Supplemental:
http://goexcelglobal.com/students-cuba-phil_luce.pdf The Cuban Revolution and the Emergence of New York’s Radical Youth, 1961–1965
On 4 July 1963, only about nine months after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Premier Fidel Castro in his green beret and combat jacket defeated four American students at table tennis on Veradero Beach in Cuba. Reuters reported that it was a “surprise visit” by Castro to fifty-nine American students who were visiting the island despite the U.S. State Department’s travel regulations. The trips, organized by the Student Committee for Travel to Cuba (SCTC) in 1963 and 1964, were groundbreaking events in the development of student radicalism in the sixties. The U.S. government and the media of the time paid special attention to those students by regarding their activities as marking the emergence of a New Left wing in the U.S.
The American sixties can never fully be understood unless the period is situated in the international context of the post-World War II era, including not only the Cold War relations between the First and Second Worlds but also the entangled web of post-colonial relations among all three worlds. The activities of the SCTC were organized as a publicity campaign of the Progressive Labor Movement (PLM) in New York City, which was a Maoist group that split from the Communist Party USA in the beginning of the sixties. This split not only reflected the international change of Communist leadership but also symbolized the generational shift of American radicalism from the Old Left to the New. The city of New York served as a site for intellectual, cultural, and political interactions that spurred this transformation and enabled the SCTC to send students to revolutionary Cuba. Cuba was a window to the Third World through which radical youths absorbed the rhetoric of anti-imperialism and national liberation. When it was incorporated into the American tradition of civil disobedience, the course for political developments on the streets in the latter half of the sixties was set.
Nevertheless, the movements of Third World-inspired New Leftists, including the PLM and the SCTC, have been neglected by research focused on youth activism in the sixties. The main reason for this is that those stories have never found a comfortable place in the prevailing narrative of the sixties, which is now called the “New Left Consensus.”
Intellectuals of the anti-Vietnam War generation defensively reacted to the assault by conservatives in the eighties and the nineties that the New Left had had a destructive effect on the American political tradition. Exradical scholars, in many cases, veterans of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), asserted their view of the sixties as an era of authentic American protest.
(snip, more at link)
Supplemental:
The Fight for the Right to Travel to Cuba Chronology
The U.S. has had restrictions on travel to Cuba for most of the past 40 years. While the Constitutional right to travel was technically won in a 1958 Supreme Court decision, the U.S. government and its ideological allies have tried to prevent us from traveling through a variety of legal, extra legal, and illegal means. Since the beginning, people have fought back vigorously and continuously for our right to travel to Cuba.
In the 1950’s the US government attempted to curtail our right to travel through passport controls (either by not issuing a passport to certain persons – Paul Robeson and Rockwell Kent were the most famous) or – when that method failed to survive court challenges – by listing countries in the passport which were ‘invalid’ for travel. When this method also failed in court, the government switched from ‘travel controls’ to ‘currency controls’. The current restrictions on travel to Cuba come under the Treasury Department - and not the State Department- because they have to do with the spending of money by US citizens, residents, and corporations. Of course, these ‘currency controls’ are just a back door method to restrict our right to travel.
(snip)