Americans of a certain generation know C. Wright Mills for his iconic critiques of the US “power elite,” Cold War big-power machinations, and the alienated habitus of the postwar middle classes. These works earned the sociologist a dedicated following within the New Left, the political and intellectual movement that he helped to shape. Cubanists, however, maintain a rather different image of Mills as the author of the polemical 1960 tract Listen, Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba. His sympathetic portrait of the Cuban Revolution, based on a 16-day trip to the island in August 1960, quickly became a best seller in the United States, Latin America, and beyond and helped to thread anti-imperialist politics into the ethos of hemispheric youth protest. Though Mills died shortly after the book's publication, for decades thereafter he would be credited with—or blamed for—the explosion of international solidarity with the revolutionary island.
A. Javier Treviño's...
