Fighting over Fidel: The New York Intellectuals and the Cuban Revolution

New York in the 1960s was a hotbed for progressive causes of every stripe, including womens liberation, civil rights, opposition to the Vietnam Warand the Cuban Revolution.

Fighting over Fidel brings this turbulent cultural moment to life by telling the story of the New York intellectuals who championed and opposed Castros revolution.Setting his narrative against the backdrop of the ideological confrontation of the Cold War and the breakdown of relations between Washington and Havana, Rafael Rojas examines the lives and writings of such figures as Waldo Frank, Carleton Beals, C.

Wright Mills, Allen Ginsberg, Susan Sontag, Norman Mailer, Eldridge Cleaver, Stokely Carmichael, and Jose Yglesias.

He describes how Castros Cuba was hotly debated in publications such as the New York Times, Village Voice, Monthly Review, and Dissent, and how Cuban socialism became a rallying cry for groups such as the Beats, the Black Panthers, and the Hispanic Left.Fighting over Fidel shows how intellectuals in New York interpreted and wrote about the Cuban experience, and how the Lefts enthusiastic embrace of Castros revolution ended in bitter disappointment by the close of the explosive decade of the 1960s.