Cuba: "Listen Yankee!"-a Review
Friedenberg, Daniel M.
In 1956, Juan Jose Arevalo, revolutionary and President of Guatemala from 1945-1950, published a book with the title Fable of the Shark and the Sardines. Into the book, written after the...
...And the shark had three faces, Wall Street, the Department of State and the Pentagon, "three distinct aspects and one true personality...
...Professor Mills—in his truths and distortions, possibly even most in the gross distortions—reflects the view of Latin American intelligentsia today, a group twisted by the economic facts of a rapidly rising population whose standard of living is a victim of plummeting prices for raw materials and rising prices for industrial goods...
...The reviewer happened to spend several days in Portugal with the head of the department of Philosophy of the oldest university in South America...
...And the more vigorously Fidel asserted the right of Cubans to control the property and destiny of Cuba, the more rigid became the reaction of America toward the Revolution: until the revolutionaries realized that Juan Jose Arevalo had been right and that Wall Street, the Department of State and the Pentagon were in reality three aspects of the same personality...
...We are furthermore told by C. Wright Mills, speaking in his own voice this time: "Any party that campaigned in Cuba today against the revolution and against the present government's management of it would probably be set upon by the majority of the people of Cuba...
...We are told that the Communists are few and of no importance, that Cuba's way is unique and a new path for the world...
...For he discovered that the Cuban land and the Cuban sugar mills were owned to the large extent by Americans who had no intention of relinquishing their absentee control...
...But the reviewer summarizes the meaning, not the story...
...Fidel Castro, our revolutionary relates, was a student from a middleclass family whose aim was to establish a progressive social democracy...
...he is, in the old phrase, a camera taking pictures of the Cuban revolutionary mind...
...Know thyself" is incomplete doctrine in a world creaking with hydrogen bombs...
...What he said—and undoubtedly tells his worshipping students—was what C. Wright Mills tries to portray...
...The reviewer has three pages of notes enumerating these...
...and the Chinese in Latin America, they don't fool around at all with the Communist parties here...
...The thesis was simple...
...Kierkegaard at one point maintained that the only Christians were the disciples who knew Christ and who had shared in the Moment...
...Mexico, Peru, Venezuela: it is not peasant agitation nor union strife that screams the phrases of Castro so much as the middle-clays university student...
...If we abandon our hope, namely that economic advance can come with some degree of unhindered personal liberty, the new tyranny will become indeed a New Order...
...but people in a time of crisis turned to it and believed to the extent that even its seeming absurdities became strength—credo quia absurdum...
...A rational and factual criticism would have revealed its phantasy nature...
...To do this it was necessary to institute certain important and overdue reforms, particularly those relating to the inequitable land ownership and the milling control of sugar...
...Cuban history, we are told, is a series of miseries perpetrated on the Cuban people by the United States which, failing in its attempt to annex the island physically, used the guise of the Cuban war of independence against Spain to annex the island politically and economically...
...It was a clear description of what had happened in Guatemala...
...Guatemala faded into history and Cuba erupted...
...THE BASIC QUESTION, consequently, is not whether Listen, Yankee is wrong or right, but whether it represents the future and what can still be done to influence that future...
...To sum up the arguments presented by C. Wright Mills in more common terms, the United States forced Castro into his present position and made him choose Russia in order to survive...
...But the argument continues, the brutality and venality of Batista was too great even for the most resigned peons, and a revolution led by Fidel Castro, whose backing was a coalition of intellectuals and the landless farmers, succeeded in overthrowing the dictator...
...But some attempt should be made to fit the argument to frame...
...It tied into one neat package the filthiest aspects of American imperialist and monopolist practice, always seen more clearly from the outside by the injured party...
...A Fidel Castro or a Sekou Tour@, the contemporary disciples, are more revolutionary, more left, put the old pure wine in new bottles—and scorn the peace-seeking Communist leaders who have replaced the revolutionary spirit with the machine-formachine's sake...
...The fact that the mirror is in a crazy house, sometimes making the squat tall and the fat lean, even has oblique advantages...
...But Fidel, unlike the pusillanimous politicians and the cowards of other Latin American countries, decided he would not be eaten by the shark, that one sardine would stand up and fight even to the bitter end...
...As the old oligarchic order, frenzied by discontent with the status quo, tries to adjust its rule through adopting the old military control to a newer control of a liberal democracy beholden to the military for survival, the intellectuals are pushed to more appealing and ever more radical "solutions...
...And he reasoned that between two sharks, as in between the tall trees of the forest grow flowers, a sardine could still swim and make its own life...
...There is a new element in Communist thinking which approaches this...
...And it presented a common enemy to unite against...
...Actually, as a Fable, it is more subtle than this...
...This is partly but not wholly a reflection of the Moscow-Peking rift...
...Salvador de Madariaga, the leading Spanish liberal thinker and a man of encyclopedic knowledge, recently stated that the student body of Latin America was Communizoid in drive...
...We are informed—by simple fiat— that Cuba already has "well in hand" her immediate objectives: to increase and diversify production and consumption...
...The mind may be so distorted that it can no longer see reality, as is the contention of the reviewer...
...Mao Tse-tung is a "true" Communist because he attended the Moment, he is the contemporary disciple...
...it is also necessary to know thyself as others see thee...
...By the form used, a series of letters from Cuban revolutionaries, C. Wright Mills cannot even be held personally responsible for errors, since he is merely—though of course fictively —acting as amanuensis for others...
...And, taking the part of charity, this is what I believe Professor Mills may be attempting to state...
...On December 10th, speaking in Moscow, Che Guevara said: "The people of Cuba trust in the strength of progressive humanity, in the strength of the socialist camp led by the U.S.S.R...
...Let us for the sake of generality— which by definition means more right than wrong—agree with Professor Mills...
...INr HIS BOOK, C. Wright Mills does not pretend to give "an objective appraisal of the Cuban revolution...
...Statistics are always treacherous, but the facts available indicate that twice as many pesos are circulating on the island as last year, in competition for fewer goods—and the effect of the sugar embargo has barely been felt...
...Because he knew there was a new structure in the world picture: in sum, another shark, though a more benevolent one...
...The United States was a Shark and all the Latin American countries were Sardines...
...Into the book, written after the subversion of the left-wing government of Guatemala by American-armed invaders, was poured all the bile and frustration of the Guatemalan patriot...
...McGraw-Hill...
...and the converse is more likely when its message inspires hope where hope does not exist among the hungry...
...INASatucx as religion is for many more interesting than politics, the chapter entitled "Communism and Cuba" has a certain originality...
...And what many people might consider mere obscure distinctions, for those of faith weigh most heavily: religions have been torn asunder on matters of less substance...
...And not only the students...
...The familiar landscape of power politics, economic analysis and political necessity dissolves and in its place looms grandiose visions, trumpetings of doom, oracular voices...
...Scion of a distinguished family that was sent to Peru by the Hapsburg kings as administrators in the 16th century, this Professor had just returned from a free junket through China and Russia...
...So I think it must be faced up to: a real election in Cuba today is an impossible and meaningless idea"—this from a man who avows never having taken an interest in Cuba before, does not speak Spanish, and spent one month there entirely in the company of the highest officials of the regime...
...Khrushchev merely inherited the agony and the ecstasy and the message...
...Here it was that Fidel Castro, who commanded the respect and assent of the overwhelming mass of Cubans, met the factor which altered his whole political attitude...
...They are too much like some 'Society of Friends of the Soviet Union,' and they won't even go into 'the Chinese question' when you raise it...
...and to industrialize the island at the same time as improving the standard of living...
...We are now travelling with Simone de Beauvoir through China and can readily interchange books without damage to the thesis...
...The sardines existed for the pleasure of being eaten by the shark...
...They go directly to the left-wing element...
...For C. Wright Mills,** taking his keynote from Juan Jose Arevalo, has reasserted the doctrine of the Shark and the Sardines, softened at certain points too obnoxious for the American amour pro pre but retaining its basic theme...
...And now the chickens have come home to roost...
...Every leader who bears witness to the Moment is more entitled to be a real Communist than the second-hand disciples, the bureaucrats...
...Those Communists are old fashioned...
...obliged to look at ourselves as others see us...
...Since the kind of revolts they desire are no longer boxed in by a modern cordon sanitaire (imagine what China could do today with a Carlos Prestes in Brazil...
...It had certain magnificent advantages...
...And he continued, Cuba "in her peaceful construction wants to tread the way of the Soviet Union...
...LET US AGREE the argument has great merits though many facts have to have their legs and arms chopped off to accord...
...We get a hint of violent undercurrents in the socalled monolithic Communist world...
...It goes deeper...
...A doctrine is not necessarily unpopular because it is false...
...That this voice and new faith are not isolated but represent the typical student mind of Latin America outside Catholic education, can be seen by the most superficial scrutiny of the daily news...
...Every one after that merely surmised, read, imitated Christian behavior...
...Since the unique aim of this annexation was to squeeze profits, the country was developed only in relation to the needs of foreign interest and the government was deliberately manipulated to thwart the self-development of the Cuban people...
...states C. Wright Mills through the mouth of his letters...
...it is the voice and the new faith of the underground mind, idealism tied to phantasy, the will exerting itself despite and possibly because of its surface tensions and conflicts with pragmatic reason...
...and that, merely by succeeding to do so the sardine could give courage to other sardines and demonstrate that the life of a sardine has equal grace and perhaps more validity than the life of a shark...
...But at this point a new note jars the discussion, the note of ecstasy in the classic and real sense of a trance supposed to accompany prophetic inspiration...
...In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with Fidel, and the Word was Fidel...
...But for Professor Mills to state, as he does in the Introduction, that this mind has a "reasonable tone" is something else again...
...Since a book review is a small auditorium, it is impossible to go specifically into the many falsities, halftruths and wrong interpretations which are gravely stated as self-evident facts...
...he is a disciple at second hand, an epigone, a Church member rather than a Christian in the terms of Kierkegaard...
...It is this type of underlying appeal that C. Wright Mills projects and we, who do not believe because it is absurd, must take steps to permit a more rational and equally appealing doctrine to take root...
...Other reviews have already pointed them out...
...And not Mao alone...
...to increase and diversify her export markets and sources of supply...
...For the world today is a crazy house and even distortion mirrors are forms of communication...
...The book, which to the knowledge of this reviewer has not yet been translated into English (which is of itself revealing), swept the student body of Latin America by storm...
...The fact that it made general a particular case, that it presented only som° of the facts and many of these wildly distorted, and that it freed Latin Americans from responsibility in their own delinquencies, while objective weaknesses, only made the book more appealing...
...In 1956, Juan Jose Arevalo, revolutionary and President of Guatemala from 1945-1950, published a book with the title Fable of the Shark and the Sardines...
...We are all familiar with the history of a doctrine that swept the Western world two millennia ago because it gave people hope...
...For it openly reflects the stirrings of something still concealed to Western theoreticians: a new feeling that Russian Communism is old hat, dead end, barely radical, and that the Communists following Moscow are not really left...
...Yet it is a mind, and one that reflects attitudes common throughout the world, and it is valid and even scientific for a sociologist to examine its workings...
...We thus must embrace faith at a certain point, having transcended mere politics...
...The mirror is held up and we are ** Listen, Yankee!, by C. Wright Mills...
...He was filled with what he had seen and dismissed all my objections as hypocritical and lacking historical perspective...
...the voice of Mills tells us more than can be attacked on a purely factual level...
Vol. 8 • January 1961 • No. 1
