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Cuba: an American Tragedy
What exactly happened during the Cuban crisis? Why were such deep political passions aroused in America, and to what extent has Cuba been transformed by Castro's revolution?
Here at last, in this dispassionate study, two young American scholars, sympathetic and immensely knowledgeable, bring these vital events into focus. In the perspective of U.S. Cuban policy since 1898 they show how American relations with Castro began with misunderstanding and ended in unreasoned panic, and how the 'Communist Menace' began as myth and ended as fact.
Cuba almost touched off a nuclear war. This book, which has been revised and brought up to date as a Penguin Special, presents a clear, authoritative study of the developing crisis and the little country at its centre.
Here at last, in this dispassionate study, two young American scholars, sympathetic and immensely knowledgeable, bring these vital events into focus. In the perspective of U.S. Cuban policy since 1898 they show how American relations with Castro began with misunderstanding and ended in unreasoned panic, and how the 'Communist Menace' began as myth and ended as fact.
Cuba almost touched off a nuclear war. This book, which has been revised and brought up to date as a Penguin Special, presents a clear, authoritative study of the developing crisis and the little country at its centre.
368 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1963
1 person is currently reading
22 people want to read
About the author
Robert Scheer
52 books34 followersRobert Scheer is an American journalist who writes a column for Truthdig which is nationally syndicated in publications such as the San Francisco Chronicle and The Nation. He teaches communications as a professor at the University of Southern California and is Editor in Chief for the online magazine Truthdig.
Scheer was born to immigrant parents. His mother, a Russian Jew, and his father, a German, both worked in the garment industry. After graduating from City College of New York with a degree in economics, he studied as a fellow at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University, and then did further economics graduate work at the Center for Chinese Studies at UC Berkeley. Scheer has also been a Poynter fellow at Yale University, and was a fellow in arms control at Stanford, the same post once held by Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice.
While working at City Lights Books in San Francisco, Scheer co-authored the book, Cuba, an American tragedy (1964), with Maurice Zeitlin. Between 1964 and 1969, he served, variously, as the Vietnam correspondent, managing editor and editor-in-chief of Ramparts magazine. He reported from Cambodia, China, North Korea, Russia, Latin America and the Middle East (including the Six-Day War), as well as on national security matters in the United States. While in Cuba, where he interviewed Fidel Castro, Scheer obtained an introduction by the Cuban leader for the diary of Che Guevara — which Scheer had already obtained, with the assistance of French journalist Michele Ray, for publication in Ramparts and by Bantam Books.
During this period Scheer made a bid for elective office as one of the first anti-Vietnam War candidates. He challenged U.S. Representative Jeffrey Cohelan in the 1966 Democratic primary. Cohelan was a liberal, but like most Democratic officeholders at that time, he supported the Vietnam War. Scheer lost, but won over 45% of the vote (and carried Berkeley), a strong showing against an incumbent that demonstrated the rising strength of New Left Sixties radicalism.
In July 1970, Scheer accompanied as a journalist a Black Panther Party delegation, led by Eldridge Cleaver, to North Korea, China, and Vietnam. The delegation also contained people from the San Francisco Red Guard, the women's liberation movement, the Peace and Freedom Party, Newsreel, and the Movement for a Democratic Military. The purpose of the delegation was to "express solidarity with the struggles of the Koreans" and to "bring back to Babylon information about their communist society and their fight against U.S. imperialism," according to the Black Panthers' publication.
After several years freelancing for magazines, including New Times and Playboy, Scheer joined the Los Angeles Times in 1976 as a reporter. There he met Narda Zacchino, a reporter whom he later wed in the paper's news room. As a national correspondent for 17 years at the Times, he wrote articles and series on such diverse topics as the Soviet Union during glasnost, the Jews of Los Angeles, arms control, urban crises, national politics and the military, as well as covering several presidential elections. The Times entered Scheer's work for the Pulitzer Prize 11 times, and he was a finalist for the Pulitzer national reporting award for a series on the television industry.
After Scheer left the Times in 1993, the paper granted him a weekly op-ed column which ran every Tuesday for the next 12 years until it was canceled in 2005. The column now appears in the San Francisco Chronicle and is distributed nationally by Creators Syndicate. He is also a contributing editor for the Nation magazine.
Scheer can be heard weekly on the nationally syndicated political analysis radio program "Left, Right & Center" produced at KCRW in Santa Monica and syndicated by Public Radio International.
Scheer was born to immigrant parents. His mother, a Russian Jew, and his father, a German, both worked in the garment industry. After graduating from City College of New York with a degree in economics, he studied as a fellow at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University, and then did further economics graduate work at the Center for Chinese Studies at UC Berkeley. Scheer has also been a Poynter fellow at Yale University, and was a fellow in arms control at Stanford, the same post once held by Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice.
While working at City Lights Books in San Francisco, Scheer co-authored the book, Cuba, an American tragedy (1964), with Maurice Zeitlin. Between 1964 and 1969, he served, variously, as the Vietnam correspondent, managing editor and editor-in-chief of Ramparts magazine. He reported from Cambodia, China, North Korea, Russia, Latin America and the Middle East (including the Six-Day War), as well as on national security matters in the United States. While in Cuba, where he interviewed Fidel Castro, Scheer obtained an introduction by the Cuban leader for the diary of Che Guevara — which Scheer had already obtained, with the assistance of French journalist Michele Ray, for publication in Ramparts and by Bantam Books.
During this period Scheer made a bid for elective office as one of the first anti-Vietnam War candidates. He challenged U.S. Representative Jeffrey Cohelan in the 1966 Democratic primary. Cohelan was a liberal, but like most Democratic officeholders at that time, he supported the Vietnam War. Scheer lost, but won over 45% of the vote (and carried Berkeley), a strong showing against an incumbent that demonstrated the rising strength of New Left Sixties radicalism.
In July 1970, Scheer accompanied as a journalist a Black Panther Party delegation, led by Eldridge Cleaver, to North Korea, China, and Vietnam. The delegation also contained people from the San Francisco Red Guard, the women's liberation movement, the Peace and Freedom Party, Newsreel, and the Movement for a Democratic Military. The purpose of the delegation was to "express solidarity with the struggles of the Koreans" and to "bring back to Babylon information about their communist society and their fight against U.S. imperialism," according to the Black Panthers' publication.
After several years freelancing for magazines, including New Times and Playboy, Scheer joined the Los Angeles Times in 1976 as a reporter. There he met Narda Zacchino, a reporter whom he later wed in the paper's news room. As a national correspondent for 17 years at the Times, he wrote articles and series on such diverse topics as the Soviet Union during glasnost, the Jews of Los Angeles, arms control, urban crises, national politics and the military, as well as covering several presidential elections. The Times entered Scheer's work for the Pulitzer Prize 11 times, and he was a finalist for the Pulitzer national reporting award for a series on the television industry.
After Scheer left the Times in 1993, the paper granted him a weekly op-ed column which ran every Tuesday for the next 12 years until it was canceled in 2005. The column now appears in the San Francisco Chronicle and is distributed nationally by Creators Syndicate. He is also a contributing editor for the Nation magazine.
Scheer can be heard weekly on the nationally syndicated political analysis radio program "Left, Right & Center" produced at KCRW in Santa Monica and syndicated by Public Radio International.
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December 7, 2019
CUBA an American tragedy
First published 1963
These are my highlight extracts from reading CUBA an American tragedy
Opens with an excerpt from 'The Self-fulfilling Prophecy: Social Theory and Social Structure', 1957 by Robert K. Merton.
P.15 - 1. Prelude to Revolution
'The precaristas - the squatters who have settled on other people's land.'
P.16 - The conflicting views of Cuba by the Cuban Revolution and the United States.
P.16 -17 - Cuban Society before the Revolution.
'Prior to the Revolution were six decades of basic distinctions between the ruling and the ruled, the privileged and the deprived, had created a gulf that veritably separated "two nations". These two nations - the upper and lower classes - were marked in the local speech of the people as "rich" and "poor".'
P.38 - 'Cuba has an area of 44,218 square miles.
Estimated Pop: more than seven million (1964)
Cuba's proportion of cultivable land to total land area, and the fertilityof her soil, are among the world's highest.
'Until 1 January 1959, was 'an American "plantation".'
P.40 - 'The Cuban 1908 election of José Gómez. Four years later a Negro political party, the Independent Party of Colour, also threatened rebellion, together with the veterans organizations demanding the ousting of government officials who had collaborated with Spain in the War of Independence. The Negro Party, The Independent Party of Colour threatened rebellion because it had been prevented from entering candidates in the election. Earlier, on orders from Washington, leaders of the party were arrested for inciting rebellion.'
P.74 - 'Revolution Trials of Batista regime crimes. "In general; Cubans feel that sudden U.S. concerns with civil liberties in Cuba is hypocrisy in view of its long silence about atrocities of the Batista regime." '
This is where it gets interesting.
A few facts here why Cuba was ripe for revolution.
P.20 - 'More than 75 percent of dwellings of the rural population were bohios, (huts made from the royal palm tree).
• Disease and malnutrition were almost universal in rural Cuba and took their toll in the urban areas as well.
• Over 60 percent of all Cuban doctors practiced in Havana province.
P.21- • Over half of Cuba's rural dwellings had no toilets of any kind.
• 97 percent had no refrigeration facilities.
• 85 percent had no inside running water.
• 91 percent had no electricity.
• Perhaps one of the best clues to a society's welfare is its educational system. In Cuba school attendance was low, and the educational system had been deteriorating throughout the years before the Revolution.
In the years immediately preceding the Revolution, almost one half of of the children of school age were NOT in school. The problem was not that there were no funds to provide schools and teachers. On the contrary, larger amounts than before in Cuba's history were spent on education in the decade or so preceding the Revolution.
The Children were not educated because the members of the government kept for themselves the money that the Cuban people paid in taxes for education.'
Still wondering why there was a Revolution?
• Close to half of the people were illiterate.
P.83 - Interpreting the reaction in the United States.
'The Cuban revolutionaries made their democratic views clear. They came to power after overthrowing a dictatorship. Yet the reaction to the Revolution in the United States, even in this first phase when U.S. economic interests were untouched was generally hostile. To the Cuban revolutionaries it seemed as if the U.S. press was deliberately trying to stir up opposition to the Revolution.'
P. 83-84 - 'The most important step of a revolution in a social context like Cuba's must be to fire the anticipation and expectations of the population, to change the basic social outlook from age-old resignation to expectation, which becomes the basis of their willingness to adapt to what is new. Without such sparking of the spirit, the resistance of tradition would be insurmountable.
Nationalist enthusiasm is necessary for economic development. It welds a society together into one cohesive force;
It allows the focus of the people's energies; it softens immediate sacrifices with the promise of the future. Americans seem unable to understand this.'
Agrarian Reform Law. Chapt.5, P.78 - 91.
Land Reform. Chapt.7 P. 102 - 105.
P.168 - 'latifundia. The old system of huge latifundia owned by handful of Cuban and U.S. companies had to end.'
P.169 - 'Education - in sixteen months the Ministry of Education created 13,696 new teaching positions, the same number of classrooms have been opened, more than half located in rural areas.
Before the Revolution there was a divide between the ruling and the ruled. Two nations. The upper and lower classes. An élite of top government officials, army officers, the wealthy mill and plantation owners, (latifundias) and businessmen - those in short, of political power, wealth, and 'family tradition' dominated Cuban society.
▪The majority of the Cuban people, especially the peasants and rural labourers and small farmers lived in poverty, or on its margins. Chronic unemployment, poor living conditions, disease, illiteracy, malnutrition, isolation imposed by the near impassable roads.'
P.316 - 'Appendix 4 - The Paper Curtain
Between the people of the U.S. and the world, there is a paper curtain. Americans get their information from and form their opinions on the basis of a few standardized news sources.
Because public opinion in the United States is largely created and shaped by the mass media. The news services assume a crucial significance in the formation of policy toward Cuba. Not only do the opinions shaped by these media act as a primary source of pressure on the politicians, but the politicians themselves rarely have more enlightening sources than the typical citizen.'
P. 326 - 'But why is the U.S. press - with all its resources - unable to report the Cuban revolution objectively?'
This has long been one of my favourite books. I read it when Fidel Castro was still leading the Revolution as the President of Cuba.
Fidel's extentive autobiography, My Life, in interview form with Ignacio Ramonet, (first published in 2006, translated 2007), I finished reading in Feb. 2019.
When Fidel Castro died in Nov. 2016, which was widely reported on Social Media News sites, I was appalled at the comments from America on his passing.
If there's one thing that is true, it is that no Communist takeover of a country is possible unless historically the social contract be rotten to the core to start with, conditions created by either a monarchy or Colonial Imperialism.
First published 1963
These are my highlight extracts from reading CUBA an American tragedy
Opens with an excerpt from 'The Self-fulfilling Prophecy: Social Theory and Social Structure', 1957 by Robert K. Merton.
P.15 - 1. Prelude to Revolution
'The precaristas - the squatters who have settled on other people's land.'
P.16 - The conflicting views of Cuba by the Cuban Revolution and the United States.
P.16 -17 - Cuban Society before the Revolution.
'Prior to the Revolution were six decades of basic distinctions between the ruling and the ruled, the privileged and the deprived, had created a gulf that veritably separated "two nations". These two nations - the upper and lower classes - were marked in the local speech of the people as "rich" and "poor".'
P.38 - 'Cuba has an area of 44,218 square miles.
Estimated Pop: more than seven million (1964)
Cuba's proportion of cultivable land to total land area, and the fertilityof her soil, are among the world's highest.
'Until 1 January 1959, was 'an American "plantation".'
P.40 - 'The Cuban 1908 election of José Gómez. Four years later a Negro political party, the Independent Party of Colour, also threatened rebellion, together with the veterans organizations demanding the ousting of government officials who had collaborated with Spain in the War of Independence. The Negro Party, The Independent Party of Colour threatened rebellion because it had been prevented from entering candidates in the election. Earlier, on orders from Washington, leaders of the party were arrested for inciting rebellion.'
P.74 - 'Revolution Trials of Batista regime crimes. "In general; Cubans feel that sudden U.S. concerns with civil liberties in Cuba is hypocrisy in view of its long silence about atrocities of the Batista regime." '
This is where it gets interesting.
A few facts here why Cuba was ripe for revolution.
P.20 - 'More than 75 percent of dwellings of the rural population were bohios, (huts made from the royal palm tree).
• Disease and malnutrition were almost universal in rural Cuba and took their toll in the urban areas as well.
• Over 60 percent of all Cuban doctors practiced in Havana province.
P.21- • Over half of Cuba's rural dwellings had no toilets of any kind.
• 97 percent had no refrigeration facilities.
• 85 percent had no inside running water.
• 91 percent had no electricity.
• Perhaps one of the best clues to a society's welfare is its educational system. In Cuba school attendance was low, and the educational system had been deteriorating throughout the years before the Revolution.
In the years immediately preceding the Revolution, almost one half of of the children of school age were NOT in school. The problem was not that there were no funds to provide schools and teachers. On the contrary, larger amounts than before in Cuba's history were spent on education in the decade or so preceding the Revolution.
The Children were not educated because the members of the government kept for themselves the money that the Cuban people paid in taxes for education.'
Still wondering why there was a Revolution?
• Close to half of the people were illiterate.
P.83 - Interpreting the reaction in the United States.
'The Cuban revolutionaries made their democratic views clear. They came to power after overthrowing a dictatorship. Yet the reaction to the Revolution in the United States, even in this first phase when U.S. economic interests were untouched was generally hostile. To the Cuban revolutionaries it seemed as if the U.S. press was deliberately trying to stir up opposition to the Revolution.'
P. 83-84 - 'The most important step of a revolution in a social context like Cuba's must be to fire the anticipation and expectations of the population, to change the basic social outlook from age-old resignation to expectation, which becomes the basis of their willingness to adapt to what is new. Without such sparking of the spirit, the resistance of tradition would be insurmountable.
Nationalist enthusiasm is necessary for economic development. It welds a society together into one cohesive force;
It allows the focus of the people's energies; it softens immediate sacrifices with the promise of the future. Americans seem unable to understand this.'
Agrarian Reform Law. Chapt.5, P.78 - 91.
Land Reform. Chapt.7 P. 102 - 105.
P.168 - 'latifundia. The old system of huge latifundia owned by handful of Cuban and U.S. companies had to end.'
P.169 - 'Education - in sixteen months the Ministry of Education created 13,696 new teaching positions, the same number of classrooms have been opened, more than half located in rural areas.
Before the Revolution there was a divide between the ruling and the ruled. Two nations. The upper and lower classes. An élite of top government officials, army officers, the wealthy mill and plantation owners, (latifundias) and businessmen - those in short, of political power, wealth, and 'family tradition' dominated Cuban society.
▪The majority of the Cuban people, especially the peasants and rural labourers and small farmers lived in poverty, or on its margins. Chronic unemployment, poor living conditions, disease, illiteracy, malnutrition, isolation imposed by the near impassable roads.'
P.316 - 'Appendix 4 - The Paper Curtain
Between the people of the U.S. and the world, there is a paper curtain. Americans get their information from and form their opinions on the basis of a few standardized news sources.
Because public opinion in the United States is largely created and shaped by the mass media. The news services assume a crucial significance in the formation of policy toward Cuba. Not only do the opinions shaped by these media act as a primary source of pressure on the politicians, but the politicians themselves rarely have more enlightening sources than the typical citizen.'
P. 326 - 'But why is the U.S. press - with all its resources - unable to report the Cuban revolution objectively?'
This has long been one of my favourite books. I read it when Fidel Castro was still leading the Revolution as the President of Cuba.
Fidel's extentive autobiography, My Life, in interview form with Ignacio Ramonet, (first published in 2006, translated 2007), I finished reading in Feb. 2019.
When Fidel Castro died in Nov. 2016, which was widely reported on Social Media News sites, I was appalled at the comments from America on his passing.
If there's one thing that is true, it is that no Communist takeover of a country is possible unless historically the social contract be rotten to the core to start with, conditions created by either a monarchy or Colonial Imperialism.
November 3, 2017
An enlightening if dry political history of the decay of Cuban-American relations plotting the episodes during which Cold War American foreign policy seemed dysfunctional to the point of being unable to formulate any approach to a new Cuba that could do anything but deepen the rift between the two peoples and push Cuba into the Soviet sphere.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews