Rebel Publisher
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A title that even more explicitly illustrates how Grove’s intervention in the 1960s discourse of racial identity relied on typographical tropes is Turner Brown Jr.’s Black Is, with illustrations by Ann Weisman. By inverting the nighuniversal convention of black type on a white page, Black Is foregrounds the degree to which the opposition of black and white is implicated in the very materiality of the printed book. The cover of the Black Cat edition is, appropriately, black, with both title and colophon in white. Inside, all recto pages are black, with Brown’s provocative epigrams on race relations in white type, and all verso pages are white, with Weisman’s illustrations in black ink. The first two pages oppose the publication information in black type against a white page with Webster’s definition of the word black in white type against a black page. The definition is reproduced in full typographic detail, such that the word black appears in italics in all of the examples of usage. As both material object and text, Black Is illustrates the complex ways in which the design of the paperback book could, in and of itself, be part of the larger dialogue about racial identity (Figure 32).
Figure 31. Roy Kuhlman’s cover for the Black Cat edition of Look Out, Whitey! Black Power’s Gon’ Get Your Mama! (1969).
Figure 32. Cover for Black Cat edition of Black Is (1969).
Look Out, Whitey! is, by contrast, a relatively straightforward account of the historical antecedents to and causes of the transition from civil rights to Black Power in the 1960s, the central objective of which is to justify and explain its title’s rhetorical structure. Thus, in the opening chapter Lester affirms, “No more did you hear black people talk about ‘the white man’ or ‘Mr. Charlie.’ It went from ‘white man’ to ‘whitey’; from ‘Mr. Charlie’ to ‘Chuck.’ From there he was depersonalized and called ‘the man,’ until in 1967 he would be totally destroyed by one violent word, ‘honky’!”25 Later on, citing Ossie Davis’s seminal Ebony eulogy for Malcolm X, which had achieved particularly wide circulation as an appendix to The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Lester affirms, “Blacks now realize that ‘Negro’ is an American invention which shut them off from those of the same color in Africa.”26 Lester predictably concludes by affirming the international alliances enabled by the terminological and political shift from civil rights to Black Power, noting that “Black Power is not an isolated phenomenon. It is only another manifestation of what is transpiring in Latin America, Asia, and Africa.”27 Citing Fanon as his authority, Lester prophesies that “the concept of the black man as a nation, which is only being talked about now, will become reality when violence comes.”28 The rhetoric of the title, then, is simply prelude to the revolution it presages.
North and South
The short-lived hope that this revolution might in fact happen was buttressed by the one that had already successfully occurred some one hundred miles off the coast of the United States only a decade earlier. Far more than the Algerian War, whose events and participants, Fanon notwithstanding, would have seemed relatively distant to many Americans, the Cuban revolution and its charismatic leaders inspired radical activists in the United States throughout the 1960s. Grove Press, in frequent collaboration with Monthly Review, became a central conduit for the dissemination of their words and images in the turbulent second half of that decade (as Rosset quips in an unpublished interview, “I loved the idea of Cuba. It was sex and politics, really connected!”).29 Visits to Cuba, forbidden by the State Department but frequently possible by way of Mexico or Spain, became de rigueur for committed activists and artists during the 1960s (including Richard Seaver and Barney Rosset, who, both left-handed, had to work a separate plot in the fields so as not to injure anyone with their machetes). Evergreen Review frequently published their accounts, starting with LeRoi Jones’s “Cuba Libre” in the November–December 1960 issue, which also featured a “Declaration concerning the Right of Insubordination in the Algerian War,” signed by a group of French intellectuals including Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Claude Simon. In late 1967, poet and photographer Margaret Randall reported on her “impressions, often at random” of her visit to Cuba to attend the “Encuentro con Rubén Darío” along with “some eighty other poets/critics/intellectuals from all over the world” for the Evergreen Review’s new section “Notes from the Underground.” One of Randall’s more noteworthy impressions is of “a bookstore, enormous, called La Moderna Poesia” where she sees “books from all over the world, in quantity and quality to fill the demands of seven million people who know how to read and want to.”30 As Randall’s report affirms, a central component of Cuba’s revolutionary image involved both the democratization of literacy and the radicalization of the literary. Cuba modeled the conviction that reading and revolution are co-implicated.
After the revolution itself, the central event in the idealization of the Cuban model was the death of Che Guevara in Bolivia in 1967, which sparked an extensive publishing campaign instrumental both in galvanizing Che’s image as a romantic revolutionary and in affirming Grove’s position as one of its key promulgators. As Michael Casey affirms in Che’s Afterlife, the cover of the February 1968 Evergreen Review, which featured a painting by Paul Davis based on Korda’s photograph, provided the now-famous image of Che with “its first widespread appearance in the United States.”31 Grove promoted the issue heavily, distributing posters throughout New York City and the rest of the country, announcing that “the Spirit of Che lives in the new Evergreen” (Figure 33).
This issue of Evergreen Review features Fidel Castro’s eulogy for his fallen comrade, a reprint of journalist Michel Bosquet’s report on Che’s “last hours” for Le nouvel observateur, one of the opening chapters of Che’s Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War (published in hardcover by Monthly Review and then distributed as a Black Cat paperback by Grove), Che’s 1965 farewell letter to Castro (also included in Reminiscences), a “message” from Régis Debray along with an account of his arrest in Bolivia, and a reprint of K. S. Karol’s interview with Fidel, also from Le nouvel observateur. The articles are set off as a separate section introduced by a bright red title page featuring a reproduction of Korda’s photo above the phrase “The Spirit of Che.” Below this title appears a quotation from Bosquet’s article reinforcing the selfconsciously Christian iconography of the portrait:
If the Latin-American colonels and their Yankee advisers believe today, as Time magazine wrote a few weeks ago, that Che’s disappearance deprives subversion of much of its mystery and romanticism, they are doubtless committing the same error the Romans committed nineteen hundred and thirty years ago when they executed, together with two thieves, a Jewish agitator whose ideas eventually triumphed over the greatest empire in the history of the world.32
Figure 33. Illustration of Che Guevara for the cover of Evergreen Review (February 1968). (Illustration by Paul Davis)
Prominently featuring the famous photo of Che’s corpse surrounded by Bolivian military officials, this combination of eulogy, farewell, and reminiscence positions Che’s martyrdom in explicit contrast to the dismissive reports promulgated by Time, here directly identified as the mouthpiece of the neocolonial forces responsible for his death. And the concluding lines of Fidel’s eulogy, “El Che vive!,” further affirm that “it will not be long before it will be proved that his death will, in the long run, be like a seed which will give rise to many men determined to imitate him, men determined to follow his example.”33 Grove hoped to fertilize the soil in which this seed could grow.
Toward this end, Grove published a Black Cat massmarket reprint of the Monthly Review’s translation of Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War, Che’s eyewitness account of the Cuban campaign from the landing of the Granma to the decisive battle of Santa Clara; and also in coordination with the Monthly Review, a Black Cat edition of his speeches, Che Guevara Speaks, edited by George Lavan and featuring the Davis portrait on the cover. Buttressing the rhetoric of redemption that was enhanced by his mar
tyrdom, the concluding lines of Reminiscences affirm, “We are now in a situation in which we are much more than simple instruments of one nation; we constitute at this moment the hope of unredeemed America.”34 And the preface to Che Guevara Speaks announces that “the vanguard youth are … taking Che as their own: he will live for a long time to come in helping to shape the aspirations and goals of the new generation on whom the hope of the world rests.”35 Comparable to the paired marketing of The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Malcolm X Speaks, these books together promised to provide readers with both empirical evidence of and practical guidelines for the development of revolutionary consciousness. As Julius Lester affirmed in his October 16, 1967, editorial for the New York Westside News, reprinted the following year in the Black Cat edition of his Revolutionary Notes (billed on the back cover as “a book to carry to the barricades”), “Che Is Alive—on East 103rd Street.”36
Che had kept a journal during the failed Bolivian campaign, and after his death rumors circulated widely that it was in the possession of the Bolivian military, sparking what Publishers Weekly called “The Che Guevara Sweepstakes,” in which a variety of publishers, both mainstream and underground, scrambled to get their hands on all, or at least some, of what was briefly one of the hot literary properties of 1968.37 As Fred Jordan recounted to me, “Everybody wanted to find the diaries, everybody. We wanted it, too.” Working on a tip he received from connections he had at the Cuban mission to the United Nations, Rosset sent writer Joe Liss to Bolivia with eighty-five hundred dollars in small bills to see if he could acquire the sought-after journals. Liss was instructed to pose as a screenwriter (which he was) collecting material for a film on Che Guevara (which he wasn’t). The screenwriting ruse was also the basis for the code Rosset and Liss established in order for Liss to report his progress without attracting suspicion. After a series of contretemps, Liss was able to hook up with Gustavo Sánchez Salazar and Luis Gonzales Sr., Bolivian journalists working on a book about Che’s campaign, who initially suspected him a being a CIA agent. Liss was able to convince them otherwise, and they provided him with photographs of Che in Bolivia along with photostats of a small portion of the diary (which had, in fact, been scattered across Bolivia by various interested parties, making it impossible to obtain the entire document). Liss called Rosset, but they were unable to communicate effectively in the code they had established, so Jordan and Rosset flew to Bolivia to see for themselves. As Jordan further recounts, “We arrive in La Paz, and Barney disappears … I was furious.” Eventually, Rosset and Jordan managed to negotiate for the photos and a larger portion of the journal and offered Salazar and Gonzalez an advance of twenty-seven thousand dollars on their book, which Grove published in translation the following year as The Great Rebel: Che Guevara in Bolivia.38
The risks involved in such a venture were confirmed on the night of July 26, 1968, when a fragmentation grenade was tossed through the window of Grove’s University Place offices. Credit for the bombing was claimed by the Movimiento nacional de coalición cubano, which had timed the attack to coincide with the fifteenth anniversary of Fidel’s famous raid on Batista’s army in Santiago, but Rosset was convinced, although he was never able to prove, that the CIA was also involved. Grove continued to receive bomb threats in the ensuing months, and for a time fire engines mysteriously blared their sirens outside the offices on an almost daily basis, but Rosset, undeterred, published the excerpts in the August 1967 Evergreen Review. They were heavily illustrated, including a gruesome full-page photograph of Che’s corpse, the tagline for which notes that “this and similar photographs are widely in demand by the Indian farmers of the area where Che was killed, to be framed and hung like ikons [sic] next to pictures of Christ.”39 The excerpts are supplemented by a twopage guide, “Who’s Who in Che’s Diary,” providing names of the Cuban agents who accompanied him (which had been withheld from the official version of the journal issued by Cuba’s Instituto nacional del libro), and illustrated with drawings by Carlos Bustos, the Argentinian artist arrested with Régis Debray.
Debray is an important figure in the network that produced and distributed the literature of revolution in the 1960s. His book, Revolution in the Revolution?, issued in hardcover by Monthly Review and as a Black Cat paperback in 1967, is an exemplary version of the so-called revolutionary handbook, and his itinerary illustrates some of the geopolitical realignments that occurred in that network over the course of the 1960s. Starting out as a student of philosophy at the École normale supérieure under Louis Althusser, Debray first visited Cuba in 1961, where he met with both Che and Castro; he traveled throughout Latin America in the early 1960s, after which he returned to France, where he wrote a number of influential articles in both French and Spanish on Cuban revolutionary strategy and the “Latin American way.” In 1965, he returned to Cuba as a professor of philosophy at the University of Havana. In 1967, he went to Bolivia to join Che’s campaign, where he was arrested shortly before Guevara himself was captured and killed. The Bolivian government sentenced Debray to thirty years in prison, and he became a cause célèbre around the world until his release in 1970.
Although Debray was arrested for aiding the insurgency, Grove claimed that his real crime was writing Revolution in the Revolution?, whose front cover bills it, citing Newsweek, as “a primer for Marxist insurrection in Latin America.” The back cover specifies, in bold red type, “For having written this book, twenty-six-year-old Régis Debray is under arrest in Bolivia awaiting trial and a sentence that could be death before the firing squad.” The front matter on the opening page elaborates that “whatever the Bolivian authorities may charge, Régis Debray’s real crime is having written this book.” The foreword goes on to quote none other than Jean-Paul Sartre (who had himself visited Cuba in 1960 and famously called Che “the most complete human being of our age”) as affirming that “Régis Debray has been arrested by the Bolivian authorities, not for having participated in guerilla activities but for having written a book—Révolution dans la révolution?—which ‘removes all the brakes from guerrilla activity.’”40 Grove billed Revolution in the Revolution? as the ultimate crime of writing, a book that posed a threat not only to the First World powers striving to perpetuate neocolonial influence in Latin America but also to their Soviet and Chinese adversaries.
Revolution in the Revolution? partakes of the postwar realignment of anticolonial struggle from an east-west to a north-south hemispheric axis, foregrounding the very term “America” as subject and substance of revolutionary transformation. The book was originally written in Spanish and published in Havana, with an introduction by the Cuban author Roberto Fernández Retamar, as the inaugural volume in the Cuadernos series of the Casa de las Americas and with the explicit purpose of providing guidance for revolutionaries throughout Latin America. In their foreword, Monthly Review editors Leo Huberman and Paul Sweezy affirm that “Debray, though writing only in his capacity as a private student of revolutionary theory and practice, has succeeded in presenting to the world an accurate and profound account of the thinking of the leaders of the Cuban Revolution.” And they insist that, though the book was written with a Latin American audience in mind, it “represents a very real challenge to all revolutionaries everywhere.”41
Revolution in the Revolution? was widely reviewed, and the framework within which the mainstream press presented it reveals that the idea of a “handbook” for revolution had become an established generic category. The New York Times reviewed it as a “Guerilla Blueprint”; the Nation as a “Primer for Revolutionary Guerillas”; and, as we have seen, Newsweek called it “a primer for Marxist insurrection in Latin America.” It ended up selling more than seventy thousand copies.
Even though Debray’s ideas were met with varying degrees of skepticism, all reviewers agreed that the central conceptual and practical component of the book is the military “foco,” the small group of guerrillas who in their very composition make up the seedbed of the revolution. The inaugural mo
del of this utopian group formation is, of course, the eighty-two members of the 26th of July Movement who joined Fidel Castro and Che Guevara on the Granma for its famous voyage from Veracruz to Cuba, and the purpose of Debray’s book is to prove that this model is appropriate to all Latin American countries under dictatorship. But the “foco,” as Fredric Jameson has argued in “Periodizing the Sixties,” is more than just a descriptive term; it is “in and of itself a figure for the transformed, revolutionary society to come,” and, I would argue, it was in these utopian extensions that it would be so compelling to American readers during that brief interregnum in the late 1960s when world revolution, to both its adherents and its enemies, seemed historically possible.42 While the empirical referent of the “foco” was geographically specific, its potential for replication and extension was vast and enabled any small group with enough radical fervor to consider itself in the vanguard of the revolution. As Debray himself confirms toward the end of his short book, “Fidel Castro says simply that there is no revolution without a vanguard; that this vanguard is not necessarily the Marxist-Leninist party; and that those who want to make the revolution have the right and the duty to constitute themselves a vanguard, independently of those parties.”43 Revolution in the Revolution? provided both ideological license and practical guidance for such self-constitution.