The Martin Duberman Reader (45 page)

On the specific topic of racism in the gay male world, a seven-minute video entitled “The (White) Gay Rights Movement” began making the rounds on blogs and social networking sites in 2012. In response, one black gay man wrote that in his ten years of experience in the movement, he found “that the LGBT community and movement . . . is almost as unwilling as the GOP to deal openly and honestly with race . . . and the inclusion of people of color.”

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In its original form, this was a presentation speech awarding a “certificate of merit” to the gay organization Black and White Men Together (since changed to Men of All Colors Together) at the seventh annual Lambda Legal Defense Fund dinner in October 1982. As if in confirmation of my remarks, a number of gay white men angrily walked out in the middle of the speech and others later expressed strong disapproval of what they called my “inappropriate and offensive” comments.

T
o write this piece, I began by taking Samuel Flagg Bemis's
A Diplomatic History of the United States
down from my bookshelves. It was the text we'd used when I was an undergraduate at Yale in the early 1950s for a course on American foreign policy taught by Bemis himself—then widely regarded as the “dean” of American diplomatic historians. I turned to the sections in the book on Cuba and was startled at their jingoistic content and embarrassed to see that I hadn't scribbled a single note of protest in the margins. At the time, obviously, Bemis's views in no way offended my understanding of the world and of our country's role within it. Yet among his statements are the claims that our “trusteeship of Cuban independence . . . has stood as a notable example to the powers”; that we intervened in Cuban affairs and set up provisional governments “with great reluctance”; that the Cuban people, “who had not submitted to two hundred thousand Spanish troops in 1898, made no resistance to a handful of soldiers in the second American intervention because they had confidence in its righteousness”; and that our special relationship with Cuba had allowed its people to enjoy “a rousing economic prosperity.”

Bemis's views seem shocking today but at the time were representative of his generation of diplomatic historians—which should
give us all pause about the “objectivity” of scholarship. Starting in the 1960s, the revisionist work of historians like Gabriel and Joyce Kolko, Lloyd Gardner, Ronald Steel, William Appleman Williams, and Walter Lafeber shook that consensus view of the fifties to its roots. Students have also grown more skeptical about their professors' opinions, and citizens of their government's professed benevolence.

Yet perhaps not skeptical enough. The dimensions of our historic imperialism are still not widely enough known or, if known, not widely credited. As regards our relations with Latin America in general, the long-standing ignorance of the public as a whole—a compound of disinterest and disbelief—still holds. As regards Cuba in particular, our lazy susceptibility to the limited materials fed us through government channels, the media, and those few historical works that reach a wide readership—for example, Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s
A Thousand Days
—are suffused with unacknowledged value judgments that sustain the image of the United States as a kindly parent and of Cuba as a mere Soviet satellite.

Yet as revisionist scholarship has made clear, the 1961 invasion at Playa Giron has a long, dishonorable ancestry; it was but the latest in many direct interventions on our part in the internal affairs of other countries, itself illustrative of our continuing sense that we have a divine right to determine other peoples' futures. As regards Cuba itself, if we dig into the history of our relations with that country at almost any point, we unearth an appalling stench. The malodorous high point in the pre–Civil War period was probably the famed Ostend Manifesto of 1854.

In their eagerness to secure Cuba from Spain, President Franklin Pierce and his advisers arranged a conference of the American ministers to London, Paris, and Madrid. The three worthies duly conferred, and issued to the world a “memorandum” bluntly declaring that if Spain refused to sell the island of Cuba to the United States, “then by every law human and divine, we shall be justified in wresting it from Spain, if we possess the power.” Most of the world read those laws differently. Indignation was so widespread
(an indignation shared, it should be said, by many Americans—“Manifesto of the Brigands” was the
New York Tribune's
title for the memorandum) that President Pierce backed down and American rapacity was thwarted for some forty years.

But at the end of the nineteenth century, as Cuba's great poet and revolutionary José Martí feared, independence from Spain was no sooner achieved than it rapidly gave way to almost total dependence on the United States. In 1901 our government forced the Platt Amendment into the Cuban constitution, affirming Cuba's obligation to sell or lease lands to us for coaling or naval stations and our right to intervene “for the protection of life, property, and individual liberty.” That right has since been exercised many times and under many guises, from landing the marines in 1906, 1912, and 1917, to FDR's more “liberal” approach of simply sending warships into Cuban waters to register our displeasure with (and thereby bring down) a government of which we disapproved.

Business, as usual, followed the flag. American corporations moved into Cuba soon after the 1898 war with Spain, and the investment from such giant firms as the United Fruit Company and the First National City Bank of New York rose from $50 million in 1895 to $1 billion in 1959, the year Fidel Castro came to power. By then, it's no exaggeration to say, American interests had long since come to dominate all strategic sectors of the Cuban economy, turning the island into a giant plantation and the vast majority of its citizens into servants of American corporate enterprise. That Castro would change all this was immediately apparent to the American power structure. In a confidential memorandum written in April 1959 for distribution to the CIA, the State Department, and the White House, Richard Nixon suggested that a force of Cuban exiles be armed to overthrow the Castro regime. President Eisenhower adopted this suggestion in 1960, and President Kennedy implemented it in 1961 at Playa Giron. Of Kennedy's advisers, only Senator William Fulbright openly opposed the invasion.

The landing at the Bay of Pigs, in short, was not an aberration, an inexplicable deviation from our traditionally benign stance
toward Cuba. Instead it was of a familiar piece with our long-settled view that we have the right to intervene—and by force—in the internal affairs of other countries whenever our “interests” appear to be threatened. And
we
define the nature of those interests and the reality of the threat. Sadly, it's questionable whether the fiasco at the Bay of Pigs has taught us anything—other than the need to be more circumspect in our tactics and more determined upon our goals.

The literature currently (1974)
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available in English on the Cuban Revolution contains huge discordancies: vilified in some books, Castro is elevated to sainthood in others. What has most surprised me, though, has been the range of views expressed among my
own
friends, good leftists all. They deplore the historic role the United States has played in Cuban affairs and regard the Bay of Pigs invasion as wholly disgraceful. But some disagree with the common tendency to place exclusive stress on economics as a sufficient explanation for our country's role; and others question the totalitarian aspects of Castro's revolution as it's developed over time.

My own views have wobbled considerably and I can't pretend to have fully unraveled them, even to my own satisfaction. What I am certain of is that in the first decade or so of the revolution it was a gross oversimplification for our leaders to assume that “anti-communism” sufficiently justified their decisions to cut off diplomatic contact and impose an embargo. The Johnsons and the Nixons have unquestionably been sympathetic to the view that what's good for American business is good for the world—and their policies have reflected that sympathy. But saying that does not
summarize
their ideology, nor unravel its complex strands.

Our leaders, like most of us, are capable of sustaining varied loyalties: in their case, to “free enterprise,” American profits, God, “individualism,” and parliamentary democracy. That these loyalties have almost always been mutually reinforcing does not justify the assumption that they are interchangeable. To recognize, moreover,
that Johnson, Kennedy, Nixon, et al., have certain
non
material commitments is not to soften the indictment against them but to clarify it. Marxists tend to see ideas (except those of Marx) as having no authentic or independent life apart from the “material relationships” that brought them into being and for whose protection they are publicly employed. Not only does this undervalue the powerful role that a “mere” idea (such as “manifest destiny”—or Freud's concept of the unconscious) can play in human affairs, but it minimizes as well the ability of individuals to act other than along predictable socioeconomic lines. That Castro and most of the other guerrilla leaders in the Sierra Maestra came from the middle class should alone give pause to the dialecticians among us.

It's still difficult to grasp whether the island's brand of socialism is peculiarly Cuban (its Marxism derivative, superficial, original, confused, or cynical) and whether the pivotal role of the Castro brothers in making policy is a substitute for or a necessary transition to popular control. Some of the revolution's central contradictions seem to have intensified with time, as has the definition of acceptable individual deviation: the publication of the avant-garde
Lunes
has been suspended; the poet Heberto Padilla made to confess publicly his literary/political sins; homosexuals rounded up and put in isolated prison camps (a repression that has now given way to subtler but still real forms of ostracism). As Miguel Angel Quevado, the editor of
Bohemia,
wrote as far back as 1960, “To carry out a profound social revolution, it was not necessary to install a system which degrades man to the condition of the state.” Angel suspended his journal, sought asylum—and died by his own hand in Caracas in 1969.

A revolution made in the name of the masses, one that has taken large steps in eliminating the vast inequalities that earlier existed between rich and poor, white and black, urban and rural Cubans, has yet to find institutional means for ensuring that the people can have a direct and continuous voice in deciding national policy. I've long been persuaded by Fidel's argument that
before
the revolution, elections and political parties had served only to legitimize and
preserve the interests of the privileged. But I'm not persuaded that the exploitative purposes for which these institutions were used under an oligarchy need automatically discredit their potential value under socialism. The fact that some of Castro's policies have never had to stand the test of popular ratification doesn't encourage the belief that present-day Cuba has yet found substitute channels for the expression of dissent.

We know that political parties and elections bring with them the dangers of counterrevolution. We know, too, that a “free press” is often the handmaiden and alter ego of the privileged elite in power. But as Salvador Allende showed in Chile, we also know that parties can serve as authentic alternatives to, rather than mere echoes of, privilege. And as the
New York Times
demonstrated with the Pentagon Papers and the
Washington Post
during the Watergate scandal, we also know that far from being a mockery of justice, a free press can sometimes be its agent.

A devoted friend of the Cuban Revolution has asked me to remember that it must be judged not from where we are, but from where Cuba
was.
It's an injunction bewildering on several counts. No one (on the Left, that is) would want to deny that Cuba initially made impressive headway against the vast disparities that once existed in income, job opportunity, health services, diet, and education. No one would want to claim that the United States, proportionate to its resources, has made comparable strides. It therefore hardly makes sense to patronize a country whose performance thus far has been superior to our own.

Unless, that is, other kinds of costs seem to overbalance the material gains. And unless the material gains themselves seem in danger of becoming the resting place—rather than the starting point—of the revolution. Hugh Thomas has written, “Health and education are only aids to the good life. . . . The multitudes in uniform are surely supposed to be marching to a spot where they can disband.”

A growing number of people no longer locate that spot, or even
the march to it, along the older utopian continuum of “man free from material want.” They search for a new utopia in the area of psychosexual transformation, envisioning a gender revolution in which “male” and “female” have become outmoded differentiations, individual human beings instead combining in their persons the qualities previously thought the preserve of one gender or the other. It's possible to argue that this new vision, when most of the world still goes to bed hungry at night, is a luxury and an illusion, the decadent yearning of a society already sated with possessions—but not with the satisfactions they were supposed to have brought in train.

The point here is that those who see the redefinition of gender and sexuality as the cutting edge of the newest revolution tend also to regard the contours of Castro's “new man” as distressingly old. “Honor” and machismo on the one hand, and statism and authority on the other, combine to suggest an image that may not do justice to the Castro brothers'
ultimate
intentions but does seem descriptive of their current emphases. Perhaps they have no choice. Doubly beset as Cuba is by the ingrained aggressiveness of our country and the ingrained gender stereotyping of its own, the government may think it neither wise nor possible to push the revolution into still further areas of innovation. The danger is that it may not want to. Or that it may be a willing prisoner of the Marxist paradigm that sees changes in material relationships necessarily preceding changes in culture. Or it may be that even if the ultimate goal
is
a sexually liberated, stateless communism, the Castros may find, as have so many visionaries before them, that ultimate goals forever recede as they forever approach.