questions of immediate relevance that Brennan posed about the bourgeoning revolution: What kind of man is Castro, really? Is there a danger of his becoming another Batista? How much communistic influence, if any, is he up against? How much did the Communists contribute to winning the war? What is going to happen to American business interests in Cuba? Will it ever be possible to build a stable Cuban economy on the foundation of ruination left by the Batista administration?

Another book that Mills consulted was Fidel Castro: Rebel-Liberator or Dictator? Written by Latin America correspondent Jules Dubois, who covered the civil war for the Chicago Tribune, it chronicles the insurrection and revolutionary events on the Cuban island up to March 1959. Perhaps more than any other journalist writing about the Revolution, Dubois (who may have been an asset for the Central Intelligence Agency) had the most impeccable credentials, coupled with a fearlessness that allowed him access to central actors and events denied other correspondents. For example, in 1957 he interviewed, in their hideouts, first, Armando Hart, the most hunted urban guerrilla in Havana at the time, and later, Vilma Espín, organizer of the women’s underground resistance movement. Dubois had spoken with many of the top guerrilla fighters, including several times with Raúl Castro, and was the reporter to be granted the first exclusive postvictory interview with Fidel Castro. He also interviewed Fulgencio Batista, was eyewitness to many of the historical events in the making of the Revolution, and was presumably well acquainted with Ché Guevara’s father in Argentina. Dubois’s book, which may be regarded as a sort of biography of Fidel Castro, reads much like a war correspondent’s dispatches from the front. It was assembled fast, in twenty days, and published fast, a few days thereafter. Though the book was largely sympathetic to Castro and the early Revolution, shortly after its publication Dubois became fiercely anti-Castro, and by November 1960 he was writing editorials highly disparaging of Mills and Listen, Yankee.

But the volume that Mills judged to the best of the lot, and that provided him with the most recent account of events (it reports on developments up to May 1960), was Leo Huberman and Paul M. Sweezy’s Cuba: The Anatomy of a Revolution. In a preliminary draft of Listen, Yankee Mills wrote of the Huberman and Sweezy work: It is a good book, and I have drawn upon it for details as well as for more general viewpoints.⁵

Contrary to Brennan and Dubois—who as journalists embedded with the insurrectionists and rebels reported on the actions of individuals—Huberman and Sweezy, as economic analysts, scrutinized more closely the nascent revolutionary society. By further contrast, Mills, as sociologist, considered both the character structure (the conduct patterns, self-images, and aspirations) of the individuals with whom he had discussions, as well as the social structure (the norms, values, and institutions) of the new Cuban society.

In any event, Huberman and Sweezy, coeditors of the important socialist magazine Monthly Review, which they cofounded in 1949, were both acclaimed socialists and readily admit that we ourselves, as veterans of the left-wing movement, felt thoroughly at home in the intellectual and moral atmosphere of the Cuban Revolution, much more so than we do in that of the ‘affluent society.’ ⁶ Moreover, they characterize the new regime as socialist and speculate that it would remain so, given the government’s increasing nationalization of various industries.

Of particular relevance to Mills’s pre-arrival preparation is that Huberman and Sweezy raise several questions that he may have been inspired to further pursue with his interviewees: Are the Communists working themselves into a position from which they can take over control of the revolutionary regime? As the momentum of the Revolution dies down, will there be a need for a cohesive political apparatus as an intermediary between leadership and masses? Will the 26th of July Movement become a genuine political party? In addition, the authors also provided an agenda of sorts that could have inspired Mills in his research: interviewing top government officials such as Armando Hart, Enrique Oltuski, and Ché Guevara, and visiting the Camilo Cienfuegos School City.

Huberman and Sweezy had previously met the Cuban Ambassador to the UN, Raúl Roa Kourí, at the Monthly Review bookshop in New York City. Impressed by their sincere interest in the Revolution’s progress, Roa Kourí urged Ché Guevara to invite the economists to Cuba.⁷ The pair spent several weeks on the island during the spring of 1960 researching their book. Later, in the autumn, they returned to the Caribbean nation for several weeks in order to prepare a second edition that included an updated epilogue. Thus, they were in Cuba just shortly before and then shortly after Mills’s arrival in the summer. They were compelled to return to the island, given that the stages and phases of the revolutionary process were