the poor would have food and books. Castro also promised to
stop prostitution, which had destroyed the lives of thousands
of poor women and children; prostitution was considered
one of the perks of capitalism, and Havana in particular was
known for prostitution writ large. Where there was hunger,
there would be women and children selling sex. Now we would
know to look for other phenomena as well: incest or child
sexual abuse, homelessness, predatory traffickers. It would
have been hard to think of Castro as worse than Batista
outside the context of the cold war. When the tiny band of
guerrilla fighters conquered Havana and extirpated the Batista
regime, it was hard to mourn unless the prospect of equality,
which was the promise, inevitably meant tyranny (which I
think is the right-wing argument). Virtual y forced by the
United States into an alliance with the Soviets, Castro’s
system of oppression slowly supplanted Batista’s. Watching
the United States now cuddle with the Chinese because
Chinese despotism is rhetorical y commit ed to capitalism,
one can only mourn the chance lost to the Cuban people
thirty-some years ago when the United States might have
been a strategic al y or neighbor. I’m saying that the United
States pushed Cuba into the Soviet camp and that Castro
became what he became because of it.
The Grand Jury
I was eighteen; it was 1965; a grand jury had been impaneled
to investigate the charges I had made against New York City’s
Women’s House of Detention, the local Bastil e that sat in the
heart of Greenwich Village, in the heart of Bohemia itself. I
had been sexually brutalized and had turned the internal
examinations of women in that place into a political issue
that would eventually topple the ancien regime, the callous,
encrustated Democrats.
I had been subpoenaed to testify on a certain day at a certain
time. My French class at Bennington was also on that day, at
that time, and I was hopeless in the language. My French professor took my haplessness in French rather personally and refused to give me permission to miss the class. I explained
that I had to be absent anyway, and I was. She backed off of her
threat to give me a failing mark and gave me a near-failing
mark instead.
I stayed at a friend’s apartment in New York the night
before my testifying, and Frank Hogan, New York City’s
much-admired district attorney, came with another man that
night to see
