An interview with Saul Landau, on his half-century of friendship with Cuba
By Marta Rojas
From Cubadebate
In spring of 1960, a young American named Saul Landau traveled to Cuba for the first time. His stay was extended until the start of autumn. He longed to see what was happening “where people my age led ministries and the leader was only nine years older than me,” Landau reminisces today.
In those days he toured Santiago de Cuba, immersed in the living history of the victorious entry of the Rebel Army. He was one of many young Americans who came to Cuba at the dawn of the triumph of the Revolution. But Saul returned in December 1961 and spent two more months with the Cuban people. He would return many times in the next half a century.
During those days in 1960-1961, Landau had just majored in history (1957) and sought his Master’s degree (1959) at the University of Wisconsin.
“I interrupted my work for a doctorate with two visits to Cuba. I never went back to write my academic thesis, although I managed to write 14 books.”
“The first two times I visited Cuba, I was unable to meet Fidel personally as I hoped, but I could see him several times and listen to his speeches in public squares, like all others in the audience,” he says.
He recalls that his first interlocutor in Cuba was the medical commander of the Rebel Army René Vallejo, then at the head of INRA (National Institute of Agrarian Reform) in the former province of Oriente. Through him, he met Fidel personally in 1968. By then, journalist and filmmaker Saul Landau had made a documentary for U.S. public television titled “Report From Cuba.”
“It seems that Fidel was interested in the documentary, and I finally had the opportunity to see and talk with the maximum leader of the Revolution. I asked for permission to film him and he said yes. In 1968 I made the documentary ‘Fidel’ for American public television. Other things may be better known,” Landau says but graciously agrees to tell us more in this interview about his relationship with Cuba, solidarity with other peoples, including his, and aspects of his intellectual work.
“As a friend of Carol Brightman, organizer of the Venceremos Brigade, I supported her on the task, although I had nothing directly to do with the Brigade. At that time, the great journalist Lee Lockwood, an excellent photographer, author of one of the most extraordinary graphic books about Fidel, asked me to collaborate in the establishment of a center in New York devoted to providing culture and information about the reality in Cuba instead of having to ‘swallow’ the propaganda dished out by the mass media. Lockwood and I decided to ask Sandra Levinson to lead this center we wanted to create, the Center for Cuban Studies, and she did.
(For the Cuban counterrevolutionary groups in Miami and New Jersey, the newly established Center for Cuban Studies was vulnerable. It was the target of a terrorist act that destroyed much of it. The bomb exploded just minutes after young teacher Sandra Levinson left the place. The center was relocated elsewhere.)
Nothing was easy for Landau since 1960, 50 years ago:
“My difficulties with the blockade and other measures have been many since then – as they have been for all Cubans and Americans who traveled to Cuba in the 60s. I would say that the blockade was and is ‘a pain in the ass.’” Landau believes that this often-used phrase defines what his country’s blockade of the island has meant for him.
“For example, returning from Cuba in 1967, I had to submit to a full-body search and then to an FBI interrogation. In those days of civil strife, the FBI was interested in Stokely Carmichael and his plans. I had seen him in Cuba but I swore that I had no answer to those two questions. I was held up for hours in the airport in Los Angeles. And last year (2009, four decades later) I was also detained, this time at the airport in Miami, just to annoy me. But for the Cubans the blockade is obviously much more than ‘a pain in the ass.’”
These words and phrases must be quoted because it is said that Landau speaks with a strong barrio accent but uses an exquisite English that is “sometimes underlined with appropriate insults.”
As a teacher, journalist, poet and filmmaker, some of Landau’s many intellectual aspects, he has been actively involved in major international conferences in Cuba and in other countries. In addition, his is a professor and member of the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies.
We enquire about those aspects and he answers:
“Look, Martha, my academic career is secondary. Yes, it is true: I am a teacher. A visiting professor at several universities: the University of California at Santa Cruz, and the American University, for example. I also taught classes in history and sociology, the mass media and occasionally cinema, until in 1997 California State University at Pomona offered me a chair in interdisciplinary studies and I remained there for nine years.
“It was interesting, but there was a problem. A high percentage of my students were functionally illiterate. It was difficult to ask them to read texts and write essays. Yes, indeed, they had graduated from high school but could not read in a critical way to get the message contained in a novel, for example, or in an academic essay. Imagine the cultural level of the citizens of our empire!”
In Landau’s case, the journalist, professor, political scientist and the poet form a single piece. They are like tributaries flowing to the same river, and the river is his commitment to the best causes and the dispossessed. He pushes his poetry to the background. But the book of poems “My Father Was Not Hamlet” proved otherwise.
“What about the poet Saul Landau?” I ask him; and he responds:
“A poet is someone who thinks in images and converts them into words so that others may enter the imaginary world. A poet is someone who can’t discipline his thoughts […] A poet is a madman who thinks that the best minds of his generation have been destroyed by madness – like Ginsberg. A poet is Pablo Armando Fernández, who thinks poetry and knows the names of flowers and trees. Am I these things?”
However, he contradicts himself in the aforementioned work, which consists of over 40 poems, translated into Spanish and published in Madrid in 2000. In his voice as a poet we hear, for example: “Love. A simple breeze / stroked my head; / a tranquil green lake / murmured in the mountain / in the depressed autumn, / a straw / crossed the yellow / meadow, a weak branch / prepared to receive / the first snow.”
About his books of prose, Landau says: “I cannot deny that they are many,” and we add, “and they’re important.” But he stresses:
“I would rather read than write. ‘Assassination on Embassy Row’ (with John Dinges), describes a five-year process. My colleagues, classmates and friends Orlando and Ronni deserved something more than tears. I think that we contributed with material that serves well to history students, so they’ll better understand the nature of Augusto Pinochet and his regime, about his secret police, and the counterrevolutionary ravens of Cuban origin who helped murder of Orlando and Ronni, the protagonists.
Landau was an activist in the struggle for civil rights in his country, whose leader, Martin Luther King was assassinated. Landau also embraced the flag against the war of aggression in Vietnam and expressed solidarity with the Chilean people – hence “Assassination on Embassy Row” – who risking their lives from the moment La Moneda Palace was bombed, Pinochet’s fascism prevailed in Chile and spread its tentacles, killing Letelier in the United States.
“How do you see today, Saul Landau, the specialist in international and domestic policy, the Cuban Revolution in relation to the long record of U.S. administrations?”
“The Cuban Revolution has survived Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II and now Obama. It has survived as an example of disobedience but, of course, the price has been high. And we Americans, we also paid a price. Cuba ‘exported’ enemies of the Revolution and the U.S. imported them. Today they play an important role in American politics, such as the vote or, rather, the denial of voting. Remember what happened in Florida in 2000.”
“More importantly, the people responsible for planning massacres are there. We recall the Cubana airliner destroyed by a bomb over Barbados. They walk the streets of Miami and show paintings in art galleries, while the Cuban antiterrorists (The Five) sleep in prisons. I am saddened to see my country declining and declining as it wastes its wealth in the military idiocy. Education, health, public transport, bridges and roads get no attention.”
“There is a something like a death wish. They have unleashed total madness. More than a trillion dollars spent in the armed forces to fight low-tech attacks. The Department of Homeland Security (another madness) takes away our freedoms in the name of freedom. Cuba remains an obsession in Washington; in Miami, it’s even worse. Some people, however, see this clearly over there; young and not-so-young people, too.
While Landau’s first meeting with Fidel Castro in 1968 was interesting, their encounter four decades later was just as interesting, or more so. He tells us:
“I spoke with Fidel in September 2009, along with Harry Belafonte, Danny Glover and James Early. Also present were Harry’s daughter (Shari) and his wife (Pamela). Fidel seemed in good physical and mental health at all times. He worried about very deep issues, such as the environment and the threats of climate change and the nuclear question in general. He was surrounded by books and had not lost his sense of humor. His courage, and his determination to change vocations – from chief of state to wise writer – inspired me that day.”
