The other day I did a post on "Status, Radicalism & Happiness" that argued that many lefties who left the bourgeois track during the Vietnam era have had rich lives. I mentioned "my neighbor growing up in Baltimore. He got into the SDS at Harvard, and ended up dropping out and picking sugar cane for years in Cuba. Now he writes mysteries." Henry Norr in Berkeley knew who I meant. He sent the post along to Dick Cluster; and Dicky as I know him wrote to me that my facts were wobbly but my lesson isn’t.
I agree what you and your wife say, and feel free to use me as example. But actually, just to not-give-myself-airs: I was in SDS at Harvard, definitely, but alas graduated from the place (best I can claim is that I was on probation for a Dow Chemical sit-in — you can imagine my father Ray telling me on phone that he understood what we’d done but to try not to get kicked out in my last year because of the $$$ he’d invested), and spent only 2 months cutting cane in Cuba, in between stints working on "underground" newspaper Old Mole. Mysteries yes, though more recently Spanish-English translation, history, and also a couple of non-mystery novels without publishers. And teaching and advising half-time at UMass Boston, the commuter branch of UMass.
Who knows what it was I was on track to be if the movement hadn’t intervened???? My sense is like yours, though: that most of us from elite colleges, Jews and non-Jews, who got off that track ended up being able to rejoin it, though more often on some slow-freight line rather than fast-track, and with better social/service/political goals. I did stay in touch with Cuba and in the early-mid ’90s stumbled on a chance to go back there and work for (off-and-on) four years ’92-’96, with Cuban teachers of English, and my kid to go to high school there 2 semesters, and my partner Nancy live and work there much of that time too; so now we have Cuban more-or-less extended family we go back and visit (and by a long and curious and very Cuban chain of events, one of those old mystery novels got published in Cuban translation a couple years ago).
Here’s a link to a social history of Havana written w/ Cuban writer/editor friend. And here is link to something short that I wrote recently about the Venceremos Brigade etc (for the mag of the "David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies" at Harvard of all things — which is edited by someone who was also on the VB). [Weiss excerpts:]
In the spring of 1961, as a 14-year-old in Baltimore, Maryland, interested in current events, I read in the New York Times about Cubans fighting for freedom at a place called the Bay of Pigs, against a dictatorship that had hijacked a popular revolution. When the forces of good failed to triumph at the Bay of Pigs, I was shocked. A classmate of mine—a precocious member of the Young Socialist Alliance— told me that the operation had been run by the CIA. I could not believe. Hadn’t Adlai Stevenson denied this at the United Nations? Hadn’t the New York Times and other media reported the invasion was a spontaneous action by freedom-loving Cubans?
… In the years between 1961 and 1969, the Viet Nam war had taught us that what the mainstream media and our government officials said about our country’s foreign policy might not only be mistaken, but might even be a cynical and conscious effort to mislead us in both senses of the word.
