Abstract

ROJAS, Rafael. The cultural apparatus of the Empire: C. Wright Mills, the Cuban Revolution and the New Left. Perf. latinoam. [online]. 2014, vol.22, n.44, pp.7-31. ISSN 0188-7653.

This essay tries to reconstruct the public debate in the United States provoked by the book Listen, Yankee (1960), written by American sociologist C. Wright Mills. Mills was one of the first intellectuals that traveled to the island after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution and that got interested in that experience of social change. However, Mill's solidarity with Cuban socialism was not uncritical of certain authoritarian elements he observed, and was primarily aimed at defending an understanding and respectful policy from the United States towards the revolutionary nationalism of the Caribbean. In the context of the Cold War such policy and criticisms defended by Wright Mills were part of the repertoire of values and practices that he himself identified with the concept of the "New Left".

Keywords : nationalism; Cuban Revolution; Soviet Union; communism; New Left; Cold War; public intellectual.