Where the News Ends:
CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
WHERE the NEWS ENDS Mills and the Spirit of Cuba By William Henry Chamberlin Castro's Cuba has succeeded the Soviet Union as the darling of Utopians who are looking for a paradise in this...
...Yankees" should indeed listen to this prolonged scream of irrational hate...
...Listen...
...WHERE the NEWS ENDS Mills and the Spirit of Cuba By William Henry Chamberlin Castro's Cuba has succeeded the Soviet Union as the darling of Utopians who are looking for a paradise in this world...
...We should sever diplomatic relations completely and finally...
...This statement must be considered an accurate reflection of the viewpoint of Castro and his associates because it coincides closely with Castro's own longwinded tirades and the declarations of other high officials among his henchmen...
...Although this is not its purpose, if "Listen, Yankee" creates, as it should, the mood for tougher and more consistent action against Communism in our own backyard, it will not have been written in vain...
...Its outbursts of foaming hate would be natural and understandable if the United States had followed the Nazi or Communist pattern of conquest in Latin America, if it had over-run one country after another with armies of occupation, imposed puppet governments, killed or jailed all nationalist leaders...
...It should make it clear beyond a doubt that we are faced with a "weor-they" proposition and should harden the determination of our Government to do everything short of overt military intervention to see that the Castro dictatorship and any similar regime that may appear anywhere on this continent goes the way of the Communist beachhead established some years ago in Guatemala...
...If, as in Cuba, American citizens acquire property legitimately, develop agriculture, industry, communications— for profit to themselves, certainly, but also to the very considerable improvement of the local standard of living—they are sinister capitalist exploiters, all of whose goods should be subjected to the sweeping grand larceny which Castro has committed in Cuba...
...According to this effusion the United States is damned if it does and damned if it doesn't...
...Given what the United States has done, and abstained from doing, these outbursts are little short of paranoid...
...The document is almost pathological in its furious hatred for the United States and its paranoid fixation with the idea that everything that may be amiss in Cuba in particular and in Latin America in general is the direct fault and responsibility of the hated "Yankee...
...Yankee," by C. Wright Mills, taken from his new book of the same name...
...If only one new school has been built in Havana over a long period, America is somehow to blame...
...There is not an aspect of Cuban life today—wholesale spoliation of foreign and private property, no free elections, no freedom of speech and press, jails crowded with political prisoners, compulsory collectivization of agriculture, drumhead courtsmartial for political opponents, hosts of political refugees—that would not be characteristic of Moscow and Peking...
...It should indeed be widely and carefully read and pondered—but not for the reasons which apparently commend it to Mills...
...If Americans stand aside, as they have done in some of the more hopelessly backward and chronically disorderly countries of the Caribbean and South America, then they are heartless Pharisees, evading the supposed obligation to set right everything that may be wrong south of the Rio Grande...
...Most people are familiar with the weak individual who blames everyone but himself for his failures and misfortunes...
...This is precisely the psychological background of "Listen, Yankee...
...Our economic non-intercourse should be extended to the point of not permitting the smallest item of export to or import from Cuba...
...A striking example of the current cult of Castroism is the leading article in the December Harper's entitled...
...One need not be an expert on Cuba or Latin America to spot the crazily distorted history, the incredibly muddled economics, the corny histrionics...
...It should convince them, if other evidence on this point were not already overwhelming, that it is no more possible to do business, in the broadest sense of the term, with Castro than with Hitler or Stalin...
...If life expectancy in Latin America is shorter than it is in North America or in Europe, Washington is the villain...
...And praise for the Castro regime has been lavish and unrestrained in both these capitals of Communism...
...A "Fair Play for Cuba Committee," which has been making a splash with advertisements and meetings, seems to be trying to divert attention from the mass of evidence showing that international Communism has gained a beachhead 90 miles from the coast of the United States...
...We should consider economic reprisals against companies in foreign countries that set out to nullify our blockade...
...Most of this is devoted to a statement of creed and purpose by a Cuban revolutionary, with which Mills, judging from his introductory comments, is in substantial agreement...
...We should flood the Cuban air waves with broadcasts by Cuban political refugees denouncing and exposing the crimes of Castroism...
Vol. 44 • January 1961 • No. 1
