My third visit was to a somewhat extravagant gathering, the Havana Cultural Congress, ‘the last episode in Fidel Castro’s affair with the European intelligentsia’, in January 1968, to which Fidel, at that point on cool terms with Moscow, had pointedly omitted to invite cultural figures from the Soviet bloc or (except in Italy, where culture and the PCI still went together), orthodox CP intellectuals. Instead, he brought in an impressive range of independent, dissident and heterodox leftists from various cultural scenes, including most of the older generation of the Parisian avant-garde political outgroups. Their most memorable contribution to the congress was to produce a politico-artistic ‘incident’, when old surrealists physically attacked the Mexican artist Siqueiros, who had once been associated with the plans to assassinate Trotsky, at the opening of an art show, though it was not clear how far this was on grounds of artistic or political disagreement. Yet the curious thing about this invasion of the past from the Latin Quarter is how little it had in common with, or anticipated, the student rebellion that was about to sweep through Paris. Nevertheless, it was an exciting occasion, though a somewhat depressing one, considering the evident mess Cuba had made of its economy. At all events it gave me the opportunity to get to know the remarkable Hans Magnus Enzensberger in his Fidelista phase, with his Russian wife, the enchanting Masha, a lost soul whose life was to end tragically in London, child of the dark night of the Stalinist Soviet Union. For her father had been Alexander Fadeyev, General Secretary of the Writers’ Union in the years of the Great Terror, that is to say a state bureaucrat drinking his way through the task of administering his friends’ lives and deaths before committing suicide in 1955.
I do not know what Fidel made of this strange influx of Europeans. He was presumably more at ease with Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, a moustached outdoor-looking figure recently expelled from both Bolivia and for good measure Peru, who was telling the Cubans ‘in a Spanish comprehensible only to an Italian’ that ‘his function as a European publisher was at an end, and he now saw himself wholly as an anti-imperialist combatant’.11 Fortunately the publishing house he had founded in 1955, equally distinguished in politics and literature, first to publish both Boris Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago and Lampedusa’s The Leopard, still flourishes. I cannot remember whether I met him on that occasion, though I had known this intense young multi-millionaire slightly since the early 1950s when he was an impassioned Communist Party activist and financier of CP culture. I remember a summery conversation with him in his office in Milan in the nerve-racking period of the international communist crisis of 1956–7, about where the movement could or should go, between phone calls arranging a weekend with a girl in some castle on the Adriatic coast. It must have been just when he was leaving the Party. His dissidence was to take him into the underworld of armed revolutionary struggle. As a teenager he had fought with the communist partisans for revolution, against fascism and against all his family and the super-rich Milan bourgeoisie stood for. The spirit of Che Guevara revived these memories. Soon after 1968 he went underground – or as far underground as a rich and socially prominent international headline-maker can go – and was killed in 1972, in obscure circumstances while attempting to blow up a high-tension pylon in Segregate, in the Milan hinterland.
Whether Fidel himself knew the charming young French-Canadian intellectuals who failed to convince me that their plan to create a new Sierra Maestra in the forests of Quebec would advance the cause of world revolution, I do not know. I suspect that someone in Cuba did. I tried to phone the most intelligent and agreeable of them repeatedly a couple of years later when I found myself in Montreal. There was no answer. Such was my lack of rapport with the spirit of the times that it only struck me much later that he must have been one of the terrorists of the nationalist Front de la Liberation du Québec who kidnapped the British Trade Commissioner and strangled a Quebec minister, perhaps one of those allowed a safe exit to Cuba in return for the British diplomat. But those were the days when even the ultras of ethnolinguistic nationalism, such as the early Basque ETA, presented themselves in the garb of international revolution.
II
For a moment in the late 1960s the young, or at least the children of the old middle classes and the new masses rising to middle-class status through the explosion in higher education, felt they were living the revolution, whether by a simple collective private exit from the world of power, parents and past or by the constant, accumulating, almost orgasmic excitement of political or apparently political action, or gestures that took the place of action. The mood of the political young during ‘that hectic spring and summer’ of 1968 was recognizably revolutionary, but incomprehensible to old lefties of my generation, and not only because the situation was plainly not revolutionary in any realistic sense. Let me quote Sheila Rowbotham, who has described it with wonderful perception:
Personal feelings removed themselves from the foreground. My sexual encounters were snatched in between meetings and somehow the customary emotions didn’t settle upon them. It was as if intimacy had acquired an almost random quality. The energy of the external collective became so intense, it seemed the boundaries of closeness, of ecstatic inwardness, had spilled over on to the streets … I thus caught a glimpse of the peculiar annihilation of the personal in the midst of dramatic events like revolution … In retrospect revolutions seem puritanical, but that is not how they are experienced at the time … Caught in that maelstrom of international rebellion, it felt as if we were being carried to the edge of the known world.12
Nevertheless, as soon as the dense clouds of maximalist rhetoric and cosmic expectation turned into the rain of every day, the distinction between ecstasy and politics, real power and flower power, between voice and action, became visible once more. Jericho had not fallen to the sound of Joshua’s collective trumpets. The political young had to consider what action was needed to capture it. Since both the older and the younger generation of revolutionaries spoke the same language, mainly in one or another Marxist dialect, a semblance of communication became possible again, especially since the activist groups broke with the vague belief in spontaneous inspiration and often returned to the tradition of disciplined vanguard organizations. In fact, however, there was still a vast gap between the old and the young left. Revolution was not on the agenda in our countries. For revolutionaries of my generation the central problem remained what Marxist parties should do, indeed what their function could be, in non-revolutionary countries. And elsewhere? Where successful insurrection or guerrilla conquest was realistically on the agenda, we – at least I – were still in favour of it.
The old instinct to be on the side of any insurrectionaries and guerrillas who talked the language of the left, however stupid and pointless, died hard. It was not until the 1980s that, confronted with the phenomenon of the Peruvian ‘Shining Path’ guerrillas – admittedly based on an ideology eccentric even on the lunatic fringes of Marxism– Leninism – I frankly admitted to myself that this was a left-wing revolutionary movement I simply did not want to win. (Fortunately good Vietnamese communists had put a stop to Pol Pot’s killing fields.) Perhaps sympathy for the rebels was no more than the intellectuals’ version of the age-old omertà of the poor, the reflex of not telling on those harried by the state and its men in uniforms. Perhaps this came naturally to the author of Primitive Rebels and Bandits, who still finds it hard to withhold admiration from embattled, even if plainly mistaken, losers. In the USA my own sympathies were with the Black Panthers. I admired their courage and self-respect. I was touched by the simple-minded Leninism of their publications, but it was plain to me that they had not the slightest chance of achieving their objectives.