A Cuba Meeting
P., S.
Not the least of the consequences of fidelismo has been its effect upon a section of American radical youth. At a meeting organized by DISSENT and held in New York City on February 22, an...
...Emotionally committed to the image of Fidel, they will neither reason nor respond to facts...
...Dellinger consistently and emotionally...
...I do want to comment, however, on the astonishing attitude of a fair part of the audience (at least a quarter, my guess would be), particularly when stirred up by Dave Dellinger, editor of Liberation...
...These young people circumvent the need for political analysis of the Castro regime by two entirely contradictory rationalizations: (a) they deny that Castro runs a dictatorship...
...Not the least of the consequences of fidelismo has been its effect upon a section of American radical youth...
...My intention here is not to review the entire meeting (it lasted almost three hours), nor to describe the at-times heated exchange that developed...
...Fall 1961 issue: "New Styles in Fellow...
...sympathy and support to the Cuban people in their efforts to free themselves from all foreign domination and to establish their own form of democracy...
...There are times when, remembering the last few decades, one cannot but feel that history does, alas, repeat itself...
...b) they claim that dictatorial measures are necessary in Cuba because of U. S. pressure...
...While strenuous efforts were made, without success, to obtain as a speaker Waldo Frank (honorary chairman of the Fait Play for Cuba Committee), spokesmen of explicit propaganda groups were not invited...
...One asks, why...
...D? More important and disturbing than the confused apologetics of Dave Dellinger on behalf of what he, a pacifist!, offhandedly admits to be a "totalitarian police state," is the apparent taste of certain young radicals for this kind of "tough" regime...
...By contrast, I have yet to hear of a proCastro meeting (those organized by the Monthly Review group, for example) which gave equal time to opponents or even invited a lone dissenter...
...However, if the "charge" implies a general hostility on the part of DISSENT editors to the Castro regime, then at least I, as organizer of the meeting, acknowledge its accuracy...
...The consensus among DISSENT editors— not of course an "official" line—has often been expressed in the magazine: hostility to any and all attempts by the American government to "solve" the Cuban problem by unilateral action (invasion, bombing, etc...
...The point was to have a discussion on the issues, not a series of speakers...
...After raising the cry of "stacked meeting" and the even more outrageous cry of "counter-revolutionary" against those who oppose the Castro regime, he proceeded to withdraw all this his second time round...
...This section of the audience seemed to consist largely of young people and it supported Mr...
...Suffice it to say that apologists and supporters of the Castro police-state, both avowed and tacit, got in their licks freely and at length...
...Traveling," pgs...
...It is hard not to feel a certain dismay and shock, at this late date, at the ease with which they dismiss democratic and socialist values in the name of tough-mindedness...
...The idea was to have a broad discussion on the nature of fidelismo, emphasizing Cuba itself rather than reiterating an opposition to the American government's actions toward Cuba which all of the participants presumably shared...
...The charge made at the meeting by one of the speakers sympathetic to Fidel Castro that the meeting was "stacked" is both factually absurd and a slur on the chairman of the meeting, Dennis Wrong, who incidentally was not a member of the DISSENT board at the time of the meeting...
...Many of them have decided to close their minds even to the facts presented by such Cuban socialists as those who spoke at the DISSENT meeting and who blasted to the ground the claims of Castro as having carried through great social reforms...
...497-98) by Irving Howe and Lewis Coser...
...Among the speakers were Daniel M. Friedenberg, a DISSENT Contributing Editor, two anti-Castro Cubans belonging to the revolutionary socialist JURE (totally removed from the reactionary exile groups of Miami), Leo Sauvage of Figaro and author of a recent book on Castro, Dave Dellinger of the pacifist magazine Liberation, and Samuel Shapiro, wellknown writer on Latin American affairs...
...Mr...
...opposition to the Castro regime as a travesty of socialism and democracy...
...The meeting, attended by about 400 people, had been organized as a symposium on the Cuban revolution...
...Which was the real Mr...
...Dellinger, a pacifist of long and honorable standing, is a kind of hit-and run driver who does, however, return to the scene of the accident and apologetically seek to make amends...
...In this sense, they fulfill only too well the portrait of such "new-left" young radicals presented in DISSENT (cf...
...At a meeting organized by DISSENT and held in New York City on February 22, an instructive, if ironic, illustration of this occurred...
Vol. 10 • April 1963 • No. 2
