Cuba After Castro

Guest post by my old man, Tim Liveright

After watching Cuba After Castro: The Island in the Crosshairs created by directors Abby Martin and Matt Belen, the film definitively sketched for me an important portrait of Miguel Díaz-Canel, Cuba’s first leader born after the Revolution.

I urge you to watch the film not only because it strikes at the heart of Trump’s rapacious appetite for swallowing as many countries as his cannibalism can muster - including Cuba - but also because I am the son of a family that spent its lifetime fighting US arch-colonial capitalism with the 1959 success of the Fidel led Cuban revolution occurring amidst a closely related personal familial struggle 90 miles north of the Cuban win. And, this was largely how I became a devotee of almost all things revolutionary Cuba.

The following summary traces the legacy of the Liveright family and their being attacked by McCarthy-era congressional anti-communist hearings which were coincidentally linked with the US pursuance of the Monroe Doctrine and the Cuban revolution under the leadership of Fidel Castro who fought US supported Cuban president Fulgencio Batista during the 1950’s.

The family’s main victim, my father Herman Elsas Liveright, was a television executive and program director for WDSU in New Orleans during the Red Scare in the mid-1950s. Shortly after assuming his TV position and investing with my mother Betty extracurricular time taking on the New Orleanian racist atmosphere - namely the White Citizens Council - he was subpoenaed by the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS) under the leadership of Mississippi Senator James Eastland to answer questions regarding his multivariate opposition to the US cold war project. Eastland, of “unironic” note, was a plantation owner, known as the “Voice of the White South” and the “Godfather of Mississippi Politics”. He did not honor the 1st Amendment of the US Constitution ratified in 1791 as part of the Bill of Rights which prevents the government from establishing a national religion, interfering with the free exercise of religion, abridging the freedom of speech or the press, or violating the right to peaceably assemble and petition the government

For the record, the main purpose of the SISS, active from 1951 to 1977, was to investigate threats to U.S. national security, primarily focusing on Communist subversion, espionage, and the infiltration of federal agencies, labor unions, and educational institutions, and the arts (including television, theater, and the film industry). It is hardly a stretch to link this anti-constitution project with the growing US concern about the emergence of the revolution brewing in Cuba for which my family devoted itself.

Of further interest in this account, is what struck my family through its attack by the SISS. Exercising his First Amendment rights, my father refused to testify or name names during this anti-Communist tribunal which led to his being convicted of Contempt of Congress in 1956. For those who are not aware of this period in US history, others convicted of contempt of Congress for asserting their First Amendment rights were The Hollywood Ten (including Dalton Trumbo and Ring Lardner Jr.), Pete Seeger and Arthur Miller.

That was in the mid-fifties when, after being fired by WDSU with local newspapers giving this top fold front page notice, we moved out of New Orleans to our previously acquired country retreat in rural Louisiana where my sister (two years older than me) and I shared a multi-grade classroom at the local segregated country school and enjoyed some auction-bought $25 horses, some chickens as part of the 4H Club and a bunch of acquaintances who accepted our communist family with no questions asked. Meanwhile, my father began his legal appeal of the Contempt of Congress conviction with yet another surprise that snuck into our short lived respite.

As a state overshadowed by the White Citizens Council and sedition laws would have it, our bucolic splendor was abruptly interrupted. In the 1950s, Louisiana enforced strict anti-sedition legislation primarily through the Subversive Activities and Communist Control Law (enacted in 1950) and parallel loyalty oaths for public employees. These laws were designed to root out and criminalize support for the Communist Party and other organizations advocating the overthrow of the government by force.

Informed by my father’s lawyer of the time, our family was urged to vacate the state in 24 hours or likely be thrown in the clink. To wit, all animals (except our dog Happy (who really wasn’t) were dispensed to neighbors and glue factories whence we loaded up a trailer with what we could to be drawn by our Ford pickup to head through Mississippi and ultimately suburban Philadelphia where Junior High awaited us kids and jobs for the folks providing living wages.

The Tim Teenager Cuba Connection occurred between 1957 when my old man was convicted of Contempt of Congress receiving a three-month jail sentence and 1962 when the Supreme Court overturned his conviction.

Because my father faced passport restrictions following his political prosecution he asked me in 1960 to go to Cuba in his stead when an opportunity arose to join a family friend and journalist who was writing a story about the Revolution. And while basically a pretty typical high school sophomore focused as much as anything on sports and landing a girlfriend, I was drawn to the recently won Cuban Revolution so I went to Cuba and spent a couple of weeks experiencing the incredible excitement among the people there. This was the first of several trips; the next a decade and half later as a doctor and member of a medical group offering support and then later twice visiting friends of my parents who lived in Cuba. Among their friends was Bill Brent, an American member of the Black Panther Party who famously hijacked a commercial passenger jet and diverted it to Cuba in 1969 to avoid standing trial in the United States. Very much worth reading, Bill published an autobiography chronicling his experiences titled Long Time Gone: A Black Panther’s True-Life Story of His Hijacking and Twenty-Five Years in Cuba in 1996.

I have eternally stuck by the Cuban revolution and celebrate it daily and couldn’t be more saddened and pissed off at the treatment it has received by this country. This brings me to why I have told the story of my family’s inspiration and, finally, this recommendation of Abby Martin’s recent documentary: Cuba After Castro: The Island in the Crosshairs available on Youtube (click to see):

In addition to the Cuban people I write this to honor my folks who led groups to Cuba numerous times as the creators and leaders of the Berkshire Forum which they operated. The Forum was an independent educational and retreat center located in Stephentown, New York, founded in 1972. As part of their work, they regularly sponsored and led organized political study trips to socialist nations, including Cuba, East Germany, Grenada, and Nicaragua, directly challenging travel bans and facilitating cross-border dialogue during the height of the Cold War.

There you have it. See the film please and support Cuba! Venceremos!

“The ever more sophisticated weapons piling up in the arsenals of the wealthiest and the mightiest can kill the illiterate, the ill, the poor and the hungry, but they cannot kill ignorance, illness, poverty or hunger.” ~Fidel Castro

“We are not going to surrender nor dishonor ourselves nor get on our knees whatever price we have to pay.” ~Miquel-Diez Canel