A Retrospective
by
Ronald H. Chilcote
Ronald H. Chilcote is the managing editor of Latin American Perspectives.
My familiarity with Cuba began during a September 1958 visit to Havana,
the culmination of four months’ travel throughout Latin America. Life in the
city was corrupt, with gambling and prostitution. The Cuban Revolution
brought hope for profound change everywhere. Those days of graduate study
at Stanford revolved around the revolution and the fellow students who
joined together to analyze the role of revolution and the left. With one of our
professors, Ronald Hilton, we exposed the Bay of Pigs plans well before the
April 1961 invasion. Another of our professors, John J. Johnson, wrote on the
military’s assumption of a professional role in Latin America, and in fact
his work contributed to the United States’ counterinsurgency plans. The
Pentagon sent six of its young officers to learn about Latin America at Stanford
and then to participate in some of the coups that later overthrew legitimate
regimes. Two of them, for example, worked with U.S. Ambassador Lincoln
Gordon in the 1964 overthrow of the Brazilian president João Goulart.
My work on Brazil, Portugal, and the Portuguese colonies of Africa was
fundamentally framed within the Cuban experience. I wrote a monograph on
the great African revolutionary Amílcar Cabral, who was deeply influential,
along with Che and Fidel, in the Tricontinental, based in Havana. I returned
to Cuba three times, first for six weeks during 1968 and twice during the
1980s, once to participate in a conference and once to attend the Latin
American Film Festival.
