“If this Revolution falls, what we will have here in Cuba is a hell,” Fidel Castro said in Havana in 1959. “Hell itself.”
Castro was 32 when he made the proclamation during an interview recorded just weeks after the overthrow of dictator Fulgencio Batista. The new Cuba was still taking shape after the revolution led by the 26th of July Movement. Castro spoke extensively about his vision for Cuba during a 35-minute interview with an American journalist that has never been heard publicly until now.
The interview was discovered a few years ago when Laura Galloway found a tape in her late grandfather’s archives that simply said “Galloway/Castro.” Clark Hewitt Galloway was the intra-American affairs editor for U.S. News and World Report. Galloway covered Latin and South America for the magazine after serving in the same region with the U.S. Army Intelligence corps during WWII. Blank on Blank’s new episode for its PBS series animates the story behind the tape and a collection of outtakes from the interview. Castro talks about: why Che Guevara, Raul Castro and the 26th of July Movement were not Communist; and why Cuba had issues with the American presence in the Guantanamo Naval Base and, specifically, American sailors stirring up trouble while out on the town in Guantanamo.
Blank on Blank has also posted the entire 35-minute interview in Spanish with the English translation by Sebastian Betti. During the full interview, Castro goes into great detail about how the Cuban economy would be rebuilt and how the agrarian reform plan would be put into effect. He disputes whether American interests in Cuba would be nationalized. And he downplays the idea of being asked to be a presidential candidate.
The release of this unearthed interview comes as Castro’s brother, Raul, just gave a lengthy speech about the demise of Cuban culture and conduct despite what the revolution has brought to the country.
Here’s a fascinating glimpse of the very first Bloomsday celebration, filmed in Dublin in 1954.
The footage shows the great Irish comedic writer Brian O’Nolan, better known by his pen name Flann O’Brien, appearing very drunk as he sets off with two other renowned post-war Irish writers, Patrick Kavanagh and Anthony Cronin, and a cousin of James Joyce, a dentist named Tom Joyce, on a pilgrimage to visit the sites in James Joyce’s epic novel Ulysses.
The footage was taken by John Ryan, an artist, publisher and pub owner who organized the event. The idea was to retrace the steps of Leopold Bloom and other characters from the novel, but as Peter Costello and Peter van de Kamp explain in this humerous passage from their book, Flann O’Brien: An Illustrated Biography, things began to go awry right from the start:
The date was 16 June, 1954, and though it was only mid-morning, Brian O’Nolan was already drunk.
This day was the fiftieth anniversary of Mr. Leopold Bloom’s wanderings through Dublin, which James Joyce had immortalised in Ulysses.
To mark this occasion a small group of Dublin literati had gathered at the Sandycove home of Michael Scott, a well-known architect, just below the Martello tower in which the opening scene of Joyce’s novel is set. They planned to travel round the city through the day, visiting in turn the scenes of the novel, ending at night in what had once been the brothel quarter of the city, the area which Joyce had called Nighttown.
Sadly, no-one expected O’Nolan to be sober. By reputation, if not by sight, everyone in Dublin knew Brian O’Nolan, otherwise Myles na Gopaleen, the writer of the Cruiskeen Lawn column in the Irish Times. A few knew that under the name of Flann O’Brien, he had written in his youth a now nearly forgotten novel, At Swim-Two-Birds. Seeing him about the city, many must have wondered how a man with such extreme drinking habits, even for the city of Dublin, could have sustained a career as a writer.
As was his custom, he had been drinking that morning in the pubs around the Cattle Market, where customers, supposedly about their lawful business, would be served from 7:30 in the morning. Now retired from the Civil Service, on grounds of “ill-health”, he was earning his living as a free-lance journalist, writing not only for the Irish Times, but for other papers and magazines under several pen-names. He needed to write for money as his pension was a tiny one. But this left little time for more creative work. In fact, O’Nolan no longer felt the urge to write other novels.
The rest of the party, that first Bloomsday, was made up of the poet Patrick Kavanagh, the young critic Anthony Cronin, a dentist named Tom Joyce, who as Joyce’s cousin represented the family interest, and John Ryan, the painter and businessman who owned and edited the literary magazine Envoy. The idea of the Bloomsday celebration had been Ryan’s, growing naturally out of a special Joyce issue of his magazine, for which O’Nolan had been guest editor.
Ryan had engaged two horse drawn cabs, of the old fashioned kind, which in Ulysses Mr. Bloom and his friends drive to poor Paddy Dignam’s funeral. The party were assigned roles from the novel. Cronin stood in for Stephen Dedalus, O’Nolan for his father, Simon Dedalus, John Ryan for the journalist Martin Cunningham, and A.J. Leventhal, the Registrar of Trinity College, being Jewish, was recruited to fill (unkown to himself according to John Ryan) the role of Leopold Bloom.
Kavanagh and O’Nolan began the day by deciding they must climb up to the Martello tower itself, which stood on a granite shoulder behind the house. As Cronin recalls, Kavanagh hoisted himself up the steep slope above O’Nolan, who snarled in anger and laid hold of his ankle. Kavanagh roared, and lashed out with his foot. Fearful that O’Nolan would be kicked in the face by the poet’s enormous farmer’s boot, the others hastened to rescue and restrain the rivals.
With some difficulty O’Nolan was stuffed into one of the cabs by Cronin and the others. Then they were off, along the seafront of Dublin Bay, and into the city.
In pubs along the way an enormous amount of alcohol was consumed, so much so that on Sandymount Strand they had to relieve themselves as Stephen Dedalus does in Ulysses. Tom Joyce and Cronin sang the sentimental songs of Tom Moore which Joyce had loved, such as Silent, O Moyle. They stopped in Irishtown to listen to the running of the Ascot Gold Cup on a radio in a betting shop, but eventually they arrived in Duke Street in the city centre, and the Bailey, which John Ryan then ran as a literary pub.
They went no further. Once there, another drink seemed more attractive than a long tour of Joycean slums, and the siren call of the long vanished pleasures of Nighttown.
Celebrants of the first Bloomsday pause for a photo in Sandymount, Dublin on the morning of June 16, 1954. From left are John Ryan, Anthony Cronin, Brian O’Nolan (a.k.a. Flann O’Brien), Patrick Kavanagh and Tom Joyce, cousin of James Joyce.
The story of Oskar Schindler, savior of thousands of Polish Jews, produced an epic novel, Schindler’s Ark, which in turn produced Steven Spielberg’s epic Schindler’s List. Like that of Anne Frank, Schindler’s story contains actions both unimaginably courageous and relatably human, and so his drama moves us past the stupefyingly brutal machinery of the Nazi death camps and into the lives of the real people under threat and those who helped them. But when we step out of the memoirs and fictionalizations and back into the dry history of documents, memos, and orders, the inhuman bureaucratic cast of Nazi efficiency returns, even in the case of Oskar Schindler.
Take the actual list (page one above). A featureless business ledger, the list is indistinguishable from the many concentration camp registers and death records Schindler’s fellow Nazis kept assiduously as they went about the business of eradicating a whole population. We know, of course, that Schindler played the part of a party believer to save lives instead of take them, but it’s still quite eerie to look over this faceless list of names and contemplate how close these men and women came to the horrors of the camps that took so many of their neighbors, friends, and relatives.
The list above is now on sale through an Ebay auction, starting bid 3 million dollars. It is certified authentic as the actual list typed up by Shindler’s accountant Itzhak Stern (played by Ben Kingsley in the film). The auction page provides the following information:
Itzhak Stern typed up the 14 page list on onion skin paper. Up for auction is not a copy of that list, but the actual one. It was sold by Itzhak Stern’s nephew to the current owner. It is dated in pencil on the first page, April 18, 1945. The auction will also include a copy of the affidavit from Stern’s nephew, recounting more details and provenance on The List. There’s a complete history of the composition of the list in David Crowe’s brilliant bio, Oskar Schindler: The Untold Account of His Life, Wartime Activities, and the True Story Behind the List.
Before Anne Frank was forced into hiding during World War II, there was a time when she, her family and friends could do normal things that many people take for granted. Like play in a sandbox on a warm summer day. In the shot above, Anne is 2nd from the left. More photos of Frank can be viewed at AnneFrank.org. And here you can watch the only known video showing the world’s most famous memoir writer.
One of the most stunning views a traveler can have in Paris is to round a corner and see the massive four-legged base of the Eiffel Tower. One of the beautiful things about Eiffel’s tower is that it is so colossal and yet so airy and delicate.
The view from the top is also amazing (though truth be told the views from Notre Dame and Sacré-Coeur may be better because they include the Eiffel Tower too)—so much so that Google photographers hoisted their panoramic Street View camera into the tower and recorded breathtaking views from the three main levels.
The day Google showed up was a typically overcast Paris day. The sky is even a little threatening. After so much gazing out at the city, you might want to dip into a café for un petit café crème.
But keep your laptop with you. The Street View exhibit is one of three that Google now offers about the tower. Google’s Cultural Institute collaborated with the Eiffel Tower Operating Company to create three additional exhibits: The Birth of the Eiffel Tower, the tower’s construction, and another about its inauguration and early visitors.
Built to display France’s engineering prowess at the centenary of the French Revolution, the tower’s construction is amazing to contemplate. Four men were needed to install one rivet: one to heat it up, another to hold it in place, a third to shape the head and a fourth to beat it with a sledgehammer. A total of 2,500,000 rivets were used to hold the tower together.
For a much older view of the ride up the tower’s elevator, check out this film by the Lumière brothers, made the year the tower opened in 1898.
Hannah Arendt’s work has come under some critical fire lately, what with the release of the Margarethe Von Trotta-directed biopic, starring German actress Barbara Sukowa as the controversial political theorist. At issue in the film and the surrounding commentary are Arendt’s (allegedly misleading) characterizations of the subject of her 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem, as well as her ambivalent—some have said callous, even “victim-blaming”—treatment of other Jews. None of these controversies are new, however. As Arendt scholar Roger Berkowitz notes in a recent New York Times editorial, at the time of her book’s publication, “Nearly every major literary and philosophical figure in New York chose sides in what the writer Irving Howe called a ‘civil war’ among New York intellectuals.”
While acknowledging Arendt’s flaws, Berkowitz seeks to exonerate the best-known concept that emerged from her work on Eichmann’s trial, the “banality of evil.” And while it can be comforting to have an interpreter explain, and defend, the work of a major, controversial, thinker, there is no intellectual substitute for engaging with the work itself.
In the age of the media interview—radio, television, podcast and otherwise—one can usually see and hear an author explain her views in person. And so we have the interview above (in German with English subtitles), in which Arendt sits with television presenter and journalist Gunter Gaus for a German program called Zur Person (The Person), a Charlie Rose-like show that featured celebrities, important thinkers, and politicians (including an appearance by Henry Kissinger).
A blogger at Jewish Philosophy Place writes that Arendt’s interview—a transcript of which was later published in The Portable Hannah Arendt as “What Remains? Language Remains”—is “slow and deliberative, not sharp and declarative, moving in circles, not straight lines.” The interview touches on a variety of topics, drawing on ideas expressed in Arendt’s earlier works, The Origins of Totalitarianismand The Human Condition. She is somewhat cagey when it comes to the so-called “Eichmann Controversy,” and she may have had personal as well as professional reasons for indirection. Her affair with her former professor, avowed and unrepentant Nazi Martin Heidegger, dogged her post-war career, and the aforementioned intellectual “civil war” probably increased her circumspection.
Arendt’s critics, then and now, often remark upon what the Jewish Philosophy Place writer succinctly calls her “disdain for others.” While the new biopic (trailer above) may obscure much of this critical controversy—unfilmable as such things are anyway—readers wishing to understand one of the Holocaust’s most famous interpreters should read, and hear, her in her own words before making any judgments.
On February 7th, 1910, Virginia Woolf (then Virginia Stephen) and five of her Bloomsbury companions—painter Duncan Grant, Woolf’s brother Adrian, Anthony Buxton, Guy Ridley, and Horace de Vere Cole—boarded the pride of the British Royal Navy, the HMS Dreadnought, dressed in blackface and outlandish stage costumes. (In the photo above, from left to right.) In what became known as “The Dreadnought Hoax,” the six convinced the Dreadnought’s officers that they were the “Emperor of Abyssinia” (now Ethiopia) and his entourage, and they were received with high honors.
The hoax, masterminded by Cole, began when he sent a telegram to the ship telling the crew to expect a visit from some North African dignitaries. Once on board, the group spoke in accented Latin (quoting the Aeneid) and gibberish. Woolf kept quiet so as to disguise her gender. One of the officers on the ship was a cousin of Virginia and Adrian, but he failed to recognize them. It wasn’t a flawless performance on either side: at one point, Buxton sneezed and almost lost his mustache, and the Navy, unable to find an Abyssinian flag, flew the flag of Zanzibar instead.
The “princes” asked for prayer mats, presented the officers with fake military honors, and exclaimed “bunga, bunga!” each time they were shown some marvel of the ship. The Dreadnought was then, in the words of Woolf’s nephew and biographer, Quentin Bell, “the flagship of the Home Fleet, the most formidable, the most modern, and the most secret man o’ war then afloat.” (This incident is said to be the origin of the ludicrous phrase “bunga, bunga,” most associated with the exploits of the recently convicted Silvio Berlusconi.) The next day, Cole anonymously sent the photograph at the top to The Daily Mirror, revealing the hoax. According to Woolf scholar Mairead Case—who sees the incident as a precursor to Woolf’s gender-bending novel Orlando—the Mirror described the “Abyssinians” thus:
All the princes wore vari-coloured silk sashes as turbans, set off with diamond aigrettes, white gibbah tunics, over which were cast rich flowing robes and round their necks were suspended gold chains and jeweled necklaces … They also all wore patent leather boots which, Oriental fashion, tapered to a point, the ends projecting fully six inches beyond the toes. White gloves covered the princes’ hands, and over the gloved fingers, they wore gold wedding rings – heavy, plain circlets, which looked very impressive.
In a recently discovered letter, Cole wrote to a friend that the hoax was “glorious” and “shriekingly funny.” The group intended to mock what they saw as an outmoded Victorian imperialism, and they succeeded, at least in the popular press. The Mirror published the cartoon above and the Royal Navy was a laughingstock for weeks afterward. None of this pseudo-racist pranksterism (which reflected just as badly on the officers) struck the actual Emperor of Ethiopia—Menelik II—as particularly funny. When he visited England later that year, he was taunted in the streets by children shouting “Bunga! Bunga!” and denied permission to inspect the navy’s fleet for fear that his visit might cause further embarrassment.
Last week, we revisited some Cold War propaganda that taught upstanding American citizens How to Spot a Communist Using Literary Criticism. It’s a gem, but it has nothing on the 1954 film, The House in the Middle. Selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by The Library of Congress, the short documentary makes the ultimate case for cleanliness. Bringing viewers to the Nevada Proving Grounds, the 12-minute film shows what happens when clean, white houses are subjected to heat waves from an atomic blast, versus what happens when a dingy, ill-kept house goes through the same drill. It turns out that neat people can not only claim moral victory (as they always do). They also get to live another day. Consider it proof of the survival of the tidiest.
The film was produced by the National Clean Up-Paint Up-Fix Up Bureau with support from the Federal Civil Defense Administration. The National Paint, Varnish and Lacquer Association also apparently played a role, suggesting that corporate interests were capitalizing on wartime fear. Not the first time that’s happened in America. Or that last…
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