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Journalists were miffed that blacks had been omitted from the guest list to a party in Castro’s honor at the Cuban Embassy in Washington, and Dunnigan was peeved that correspondents wasted time on trivial matters when questioning Castro at a National Press Club briefing, while “overlooking some fundamental questions so significant to the future of Cuba.”
The columnist George Schuyler, an avowed conservative contrarian, warned in the Courier of June 27, 1959, that “most of the U.S. newspapers, business men and foreign service officers,” as well as some members of Congress were being duped by a man who had brought not liberation but “Red revolution” – i.e., Soviet-styled communism.
What really began to cool their ardor, however, was Castro’s treatment of a man that the black press had embraced as a symbol of what could be: Gabino Ulacia, the proudly black commandant of Havana, Castro’s right-hand man. “He’s tall, he’s black, he’s a born leader,” Cliff Mackay, the Afro-American editor reported from Havana on Feb. 7, 1959.
By the time Simeon Booker’s article in Jet’s sister publication, the monthly Ebony, appeared in April 1959, “Negro Heroes of Cuban Revolt,” Ulacia was on Castro’s enemies list. But this is what Booker wrote about the hero of the revolution: “On the home front, the most sought after rebel was 40-year-old Gabino Ulacia, commander of an underground unit which set off bombs near government buildings to embarrass Batista. Once captured, he was castrated, had teeth pulled out with pliers and his skull fractured. But he refused to quit. His courage gave hope to millions of citizens in Havana who awaited the arrival of the Rebel Army.”
The April 23, 1959, Jet reported that Ulacia had been imprisoned for two months “because he touched off the fight for non-segregation reforms” by holding mass meetings around the country and indicating his plan to run for president. “Certain people in the government are determined to annul the gains of the Negro,” he told Jet. “I will fight for our rights until death.” He was reportedly executed by firing squad two years later.
Still, the uncomfortable questions were put on hold when Castro’s residency in Harlem became the international story in October 1960 and mainstream white reporters were left twiddling their thumbs while Castro granted black reporters and photographers from the Amsterdam News, the Afro-American and the like “exclusive” interviews. In a masterful bit of staged protest, Castro and his large entourage had stormed out of a downtown hotel where they claim to have been treated badly and swept into the Harlem hotel on 125th Street. From there, he held diplomatic meetings with other world leaders, as well as with black activists, writers and artists.
Castro, of course, had paved the way for this reception. “Between January 1959 and October 1960 when Castro came, [there] already had been established a strong current of support among African Americans and this was reflected through the press, through the black press,” Moore said.
Typical was a breathless account of an “eye-opening” junket by William G. Nunn Sr., managing editor of the Courier. “My impressions…and they must remain just that…are that I have seen democracy in action,” he wrote on Jan. 16, 1960. “I’ve experienced the thing which Negro Americans have dreamed about happening in their own country. I have been the recipient of courtesies which must warm the breast of any human being….”
That kind of awe radiated from the pages of Jet, too, in those early days, when more than 400,000 copies of the magazine were sold weekly and then passed around countless times wherever blacks gathered. News of Cuba, Castro and his exploits could be found in sections laid out for national news, for politics, for foreign news, for entertainment and even for gossip. Cuba received a kind of saturation coverage now common on television and the Internet. In that time of worldwide upheaval, Jet also kept readers informed about what was happening in the Caribbean and in Africa. Indeed, the Feb. 19, 1959, issue carried news from Ghana, Liberia, Ethiopia and Haiti. One item from Cuba concerned a student takeover of the University of Havana’s School of Medicine “in an effort to wipe out the last vestiges of Batista control.”
The main story’s headline makes one wince today: “Cute Rebel Lieutenant Was Once Public Schoolteacher.” There was nothing frilly or flirtatious about the unsmiling officer standing guard outside the presidential palace or chatting with soldiers under her command. Booker reported that “the small woman-aided rebel army toppled the modern, 40,000-soldier Batista army and took over one of the richest countries in Latin America.”
“Typical of the women fighters who braved hunger and despair in the mountains is 22-year-old Lt. Gladys Trava, one of the few Negro rebel women officers. A teacher in the Oriente Province, she joined the army 18 months ago when the schools in the area were closed because of repeated air raids. Leading a 75-man (mostly male) unit, she tramped some 10,000 miles during the period while helping wounded, loading guns, guarding prisoners and shooting it out with government soldiers.” Booker reported that some women had even more dangerous jobs in “the dread suicide patrols, the units which laid mines, dynamited bridges, attacked arms-carrying trucks and sneaked into towns to kidnap leading Batista supporters.” Through photos and stories of people like 19-year-old Juana Rosa, who fought in the suicide patrol, and 114-year-old Genera Jiminez, a “rebel elder,” Jet brought Cuba into the mix of discourse at barbershops and beauty parlors.
Through the arrest, forced exile or execution of former comrades, through the failed Bay of Pigs invasion sponsored by the U.S. to topple Castro, and through ever tougher economic sanctions, this sort of coverage carried the day until April 1961, when Castro announced that Cuba had become a communist satellite of the Soviet Union.
“That stymied the type of support that the press would be giving him,” Moore said, “because the African American press would not want to see itself be labeled in the United States as anti-American and pro-communist. So this introduced a new situation which led the African American media to disengage – although they were sympathetic, continued to be sympathetic – but disengaged from this overwhelming, over-enthusiastic, very candid embrace of the entire Cuban revolution.”
Though the Triumph of the Revolution did not usher in a racial utopia in Cuba, Castro retains a measure of respect – if not adoration – for his commitment to African states – e.g., Angola and South Africa – in their freedom struggles. Nelson Mandela, for one remained loyal until his death.
The traditional black press is less vibrant as a whole than it was 50 years ago; and, with the exception of papers like The Final Call or the Carib News, no more drawn to international news than the mainstream press. Issues of racial identity and racism in Cuba are more the forté of books and journals and websites like AfroCubaWeb than a steady diet of information in newspapers like the Afro, the Amsterdam News, the Tribune or even Jet, which in July rebooted itself as a digital publication.