By Rafael Rojas
Princeton University's archives guard a story that helps to build an understanding of the totalitarian drift of the Cuban Revolution and the convoluted reading that the West gave that Latin American and Caribbean phenomenon. In April 1959, Fidel Castro, the prime minister of the new Cuba, and his delegation took a detour from their itinerary — leaving Washington D.C. for New York — in their first visit to the United States, which had been organized by the American Society of Newspaper Editors. They went to spend a couple of days at Princeton.
Castro’s visit to Princeton was aided by several scholars and institutions of the University: the historian Roland T. Ely ’46, a scholar of the Cuban economy who lived in Princeton; ambassador Paul D. Taylor ’60, then a student and the president of the American Whig-Cliosophic Society, the organization that extended the invitation to the Cubans; and the Wilson School, whose program in American Civilization had scheduled a seminar for those same days of April 1959 titled “The United States and the Revolutionary Spirit.”
Castro delivered the keynote speech on the evening of Monday, April 20, 1959. According to the notes that Taylor took at the event, the Cuban prime minister opened his remarks proposing that the scholars and students in attendance listen to himas a practical revolutionary, as someone who did not study but rather produced a revolution. In Castro’s words, the Cuban revolution had knocked down two myths of 20th century Latin American history: It had shown that a revolution was able to defeat a professional army that possessed modern weapons, and it had shown that it was possible to create a revolution when the people were not hungry.
This second observation is interesting in light of the official story of the Cuban revolution that, for the last half-century, has insisted in presenting the island’s pre-1959 society as a victim to the triple calamity of hunger, misery and exploitation. Curiously, in April 1959, Castro told the Princeton students and faculty members that one of the particularities of his revolution was that it had triumphed in a Latin American nation with a relative degree of social welfare. The Cuban revolution, according to this young Castro, had been more a political and moral revolution against a corrupt dictatorship than a class-based uprising of poor against rich. For this reason, the revolution had been supported by “95 percent of the people,” generating “unanimity of opinion,” a phenomenon unheard of in Cuban history.
This analysis allowed Fidel Castro to add to the debate on “The United States and the Revolutionary Spirit” among the historians, philosophers, sociologists and economists of Princeton. The central theme at this seminar, as well in a good part of the historical and philosophical thought in the United States during the Cold War, was the parallel between the American, French and Russian revolutions as opposing models of social change. According to Taylor’s notes at the conference, Castro argued that the Cuban revolution belonged more to the 1776 tradition than to 1789 or 1917 traditions because it did not encourage class warfare. Nor did the Cuban revolution propose a confrontation with the United States, given that it preserved its distance from communism and encouraged a defense of Cuba’s national interests, a defense that the U.S. government could tolerate because it was framed on its own tradition of self-determination.
One of the professors who participated in the seminar and who, most likely, listened to Castro that evening, was the German philosopher Hannah Arendt. Just that year, the author of “The Origins of Totalitarianism” and “The Human Condition” had been hired by the University and had begun to research the history of the French and American revolutions. Arendt’s lecture at the seminar was the starting point of her 1963 book, “On Revolution.” In the acknowledgements section, Arendt explains that the idea for the book had started during the seminar on “The United States and the Revolutionary Spirit,” organized by the program in American Civilization at Princeton’s Wilson School.
In her book, Arendt argues that the historical linkage ofrevolution and war — two phenomena that, in her judgement, were radically different — had distorted the basic objectives of the modern revolutionary tradition: liberty and happiness. The advantage that, in her understanding, the American Revolution of 1776 had over the French and Russian revolutions was that by confronting the “social question” of equality through constitutional rights, the American revolution had achieved those historical objectives. Jacobinism and Bolshevism, instead, had created a disconnect between justice and law — what Ferenc Feher would later conceptualize as “frozen revolution” — that promoted despotism and buried the moral legacy or the “lost treasure” of the revolution.
But despite having written her book between 1959 and 1963 in New York, a city where the communist radicalization of the Cuban revolution was fiercely debated, Arendt did not make any allusions to Cuba or Fidel Castro. In fact, the philosopher refers to Latin America only once in her book and does so only to place the experience of revolution in the 20th-century third world more in the French tradition than in the tradition of Russia or North America. An argument could be made similar to Susan Buck-Morss’ in relation to the lack of references about the Haitian Revolution in Hegel’s “The Phenomenology of Spirit,” but it is most likely that such silence contains as much colonial prejudice as rejection to the idea of communist totalitarianism, even in a region so dominated and intervened by the Atlantic empires like the Caribbean.
In other moments of her book, Arendt describes the single-party dictatorships and the bureaucratic regimes of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe as new forms of tyranny. In 1963, that seemed to be the rational choice of the Cuban leaders, reason for which the words of Castro that evening in Princeton must have rang, four years later, as a complete fabrication. According to Castro, the difference between the Cuban revolution and the revolutions in France and Russia was that, in the latter, “a small group had taken power by force and had established a new form of terror,” while in his nation the totality of the people had mobilized because of their “hatred towards a dictatorship.”
Rafael Rojas is a Cuban historian. He spent the 2013-14 academic year at Princeton as a Global Scholar.
This article was originally published in Spanish newspaper El Pais on July 6, 2014. Republished with permission. Translation by Marcelo Rochabrun.
© RAFAEL ROJAS ROJAS/EDICIONES EL PAÍS, SL., 2014.
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