We did not understand how deeply even the unquestionably political ultra-left, the armed revolutionaries and neo-terrorists who emerged from the 1960s, were influenced by, indeed were part of, the ‘counterculture’. The Weathermen in the USA took their name from a song by Bob Dylan. The Red Army Faction, better known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang, lived in the German version of a counter-culture of outsiders by choice and behaviour.
My age group did not understand that the student generations of the West in the 1960s believed, as we had once done, though in a manner far less easy to specify as ‘politics’, that they lived in an era when all would be changed, because around them everything was already being changed, by revolution. We, or at least congenitally pessimistic middle-aged reds such as myself, already bearing the scars of half a lifetime of disappointment, could not share the almost cosmic optimism of the young, as they felt themselves to be ‘caught in that maelstrom of international rebellion’.10 (One of its byproducts was the fashion for global revolutionary tourism, which was to see Italian, French and British left-wing intellectuals simultaneously converging on Bolivia in 1967 at the death of Guevara and for the trial of Regis Debray.)
Of course all of us were caught up in these great global struggles. The Third World had indeed brought the hope of revolution back to the First in the 1960s. The two great international inspirations were Cuba and Vietnam, triumphs not only of revolution, but of Davids against Goliaths, of the weak against the all-powerful. ‘The guerrilla’ – an emblematic word of the era – became the quintessential key to changing the world. Fidel Castro’s revolutionaries, recognizable by their youth, long hair, beards and rhetoric as heirs of 1848 – think of the famous image of Che Guevara – could almost have been designed to be world symbols of a new age of political romantics. It is difficult to recall, and to understand even now, the almost immediate global repercussions of what in January 1959 was after all a not unusual event in the history of one Latin American island of modest size. Small, scrawny Vietnamese on jungle trails and in paddy-fields checkmated the giant destructive force of the USA. From the moment in 1965 that President Johnson sent in his troops, even middle-aged non-utopians such as myself had not the slightest doubt about who would win. More than anything else in the 1960s, it was the grandeur, heroism and tragedy of the Vietnamese struggle which moved and mobilized the English-speaking left and linked both its generations and almost all its usually feuding sects. I met contemporaries and pupils in Grosvenor Square, demonstrating in front of the American Embassy. I went on marches with Marlene and our small children, chanting ‘Ho-Ho-Ho-Chi Minh’, like the rest. I was a declared sceptic about the Guevarist guerrilla strategy, which in any case proved uniformly disastrous (see chapter 21), but Vietnam remains engraved on both our hearts. Even at the very end of the century, the emotion was still there, and palpable in Hanoi, as Marlene and I watched a party of tiny, hard-bitten elderly men in formal suits, wearing their campaign medals, make their way under the trees to visit Ho Chi Minh’s home. They had fought for us, instead of us.
Apart from sharing in the campaigning for it, I had no particular connection with Vietnam during the war, nor did I visit it until a quarter of a century after victory, and then purely on holiday. On the other hand, like so many leftwingers who were inspired by the Cuban revolution, I visited Cuba several times in the 1960s, and thus, incidentally, saw a good cross-section of the world’s itinerant left. My first trip there was in 1960, the irresistible honeymoon period of the young revolution. I found myself coinciding and joining forces with two economist friends who represented that rare phenomenon, the old US Marxist left identified neither with the CP nor with its opponents: the tall Paul Sweezy, all slow-speaking New England Yankee, and Paul Baran. Since their embattled little journal, the Monthly Review, had kept the red flag flying in Cold War USA, they were welcomed by Castro and the ex-guerrillas of the Sierra Maestra. My own contacts came rather through a formidable CP leader with an exceptional gift for political adaptation, Carlos Rafael Rodriguez, whose insistence on making common cause with Fidel while he was in the Sierra Maestra paid off after the victory. Havana was still sufficiently close to the free-swinging paradise for shady tourists of the musical Guys and Dolls to radiate rumba and cultural tolerance, and the island looked sufficiently fertile to give the revolutionary regime what looked like an easy future. We agreed that it ought to have no difficulty in feeding its 10 million inhabitants, with enough left over for Cuba Libres (rum and Coca-Cola), cigars and those wonderful tiny street-corner coffees which disappeared as the economy foundered. Eighteen months after victory the honeymoon between people and revolutionary government was still tangible. Dodging radical young Americans with movie-cameras we toured the country in an optimistic haze.
My second visit, in 1962, via Prague, Shannon and Gander, was with a British left-wing delegation of the usual composition: a left-wing Labour MP; unilateral nuclear disarmers; a hardnosed, usually Party-line union leader, not without an interest in foreign nooky; the odd radical conspirator; CP functionaries and the like. A young, fast-talking African had somehow attached himself to us, claiming to represent an undefined ‘Youth Movement’ in a vaguely defined region of West Africa, whose first action on arriving in Prague was to make tracks for the Foreign Ministry where he hoped to find somebody to fund Third World revolution through him. The Cubans refused to have anything to do with him. At the time I saw him as that curious by-product of that age, a black confidence man exploiting the ignorance or anti-imperialist reflexes of white progressives: one of the Good Soldier Schwejks or picaros of the Cold War. The liberal left became familiar with, and sometimes let itself be exploited by, such figures – in Britain the highly uncongenial ‘Michael X’, halfway between a bad beginning as a West London hustler and a grim end on the scaffold in Trinidad and on the pages of V. S. Naipaul’s harsh novel, was at one time familiar at London parties. Certainly these examples of the flotsam and jetsam of a disintegrating empire were less impressive than the black militants from the USA who were soon to look to Cuba for aid, but behind the unpersuasive scams of people such as the young African there was a tragedy of uprooted lives among white aliens which I did not sufficiently appreciate. As for the delegation itself, all I can remember about it is that I found myself translating for Che who (in Fidel’s place) received us for lunch in the former Hilton hotel. (He was indeed as fine a figure of a man as he looks on the famous photo, though he said nothing of interest.) However, thanks to the invaluable Argeliers Leon, expert in the affairs of Afro-Cuban secret societies and cults and director of the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore which the new regime had just established, I was able to listen to some wonderful music in the black barrios of Havana.