Reporting the Cuban Revolution: How Castro Manipulated American Journalism by Leonard Ray Teel (review)

On November 26, 2016, upon Fidel Castro’s death, the New York Times trumpeted that the Cuban leader “Brought the Cold War to the Western Hemisphere” (A1). The headline, as anyone with a passing knowledge of postwar US history knows, was demonstrably false, and its appearance was made particularly ironic by the Times’ concurrent bemoaning of the “fake news” stories consumed by supporters of president-elect Donald Trump. The headline made clear that the Times’ mythmaking about Castro would continue after his death, while raising questions about the integrity of reputable US news sources and its ongoing construction of the United States as a perpetually imperiled defender of global freedom.

These questions drive Leonard Ray Teel’s engaging new book, which tells the story of the years leading up to the Cuban Revolution, during which American journalists saw Castro not as a hemispheric aggressor but as a swashbuckling fighter who opposed the corrupt tyranny of Fulgencio Batista’s dictatorship. In 1957 and 1958, as Batista imposed increasingly strict censorship policies on Cuban journalists, American journalists embedded themselves with the insurgents in the Sierra Maestra and assumed important roles in the struggle to overthrow Batista. In April 1959, Castro bestowed medals on 13 American journalists for reporting on the strength of Castro’s movement and its principles and the atrocities inflicted by Batista’s government. By focusing on the stories of these 13 journalists, Teel provides us with a window into a historical moment when Castro was lauded as a hero, and then pieces together how he conscripted journalists to craft his historic image.

Teel tells the story of “the 13” episodically, recounting their backgrounds, their dramatic journeys with the revolutionaries, the narratives they published, and how those news stories circulated. The stories of Herbert L. Matthews, Andrew St. George, and Georgette “Dickey” Chapelle (the only woman in the group) are particularly fascinating. Equally fascinating are Teel’s explorations of the journalists’ motivations, which included previous experiences with fascism as well as more immediate career ambitions, and their various approaches to journalism.

While the stories Teel tells are memorable, they are framed with surprising simplicity. Despite the journalists’ varying perspectives, Teel insists that he is telling a simple tale of “misreporting,” of how the journalists “misinformed the public and misled Congress and policymakers” (xiii). Even as he describes how Batista dropped napalm on his people and tortured his foes, Teel retains a Manichean perspective that equates the 1950s United States with freedom and communism with absolute unfreedom. The book does not engage with histories of US-Cuba relations or scholarship on the Cold War in Latin America. In particular, it would benefit from some acknowledgement of Van Gosse’s excellent 1993 history Where the Boys Are, which detects an emerging New Left sensibility in the adventurism of young Americans who fought alongside Cuban revolutionaries.

Gosse’s work, and other accounts of US regional hegemony, cultural fantasy, and Cold War policy, might have helped Teel see in the reporters’ accounts something slightly less straightforward than noble, freedom-loving Americans duped by nefarious freedom-hating Cubans. Rather, the story seems to feature reporters encountering the Cuban revolution as a projection screen, one that is occasionally punctured by the revolutionaries themselves. On this point, I want to let one of the revolutionaries, “Deborah”—after the meaning of her revolution is mansplained to her by CBS correspondent Charles Shaw—have the last word: “At that point in the interview, which became part of the broadcast script, Shaw shared his own passion for freedom. ‘I am not particularly interested in Cuba, but I am interested in freedom. . . . As far as I’m concerned, you are not fighting for Cuban freedom . . . you are fighting for freedom.’ When he finished, Deborah looked at him ‘with her big black eyes.’ She glanced toward the ceiling of that ramshackle old barn and said only ‘Freedom! That’s a big word’” (156).