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  • The Cubalogues (and After):On the Beat Literary Movement and the Early Cuban Revolution
  • Todd F. Tietchen (bio)

At a 1961 meeting of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, Lawrence Ferlinghetti unveiled one of his most famous poems: "One Thousand Fearful Words for Fidel Castro." Composed upon Ferlinghetti's return from Havana the previous year, the poem warned Castro that he would soon be overthrown and assassinated, much like his boyhood hero Abraham Lincoln. In a telling allusion to the Spanish-American War, Ferlinghetti declared that "Hearst is Dead but his great / Cuban wire still stands: 'You / get the pictures, I'll make the / War'" (48). As was the case with Theodore Roosevelt's foray up San Juan Hill, Ferlinghetti believed that U.S. military intervention was a foregone conclusion augured by the yellow journalism of his time. Or as Ferlinghetti so bluntly put it: "They're going to fix [Castro's] wagon / in the course of human events" (48).

The political thrust of "One Thousand Fearful Words for Fidel Castro" was inspired by the concerns of Ferlinghetti's audience: the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC). The FPCC was formed in 1959 by the liberal activists Robert Taber and Alan Sagner, both of whom rejected the acquiescence to U.S. foreign policy typical of other Cold War liberals.1 Van Gosse has argued that the FPCC—a signal organization of the emergent New Left—was animated by a high degree of "Fidelismo" which celebrated Castro and his revolutionary circle as American insurgents in the tradition of Ethan Allen's Green Mountain Boys (5–10). This sentiment was clearly registered in Taber's film documentary "Rebels of the Sierra Maestra: The Story of Cuba's Jungle [End Page 119] Fighters," which aired on CBS in 1957 and portrayed Castro and his men as romantic, young freedom fighters taking on their own version of the Red Coats (Gosse 82–85). Along with their lionization (and Americanization) of Castro, the FPCC was convinced early on that U.S. military intervention was imminent in Cuba in order to secure U.S. interests in corporate entities such as the United Fruit Company. By 1959, U.S. corporations were into Cuba for close to $1 billion dollars a year, dominating virtually every sector of the Cuban economy (Duberman 133–34). The FPCC contended that the U.S. should begin divesting itself of its hemispheric ambitions by taking a non-interventionist stance toward the revolution. The federal government, so the FPCC argument went, should work with Castro to assure an autonomous Cuba as a trading partner, thus defusing the possibility of Soviet influence in the American hemisphere.2

The stance of the FPCC helped give birth to the literary subgenre which I call the Cubalogues. Part Beat narrative and part reportage, the Cubalogues include works such as Ferlinghetti's "Poet's Notes on Cuba," LeRoi Jones's "Cuba Libre," and Mark Schleifer's "Cuban Notebook." As a subgenre of Beat travel narratives, the Cubalogues are animated by several common characteristics. First, each narrative begins by expressing profound skepticism concerning the negative portrayal of Castro's revolution in the mainstream U.S. press. Second, each writer then identifies this skepticism as the guiding factor in their decision to travel to Havana in order to witness the revolution firsthand. In turn, each figure becomes involved in an inter-American dialogue with Cuban intellectuals and artists concerning the meaning of the revolution and revolutionary culture, which they come to identify as the spontaneous and open antithesis of an ossified public sphere at home. Third, enmeshed in this new web of intercultural relations, their original skepticism regarding media portrayals of Castro's Cuba is not only confirmed, but results in a political epiphany concerning the limits of "Beat" protest in the U.S. As such, these travelogues represent a more overtly politicized version of the road narratives proffered by figures such as Jack Kerouac and the early William Burroughs, as stock features of Beat writing—such as the celebration of spontaneity, musical culture, and the street hustler—are recast as politically progressive values.

The Cubalogues, as I hope to make clear in the remainder of this essay, have much to...

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