Recorded Interviews with Cuban Citizens

This chapter includes Mills’s recorded interviews with 3 private citizens who provide unique insights into life in Cuba before and during the Revolution. All of the interviewees witnessed revolutionary events at firsthand. The interviewees include: the clinical psychologist Franz Stettmeier; Stettmeier’s wife, Elvira Escobar; and housekeeper Elba Batista. These civilians Mills interviewed were those “Cubans who were close to events.”

Introduction

and Keywords to be supplied.

Fellow-Traveling with Fidel

This chapter consists of two transcribed recordings that Mills made detailing his experiences and conversations with Fidel Castro. These are important not only because they offer a firsthand account of Mills’s conference with the Prime Minister, but because they also reveal Mills’s impressions of Castro and the revolution he was leading. Mills, who did not speak Spanish, spent three and a half 18-hour days traveling and conversing with Castro and Juan Arcocha, who served as his translator. On at least one occasion Mills took meticulous notes of such a conversation, but did not record it; later that day he made an audio recording of those notes as he dictated them onto the recorder. In this chapter is another recording that Mills made of interactions Castro had with military men on the Isle of Pines.

The Cuban Summer of C. Wright Mills

This chapter places Mills’s experiences in Cuba in the larger sociohistorical contemporaneous context. It depicts the major social and political transformations in the revolutionary process that were transpiring at the time Mills was on the island. It also considers wider global events of that summer, against the backdrop of Cold War tensions, of pertinence to Castro’s Cuba. In addition, the chapter describes the effervescent mood that permeated the island during Mills’s visit.

Recorded Interviews with Cuban Officials

This chapter presents five interviews that Mills conducted with people in some way attached to the Revolutionary Government, four of them associated with the military. These were: Juan Arcocha, who worked for the newspaper Revolución, the official organ of the July 26 Movement that aimed to organize, guide, and disseminate revolutionary ideology to the Cuban people; two army captains who had long been involved in military and administrative capacities; Captain Isabel Rielo who was working at the Camilo Cienfuegos School City; and Comandante Dermidio Escalona who was military commander of Pinar del Rio province.

Insurrection, Revolution, Invasion

This chapter furnishes a sociohistorical account of those main events and turning points of the armed struggle against the tyranny of Fulgencio Batista, beginning with Fidel Castro’s first assault on the dictator’s troops in 1953. It also examines how the Revolution was being made at the time that Mills visited Cuba in 1960 as well as how the revolutionary project was threatened by the U.S.-sponsored military invasion at the Bay of Pigs in 1961. The main period in Cuban history analyzed in this chapter is roughly between 1953 and 1961.

Mills on Individuals, Intellectuals, and Interviewing

This chapter examines the conceptual and empirical methods Mills applied in understanding the Cuban revolutionaries, whose thoughts and sentiments he so eloquently and passionately expressed in Listen, Yankee. These have to do with his view of individuals as seekers of freedom, of intellectuals as agents of social change, and of interviewing as a way of discerning people’s character structure—their symbols, their self-images, their personalities.

Confronting the Enemy

This chapter looks at the considerable consequences Listen, Yankee had on Mills, personally and professionally. The chapter includes a transcribed telephone conversation, tape-recorded by Mills, with a mysterious “Mr. Hadley,” who was likely an FBI agent assigned to investigate Mills and his ties to the Cuban revolutionaries.

The Book That Sold Half a Million Copies

This chapter examines how the information conveyed and topics covered in the interviews led Mills to construct Listen, Yankee’s full-throated message of revolutionary cry. Also included is a transcribed recording Mills made of a meeting he had with the publisher, Ian Ballantine, laying out his vision of, and production plans for, Listen, Yankee.