Radio Free Dixie by Timothy B. Tyson

Author:Timothy B. Tyson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2010-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

8: Cuba Libre

When Fidel Castro came to Harlem and lived at the Hotel Theresa for several days in the autumn of 1960, he met with Nikita Khrushchev of the Soviet Union, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Malcolm X, and Robert F. Williams. The two men had struck up a friendship when Williams had traveled to Cuba earlier that year. When the Cuban leader played the race card in Harlem in this master stroke of international diplomacy, it was logical that he turned to Williams. “The man largely responsible for Castro's interest in American Negroes,” syndicated newspaper columnist Drew Pearson charged, “is Robert F. Williams of Monroe, N.C.”1

It was a long way from Monroe to Havana, but Williams was not the first native of Monroe to make the trek. Jesse Helms, a future U.S. senator, enjoyed a cruise to Havana in 1956 as the new director of the North Carolina Banking Association.2 With the cooperation of military dictator Fulgencio Batista, who had overthrown the Cuban government in 1952, U.S. corporations and organized crime had turned Cuba into an American brothel. The Caribbean island was “where respectable North Americans went to gamble without restraint,” historian Van Gosse observes, “to see live sex shows of the most inventive character, to indulge without fear of discovery in whoring with partners of either sex, to drink and eat cheaply, to be waited on hand and foot—all in an environment as close at hand as Miami and completely geared to servicing their tastes.”3 The comprehensive array of vice brought in millions of dollars every month; by the mid-1950s, 300,000 U.S. tourists vacationed in Cuba annually. “My fellow countrymen reeled through the streets, picking up fourteen-year-old Cuban girls and tossing coins to make men scramble in the gutter,” historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. observed. “One wondered how any Cuban—on the basis of this evidence—could regard the United States with anything but hatred.”4

Anti-American sentiment in Cuba helped the guerilla army led by Castro. When a general strike by hundreds of thousands of Cubans forced Batista to flee on January 1, 1959, public opinion in the United States greeted the Cuban revolution with considerable sympathy. The most popular hosts on U.S. television, Jack Paar and Ed Sullivan, both flew to Havana to interview the man whom Life magazine depicted as the “bearded rebel scholar” in its cover story on Castro. Edward R. Murrow's “Person to Person” news program featured a lovable Castro and his young son in their pajamas with a puppy. “The undergraduates were delighted,” Schlesinger wrote of the revolutionary leader's visit to Harvard in 1959. “They saw in him, I think, the hipster who, in the era of the Organization Man, had joyfully defied the system, summoned a dozen friends and over-turned a government of wicked old men.” On the mainland, the news media celebrated the departure of Batista and the victory of Castro as a triumph of humanity and democracy over tyranny and corruption, as the expression of a uniquely American brand of manly courage.

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