{"id":6469,"date":"2022-05-15T21:34:43","date_gmt":"2022-05-16T01:34:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tempestmag.org\/v01_2020\/staging\/?p=6469"},"modified":"2022-05-19T23:30:09","modified_gmt":"2022-05-20T03:30:09","slug":"reflections-on-building-the-third-camp","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2022\/05\/reflections-on-building-the-third-camp\/","title":{"rendered":"Reflections on building the third camp"},"content":{"rendered":"

Samuel Farber (1939-) is a prominent scholar, essayist, and activist. Born and raised in Marianao, Cuba, Farber participated in the popular movement against the Fulgencio Batista dictatorship as a high school student. He moved to the United States in 1958, where he shifted further left and embraced a third camp, anti-capitalist\/anti-Stalinist perspective. He took part in the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley and played an active role in the Independent Socialist Clubs (ISC) and its successor organization, the International Socialists (IS) during the 1960s and 1970s. In recent years he has become a prolific political commentator, contributing to numerous online and print publications, including Jacobin<\/em>, New<\/em> Politics, Foreign Policy in Focus, Havana Times, Spectre, Revista Sin Permiso, <\/em>and La Joven Cuba <\/em>(the last two in Spanish). <\/em><\/p>\n

Sam Farber received a B.A. from the University of Chicago, an M.A. from the London School of Economics (LSE), and a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. He subsequently taught at the University of California at Los Angeles, SUNY-Old Westbury, Fairleigh Dickinson University, and Brooklyn College-CUNY, from which he retired in 2007. He is the author of six books: Revolution and Reaction in Cuba, 1933-1960 (1976); Before Stalinism: The Rise and Fall of Soviet Democracy (1990); Social Decay and Transformation: A View from the Left (2000); The Origins of the Cuban Revolution Reconsidered (2006); Cuba Since the Revolution of 1959: A Critical Perspective (2011); and The Politics of Che Guevara: Theory and Practice (2016).<\/em><\/p>\n

Farber\u2019s books and articles on Cuban history and politics have established him as a leading authority on Castroism and Cuba in the twentieth century. He has also written on Latin American politics, Soviet Communism, and contemporary U.S. politics. His writings have attracted attention beyond academic circles due to the fact that he has been deeply critical of the Castro regime from a leftist and radically democratic and socialist perspective.<\/em><\/p>\n

This interview is based on six conversations conducted via Zoom between September and December 2020. It has been lightly edited by the participants. The interview was originally published in Left History 24.1<\/a> (Spring\/Summer 2021).<\/em><\/p>\n

–Kent Worcester <\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

\n

Cuban background<\/h4>\n

Kent Worcester:<\/span>Say something about your parents and your siblings. <\/strong><\/p>\n

Samuel Farber:<\/span>My parents were Polish Jews who met in Cuba. My father arrived in Cuba in 1924, and my mother arrived in 1928. They met the year after she arrived, and they married in 1930. I am the youngest of three children. My older siblings are both dead. My sister would have been 89 this year, and my brother would have been 84.<\/p>\n

My parents were originally small shopkeepers. My father hated retail trade, so he became a middleman in the workingman\u2019s pants section of the garment industry in Cuba. The post-World War II period in Cuba was a boom period, in part because the price of sugar went up. I remember when we first got a telephone. I was about seven years old. Before then, if you wanted to get in touch with my parents you would phone neighbors of ours who lived across the street, and they would tell us that we got a telephone call. At some point in the period my parents replaced our ice box with a refrigerator. In 1951, when I was almost twelve, they bought their first car, a 1950 Plymouth. My childhood was a time of increased affluence, but we continued to live in an old house that was right next to my parents\u2019 business. Our living room and dining room served as passages into the business. In 1952, shortly after I became thirteen years old, we rented a much nicer house a couple of blocks from the famous Tropicana <\/em>nightclub. This was a newer and solidly middle-class area where we never got to really know our neighbors. But since my parents\u2019 business remained where it always was in the old mixed class barrio<\/em> and we were duty bound to help my parents at work, we continued to \u201chang around\u201d there more than in our new neighborhood, which was actually only one and half miles away.<\/p>\n

There was no real separation between home and work in our family. My siblings and I were constantly pitching in to help with the business. My parents worked seven days a week. They had no time to entertain us, so we were dependent on our neighbors, who would sometimes take us out to baseball games, eating out at Spanish restaurants and shopping in downtown Havana.The town we lived in, Marianao, was adjacent to Havana. I grew up in a real neighborhood. Right next door to us was a tenement block.<\/p>\n

I remember the hurricane of 1944. Some of the people from the tenement came to our house to take shelter. It was that kind of neighborhood. I had a middle-class up upbringing but it was very different from the kind of middle-class upbringing that postwar Americans enjoyed in the new suburbs. For one thing, we were close to people who came from very different class and racial backgrounds.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Samuel Farber\u2019s Kindergarten Class (top row, third child from the left) in
Marianao, Cuba (1944-1945).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

KW:<\/span>Did your parents encourage you and your siblings to read books?<\/strong><\/p>\n

SF:<\/span>Not at all. Apart from textbooks I didn\u2019t read any serious books until I was in my late teens. There were very few books in our house, mostly on Jewish related themes and a couple of encyclopedias. My brother and sister became interested in classical music, and so we had some records. We also had a piano in our living room that my sister had played when she was younger. We had a subscription to Selecciones, <\/em>the Spanish-language version of Reader\u2019s Digest<\/em>, but my 1<\/a><\/sup>parents were fundamentally apolitical. Nor were they religious in any strict sense, but rather culturally traditional in the Eastern European Jewish manner. They were not historic Zionists but like almost every Jew in Cuba they were horrified by the Holocaust (I lost innumerable uncles, aunts, grandparents and cousins in Nazi-occupied Poland) and supportive of the new state of Israel, for which my father later helped to raise funds.<\/p>\n

In 1945 I started attending a Jewish school where the instruction was half in Spanish and half in Yiddish. It was a pain in the neck. I had to travel seven miles to school and had to go home for lunch and then go back again. Totally crazy. The school had been founded by Bundists1

I remember joking that when I finally visited Israel, I would look for our family\u2019s forest because we were always donating money for planting trees as gifts. For my Bar Mitzvah, I got about half a dozen Parker 51 pens. I used one after the other until I was in graduate school in Berkeley. They were good pens! I also got lots of wallets and as I said before, trees in Israel. Fictional trees, of course.<\/p>\n

KW:<\/span>Did your siblings stay in Cuba?<\/strong><\/p>\n

SF:<\/span>No. Both my brother and I left before the Revolution. My sister and parents left almost two years later in late 1960.<\/p>\n

During high school I became politically active, which by definition meant oppositionist politics. I was even arrested as a result of my political activities. Since this happened in late 1955, before politics got really hot in the island, the prosecutor dropped the charges at the trial against me and the rest of the group of students who were arrested at the same time as I was. The trial took place in the early part of 1956, which was the same year that I graduated from high school.<\/p>\n

After graduating from high school, I attended law school, but only for about six weeks. One of the things we studied was Roman law, which I thought was as boring as hell, but was actually interested in the totally new knowledge I acquired in a course called Antropolog\u00eda Jur\u00eddica, a rough equivalent of forensic medicine. The campus was shut down by the university authorities as a safety measure in November of 1956. I continued to be supportive of the 26th of July Movement but since I was not attending school I was no longer at the center of the action and remained on the fringes selling the movement\u2019s bonds and visiting political prisoners with my closest friends. Things were starting to really heat up. Once there was no longer school, I spent most of my time helping with the family business. My brother, who had studied electrical engineering at university, decided to move to Chicago, where we had a large family on my mother\u2019s side. A year later I joined him.<\/p>\n

Through personal connections, I was able to get into the University of Chicago. At first the University did not want to even consider my application because they had a policy that they would not consider undergraduate applicants from abroad unless they had already studied at a U.S. institution for at least one year. My first application was turned down right off the bat. But some of my cousins had connections and the next thing I knew I was admitted.<\/p>\n

KW:<\/span>What were you planning to study?<\/strong><\/p>\n

SF:<\/span>I postponed my major at the University of Chicago because I planned to return to Cuba and be useful to the new revolutionary government. It was only after the government had taken a clear Stalinist turn that I decided not to return and decided to major in Sociology.<\/p>\n

KW:<\/span>When were you politicized?<\/strong><\/p>\n

SF:<\/span>Batista\u2019s coup had taken place during my first year of high school. He came to power in 1952. As a result, the atmosphere in my high school was definitely one of political protest. We were nationalists but not anti-imperialists. Terms like \u201cimperialism\u201d and even \u201cleftist\u201d were only used by people who were in the Communist Party or very close to it. Most of us were democratic populists who wanted a clean and democratic government. We favored democracy, agrarian reform, the nationalization of public utilities and a generous welfare state. I thought of FDR as a god. I had many criticisms of U.S. foreign policy, for supporting various dictators and so on, but that does not mean that I was anti-imperialist. We also rejected the U.S. in cultural terms\u2014for the cold, highly individualistic and impersonal human relations it encouraged. Cuba then and now has a very effervescent, good-humored type of culture. There is racism, but in a different package than in the U.S.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll give you an example. My brother had two study partners, one of whom was black. This was in Cuba. The woman who was my uncle\u2019s second wife, a pretentious woman originally from Warsaw no less, came to visit us at our new rented house and saw the study partner and said in Yiddish, \u201cWhat is this schvartze<\/em> doing here?\u201d I was infuriated. My parents were not anti-racist, but they certainly would not have thought in those terms, much less used a term like that. Some of their ideas might have had racist implications, but they were not elitists and they didn\u2019t place any weight on these issues. The fact that my brother had black friends, and that I had black friends, did not concern them. What might have concerned them was the fact that I did not have as many Jewish friends as they had hoped.<\/p>\n

KW:<\/span>How did you end up picking \u201cSergio Junco\u201d as your pseudonym when you started writing articles on Cuba for the IS press in Britain? <\/strong><\/p>\n

SF:<\/span>There was a black Cuban named Sandalio Junco who had been a Trotskyist and then a trade union leader before he was killed by the Stalinists in 1942. He was an important Latin American political figure during the Comintern days in the twenties.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Cuban labor leader and Trotskyist, Sandalio Junco, murdered by Stalinists in 1942. Photo from the Militant newspaper, June 20, 1942.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

KW:<\/span>Did you ever try to return to Cuba once you relocated to the United States?<\/strong><\/p>\n

SF:<\/span>No. First of all, it was very difficult to travel to Cuba in those days. Also, when I returned to the United States in 1963, after having spent a year in England, I had a green card. I was nervous about losing my immigrant status. I wasn\u2019t going to travel anywhere outside the country and I certainly was not going to go back to Cuba. I thought there was a chance that if I returned to Cuba that I would be arrested. I wasn\u2019t well known, so perhaps they would have let me back in. But it was rare for Cubans to return to Cuba unless they had a connection to the regime.<\/p>\n

I applied for U.S. citizenship in 1968. It wasn\u2019t until 1971 that it was granted. When I applied, I decided that I was not going to lie about my political affiliations, in case they caught me in a lie and invalidated my citizenship and threw me out of the country. But once I let them know about my affiliations, they placed me in a separate track and assigned me an attorney as my case officer. And then they sat on the application. On the one hand, they didn\u2019t want me as a citizen, but on the other hand they didn\u2019t have any legal grounds for turning me down. I hadn\u2019t broken any laws.<\/p>\n