A Real, Live Communist Who Wrestled With the Real, Live Communist Party
If you believed the mainstream media portrait of Communism in the 1960s, you’d assume the Cubans, Russians, and Americans were in lockstep. But if you were inside the Communist Party USA, as Michael Myerson was, you knew the reality was far different.
CPUSA members listen as Gus Hall addressed the opening day of the National Convention of the Communist Party, New York, June 22, 1966. (Bettmann Archive via Getty Images)
After several years away, I moved back to New York City in 1966. This time it would be permanent. I took the first job offer I had in New York: as an editor at International Publishers, the book publishing arm of the Communist Party (CP). I hadn’t yet joined the Party. I had joked with friends of mine who were Party members that I’d follow Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois’s lead and join when I was in my nineties.
My history with the Party, or at least with its leadership, was a checkered one. About the same time I went to work at the publishing house, I launched the Tri-Continental Information Center, which published a monthly newsletter, organized public forums, and distributed news and reports about the liberation struggles in southern Africa, the Middle East, southeast Asia, and Latin America. The name of the center was inspired by the Organization of Solidarity with the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America (OSPAAAL), based in Havana.
The CP leadership took a mainly jaundiced view of this activity. Holding fiercely to a vulgar caricature of class struggle and revolution as being led by “workers at the point of production,” they offered verbal support to the liberation struggles in these countries but did little to aid them. (One exception was in the case of Vietnam, where the Soviet Union was a lifeline to the Vietnamese resisting the US barbarism.)
Nevertheless, my work was tolerated and, if not assisted, also not hindered. I remember one day being in the offices of the Worker, the Party’s newspaper. I was carrying a copy of Revolution in the Revolution? by Régis Debray, a French journalist then in support of the Cuban revolution and of Che Guevara’s theses on guerilla warfare. The Worker’s editor, Carl Winter, looked at the book and asked why I was reading that. I replied that it was being read and discussed by radicals all over the world and asked if he’d read it. He said he didn’t need to read it to know it was crap — an advanced state of dialectical analysis I apparently had yet to master.
Because of my Tri-Continental Informational Center work, I had a wide circle of contacts, some of whom became personal friends. Among them were the UN representatives of the African National Congress of South Africa; the Palestine Liberation Organization and its Marxist component, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine; other liberation movements; and with members of the Cuban Mission to the UN. I became especially close with the Cubans, so much so that we organized a regular Sunday softball game between them and my radical friends. (We were no match for the Cubans but had fun getting our butts kicked weekly.)
The editor and publisher of International Publishers was Jim Allen. Legally Sol Auerbach, his given name, he used James S. Allen as his nom de guerre working first as editor of the Southern Worker, the Party’s newspaper in the South, where he played a major role in publicizing the case of the Scottsboro defendants, young African Americans falsely accused and convicted of rape in Alabama. Jim kept his pseudonym a few years later when he was sent to the Philippines as the representative of the Communist International in the 1930s. The Filipino communists headed up the Hukbalahap, the peasant guerilla army that led the resistance to the Japanese occupation. When he returned to New York, Jim retained his underground name and published several books and pamphlets as James S. Allen.
My job at International consisted in part of preparing submitted manuscripts for publication. Some of these were quite pleasurable to read because the writers were actually writers — the British historian Christopher Hill, the American poet Walter Lowenfels, the Australian war correspondent Wilfred Burchett. My favorite assignment was working on The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois. But because this was the publishing organ of the CPUSA, I was also compelled to “edit” — really, rewrite — the miserable prose of manuscripts submitted by longtime Party functionaries.
One of the first books I handled was by George Morris, the top trade union reporter for the Worker. Perhaps Jim gave it to me as a test. George understood the labor movement and had more and better sources perhaps than any reporter in the country. But his writing was impenetrable.
The work at hand was an expose of the links between the AFL-CIO International Department and the CIA and how they worked together to neutralize communist- and left-led unions in other countries. I approached the task with energy — and naiveté — crossing out this sentence and that, rewriting this paragraph and that, moving sections from one chapter and placing them in another. Essentially, it was a complete rewrite. When George next came in the meeting with Jim, I was called into the office. I presented George with the edited manuscript. He reacted as if I vomited into his lap. Later, the receptionist who worked three rooms away asked me what all the shouting was about.
Jim dismissed me from the room and closed the door to calm down George. Afterward, he gave me back the edited manuscript, asked me to type it up with all my changes and he’d present a clean copy to George next time around. As it happened, George loved the freshly typed but still completely rewritten work and was proud of “every word he’d written,” Jim told me.
A couple of months later, I told this story to Al Richmond, the editor of the west coast Peoples’ World newspaper. Al, who was born in Russia, told me, “There are two writers whom it’s impossible to translate into English. One is Pushkin, the other is George Morris.”
One of my jobs at International was to conceive of and develop new works that we would want to print. I proposed to Jim that we approach the Cubans about publishing Fidel Castro’s collected speeches. The mass media in our country, without exception hostile to the Cuban revolution, used to caricature Fidel as a windbag and a narcissist for his speeches, many of which could last a few hours. US journalists could not understand that Fidel had created a schoolroom of ten million students, the majority uneducated and, in the beginning, illiterate peasants, and that his speeches were primarily informational and pedagogical.
Many, maybe most, Cubans didn’t have televisions. In the early years of the revolution, many didn’t even have electricity. But the hundreds of thousands that gathered to hear Fidel in the plazas throughout Cuba walked away understanding the various challenges the revolution faced in the economy, in food production and distribution, in hostile actions from the Colossus in the North, and more. A collection of Fidel’s speeches would give the North American reader great insight into the Cuban revolution.
Jim liked the idea and asked me to write to Fidel making the request and pass it along via my friends in the Cuban Mission to the UN. Between my work at International and my projects with the Tri-Continental Information Center, after sending the letter, I’d pretty much forgotten about it. But months later, I was at my desk when my phone buzzed telling me that “a couple of gentlemen at the front desk” wanted to see me. I might have mistaken the two “gentlemen” for FBI agents, identically dressed in dark blue suits and striped ties, were it not for their dark skin. The FBI did not employ agents with dark skin. They were Cuban diplomats and presented me with a letter from Celia Sanchez.
Celia was a founder of the 26th of July Movement and had made the arrangements on the southwest coast of Cuba for the landing of the Granma expedition that brought Fidel, Raul, Che, and their comrades from Mexico to launch the armed rebellion. She supplied the rebels with weapons, food, and medicine, and later was one of the first women to organize a combat battalion. After the revolution came to power, she became Fidel’s primary aide de camp and his unofficial chief of staff, and was widely understood to be his closest confidant.
Her letter was an invitation from Fidel to come to Cuba to discuss the proposed collected speeches. I was flattered, of course, and excited about the invitation. But when I showed the letter to Jim, he pulled rank. As chief editor and publisher, he was the one who should meet with Fidel, I was told. When I passed this message on to the Cubans, I was told they would get back to Jim. He went to his grave thirteen years later still waiting for the response.
About this same time, the summer of 1968, I received an invitation through the Tri-Continental Information Center from Gensuikyo, the Japan Council against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs, to attend its annual conference in Tokyo and commemoration of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Happily, the visit also included side trips to Kyoto and neighboring Nara, Japan’s capital in the eighth century and now a village whose entirety was a grassy pedestrian mall consisting of ancient temples and pagodas and human-friendly deer roaming the grounds.
Among the other international delegates to the conference was Paulo Jorge from OSPAAAL. Paulo represented the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) at the Havana-based OSPAAAL. At the end of the year, Cuba would mark the tenth anniversary of the revolution’s victory, and Paulo invited me to Havana to help celebrate as a guest of OSPAAAL.
At this time, relations between CPUSA and the Cuban Communist Party barely existed. No US Party leader, or even prominent member, had visited the island in years. After the Comintern was dissolved in 1943, individual national parties established fraternal relations with one another. But in time, many of these fractured, with the split between the Soviet and Chinese parties in the 1950s, and a decade later with the development of “Eurocommunism” following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.
The CPUSA leader Gus Hall, a horse’s ass but in full control of all internal levers of power, was no fan of the Cuban revolution or of Fidel Castro. While formally supporting the Cubans — saluting them via press releases on national holidays and such — no actual solidarity was extended to the first socialist revolution of the Americas. I suspect that Gus took the fact of that first socialist revolution in his hemisphere as a personal affront.
He, after all, was the self-proclaimed “great American Marxist,” an accolade to which every last one of his handpicked “leaders” subscribed. A son of Minnesota’s Iron Range and, for a brief period in the 1930s alongside thousands of other Young Communist League members, an organizer of the budding Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) — this experience later led Gus to claim among his credentials being “a founder of the steelworkers’ union” — he believed that a socialist revolution wasn’t truly a socialist revolution if it wasn’t led by the industrial working class, whose vanguard was the Communist Party. The poor Cubans had no steel or auto or coal mining industry, and thus simply didn’t meet the criteria. And the Cuban Communist Party, with some important exceptions, was late by months and even years in supporting the revolution, led by the 26th of July Movement. (After taking power, the Movement absorbed the old party and other supportive movements into the new Communist Party of Cuba, under Fidel’s leadership.)
Gus was apparently offended that Fidel had not cleared with him his path to victory. A year or two after the Cuban revolutionaries took power, Gus wrote a letter to Fidel instructing him to hold elections as soon as possible so as to allow the CPUSA to best be able to mount support activities. Fortunately, this embarrassing episode was never made public, but I was told it was so on separate occasions by two top Cuban leaders.
Hence the relations between the US and Cuban parties were slim to none, and slim had gone on vacation. Naturally, I accepted the invitation to attend the revolution’s tenth anniversary celebrations. This would win me no indulgences with the CPUSA leadership, out of whose favor I’d already placed myself with my public opposition to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Quite the contrary: internally, I would be “brought up on charges” for traveling to Cuba without permission. I pretty much anticipated this, so I told nobody in advance of my trip. I had left International Publishers by then so had no need to tell Jim Allen.
The US contingent to the tenth anniversary celebrations in Cuba was small. Near as I remember, it consisted of Bob Silver, editor in chief of the New York Review of Books; Sandy Levinson, head of the Center for Cuban Studies; Bob Scheer, editor in chief of Ramparts ; and Susan Sontag and her sixteen-year-old son, David Rieff. I was thrilled to be in revolutionary Cuba — not just Havana and the ordinary tourist highlights like Ernest Hemingway’s home and various sites of the uprising like the Moncada barracks, but watching the response of the campesinos to Fidel, whom we heard speak at a cattle farm outside Havana province, and in the Plaza of the Revolution on New Year’s Day. We also were able to chat with Fidel at a reception in the presidential palace, and have an extended meeting with Manuel Piñeiro, known familiarly throughout Cuba as “Barbarroja” (Red Beard), the commander in charge of intelligence and Latin American relations.
There would be several more visits to Cuba, but for me one of the surprising and enjoyable outcomes of that first trip was a close friendship with Susan. I could hold my own with her in political debate, which seemed amusing and mazing to her. I was a real, live US communist, that strange animal she and the rest of the country had heard was hiding around every corner and under every bed in the postwar period. I’d already started writing for Ramparts prior to the Cuba trip, but in Havana, Bob Scheer induced Susan to contribute to the magazine as well. Some months later, when making a movie in Stockholm, she wrote a major piece for the magazine, “A Letter From Stockholm,” about the politics and psychology of this center of social democracy. Susan told me that the article, later included in a number of collections, was written as a letter to me.
That I was a huge movie fan was a big plus for her. Now she’d have someone else to accompany her. Back in New York, we went to the movies a couple times a week. We especially liked the Bleecker Street Cinema in the Village and the Elgin in Chelsea. (The Elgin was an ancient neighborhood theater, complete with aisles caked with used chewing gum making a sticky mess of locating a seat. Today it is completely refurbished as the upscale modern-dance venue, The Joyce.) Susan was also on the selection committee for the New York Film Festival, which required going to half a dozen screenings a week during the summer. I was always invited along for the ride. Tough work, but what’s a poor boy to do?
Susan lived part of the year in Paris — and generously let me have the key to her apartment on the Ile Saint-Louis one week — and part of the year in a Riverside Drive penthouse on the Upper West Side. Her son, David, was away at Amherst College, and when Susan was in Paris or elsewhere abroad, I sometimes stayed in her apartment. I was working (in a manner of speaking) at American Documentary Films on West 84th Street; her place was on West 106th, so it was walking distance, an easier commute than from my own apartment on Sullivan Street in the Village.
“Penthouse” sounds glamorous, and it is true that the apartment had a wraparound balcony overlooking the Hudson. But the flat itself was spartan and austere. Formerly Jasper Johns’s studio, the only art on Susan’s walls was an Andy Warhol original print of Mao. Susan’s laundry room was empty, the kitchen nearly so (as was the refrigerator). There were two bedrooms, with no more furnishings than a low-rent motel, and the living room — huge by New York standards — was empty except for a television, and a leather-upholstered Eames chair and footrest.
But the hallway bookshelves contained thousands of volumes. Susan had her priorities.