Cuba's Contribution to the American Radical Movement
Geyer, Georgie Anne
Cuba's Contribution to the American Radical Movement by GEORGIE ANNE GEYER Georgie Anne Geyer, roving foreign correspondent for the Chicago Daily News, interviewed dozens of strategic ally-placed...
...What people do not realize," one former Cuban official told me, "is that there is no immediate objective...
...It is no accident that Latin urban guerrilla styles are now employed in the United States . . ." The most obvious gain is to present the world with the picture of a United States in turmoil, unable not only to cope with a remote war in Vietnam but even to cope with its own problems and satisfy its own people at home...
...Cuba just took me totally," Rubin, who had odysseyed all over the world searching for a revolutionary model, said after his return...
...The intelligence agencies of the two countries were brought so close that, in effect, what is Cuban intelligence immediately becomes Russian intelligence...
...In 1968, out of sheer economic necessity, Castro was forced to draw even closer to the Russians, despite his dislike of them...
...No one came for less than a month, which was considered the minimum amount of time necessary for influencing and winning over someone...
...Cuba was the tail that wagged the dog," says Theodore J. Lowi, University of Chicago political scientist and a specialist on radical movements...
...Cuba has been the greatest single influence on the American radical movement today" What does Premier Castro hope to gain by this campaign...
...Behind this, too, is the idea—not such a fantasy the way things are going—of cutting Latin America off from the United States, forming an "Organization of Revolutionary States" to oppose the Organization of American States, just the way the United States cut off Cuba from Latin America in 1961...
...I remember saying to myself, This is the first place, outside of Berkeley maybe, where the atmosphere is healthy...
...Today Cuba is getting even...
...All were to become disillusioned, to one extent or another, and Castro was nonplused by them...
...All the Weathermen blown up or escaped from the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion last winter had been in and out of Cuba...
...I talked to participants at the informal sessions that followed the tours of Cuba given the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) delegations and others...
...Uniquely, the program was tailored to give each group—in some instances, almost every individual—the kind of treatment and political indoctrination in Cuba that would appeal to him or to his group...
...The one thing so attractive is how masterfully the Cubans have set up institutional arrangements in which the work of the individual does accrue to the collective...
...The question of Cuban financing is a delicate one, but I learned from reliable sources that there certainly has been some funding, particularly to individuals and particularly within the black and Puerto Rican groups...
...The program was designed to bring the proven young American radical leaders—people like Bernardine Dohrn, Carl Davidson, and Mark Rudd—in contact with the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong in order to feed the fires of the opposition to the Vietnam war they had long since begun at home...
...The Cubans said it contained "Christmas presents...
...intelligence agencies estimate that about 200 have not returned, or at least have not surfaced...
...Castro smiled...
...The first place where people care about one another, where people really feel bad when someone gets hurt.' You could feel mass enthusiasm on the streets, energy everywhere...
...What should the United States do...
...And so it went...
...They always turned everything around— they'd ask, 'Now, how would you do it?' " "You can't overestimate the effect of the beach, the water, the moon, the fires in the evening, and the romantic appeal of the guerrillas and comman-dantes who came to talk to them," a former Cuban official confided to me...
...In July, 1969, for instance, Bernardine Dohrn and a handful of Weathermen met for eight days with the Vietnamese Communists, led by diplomat Huyn Van Ba, to plan "bringing the war home" and "opening a new front" during the "Four Days of Rage" in Chicago that October...
...Culturally, the Cubans are all together...
...Cuba played David to our Goliath...
...Diana Oughton, one of those killed, was at the meeting at the beach at Jibacoa...
...But intelligence units suspect strongly it was probably narcotics—something that could be sold easily for funds for radical causes...
...The program was designed to radicalize the prospective leaders of the "American revolution...
...It was always the question of "black power" versus integration...
...but for the whole socialist world...
...Practically everything it is not now doing: % The United States should revise its policies toward the underdeveloped world, if it is not already too late, and return to the more enlightened policy, briefly and modestly in force under President John F. Kennedy, of supporting democratic governments committed to basic reform, instead of supporting the intolerable status quo in large parts of the world...
...They found a society which, despite all its problems, valued cooperation instead of competition, a society where the most Utopian ideals, such as the abolition of money, were considered actually possible, and a society which had itself fought to a standstill the capitalist establishment they hated...
...Then, "Tell them how you un-pin grenades," the commandante urged...
...Williams' problem, which is the persistent problem of American blacks with Castro, is that Williams wanted "black power," "black nationalism," "black separatism...
...The effects on individual Americans differed, but according to what the young radicals reported and did when they returned, the span of difference stretched only from ecstatically favorable to favorable...
...It arouses others abroad...
...He was and is Commandante Manolo Pin-heiro, or "Red Beard...
...He shrugged...
...Every once in a while during the two months I was there, Pinheiro telephoned me about two a.m.—Cubans are notorious "night people" and that was the time he "got off work"—and we would sit in the lobby and talk until the restaurant opened for coffee...
...It was after Williams left, in 1967, that the Cubans began their hard-core wooing of American blacks...
...Robert Collier, black militant imprisoned in 1965 for his part in the attempted blowing up of the Statue of Liberty and other American landmarks, was a member of the violent black militant group, Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM...
...But in addition to this inspiration which almost every young American received in Cuba (few of them saw the many warts on the system—they were totally uncritical in that direction), there were those who did receive guidance and direction for violent action in this country...
...And if they learn shooting for the Olympics while they are here, what can we do about it...
...they are "sleepers," young radicals who are staying underground and who have broken family ties while apparently waiting for instructions to act...
...The Cubans feel passionately about Vietnam, not only because it is another "little country," but because they feel they are in the "waiting room" for an American invasion should Hanoi lose...
...Castro has still another objective...
...Some poor kid may think he's being trained," Williams said, shaking his head, "but it's not enough training to make a revolution—just enough training to keep some disturbances going...
...A secondary gain is to dilute the image of the United States and its way of life as an alternative for his own people, who are suffering under increasing economic deprivations...
...officials were also loath to talk...
...Castro wants integration in his own country and a united front among whites and blacks in the United States...
...Then the former Marine in him came out...
...Even the dynamiting of the University of Wisconsin Army Math center, in which an innocent student lost his life, may have had a Cuban connection...
...After 1967, the Black Panthers went to Cuba en masse, peaking with the grand finale of fugitive Eldridge Cleaver's arrival there in 1969...
...Black Panther leader Joudan Ford visited Cuba in August, 1968, then went back almost immediately to become the center of the riots at San Francisco State College...
...Both sides need each other...
...The idea was to make the young radical feel important, to flatter him...
...He personally oversees the program aimed at Americans...
...Cuba is really the only country, despite ideological bouquets thrown to such exotic spots as Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, which can help them financially, and Castro still believes that the real revolution in the United States will be made by the blacks who have such a great stake in change...
...The radicals were hesitant to discuss their Cuban experience, and, more strangely, U.S...
...I can't wait until we have anarchy so I can rebel against that" He acknowledged that many of the black militants did indeed get military training in Cuba, but he said he did not think it was very good training since "you plan to lose some of the battles, but you don't plan to lose them all...
...And you," he would say, with those probing green eyes, "are you the kind of person who could sacrifice yourself for something you believed in...
...What is he trying to gain by shaping and indoctrinating American radicals...
...The atmosphere was free and easy, and among the Americans "anything went...
...They reported that the meetings took place at two major camps, one at Soroa in the mountains and another on the beach at Jibacoa...
...others were radicalized in Cuba...
...Of course...
...The entire program is so complex, so tailored to the individual radical, and so well planned that it is difficult to categorize it in a few words...
...Cuba did not create the movement, but it helped shape it...
...Nor has there ever been a situation where a small revolutionary country was the tail wagging part of a colossus...
...The policies of President Nixon and Vice President Agnew are serving only to polarize and alienate these young Americans and to throw them into the same corner with the violent radicals...
...Actually, Castro started wooing American minority groups as early as 1959, but it was not until he declared Cuba a socialist state (at least in part because he knew an American invasion was imminent) that he took the whole thing seriously...
...But today, despite the fact that the program with American blacks has been riven with problems and disagreement, it continues—and it continues to have enormous importance...
...the long term goal is revolutionary change in the "collos-sus of the North...
...It was the hardest single story I have had to do, because nobody seemed to want it told...
...The most dramatic incident involving the old greystone mansion at 6 East 67th Street in New York took place on January 11, 1968...
...The Cubans gave no tactical advice...
...Thank heaven he's stopped parading around the streets making a spectacle of himself" Richard Fagen, the Stanford University political scientist who has analyzed these developments perhaps better than any other scholar and has visited Cuba many times, says that "all the students who return [there] are impressed by a sense of patriotic and societal development...
...In the evenings, with the moon out and the Caribbean breeze blowing gently in from the sea, the Cuban and European cadre of leaders would build fires in the sand and Cuban comman-dantes and former guerrillas would tell the Americans how they had made their revolution...
...But the Cuban drama shows that we are quite capable of doing it ourselves, to ourselves, from within—by turning a small, dependent, and once devotedly friendly country into our worst enemy and by turning our own children into destroyers of their fathers and their fathers' dreams...
...Regarding preparations for this article, Miss Geyer wrote us: "What should be noted is that many of the sources were necessarily shadowy and clandestine—both inside and outside Cuba...
...The short term goal of the program is to destroy the prestige of the United States through creating constant, convulsive chaos here...
...Most of them have come back enthusiastic missionaries for the Cuban cause, blaming all the obviously evident economic problems there on their own country for its policies—a view that is at least partially supported by the evidence...
...The pre-Castro American tourists, with their Havana cigars and their bleached hair, used to love it, and so have the young radicals in the last six years...
...Tell them how we used to make bombs," the commandante would suggest from the sideline...
...Castro still believes that the real revolution in the United States will be made by the blacks . . ." "I want to be a guerrilla, Fidel," I told him, joking, at one point during a three-hour conversation...
...Later, in 1969, when the program for training Latins was being whittled down on Russian suggestions that the Cubans be more selective, the program for Americans entered still another phase: that of the Venceremos ("We will win") Brigades...
...They began advocating violence and revolution, telling them that the revolution requires violence...
...The whites, each one considered a potential infiltrator for the FBI, were given an indirect type of indoctrination straight out of the Comintern which was as effective as it was indirect...
...The most obvious gain is to present the world with the picture of a United States in turmoil . . •" f At home, the United States should exercise a strict surveillance over the "violent radicals," the bomb-throwers...
...The blacks, whom Castro told American journalists as early as 1959 would "make the revolution in the United States," were given much more hard core training, including guerrilla warfare...
...Two, for instance, who "found themselves" as revolutionaries in Cuba were Mark Rudd, who visited in the winter of 1968 just a couple of months before he led the Columbia University riots—the real kickoff of the modern radical movement—and Jerry Rubin, later one of the Chicago Seven, who visited Cuba in one of the first delegations in 1964...
...It was then that the Cubans started trying to encourage black militants and white revolutionaries to be more revolutionary," Williams said recently in an interview in Detroit...
...We aren't training any guerrillas," he said, grinning even more broadly...
...Though I did not know his role at the time, I knew the man who was in charge of training "foreign students" in "shooting for the Olympics...
...he has always had a good sense of humor...
...In the last year, three brigades have been formed, taking some 1,300 young Americans to Cuba to cut cane and "rap" with the Cubans...
...It is no accident that one hears over and over on the campuses, "We don't support the bombers, but we are not going to turn them in...
...Pinheiro, a highly intelligent man with cool green eyes and an unbelievable red beard, used to hang around the lobby of the Havana Libre Hotel watching foreigners and, I am sure now, sizing up their possibilities for recruitment of one sort or another...
...Most interesting, U.S...
...We do have foreign students here in the university studying all kinds of things...
...It was a heaven for radical youth...
...Between 1961 and 1964, radical student delegations, mainly from the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) and SDS, came to Cuba, largely of their own yolition...
...A popular urban guerrilla manual, the "Mini-manual" of the Brazilian Communist, the late Carlos Marighela, is now found everywhere in radical communes and among the Panthers, after a gigantic mailing from Havana last March...
...Other Americans might realize simply that the chickens of history are coming home to roost...
...Che Guevara, Fidel, and Regis De-bray are really the influences on our movements," Allan Young told me in an interview in New York...
...In factories, guys would say, 'Look, this is my factory.' It was, like, fantastic...
...Jibacoa lies along the sparkling white beach that stretches from Havana to Varadero and on eastward...
...None of this should surprise anyone, though much of this information angers American radicals, who naturally do not like to feel they are being influenced or used by anyone...
...Everyone knew that he had been enthusiastically training Latin guerrillas for years—in fact, about 5,000 have now gone through the guerrilla training camps in Cuba—but I was probing about the question of indoctrination of Americans...
...Cuba is building a New Man—Russia is only concerned with building a family car...
...Cuba was the blackest mark in America's imperialistic Latin American policy, and through it the United States provided its "own children" with a ready made sample of self-disillusionment...
...There are many other black militant leaders who made long stays in Cuba...
...By the time they left," the Cuban went on, "they understood perfectly what they should do, without ever having been specifically told...
...In the last six years, Cuban Premier Fidel Castro's Communist government, through its hyperactive "Department of Export of the Revolution," has been carefully, systematically, and deliberately shaping, indoctrinating, and training American radicals...
...But all were carefully checked and judged...
...Until recently he was editor of Liberation News Service, the underground newspapers' news service...
...The revolution in the third world, of which Cuba is the prime example, is now extending itself and even its tactics into the most advanced country of the developed world...
...It is no exaggeration to suggest that there has never in American history been a moment like this one, with its enormous possibilities for real revolution...
...I recall, when I visited Cuba in 1966, talking with Castro—joshing with him, really—about these developments at a state farm near Banao, where we had eaten lunch...
...Cuba has also served as the transmitter of revolutionary styles from Latin America to the United States...
...There are some direct correlations between trips to and meetings in Cuba and violence in the United States...
...He is thinking in the long run...
...The "camp" was really just a few thatched roof huts and some barracks...
...Cuba's Contribution to the American Radical Movement by GEORGIE ANNE GEYER Georgie Anne Geyer, roving foreign correspondent for the Chicago Daily News, interviewed dozens of strategic ally-placed persons—including Cuban officials, young American radicals, and U.S...
...It operated on a hit-or-miss basis after the 1959 Cuban revolution and began in earnest in 1964...
...Ralph Featherstone, the black militant who blew himself up last March leaving Bel Air, Maryland, where Rap Brown was to be tried, had visited Cuba's "Cultural Congress" in 1968...
...A note left by the mysterious "Marion Delgado collective" said they did it as a conscious act taken in solidarity with "the V.C., the Tupamaros [Uruguayan terrorists trained in Cuba] and the Cuban people...
...With John Kennedy dead, he gave up any hopes for rapprochement with Washington...
...These people are being sacrificed...
...U The United States should take a new, hard look at Cuba...
...Well, it's the same in Cuba, only it's a Havana cigar...
...But the evidence is clear that Cuba has been the greatest single influence on the American radical movement today...
...The civil rights movement, with its idealistic non-violent ethos, had turned into the violence of Berkeley, and Castro began to act...
...He ran back into the Mission, where he was protected by the Cuban guards, and to this day no one knows what was in the brown paper bag...
...Russia, whose monolithic statism is anathema to the young radicals of the United States and the third world, is clearly using Cuba as her "proxy" in dealing with these revolutionaries, and Cuba is performing an invaluable service, not only for the U.S.S.R...
...I just never slept...
...What else did others find in Cuba that they did not find at home...
...We were never told to go and do this," one of the American participants told me...
...Angela Davis, captured in New York in October for an alleged role in the San Rafael, California, courthouse shootout in which four people were killed, had visited Cuba in July, 1969...
...The Cuban program for the American blacks, which was always separate, really began with that ubiquitous traveler in socialism, Robert Williams, who fled a kidnapping charge in North Carolina during a civil rights fight in 1961 and escaped to Cuba, where he broadcast vitriolic programs to the United States until his disillusionment and subsequent departure in 1966...
...The Cubans think at this stage that it's better for the blacks to get arrested than to win a revolution...
...Among other things, the grandfatherly Huynh Van Ba advised them to "Look for the kid who wants to go out and kill policemen, not for the one who is going to stay up all night talking theory," and he "instructed" (Davidson's word) them to resist the draft, from within and without, and to put up a "united front...
...Castro now sees—to his astonishment—the possibility of revolution in this country, but not in the short run...
...In addition to contacts with the well-organized Castro intelligence ring in this country, many of whose agents are infiltrated into the United States on the airlift to Miami, there is close contact between American radicals and the Cuban mission to the United Nations, through which comes everything from posters, precise advice on tactics to be used here, and money...
...The life that the kids know in the United States is so fragmented...
...Some Americans were highly radical before they went to Cuba and went as a form of prize...
...SNCC leader H. Rap Brown was stopped by New York police when he left the Cuban Mission carrying a mysterious brown paper bag...
...The year 1964 marks the year that Fidel Castro decided, at first to his great astonishment, that there was actually a possibility for revolution in the United States...
...The thing that was exciting about the Cuban revolution was that it made the break with the Old Left...
...Pinheiro is chief of Cuban intelligence and head of the department for export of the revolution...
...American student and youth delegations were broken down into black and white...
...But our Government must develop policies of basic reform and change in race relations, in the environment, and in communications with the young that would bring back into the system the masses of progressive young Americans who want peaceful but fundamental reform and change...
...This organization was led by Robert Williams, NAACP leader who was broadcasting from Cuba during this period...
...Stokely Carmichael was the star of the meeting of the Organization of Latin American Solidarity in 1967, when he dramatically called for guerrilla war in the United States...
...intelligence agents in preparing a series of reports for the Daily News and for this article written especially for The Progressive...
...Nothing could destroy the United States from outside...
...Much of the influence is romantic . . . but that doesn't negate the serious link...
...Despite the fact that Castro has shown repeatedly he does not desire diplomatic relations with the United States, it would be well to begin dealing with him on some level...
...And the guerrilla would tell the eager young people how he had made bombs...
...It is no accident that Latin urban guerrilla styles are now employed in the United States, and that threats of political kidnappings, as well as actual bank robberies and strategic bombings, are spreading here as among the Tupamaros...
...They'd be better off to get their training in the Marine Corps," he added...
...But we were constantly told how the Cubans had done it...
...Now back in Detroit, while North Carolina is trying to extradite him on the kidnapping charge he claims is a frameup, Williams says with his customary good sense of humor, "Remember in the South they used to slap the black man on the back and give him a cigar...
...Those are all lies...
...It appealed to American youth, which is why so many of them have gone down there...
...Every country has a right to defend itself from external aggression and internal violence...
...Why don't you send me through one of your camps...
...Castro was one of the fathers of the New Left, especially in his use of armed struggle to capture power rather than the employment of the parliamentary procedures and the electoral process of the Old Left...
...Educated at Columbia University, where he married an American ballerina, he knows Americans well...
...It is very simple and uncomplicated—a tropical variant of the old barn-raising...
...Though there are no exact numbers, an American intelligence estimate is that of approximately 4,000 persons who have visited Cuba since 1959, between 1,000-1,500 were convinced radicals, many of them devoted to violent overthrow of the American system...
...One Cuban who had been to Hanoi told me that "everywhere we Cubans were praised for the wonderful work we were doing with American youth...
...It must have been a fascinating meeting, if Bernardine's notes, "liberated" by the police when they raided her apartment in Chicago that fall, and Carl Davidson's reports in The Guardian, sl radical weekly, are to be believed...
...The only explanation I have for this is that with the tacit agreement between the United States and Russia that Cuba's status is to remain as it is, nobody wants to rock the boat...
...The Editors For sixty years, the United States reserved for herself the right to intervene in Cuban affairs, ending its "tutelage" by backing one of the worst dictators in modern history...
...It would be tedious to list all the delegations and groups of Americans who have come under Pinheiro's careful and discerning guidance, but most of them were SDS (the Cubans early spotted SDS as the group to woo), PLP, Young Socialist Alliance, the Committee of Returned Volunteers, the Student Non-Violent (later National) Coordinating Committee, the Black Panthers, the Revolutionary Action Movement, the Republic of Free Africa, and many others...
Vol. 34 • December 1970 • No. 12
