Review of *Fighting over Fidel: The New York Intellectuals and the Cuban Revolution*

After the overthrow of the dictator Fulgencio Batista at the beginning of 1959, the new Cuban government embarked in an ambitious experiment in participatory democracy.   Cubans  at every level of society gathered in their neighborhoods and their workplaces to discuss the problems facing the nation as well as their local situations.  Cadres summed up discussions and forwarded popular concerns and recommendations to ministries and agencies responsible for synthesizing a national consensus.  In 1961, at a meeting of several thousand writers in Havana, Fidel Castro insisted that intellectuals were vital to the expanded democracy Cubans were creating.  Like all Cuban citizens, they became part of the revolution by freely expressing their opinions on how the nation should move forward.  Suspending the congratulatory emphasis, however, Castro added that only those with fundamental doubts about the revolution would worry that their work might be censored.  If such people might be in the room, Castro warned them that any Cuban who stood apart from the revolution had no rights as a citizen whatsoever, a conclusion repeated several times in what would become subsequently the slogan, “within the revolution everything, outside the revolution nothing.” That some intellectuals believed that the new government practiced censorship surprised Castro.  He claimed to have been totally unaware of these concerns until his friend the U.S. sociologist C. Wright Mills raised the matter with him.  Castro then knew he must attend this meeting of writers in order to clarify the place of intellectuals within the revolution.  The applause indicated frequently in the transcription of the speech (Fidel Castro, “Palabras a los intelectuales,” 30 June 1961, online at http://lanic.utexas.edu/project/castro/db/1961/19610630.html) suggests how strongly his presence moved those in attendance, despite his frequent chiding and undisguised threats.

Only two months before this speech, the Cuban people had defeated a U.S.-organized invasion by political exiles at Playa Girón (Bay of Pigs).  The country was preparing for a second invasion, possibly by the U.S. military itself.  The U.S. government was actively sabotaging the Cuban economy and infiltrating paramilitary units into the country to plant bombs, assassinate revolutionaries, and otherwise lay the groundwork for an invasion and occupation.  Fidel’s government expected a besieged nation to accept military discipline as a necessity of defending the nation from an implacable enemy.  Castro’s demand for loyalty to the revolution easily transformed into a demand to follow orders and defer the more difficult debates to the future.  Many historians of the Cuban revolution, including Lillian Guerra, Jennifer Lambe, Abel Sierra Madero, and María Antonia Cabrera Arús, have noted that internal politics also shaped the direction that the country took after 1959.  Many in the revolutionary leadership that took power in 1959 did not accept Fidel’s primacy.  The revolution against the Batista dictatorship involved an alliance of three groups: the professional urban middle class frequently grounded in the Catholic church; a new left of high school and university students independent of the communists that formed the base of the July 26 movement and the guerrilla struggle; and trade unions often led by the Cuban Communist Party, which did not join the movement against Batista until 1958.  Early in 1959, a struggle for power between often ideologically incompatible groups led to Fidel Castro organizing a new coalition centered on him as the most important voice of the revolution now demanding a program for revolutionary stability.  In the course of internal struggle, overlapping with deepening struggle with the U.S. government, Fidel’s new coalition eliminated independent media, curtailed civil society, and actively sought to eliminate internal opponents, most of whom had been anti-Batista and viewed the revolution as the result of their work and sacrifice.  Internal opposition intensified through 1961, and the government took increasingly draconian steps to place a country that in fact was at war on a war footing.  Decisions might be heavyhanded at times, Castro frequently conceded.  He told the meeting of writers that he was not infallible.  He and the government would make mistakes, which would eventually be rectified.  The immediate crisis however demanded an end to meaningless debate.

And so five months later, in November 1961, the Cuban government closed the weekly cultural journal Lunes de Revolución.  With 250,000 readers, it was the most widely read magazine produced in the country.  The government claimed that material published was “counterrevolutionary” and “extranjerizante” (“promoting fascination for things foreign”).  The journal’s founding editors, poet Carlos Franqui and novelist Guillermo Cabrera Infante, were committed to exploring the revolutionary potential of the imagination.  They presented contrasting perspectives on the choices facing Cuba that their critics complained unnecessarily complicated issues and confused readers at a time when the country demanded clarity and discipline.  The editors published many writers from the United States, western Europe, and other Latin American countries, generally with the goal of introducing Cubans to radical and revolutionary thought around the world.  U.S. writers published in Lunes de Revolución were generally new left intellectuals, countercultural writers, and leaders of the black liberation movement.  At times, the editors invited foreign writers to edit special editions, such as Carlos Fuentes’s issue on politics and culture in Mexico.  The international slant of the journal was also a problem for its critics since few of the foreign writers appearing in the journal were orthodox Marxist-Leninists, which was becoming the preferred ideology of the new government as Castro sought alliance with the Soviet Union. The closing of Lunes de Revolución was a critical turning point in Cuba’s transition into a communist society.  By 1965, the country had only one newspaper, Granma, well written and striving to present the many debates underway within the revolution, but run by the government to promote official policy and to make clear contrary positions that they considered “outside the revolution.”  The Cuban government closed Lunes de Revolución primarily because the editors were allies of leaders in the revolution challenging Fidel Castro’s leadership.  A by-product of the revolution’s internal political struggles was growing suspicion within the consolidating power structure that friendship with people from the U.S. left might well be an indicator of political unreliability.  The socialist government wanted allies in the United States but wanted to limit their influence on life within Cuba.

Cuban historian Rafael Rojas’s recent book, Fighting over Fidel: The New York Intellectuals and the Cuban Revolution, focuses on how U.S. intellectuals sympathetic to the revolution responded to developments in Cuba from 1958 to 1971.  The reference in the book’s subtitle to “the New York intellectuals” is misleading, perhaps a clue that the author interprets U.S. history in ways that are distinct from a historian from the United States.  The most familiar New York intellectuals are entirely missing because Rojas excluded explicitly anticommunist writers to focus on writers and a small number of visual artists aligned with the emerging new left, several of whom were based in California, North Carolina, Texas, or other places far from Manhattan.  As a result, there is only passing reference to the Partisan Review, none at all to the New York Review of Books, and only occasional discussion of Dissent.  The three U.S. journals most extensively discussed are the Monthly Review, Kulchur, and Pa’lante.  The figures Rojas analyzes fall into three distinct groups:

• older, well-established, influential writers that the Cuban government actively courted in hopes that they could positively reshape discussion of the revolution in the U.S. press, including Waldo Frank, Carleton Beals, C. Wright Mills, Paul Sweezy, and Leo Huberman;
• younger writers and artists, generally associated with the beats and the emerging counterculture—with Rojas giving closest attention to Allen Ginsberg, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Elizabeth Sunderland Martinez, and Leroy McLucas—who formed close friendships and working relationships with Cuban writers and artists, many of whom, like the editors of Lunes de Revolución, got into trouble with the government;
• black liberation leaders who came to Cuba seeking refuge from police persecution in the United States, most prominently Robert F. Williams, Stokely Carmichael, and Eldridge Cleaver.

The diverse group of figures and specialized topics presented in the book is another striking difference from other books on the “New York intellectuals.”  Additionally, Rojas is presenting U.S. figures to Latin American readers, many of whom have relatively limited knowledge of U.S. history in general and little or no prior knowledge of most of the figures discussed in the book.   Giving them the contexts they need to understand the story requires introductory discussion of subject matter that is basic for U.S. readers, at least for those who are specialists in the intellectual and cultural history of the United States after 1945.

What makes Rojas’s book most interesting for U.S. readers is an analytic perspective on intellectual life in the cold war-era United States shaped by evaluation of the Cuban revolution as a primary but increasingly divergent expression of a global new left.  For Rojas, examination of Cuban relations with the U.S. left helps reveal the complexity within the Cuban revolution and the possibilities for other paths that the country might have taken after 1959.  At the same time, by ignoring specifically anticommunist critiques and by digging beneath routine expressions of “solidarity” from U.S. sympathizers with Cuba, Rojas concludes that engagement with Cuba and the misunderstandings that inevitably followed initial enthusiasm pushed the U.S. new left in directions that accentuated the movements’ “newness” and strengthened their impact within the United States.  Those developments, however important for the United States, were irreconcilable with Cuban conceptions of revolutionary change.

The range of topics addressed—sociology, economics, political theory, the history of race relations, literary theory, poetry, and photography—are challenging for author and reader alike but necessary to present a pattern of misunderstanding that Rojas argues was not due to any specific theoretical differences but inherent to the relations left activists from the United States of any background developed with their counterparts in Cuba.  Mutual misunderstandings, or to use an everyday Spanish word looming over the English version of Rojas’s book, desencuentros, occurred frequently and in dramatically distinct contexts.  As an everyday word, desencuentro is used for an appointment or rendezvous that fails to take place.  When the word is used figuratively, it can be translated into English as “divergence,” “misunderstanding,” “disagreement,” “discord,” possibly “out of sync.” However, disencounter is the neologism offered in Fighting over Fidel, one of several renditions of relatively straightforward Spanish terms into awkwardly unusual English.  Another example is consistent use of “plurality” in situations where, depending on context, a U.S. writer might more likely use “pluralism” to indicate an ideology or “diversity” to indicate participants and their backgrounds.  Carl Good, the translator, clearly chose to push the book’s readers towards terminology important for Latin American scholars but which lack exact equivalents in English.  Colloquial English alternatives are available and would be easier to grasp but might indeed contribute to misunderstanding because they suggest a shared analytic framework that ought never to be assumed in the course of transnational intellectual exchange.   The translation strategies Good adapted may be uncomfortable but model the core contradictions Rojas presents in his study: The revolution led to an explosion of encounters/engagement.  Given distinct current priorities, historical predispositions, and analytic frameworks, encounters led inexorably to “disencounter”—an inability to comprehend each other, to arrive at any form of sustainable or productive interaction beyond rituals of solidarity.  Rojas, challenging common interpretations in Latin America, argues that the trajectory he outlines was not a result of “betrayal,” “opportunism,” or the “anticommunism” of the U.S. new left.  The underlying problem Rojas insists was an assumption of solidarity leading to reluctance to confront difference and find ways to turn divergence into a strength.

The argument is pertinent to inter-American relations more broadly, as Rojas has shown in his study of Latin American writers and Cuba, La polis literaria: El boom, la Revolución y otras polémicas de la Guerra Fría (Taurus, 2018; “Literary Polis: The Boom, the Revolution, and Other Polemics of the Cold War”).  To read Rojas is to drop into an ongoing conversation on how the left across the continent can best advance a politics of self-determination and cultural autonomy, a debate in which assessment of the achievements and failures of the Cuban revolution is an inevitable if conflicted issue.  For North American readers working in U.S. intellectual history, the possibility for misreading Fighting over Fidel is augmented because the book discusses writers of considerable importance to the field, figures whose careers have generated voluminous secondary literatures in the United States.  Rojas relies heavily on U.S. studies to frame his characters for his readers in the Spanish-speaking world.  His approach diverges from the concerns of the U.S. sources he cites, if only because his interpretation of the United States is necessarily inseparable from his evaluation of choices made within Cuba and his interpretation of the revolution.

Rojas identifies as a democratic socialist.  He was born in Cuba in 1965 to an upper-middle-class family.  His father, a medical doctor, was strongly committed to the revolution.  Rojas has noted that as a child and adolescent, he heard Fidel Castro speak many times and viewed him as infallible, as did his family and his classmates.  As a talented student from a loyal family, Rojas met personally with Castro on occasion, the last time in the late 1980s after Rojas returned from a term abroad studying in the Soviet Union and Castro wanted a firsthand impression of Russian life under Gorbachev’s reforms.  While a philosophy student at the University of Havana, Rojas came to view the Cuban government as inherently “arrogant” and incapable of adapting to a dramatically changed international environment or reconciling Cuba’s bitter internal differences.  In 1991, Rojas left Cuba to study for a Ph.D. in history at the Colegio de México.  Living abroad, he grew more outspoken in his criticism of Cuban socialism.  He remained in Mexico, becoming a university professor teaching intellectual history of the Americas at the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económica (CIDE, “Center for Economic Research and Teaching”), the school that continues to be his home base—though he has long been able to return to Cuba and work in archives there.  Over the last twenty years, Rojas has published twenty books on Cuban history and Cuba’s place in the larger history of Latin America. A book of essays on Cuban intellectual history appeared in English in 2008.  Rojas’s project has been the recovery of alternative political and intellectual traditions in Cuba’s past, small-r republican ones, social democratic ones, anarchist, and other alternative left visions to the official position that he claims redefined the Cuban Revolution. Fighting over Fidel is his first book-length study to be published in English. Rojas is of course but one voice from a part of the world with deep and fast-growing scholarly activity expressed in a wide range of debates.  Venturing into subject matter that is relatively new for him, he makes occasional mistakes of dating or location, which will be noticeable to specialists, but my conclusion is that these errors, regrettable as they are, have no bearing on his findings.

Rojas’s reconstruction of how U.S. left intellectuals viewed the revolution in Cuba resurrects three principal arguments of the early 1960s that, given the mutual failures of the United States as a global leader and Cuba as a revolutionary society, he believes remain unresolved and in need of renewed, but deeper discussion.

The first debate concerned the nature of the Cuban revolution.  U.S. intellectuals treated in the book wanted to know whether Cuba could provide a model for “humanist” socialism—what Fidel promised in 1959 when he assumed power in Cuba and when he introduced himself to the United States in his first visits as Cuba’s leader—a revolutionary socialism that stood apart from the cold war and consequent demands for political conformity strong in the United States as well.  U.S. visitors hoped that what was happenening in Cuba could disprove arguments that socialism necessarily leads to authoritarian if not “totalitarian” dictatorship.  North Americans already committed to democratic socialism were seldom willing to compromise on that issue.  The Cuban government commissioned Waldo Frank to write a book on Cuba that would join the shelf of work on Latin American culture and politics that Frank had produced regularly since the 1920s.  As Frank traveled around the island gathering material for Cuba: Prophetic Island (1961), he saw much that he liked but he increasingly questioned how committed the new government was to the people taking charge of the government and the economy.  In 1960, as his manuscript was close to completion, the Cuban government seemed to confirm his worries by canceling planned elections indefinitely.  Dismayed, Frank revised his book to argue that a mass social uprising had toppled Batista, not the guerrilla forces Castro led.  Frank believed that Castro was probably the only leader capable of uniting the historically fractious Cuban people, but Frank warned that charismatic bonds can easily become corrupt and would as debate withered. The political argument surrounding Frank’s otherwise fulsome praise of the new Cuba displeased the government, which refused to print the Spanish-language version of the book or allow an edition produced in Argentina into the country.  In the context of ongoing sabotage from the United States and a divided leadership competing for power, Frank’s book was divorced from Cuba’s most pressing problems and a history that Frank knew better than most U.S. writers of brief democratic episodes declining into lengthy dictatorships, each more corrupt than its predecessors.

1. Wright Mills’s Listen, Yankee!: The Revolution in Cuba (1961) pleased the Cubans more because Mills foregrounded Cuban perspectives, presenting his extensive conversations with Fidel Castro and other top leaders of the government as interviews collected with random rank-and-file supporters of the revolution met as he traveled around the island. Mills wanted to build understanding for a revolution that, because it had taken place in what he called a “hungry nation,” was likely to reappear in many other countries around the world. For readers in the United States, whether sympathetic or suspicious of Castro, the challenge was to understand the actual choice facing their own country: recurrent wars with many weaker countries rebelling against the internal corruption and foreign domination responsible for poverty; or letting countries like Cuba go their own way in search of a stability that only a lengthy period of internal social realignment could provide.  Cuba under Fidel might not be truly democratic, a disappointed Mills privately concluded, but the country’s transition to authoritarian socialism might be the only available basis, given U.S. hostility, for sundering the linkage of political power and personal enrichment that had undermined previous revolutions.

Leo Huberman and Paul Sweezy, the editors of Monthly Review, were unlike either Frank or Mills committed communists.  They arrived in Cuba with no illusions about constitutional democracy.  They approved the forceful imposition of revolutionary values on a country where elites historically demanded deference and punished independent thinking.  They expected that a period of revolutionary dictatorship was needed to break the resistance of older elites and assure the Cuban people that the nation’s future depended on their taking control of the forces, internal and external, that had long controlled them. They came to Cuba specifically to study implementation of policies Ernesto Guevara introduced while serving as minister of industries and director of the national bank to encourage extensive popular involvement in setting economic goals and discussing methods for implementation.  Huberman and Sweezy found it particularly pertinent that the democratic process Guevara introduced into the workplace led to incentives shifting away from individual rewards towards investment in shared uses—a controversial conclusion within Cuba because it strongly diverged from Soviet economic practices.  Huberman and Sweezy predicted that Guevara’s experiments were likely to be inconclusive or fail, but such efforts to reconcile scientific planning with democratic governance made the Cuban revolution a site for uniquely interesting innovations that merited intensive study and analysis, which they offered in Cuba: Anatomy of a Revolution (1960) and Socialism in Cuba (1969), the later study focusing on the contest within Cuba between democratic and command planning that led ultimately to Guevara’s resignation from his government posts and his return to leading guerrilla campaigns in Africa and Bolivia.

The second debate Rojas centered around the meaning of “intellectual freedom” in a socialist society.  While this was a critical issue for all the U.S. intellectuals that Rojas discusses, a particularly full theoretical discussion of the topic appeared in the Monthly Review in 1961, with Paul Baran’s essay “The Commitment of the Intellectual.”  Baran took as a given that opposition from global capitalism was inescapable and generated crises that encouraged revolutionary governments like Cuba’s to repress debate.  Baran argued that repression while understandable from the perspective of military discipline was mistaken because responding effectively to crisis required free and open debate.  “Intellectual independence” was not a question of “liberty” as an abstract concept, but a practical necessity of innovation, particularly in difficult times. Most importantly for the long-term future of a revolution, worker autonomy itself depended on preserving the independence of “critical intellectuals,” whose loyalties were to their fellow citizens, not to party leadership.  Free debate disciplined by problem solving oriented to autonomously defined popular needs pushed citizens to tell the truth to each other in forums not overdetermined by fear (as in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, or China) or by the quest for personal gain (as in North America, western Europe, and Japan).  in both the so-called “free world” and the Soviet bloc, repression of free argument led to bureaucratic managerial societies where the highest priority was preserving a counterrevolutionary status quo and protecting careers enterprising managers were building for themselves.

For the countercultural figures treated in the book, the issue of “intellectual freedom” operated more personally and directly.  U.S. countercultural writers, like Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, or Baraka, did not arrive in Cuba with sophisticated theoretical views of political and economic theory.  For them, Rojas states, “to express solidarity with Cuba meant supporting primordial political values anterior to or independent from the ideological polarization of the Cold War, such as recognition of Cuba’s sovereignty, rejection of the obscene exercise of US hegemony around the globe” (143). Starting with the closing of Lunes de Revolución in 1961, however, restriction of open debate in revolutionary Cuba grew in a series of well-publicized attacks on prominent cultural figures, including the summary expulsion of Allen Ginsberg from Cuba in 1965 after Casa de las Américas had invited him to sit on the jury for an important poetry prize.  Rojas argues that initially there was considerable mutual attraction between the beats and Cuban revolutionaries, many of whom found in beat writing emotional resources justifying their rebellion against repressive Spanish Catholic traditions.  According to Rojas, the beats were indicative of a new type of radicalism emerging in the United States with new movements going beyond class and civil rights to assert black power, women’s liberation, gay liberation, and other causes that the Cuban government deemed unacceptable and counterrevolutionary.  The invitation to Ginsberg indicates how fluid the situation was in Cuba, with prominent leaders of Casa de las Américas embracing a U.S. writer who in “Prose Contribution to the Cuban Revolution” (1961) attacked the suspension of criticism associated with “solidarity” as amoral submission to policy calculations that quickly undermined commitment to human liberation in the broadest sense and support for the Cuban people specifically.  “No revolution,” Ginsberg wrote in a piece whose publication in Cuba had been a factor in the closure of Lunes de Revolución, “can succeed if it continues the puritanical censorship of consciousness imposed on the world by Russia and America.”  Ginsberg’s expulsion was a reminder to Cuban intellectuals that only the country’s leadership possessed the authority to determine what was “within the revolution.”

Rojas’s third debate concerned the understanding of race in Cuba and whether the revolution was transcending a history of slavery and discrimination that disenfranchised African-descent Cubans and relegated them to poverty.  Robert F. Williams, leader of an NAACP chapter in North Carolina, fled with his family to Cuba in 1961, escaping bogus kidnapping charges that the state government filed against him.  Wiliams wrote about what he saw in Cuba for U.S. periodicals, describing programs to end racial inequality and improve the economic position of Cuba’s poor, the majority of whom were black.  He came to the conclusion that Cuba showed revolutionary communism better able to handle the problems affecting black communities in the United States than the integrationist policies advanced by the postwar civil rights movement, an important step in Williams’s transformation from southern civil rights leader to international communist.  Williams’s famous book, Negroes with Guns (1962), Rojas argues, emplotted the movement towards black power into a sophisticated understanding of the history of liberation struggles in both Cuba and the United States.

The book begins as a debate between two apparently contradictory revolutionary principles: the strict non-violence of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference led by Martin Luther King versus the Cuban position that violence is necessary for genuine revolution.  Williams’s defense of blacks in the South arming themselves to confront Jim Crow is famous and would seem to align Williams firmly with the Cuban position.  However, Rojas argues that Williams’s growing concerns for evident limitations on popular participation Cuba’s governance led to his reframing the argument: a primordial right of a people under attack to self-defense “by any means necessary” versus theoretical advocacy of violence “as a tool of advancement.”  In this framing, Williams insisted that the moral argument for non-violence advanced by King could not be eliminated, even in situations where peaceful resistance is not an effective practical response.  Self-defense requires, Williams argued, a conviction in the moral priority of non-violence even after one is forced into a position of armed self-defense.  Williams concluded that situation shapes the action one takes for liberation.  “Flexibility” is the term he invoked while insisting on his agreement with King’s moral arguments, which if dismissed turns revolutionary action towards nihilism.  Rojas finds it fundamentally important that Williams’s book grounded this conclusion with a historical argument about the U.S. anti-slavery movement.  Thoreau’s seminal essay “Civil Disobedience” and John Brown’s failed plan at Harper’s Ferry to arm slaves were both equally critical turning points.  Advocates for black liberation and social change in the United States need only look to the history of abolition and the Civil War to understand that non-violence as a moral imperative had not been in contradiction with armed struggle as a practical necessity in defending the rights of the people, but provided a moral underpinning to the Union cause that contributed to its victory.

This discussion in Fighting over Fidel is core to Rojas’s arguments over increasingly divergent strategies for liberation separating Cuba from its supporters in the United States.  The U.S. left in the United States was reforming around “new social movements” that challenged conservatives, liberals, and revolutionaries alike but posed particular difficulties for the left.  Socialist conceptions of democracy viewed existing contradictions within and between nations as stemming from class oppression and private ownership of the means of production.  Socialist transformation erased the conditions generating inequality and entrenched difference. The new social movements however accepted difference as a permanent aspect of social life, positive in allowing citizens to disclose attachments that both left and right had previously ignored except for disparaging or persecuting. Indeed, midcentury revolutionary movements treated sexual difference as a taboo topic, treatment that left them unprepared for the growing power of the feminist and queer perspectives they excluded. The Cuban government similarly viewed black power as a dangerous threat to national unity.  Leadership insisted that the country’s social policies eliminated racial discrimination and created the basis for national identities to replace group identities, which were identified as counterrevolutionary.  The Cuban position was complicated because the government saw black nationalists in the United States as potential allies undermining Cuba’s enemy, thus deserving of practical support.  Their presence in Cuba however had to be monitored and interaction with black Cubans restricted.  Cuba’s racial policy alienated and eventually enfuriated U.S. exiles, leading Robert Williams to leave for China in 1965 and the Black Panthers several years later to relocate to Algeria.  The question of race, Rojas argues, was a point of “irreducible divergence.”

The exchanges and the juxtapositions covered in Fighting over Fidel provide a remarkable record that Rojas concludes by arguing that any effort to understand the relation of the U.S. left and the Cuban revolution has to avoid the “paradigm of solidarity” (193).  Theorists and activists from both countries sought each other out, taking for granted that they were on the same side.  In the course of defining the issues uniting them, their divergences proved more striking than their agreements.  In principle, they stood shoulder to shoulder; in practice, they had different priorities, which often were in opposition and not simply distinct.  Rojas insists that historical experience is more complicated that any theoretical or conceptual constructs historians and theorists use, or the activists of the 1960s used, to interpret the past.  Curiously but perhaps appropriate for a book contributing to a history of the global new left, the moral center of Rojas’s argument pivots around the British historian E. P. Thompson and his arguments that popular experience, confusing and muddled as it can be, provides a more sustainable guide for revolutionary activity than the theoretical propositions about structures that consumed the Marxist left across the twentieth century.  Successful political leadership necessarily analyzes forces, opportunities, and constraints, but also accepts that action, because actors are diverse and typically work in contradictory ways, leads to unexpected developments that, on occasion, suddenly produce outcomes and possibilities that theory precluded.  Rojas argues that openness to historical complexity was part of what made the new left “new.”  In the United States, the new left involved turning away from the CPUSA to rediscover and modernize older but eclipsed traditions for justice and equality—some republican, some socialist, some Christian, some grounded in the struggle for black liberation.  Similarly in Cuba, Rojas argues that Cuban responses to their U.S. counterparts reveal continuing influences of heterodox revolutionary traditions that had been vital for the 1959 revolution but then depreciated and suppressed as the new government struggled simultaneously with its own divisions and U.S. aggression.  The continuing appeal of U.S. radical ideas for many Cubans in positions of responsibility and the increasing strictness of the government’s determinations of what was “within the revolution” suggests how central disagreements over how to understand the country’s past remained for the struggle over the future of Cuba.