A Prejudiced Listener
By Manuel Yepe*
“What the Cubans are saying
and doing today, other hungry
people in Latin America are
going to be saying and doing
tomorrow.”
- C. Wright Mills, 1960.
Forty-seven years ago, in 1960,
a book published in the United
States titled “Listen, Yankee”
warned the government of that
Nation about the great historical
mistake it was committing in its
policies towards Cuba due to
its inability to understand the
outreach and meaning of the
Cuban revolution.
The worthiness of the warning
derived from the fact that it
came from one of the leading
sociologists of the time in the
US, Charles Wright Mills (1916-
1962).
In January 1959, when the victory
of the Cuban revolution took
place, Wright Mills was already
an outstanding scholar for his
works The Power Elite; Whitecollar
(The American Middle
Classes) and The Sociological
Imagination, among others. He
was considered an acute analyst
of the every-day life in the United
States, whose sharp comments in
relevant publications frequently
triggered harsh polemics. When
analyzing the power structures,
he warned about the degradation
of democracy through the
social control exercised by the
oligarchies, the bureaucratization
of industrial society and the
techniques applied for the control
of workers.
Wright Mills also studied the role
played by the media by means
of adulterating information and
manipulating public opinion in
order to profit the elites, while
debasing the public scenario by
simulating a democratic debate.
He was probably the first author
in the United States stating that
the overflow of information does
not favor communication but,
on the contrary, creates a real
problem of assimilation.
It was acknowledged that C.
W. Mills had an amazing sense
of anticipation in his analysis,
which validated his sociological
arguments. The soundness of
this assessment is confirmed by
his book Listen, Yankee at the
light of the present situation in
Latin America.
Three and a half days of
conversations with the then
Prime Minister Fidel Castro and
five or six more days with the
delegate of the National Institute
for the Agrarian Reform, Rene
Vallejo , as well as interviews
with many other Cuban leaders
and a number of peasants,
workers, students and house
wives, in August 1960 supplied
the arguments in the book.
The readers of this book find as
its conductive axle a warning to
the American society, rather than
to the American government,
that the Cuban revolution
might not simply be an isolated
accident but the beginning of a
succession of similar scenarios in
the entire underdeveloped world,
especially in Latin America.
Wright Mills expresses an advice,
by means of eight successive
letters from the figurative Cuban
revolutionary protagonist who,
sometimes with arrogance, others
with serenity, but always with
pride, voices the feelings that the
author gathered in our country a
year and a half after the popular
victory of January 1959.
In one of these eight letters, the
Cuban revolutionary proclaims
that “we Cubans are part of Latin
America –not of North America-
. Our history is not part of your
history; it is part of the Latin
America history.
And Latin America
is 180,000,000
people, growing
faster than you
are growing, and
scattered over a
territory more
than twice as large
as the U.S.A.
Like all of Latin
America, we’re
fed up with what
your corporations
and what your
governments do
down here. They’ve
dominated us long
enough, we’ve said
it to ourselves now.
Your government
supported Batista
right up to the
last minute of his
gangster regime.
But now Cuba is
not just another
island in the
Caribbean. The Caribbean is not
a North American lake. All that,
that’s over.”
Wright Mills reasons in the initial
note to the reader that: “The
voice of Cuba today is the voice
of revolutionary euphoria. It is
also an angry voice. I am trying
to explain something of all this
along with the Cubans’ reasons
for it. For their reasons are not
only theirs: they are the reasons
of the entire hungry world.”
He shows an exact understanding
of the Cuban political
situation when he
spells his mind about
the electoral exigency
promoted by US
media and the internal
counterrevolution
which Washington
was trying to oxygen.
In his final note to the
reader Wright Mills
declares: “I share
the view of every
competent observer
that in any election
the victory of the
fidelistas will be
overwhelming. But
what seems to me
more relevant to the
question is that no
matter how elections
were organized,
and no matter
how they may be supervised
by an international agency,
such a victory would be quite
meaningless. To have meaningful
elections it is necessary to have
at least two political parties
and it would be necessary
for these parties to campaign
on some range of issues. The
only issue in Cuba today is the
revolution, conceived by the
Cuban government primarily
as economic and educational
construction and as military
defense of Cuban sovereignty.
Any party that campaigned
today against the revolution and
against the present Government’s
management of it would probably
be set upon by the majority of
the people of Cuba. So I think
it must be faced up to: a real
election is an impossible and
meaningless idea. It will only be
made meaningful by deliberately
giving institutional form to
the counterrevolution, and that
today would be unacceptable
to the immense majority of the
people of Cuba. The absence
of elections signifies absence of
democracy only on the formal
assumption that the electoral
process is at all times and in
all places indispensable to
democracy. But be that as it
may, an election in Cuba is at the
present time an impossible and
meaningless demand.”
When, 15 years later, in 1975,
Cuba institutionalized it’s
major social and political
revolutionary achievements in a
new Constitution discussed and
approved by all its citizens, as
well as a self-developed electoral
system, truly democratic and
participative, very different
from the US system, the ideas
expressed in the book were
confirmed: the US electoral
model is not a valid paradigm for
the underdeveloped countries.
Wright Mills clearly identifies the
historical antecedents, economic
roots and universal outreach
of U.S. imperialism expressed
in its Cuban policies when the
Cuban revolutionary character
states that “there cannot be
peace –by which we mean real
understanding- between North
and South America as long as
these Yankee corporations own
the riches of our countries.
Because with this kind of
ownership goes the real control
of the politics of our countries…
That’s not ideology. That’s just
a plain fact that we have lived
in Cuba, and that most of Latin
America is still living.”
However, in his own final
observations, he prefers not
to go so deep into the question
and states that “the policies the
United States has pursued and
is still pursuing against Cuba
are based upon a profound
ignorance, and are shot through
with hysteria.”
The shamelessly declared
imperialist objective to bring
democracy to Cuba was
also rejected by the “Cuban
revolutionary” created by Wright
Mills 47 years ago when he
says: “We don’t know what you
mean by the word ´democratic´
but if what we are doing isn’t
democratic, then we don’t want
democracy. And if you identify a
free society with what you have
in North America, please know
that we don’t. We’ve tried that
kind of political system in Cuba.
Maybe it works for you –that’s
your business; it certainly did
not work for us.”
C. Wright Mills did not have a
formal political militancy and he
was neither a communist nor an
anticommunist. He had studied
and written about Marxism,
and evidently he felt attracted
by the Cuban revolution. “Were
I a Cuban, I have no doubt that
I would be working with all
my effort for the success of my
revolution. But I am not a Cuban.
I am a Yankee.”
And, as an American, he
formulated a recommendation
to the government of his country
which he put in the words of the
protagonist of his book: “You
ought to use Cuba as The Case
–The Case in which to establish
the way you are going to act
when there are revolutions in
hungry countries everywhere in
the world.”
Recently, Cuba was visited by
the famed U.S. writer Gore
Vidal, accompanied by a
group of other fellow citizens
among who I recognized Saul
Landau, an outstanding writer,
political scientist, filmmaker and
journalist who, being very young
and already a bright intellectual,
worked with Charles Wright
Mills in the days of Listen,
Yankee and he could have been
the one who attracted Mills to the
studies of the Cuban revolution.
At the beginning of 1960,
they and many other excellent
intellectuals in the United States
created the Fair Play for Cuba
Committee in New York and
not without serious risks to their
lives, pronounced themselves
against a policy that, as they
foresaw and advised, would sink
their country in dishonor.
Sadly, the message was never
listened to.
*Manuel E. Yepe is a lawyer,
economist and social scientist. He is
a professor at the Raul Roa Higher
Institute of International Relations in
Havana. He served as Ambassador,
Director General of the Prensa
Latina News Agency, Vice President
of the Cuban Institute of Radio
and Television, founding National
Director of UNDP’s Technological
Information Pilot System (TIPS) in
Cuba and Secretary of the Cuban
Peace Movement.
Havana, March 2007.
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