C. Wright Mills and the Cuban Revolution by Treviño A. Javier;

Author:Treviño, A. Javier;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press

The Charismatic Leader

Mills cultivated close relationships with Castro and Vallejo. It seems that Mills and Castro first cemented their friendship shortly after Mills’s arrival in the Cuban republic. As the story goes, Mills, along with Juan Arcocha, Saul Landau, and a young intellectual, Manuel E. Yepe, drove from Havana to the town of Viñales in Pinar del Río, the island’s westernmost province. They arrived late at night at the La Ermita Hotel, and Mills went to his room. Early the following morning, Yepe brought Mills to Castro’s room, where they found him still in bed, holding a machine gun. Vallejo, who was fluent in English, came by to interpret. They shut the door and talked for the next eighteen hours. The following day they traveled around the province, where it is likely that Mills accompanied Castro, with Castro as guide, on an inspection tour of several “people’s farms” (granjas del pueblo), agricultural establishments that were breeding chickens, hogs, cattle, ducks, and goats. That night, Arcocha, Castro, and Mills had dinner at the hotel, and afterward the conversation continued for many hours; Fidel and Mills passionately discussed the Cuban Revolution. “A solid friendship,” Arcocha noted, “was forming between those two very different men.”24

Whatever differences Arcocha may have had in mind, it is clearly the case that Castro and Mills had in common several constitutional and biographical influences. At forty-four, Mills was almost exactly ten years older than Castro. But both possessed an indomitable dedication to everything they did and believed in, coupled by seemingly boundless energy. Both looked to youth, in the emerging New Left and in the Cuban leadership, respectively, to create a better society. Both inherited, and subsequently abandoned, the Roman Catholicism of their mothers. Both were considered outlanders: Mills because of his “backwoods” origins in Texas, Castro because he was from rural Oriente, the “Texas of Cuba.” Both had a penchant for firearms—pistols, rifles, shotguns—which they owned and delighted in shooting. Both men were fiercely ambitious, wanting—needing—to make a mark in their lives, which they believed would soon be cut short: Mills because of his worsening heart problems and the threats made on his life by Cuban exiles, Castro because of assassination attempts by exiles, defectors, mercenaries, the Mafia, and the CIA.

Commonalities and differences between the two men notwithstanding, Mills appears to have assiduously maintained his relationships with Castro and Vallejo long after departing the island. Indeed, he would again see Castro a few weeks later, this time in New York City, where the prime minister went to address the Fifteenth General Assembly of the United Nations and deliver a four-hour speech in which he inveighed against the imperialist policies of the United States toward the Cuban nation. A few days prior to that historical speech, Mills met Castro at the Hotel Theresa, a residential hotel in the heart of Harlem, where they discussed plans for Mills to conduct a six-to-eight-week seminar in Havana that would cover the ideological differences between China, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union. The seminar was to be attended by Castro and several other revolutionary leaders.

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