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  • Fighting over Fidel: The New York Intellectuals and the Cuban Revolution by Rafael Rojas
  • Karen Dubinsky
Rafael Rojas, Fighting over Fidel: The New York Intellectuals and the Cuban Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2016)

Rafael Rojas, a prominent Cuban intellectual who lives and works in Mexico, has written a weighty and prescient book. Fighting Over Fidel: The New York Intellectuals the Cuban Revolution (translated by Carl Good) is not a book to be digested in one sitting. My slow and extended reading turned out to be significant in ways I had not anticipated as I picked up and put down and picked up this book over several months. For during this time, the protagonist himself died, and the world offered up more fuel for the debate this book explores. Fighting over Fidel's death has proven just as controversial, and fascinating, as fighting over Fidel's life.

The book covers extensive empirical ground. While his chosen container, "The New York Intellectuals," is porous and in practice quite useless, the range of publications, thinkers, and public figures in this wide-ranging intellectual history makes this a fascinating study. From The New York Times to Monthly Review to a range of lesser known alternative publications, and similarly from Herbert Matthews to Amiri Baraka to Allen Ginsberg, this is a compendium of who thought what about Cuba, especially in the 1960s. Opinions and debates about race in Cuba, within the African American Left, are given substantial coverage. Sadly, predictably, and frustratingly, opinions and debate by the feminist left about gender in Cuba are not. Margaret Randall, a huge figure in the history of US/Cuban relations, who lived in Cuba for years, wrote voluminously of her experiences, (and annoyed the US government so much they tried to revoke her citizenship) is unmentioned here. This is inexplicable, and far more than an oversight. The paucity of female voices among the mythical New York Left is bad enough; the inability to conceptualize women's liberation as part of this movement should make readers pause and consider whether some male leftists have heard anything feminists have said in the past 50 years.

In this book, New York is to the US as Toronto is to Canada; the intellectual and cultural community where the actual folds into the imagined, with the same annoying results. So rather than trying to figure out how, to take an example, the opinions of British historian E.P. Thompson about Cuba can be considered as part of the "New York Left," readers would be wise to simply ignore this problematic categorization and move on to the more interesting questions this book raises.

For me those questions are many, but I'll select two here. Rojas begins with an intriguing and insightful observation, pertaining to the larger issue of political and cultural translation. The study of debate over the Cuban Revolution during the 1960s in New York, he says, "must consider politics of the translation of Latin American experience" (6) that emerged since the 16th century. Translation, he says, referencing work such as Mary Louise Pratt, has been the centre of the historical confrontations and contacts among the cultures of Europe, the US, and Latin America. [End Page 300] How is knowledge about the Other produced across borders? This question is as relevant for leftist intellectuals as it was for earlier generations of colonial missionaries and travellers. This insight from postcolonial studies is extremely useful for cutting through sloganeering and sermonizing, but for this case study, there is an additional dimension, Rojas' second important theme. What was subject to translation in the case of the Cuban revolution, he argues, was not just a culture but also a political project that unfolded in the midst of the Cold War.

The book is far more weighted to this second theme. Despite the differences between his protagonists such as Leo Huberman and Paul Sweezy, C. Wright Mills, and Eldridge Cleaver, the narrative arc of each example of US left opinion on Cuba has a similar trajectory. In sum: the closer Cuba moved to Moscow, the further it moved from New York. As Rojas puts it, "nearly all of these adventures that began...

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