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Cuba, Castro, Hemingway and the American Dream

Richard Kadzis

Commentary: Without knowing Fidel Castro had just died, I watched the film “Papa” on an airline flight that very same day.

The movie focused on the life and times of Ernest Hemingway, especially the time he spent living in Cuba in the 1950’s.

Papa showed how Hemingway was quietly supporting the arming of the Cuban revolution that would eventually topple the repressive regime of Juan Batista, and how he barely escaped arms smuggling charges and the wrath of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.

Hoover was hell-bent on stopping Castro and the movement he spearheaded.

Where Hemingway was concerned, Hoover made it a personal issue, because Hemingway had exposed Hoover’s perverse private lifestyle years earlier.

In a scenario with close resemblance to America’s backing of the Shah of Iran, the U.S. and Hoover failed miserably, setting the stage for more than six decades of Communist rule in Cuba.

An emotionally tortured Hemingway, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for Literature, would take his own life in 1961.

Before the time arrived for JFK to succeed Ike Eisenhower in the White House, Batista and his militia were ousted.

The coup d’état is undoubtedly one of the most renowned historically, attracting non-Cuban revolutionaries such as Ché Guevara.

The overthrow would lead to global crises for the Kennedy administration – not only the Bay of Pigs disaster that tainted Kennedy’s early days in office, but mainly the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Never in our lifetimes had America seen an enemy so close to its shores. Nazi U-boats patrolled our eastern shores in World War II but the Russian build-up of nuclear arms in Cuba was much more blatant considering there was not a world war going on.

Never had we anticipated that Russian-funded Cuba would gladly roll out the welcome mat for Soviet nuclear missile silos.

Linking Cuba to the American Dream

The world suddenly became a dangerous place in the 1960’s, just as it is today.

But having grown up in the midst of that era, being old enough to wonder if the Cubans played a role in the assassination of President Kennedy, I began to think back and compare that Cold War era to life today.

Belying the threat of global nuclear war was the pre-eminence of America on the world economic stage.

Americans’ earning power peaked during Kennedy’s time in the Oval Office.

We saw one of the biggest run-up’s on the stock market that any presidential election yielded.

Thanks in part to the carry-over of our World War II industrial machine, we began to dominate the world export markets.

More notably, the American Dream became a post-war reality on a massive scale. The Middle Class was born.

In real dollar terms adjusted historically for inflation, our incomes reached an all-time high. The cost of living was lower in proportion to now.

Suddenly, there was a car in every garage, not merely a chicken in every pot. 

This was time, conversely, that our Age of Innocence ended.

Vietnam, the anti-war movement, police clubbing hippies, the deaths of Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr, riots in Watts, Detroit and Boston, all added up to a startling conclusion.

The Age of Normalcy, a post-World War II psychographic and economic phenomenon, ended abruptly.

Strange, how I returned to my home town for the 45th reunion of my class at Boston Latin School held on November 22, the very day that marked the end of our normal, the day JFK was shot dead by a former CIA operative with ties to Cuba.

Our Pax Romana didn’t really last all that long, relatively speaking.

Of course, we had the Korean War smack-dab in our daily view. It was puzzling, how the government classified Korea as a “Conflict” to reduce the fear of another world war.

Let’s attribute that to denial. A conflict wasn’t going to sidetrack the Age of Normalcy.

A Diluted Promise

Now that we have a longitudinal view of Korea, and of Vietnam or Iran, for that matter, we can plainly see how flawed the policies and direction of our federal government proved to be.

During my visit, I stopped by my cousin Steve’s house to say hello. He is 66 years old, holds a Masters in Biology, works part time but is facing some serious health issues.

We talked about the old times and what great lives our parents lived after paying dearly for the Great Depression and World War II.

Steve works in a family business that will be sold soon due to his sister-in-law’s retirement.

Like thousands, probably more, Baby Boomers, Steve faces a retirement without the trappings of the pensions, savings and household equity that our parents benefitted from.

Steve told me, “the American Dream is dead.” No doubt, it’s been watered down. One reason is because a lot of Baby Boomers are facing age discrimination in the workplace.

The middle class lifestyle that our parents built and embodied is eroding, corrupted by forces like offshoring, international trade agreements, and the hoarding of wealth by an astoundingly small percentage of Americans.

There is no room for working-class people in the same urban neighborhoods we grew up and were well educated in. Those neighborhoods are all being gentrified now, and in cities including Boston and Denver, expensive high-rise condominiums are replacing the low profile shops, restaurants, bars and homes we all grew up around.

There is still at least one positive variable. America is still the Land of Opportunity willing to embrace anyone with the intelligence, insight and ability to master the Age of Knowledge once known as the Industrial Revolution.

Revolution takes many forms

Hemingway wrote eloquently of the Spanish Civil War, which provided the wellspring for Cuba’s revolution to Communism. It served as a precedent of sorts demonstrating how those who have not overthrew those who have.  

At long last, as our conflict with Communism seems less intense, America is on speaking terms again with Cuba, and commerce leads the way.

President Obama’s decision to reach out to Cuba is another historical marker in this long-running drama for control of the Western Hemisphere. Will the early progress of normalization continue?

It’s a sign that the global economy is stronger than any ideology or army. It’s another signal for those who still believe in the American Dream – as realized by Ernest Hemingway and the rest of the “Greatest Generation” – that the ability to design one’s personal success is no longer tied to a government or a GI Bill.

It is tied to any individual’s adaptiveness to a fast-changing, information-driven world.

The velocity of change began to accelerate with events like the Cuban Missile Crisis, which threatened the American Dream at its apex.

Today, our ability to grasp the American Dream lies not so much in societal terms but in our ability to prepare ourselves for complexity. In a Darwinian sense, the dream is available on a case-by-case basis, increasingly in favor of the three percent holding 98 percent of the wealth. Wasn’t it the same circumstance of distribution of wealth that spawned the Cuban Revolution, and the French Revolution?

Maybe the American dream is no longer attainable on a mass scale, although the thousands of expatriated Cubans who escaped to Miami starting in the late 1950’s came here in pursuit of the same objective: to simply find a better, more equitable life. Maybe the dream is not a promise.

Richard Kadzis is a resident of Las Cruces and former New England correspondent for National Public Radio based at NPR member station WBUR FM in Boston.