1963 Student Trip to Cuba pt 1: Martin Nicolous

The federal government’s ban on travel to Cuba had put an end to direct flights.  Although Cuba is only 90 miles from Florida, you had to take a detour to get there.  And what a detour!  The student group I joined for the trip, nearly 60 strong, divided in half for the first leg.  Some of us went to Paris, some to London.  We came together in Prague, Czechoslovakia.  There we traveled by bus for a few days in Karlovy Vary (Carlsbad), a spa resort, where we waited for our connecting flight.  Then the long haul:  Prague to Shannon, Ireland, for refueling; back across the Atlantic to Gander, Newfoundland (Canada) for refueling, and then down along the American coast to Havana. We had taken a week and flown 9,500 miles.

The Cuban revolution was then four years in power.  It had begun in 1953, when a group of students outraged by Fulgencio Batista’s military coup of 1952 attacked the Moncada Barracks.  Most were killed, the rest were captured and put on trial.  In a famous four-hour speech at his trial, student leader Fidel Castro outlined a program of wide-ranging political and social reforms.  He was condemned to prison.  Popular agitation forced his release via an amnesty two years later, and Fidel’s small group fled to Mexico, where they trained and organized.  The Argentine doctor, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, joined them there.  They landed in Cuba on the ship Granma in 1956.  Again, most were killed, but a handful survived and began a three-year guerrilla war in the Sierra Maestra mountains, with widespread support in the cities.  In January, 1959, Batista fled, and Fidel’s forces marched into Havana and formed the government.

Full article here and well worth reading http://nicolaus.com/mn/2011/09/cuba-1963/

Phillip Abbott Luce died quietly, of natural causes, in December 1998, in his native Springfield, Ohio. He had also lived quietly, at least as far as the wide world could tell, for many years before his death, but his life was not always so. To my generation of ’60s-era Young Americans for Freedom, Phillip Abbott Luce was a hero: a former radical who had twice traveled illegally to Cuba under the auspices of the pro-Red Chinese Progressive Labor Party, who had been indicted and who testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee as a result, and who awoke from his communist daze in 1965 to be born again as an author, lecturer, and organizer against his lost faith. Like many others who later broke with the god of leftism, Luce sought to take some good from his bad experience by telling the truth about it. In The New Left, his first post-communist book, published in 1966, he wrote that he would “feel that the public exposure of my own political aberrations has resulted in something worthwhile” if he succeeded in keeping “one young person from wasting the time that I did in the Communist movement.””

Phillip Luce’s beginnings appear somewhat uncertain. According to the Ohio Department of Health, he turned 63 on his last birthday before he died, having been born October 17, 1935. But three of his books say he was born three years later, in 1938. “Young people feel that anyone over thirty is an enemy,” he wrote in The New Left, so perhaps the birth dates in the books (published between ’65 and ’68) were hedged to keep him within the age limits of his audience’s trust. That would have been fitting in a way — a parting indulgence in characteristic New Left irresponsibility about facts in particular and reality in general. The ease with which the left falls into self-delusion and into deceiving others is a recurring theme in Luce’s post-communist writing. Another is the left’s gross irresponsibility in stirring up trouble, as when it calmly casts whole, huge categories of people — anyone over 30, for instance — as “enemies.””

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“Heaven forbid,” Luce wrote in The New Left, “that a young person may decide to take a position other than the prevailing middle-of-the-road liberalism, whether on fluoridation or on foreign aid .... In this country, when one voices strong political viewpoints, he is automatically labeled a zealot, a Communist, or a McCarthyite. The era of the 1960s is the era of the nullification of politics.” It was an era of intellectual confusion and timidity in which “most parents pose as liberals, but often act like social conservatives and feel it’s better to remain quiet than to involve yourself.” The “kids”’ reaction was often to take this empty “ism” to its logical, absurd conclusion, as if to say: OK, you want vacuity, we’ll show you the real thing. “Pot, Kama Sutra sex, bennies, and bra-less females,” Luce wrote, “also are expressions of alienation from traditional society.” And also, there was Communism, seeming to offer an outlet that, in stark contrast to liberalism, possessed a clear moral purpose and a firm assurance about its actions and objectives.”

After receiving his Master’s degree, Luce began to participate in the activities of the Communist Party, which he considered “the only organization of any radical significance around.” Soon, however, he found he had fled one set of stultifying conformities for another. In the fall of 1961, he moved to New York and attempted to go to work on a moribund Communist Party monthly literary magazine called Mainstream. He joined other young writers there in an effort to infuse new ideas and youthful energy into the publication. The group set up a meeting to discuss their plans with American Communist Party head Gus Hall in Hall’s top-floor office at Party headquarters in New York.”

“Hall’s office had the warmth of a barren, unheated attic,” Luce recalled. “Empty bookcases lined the walls, and except for a conglomeration of mixed chairs and a desk, the only ornamentation was a blackboard. This blackboard was utilized by the ‘comrades’ whenever they wanted to mention someone’s name without its being recorded by the FBI .... A personification of paranoia! Such blackboards, I later discovered, adorn all of the cubbyhole offices at the CPUSA. Hall’s appearance was as stark as the physical layout. As he leaned back in his chair, his feet on the desk, he constantly fingered a clothespin and certainly resembled Captain Queeg a lot more than Lenin.” Hall, of course, vetoed any notion of new ideas or youthful exuberance for Mainstream.”

But Luce moved on to become editor of Rights, the house organ of the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, a group founded in 1951 by “old radicals” Corliss Lamont, I.F. Stone, and others. Clark Foreman, its director, Luce wrote, was “always too independent to join the CPUSA.” Luce thought Foreman was “probably the only ‘old’ radical who understood and sympathized with the frustration and impatience of the young radicals.” Luce credited his own “need for independence, which Clark helped instill in me” with leading him later to break with Communism.”

In 1963, Luce led 58 fellow radicals on his first illegal trip to Cuba. When he returned, he was indicted and subpoenaed to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee. “We literally swaggered into the hearing room,” Luce wrote, “determined to give the Committee a bad time. When asked my name, I sarcastically replied, ‘Phillip Abbott Luce, as in Henry and Clare Boothe.’” A fine joke, effectively conveying the contempt he felt for an established order he had not yet made any serious effort to understand. “I joined Progressive Labor,” Luce wrote, “because I had a vision of the future and a hatred for the present.” The “vision,” apparently, consisted of little more than vindicating and appeasing the hatred. “I felt that perhaps a united Communist venture could oust the present government. I overlooked all that I knew of the history of the Communist movement, the purges, etc., and held to a belief that Progressive Labor was really interested in individual freedom and the betterment of the people."”

Full article here and well worth reading http://www.steelzone.org/articles.php?y=2000

The Hall-Hoag collection, as such, began when Hall returned home from the war and first encountered U.S. domestic hate groups. Appalled by their ideology and beliefs  Hall came to the determination that groups at both the far left and far right of American society were a danger to democracy and good government, and he set out on a plan to combat them. Hall began to infiltrate and investigate these groups and actively collected their printed propaganda  After a few years as an investigator for the Friends of Democracy, an anti-totalitarian group, he was struck out on his own as a freelance researcher. He supported this research by giving public lectures about the dangers posed by radical extremist and hate groups in which he used their propaganda as evidence of their ideology and activities. A firm believer in the Constitutional framework of American governance and the open society it created, Hall took it as his mission to educate ordinary Americans about extremist groups and their activities so they they could make informed decisions about them. Collecting and lecturing on these groups became Gordon Hall’s life work. By the late 1960’s he had recruited a circle of like-minded volunteers to help in his collection efforts.  
http://blogs.brown.edu/hallhoag/gordon-hall-and-grace-hoag/

Abstract : An attempt was made in this paper to account for a person's showing a consistent preference between two gambles that differ in variance (i. e., in degree of riskiness) but have the same expected value (where expected value is defined as the sum of all the possible payoffs from the gamble, each one multiplied by its objective probability of occurrence). Researchers in decision theory, starting from the assumption that the person must be maximizing utility, have advanced two major explanations for such a preference.
http://www.dtic.mil/docs/citations/AD0608436

Paul Klein wrote:

greg parker wrote:

A review of a Dylan bio by PAL in which he discusses the infamous award ceremony in which Dylan made comments about Oswald and dedicated the award to Luce. http://www.unz.org/Pub/AmSpectator-1973jan-00013

I always suspected Dylan may have been stoned when he went up to receive the Tom Paine award.