Many jazz musicians felt compelled to publicly respond to the situation.135 At the Newport Jazz Festival in 1957, George Shearing, Stan Getz, Dizzy Gillespie, Specs Wright, and others convened a panel on “Music and the Use of Habituating and Addicting Drugs.” While the panel faced criticism that it might contribute to the general perception of a connection between drug addiction, black people, and jazz music, the panelists believed that a “factual discussion would help clear the air.” Among other things, the musicians decried the targeting of their community by the police.136 They denounced the Philadelphia police’s “special habit” of “rounding up all nearby jazz musicians at random in dope raids.” While these raids accounted for 2700 arrests between 1953 and 1954, they had resulted in “only 960 convictions.” They condemned discrimination in New York City where having an “arrest” record (not necessarily a conviction) was grounds to be denied a music license to “perform in restaurants or night clubs in the city.”137 In a more subversive vein, in the mid-1950s a group of jazz musicians approached by psychologist Charles Winick who was studying the “connection between drug use and jazz musicians” told him they all smoked marijuana and at a benefit concert for a police narcotic group had performed songs “which had synonyms for narcotics in their titles”: “Tea for Two,” “Tumbling Tumbleweed,” and “Flying Home.”138
In the midst of such protests, investigators like Winick helped to establish policing and medical science as the terrain for understanding, identifying, and combating the “narcotics problem.” Winick became the director of the Musician’s Clinic in New York City, established with proceeds from the Newport Jazz Festival, “which provide[d] psychiatric treatment for jazz musicians.”139 A participant on the drug panel organized at Newport, Winick had served as secretary of the National Advisory Council on Narcotics and as a consultant to the US Senate Subcommittee on Delinquency. His assessment of the first few years of the jazz clinic’s operation captures the public mood: “From the epidemiological point of view, which would regard addiction as a contagious disease, the world of jazz contains a large number of potential hosts to the disease of addiction and a number of carriers, some of them enjoying high status. The environment is a uniquely favorable one for the spread of contagion.”140
This representation of the character and creative potential of jazz as “contagious disease” was intimately tied to the politics implicitly associated with the genre. As Winick explained elsewhere, “Rebellion and experimentation are related needs found in some addicts.”141
In one of many events where this politics came to the fore, jazz artists Charles Mingus and Max Roach, self-proclaimed “Newport Rebels,” organized a protest concert to run concurrent with the 1960 Newport Jazz Festival, which in their minds had become “too big, too square and too interested in box office instead of music.”142 An array of prominent musicians joined the rebels, protesting the commercialization of the festival, the trend toward “standard, conventional type music” along with the fact that the organizers had been “capitalizing on our efforts and not paying the musicians any money,” by moving to an alternative venue down the street from the main event.143 Mingus suggested the Newport Festival organizers had “lost their true identity with jazz” and jazz critic Nat Hentoff noted “the occasional Jim Crow at Newport,” while a Time correspondent reported on the rebels: “This is like an extension of the sit-ins. I called it a sit-out.”144 At the beginning of the weekend, more than twelve thousand college students who had shown up for the main festival broke out in “drunken rioting,” triggering the deployment of the police, National Guard, and US Marines and the cancellation of the festival.145 Langston Hughes, organizer of the festival’s blues session, tried to distance jazz musicians from the violence: “The rioters were not lovers of jazz, but young beer drinkers who had nothing better to do than throw their beer cans at cops,” while feeling compelled to add: “(Incidentally according to the police records there was not a single Negro among them: and the riots had no racial angles).”146 In contrast, the Mutual Broadcasting System, a major national broadcast radio networks, linked events at the jazz festival to political subversion: the “riots had not been spontaneous, but like those in Japan, Korea and Turkey, had been Communist inspired.” New York’s Journal America noted the incident did not conform to public presumptions: “The Newport rioters were definitely not delinquents with holes in their pockets. They were ‘good’ boys and girls from ‘better’ families and colleges.” Jazz journalist Nat Hentoff noted the Soviet mouthpiece Izvestia tried to capitalize on the incident by pointing out, “‘the savage beat of the drum and the howl of the trumpet’ so often used in recent years as ‘a cold war propaganda weapon’ in support of ‘Western Civilization’ had been decisively unmasked.”147
By the late 1950s, jazz had indeed been established as a “propaganda weapon” in the US Cold War arsenal, although the messages delivered by musicians traveling in the State Department–sponsored cultural diplomacy tours were as mixed as interpretations of “riots” and “rebellions” at Newport. As Penny Von Eschen has argued, the “jazz ambassadors” tours opened “an avenue for pursuing civil rights, solidarity, and musical exchange . . . with those behind the Iron Curtain, as well as a new embrace of Afro-diasporic connections and a deep interest in African independence.”148 During the Cold War, jazz, much like drugs, functioned in many ways as a floating signifier: it was hailed as proof that the United States could transcend its Jim Crow foundations and embody the spirit of the free world against Communism, while at the same time providing a vehicle for expressions of black political solidarity and the associated danger of revolutionary action. This led at times to incongruous intersections of music and politics. For instance Dizzy Gillespie, a former card-carrying member of the Communist party, joined many of the Newport Rebels, including Charles Mingus and Ornette Coleman, on international tour under the State Department banner.149 The “infectious” power of jazz was embraced in this context as a Cold War weapon of containment. Such jazz tours not only pulled in big-name performers, but also groups like the Paul Winter Sextet, a college jazz band which in 1962 toured twenty-two Latin American countries, “intended primarily to reach students, the sextet played for many non-student audiences, including Indians in the Andes, who applauded with as much vigor as the jazz-initiated audiences of Buenos Aires, Santiago, Rio de Janeiro or Montevideo.” In Quito, Ecuador, the group played a benefit for “a splendid anti-Communist student group,” while elsewhere they encountered “leftist agitators” including a group in Colombia who “tried to portray jazz as a product of Africa, something the United States had “stolen.” However, overall, the Music Journal reported, “The group encountered less resistance from left-wing groups than they had anticipated—partly, it is believed, because three of its members are Negro, and to demonstrate against them would have put the Communists on awkward ground, in view of their claim to be the ‘friend’ of minority groups.”150
REVOLUTION AND REACTION
Even while jazz was depicted as fertile ground for drug contagions and communist infiltration, news reports mimicked State Department propaganda in celebrating that “Jazz Battles Communism” abroad. Drugs occupied this alchemical diplomatic realm. The international policing of drugs became a double-edged sword the United States unleashed in the Cold War battle. Just three months after the college jazz sextet returned from their Latin American tour, the Cuban Missile Crisis marked a crescendo in the ongoing racial, political, and diplomatic turmoil sparked by the Cuban Revolution, and signaled the culmination of the decline in relations between the United States and Cuba since Fidel Castro’s arrival in Havana in January 1959. This deterioration was also evident in US-Cuban narcotics control diplomacy, revealing again the material and symbolic power of drugs and drug enforcement to projections of US power. Much as had happened with the Chinese in the midst of Cold War diplomatic realignments, the US government was quick to deploy accusations of illicit drug trafficking as a weapon against Fidel Castro�
�s regime, accusations whose intensity grew in tandem with the broader diplomatic fissure.
Just days after Fidel Castro replaced Fulgencio Batista as leader of Cuba, on January 12, 1959, Anslinger sent his deputy FBN officer Charles Siragusa to Havana to establish contacts with the new regime. Siragusa shortly afterward wrote a book where he detailed Cuba’s failings in drug control. It is difficult to disentangle distortion from facts in his self-aggrandizing account of his own heroic antinarcotic efforts, but portions of his narrative were serialized in a popular magazine, speaking to the public’s fear and fascination with the drug trade in the midst of Cold War rivalries. Siragusa recounted that when he arrived at the Havana Hilton to meet an old informant he was surprised to find, “The revolution had turned the mousy [Juan] Gonzalez into a tiger. Instead of the ill-fitting ‘zoot’ suit he had worn in New York, he now wore the green uniform of the day. Even he packed a .45.” Evoking the image of the gun-toting, army-clad revolutionary that became so central to American imaginings of Cuba, the much-feared revolutionary potential of urban youth culture was materially embodied in Gonzalez’s transformation from awkward rebellious urban youth culture to a full-fledged revolutionary soldier—although here the FBN agent hoped to harness it for collaborative drug policing. He claimed to have provided Cuban officials with a report detailing a number of mafia-led trafficking operations the United States had been following in Cuba, telling them “that honest cooperation between our police forces would enhance relations between Cuba and the United States, for my government considered the unhindered flow of cocaine over its borders a pressing problem.”151 As the new Cuban government established itself, narcotics enforcement constituted one of the very first sites of potential diplomatic collaboration, and very rapidly augured a decline in relations as Cuba pushed back against US dictates.152
Two weeks after Siragusa’s encounter at the Havana Hilton, Commissioner Anslinger expressed his dismay with the new Cuban government’s failure to act on US intelligence. He told Congress, “We never got any response,” which launched a diplomatic scuffle and mutual recriminations over whether a list of drug traffickers had ever exchanged hands. The commissioner explained that while the United States was “willing to help them suppress this traffic,” it would do so with preconditions; that prosecutions follow arrests, that foreign “hoodlums” be deported, and that Cuba cooperate more extensively with UN drug control.153 These warnings were printed in both Cuban and US newspapers and predictably inspired a firm response. In the March 18, 1959 issue of Prensa Libre, Castro attacked Anslinger and questioned US motives: “What happens is that the American Bureau of Narcotics has not heard that there has been a revolution here and that gangsterism, racketeering, interventionism and similar things have stopped.”154 Still, one month later on an unofficial visit to Washington, Castro dispatched an emissary to meet with FBN officials but failed to stem the hostile drift.155 Siragusa lamented “the strong stench of communism had begun to permeate [Castro’s] government” and implied an increase in cocaine trafficking (measured by two large seizures in Miami and New York) could be attributed to Cuban neglect: “If this was Castro’s idea of cooperation, I sincerely hoped he would forget the whole thing.”156 While a decade earlier a dope bust in Cuba had been invoked as evidence of successful collaborations, now drug seizures provided proof of Cuban duplicity.157 By January 1960, Anslinger’s position solidified. He announced to Congress “there is probably more cocaine traffic in Cuba than all the rest of the countries of the world put together,” before continuing the conversation off the record.158 Politicized allegations of Cuban drug criminality were also on display at bilateral and regional drug control efforts in the hemisphere.
In March 1960, the First Inter-American Meeting on the Illicit Traffic in Cocaine and Coca Leaves convened in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The first of three Inter-American conferences held between 1960 and 1962 brought together policing and public health officials from the United States and Latin America (including Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, and Venezuela) and representatives from the UN CND and the European police agency Interpol. FBN agent Siragusa Chaired the US delegation and triumphantly reported back to his superiors that the final acts and resolutions adopted were “almost entirely ours,” and “virtually guaranteed” that harsher law enforcement mechanisms and stricter controls over the legal drug trade would be implemented in Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil because of the delegation’s close contact with “their high ranking police representatives.”159 A number of these representatives, including the Peruvian Chief of Criminal Investigations, Dr. Alfonso Mier y Teran, had been trained at the US Federal Bureau of Narcotics training school, created by the 1956 Narcotics Control Act.160 By the following year’s Second Inter-American meeting, eight additional police officials from Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Venezuela had all graduated from the FBN training school, smoothing the integration of US policing priorities across the Americas. Connections forged at the First Inter-American conference brought FBN officials to Bolivia to participate in counternarcotics operations that culminated in the passage of a law modeled on US drug enforcement, introducing “minimum mandatory sentences ranging from one year to life imprisonment for various types of trafficking offenses.”161
As the US government pursued hemispheric police collaboration outside the UN framework, designations of legality remained politically powerful tools. The United States used Inter-American drug forums to try to discredit the Castro government. In preparation for the 1960 conference, Siragusa wrote to Brazilian officials “regarding our mutual problem represented by Peruvian and Bolivian cocaine. This cocaine is smuggled into your country, and large quantities are also smuggled into the United States via Cuba.”162 US officials expressed concern at the persistence of the “coca-chewing problem” in the Andes, and anxiously reported “with the spread of the knowledge of chemistry . . . the flow of crude cocaine towards the outer world seems now at a critical point.”163 A US representative informed Latin American police officials, “Cocaine paste, smuggled into Cuba from Peru and Bolivia . . . is converted into cocaine. Consequently, this excessive coca leaf production is ultimately responsible for the cocaine entering the United States traffic from Cuba.”164 The North–South hierarchy of legal production was being disrupted and rendered illicit by alleged Cuban intermediaries. The US delegation reported that while “several years ago the use of illicit cocaine in the United States appeared to be a thing of the past,” with the Cuban revolution, “The picture has changed radically and today it is disturbing.”165 In the months following these accusations of Cuban involvement in the illicit drug trade, economic relations between the United States and Cuba would hit an all-time low as the United States cut off its sugar imports and the Cubans retaliated by nationalizing parts of the industry.166 Disputes over drug control must be viewed as part of a larger confrontation through economic warfare, one which very effectively mobilized a narrative of criminality in an effort to politically isolate the Castro regime that was increasingly challenging the terms of US economic dominance in the hemisphere (and within its own economy).
Cuba represented more than an economic threat. The Cuban Revolution, in part because of its widely broadcast antiracist and anticolonial sympathies, garnered much support in Africa and its diaspora.167 In July 1960, a few months after the regional narcotics conference, The Fair Play for Cuba Committee organized a trip to Cuba of prominent black activists, writers, and poets. Black nationalist and Afrocentric jazz critic LeRoi Jones returned from Cuba advocating a politics of active engagement, impressed by the revolution’s grassroots base. Jones reported that Castro declared himself neither communist nor anticommunist, but rather a “radical humanist.”168 Castro’s initial self-identification relied on the language of the non-aligned movement and was also adopted by some African American activists in the United States who challenged the Cold War consensus. When Castro traveled to New York to attend the UN General Assembly meeting in 1960, whi
ch had witnessed the revolutionary shift in power toward an Afro-Asian bloc, a downtown hotel offensively demanded thousands of dollars from Castro in advance while the New York tabloid press maligned the fidelistas as “uncouth primitives” that “killed, plucked, and cooked chickens in their rooms at the Shelburne and extinguished cigars on expensive carpets.”169 In protest, Castro moved his delegation to Harlem, where the Hotel Theresa welcomed him as an honored guest. Prominent civil rights advocates Robert Williams and Malcolm X, as well as international political leaders such as Jawarharlal Nehru of India, Gamal Abdul Nasser of Egypt, and Nikita Khrushchev of the USSR, all made the journey uptown for high-profile visits. Khrushchev’s visit and, more significantly, the visits of Nasser and Nehru, both prominent leaders of the Third World Non-Aligned Movement, symbolically linked the US civil rights struggle to anti-imperialist struggles around the globe and Soviet propaganda efforts to capitalize on them. The US delegation to the General Assembly lamented the US media’s “ill-informed” attack on these leaders’ presence in New York, warning that the non-aligned leaders’ seeming symbolic victory was far less “serious” than the need of US delegates to be “acutely conscious” of the way racial discrimination undermined US diplomacy: “All the explaining and apologies in the world will not erase the injury to an African delegate who is turned away from a restaurant.”170
We Sell Drugs: The Alchemy of US Empire Page 28