Cuban revolution collection

Born in Hungary in 1923, Andrew St. George was a highly educated man who spoke eight languages. Although he attended Columbia University in the 1950s, he never graduated, preferring to find work as a writer and photojournalist in order to support his young wife and frequent collaborator, Jean, and their growing family. A staunch anti-Communist who disdained affiliations with political organizations of any kind, St. George worked for United States military intelligence in Vienna after World War II. According to his wife, he also collaborated with Raoul Gustav Wallenberg, the Swedish businessman who used his diplomatic post as head of the Swedish Legation in Hungary to save tens of thousands of Jews targeted for extermination by the Nazis in the final years of the World War II.

St. George was inspired by Herbert Matthew's historicNew York Times report in February 1957 on Fidel Castro's guerrillas that contradicted official reports of their deaths at the hands of Cuban government forces. He immediately set about looking for a way to get to the Sierra Maestra and render a more thorough view of happenings there. Armed with an advance of only a few hundred dollars, as well as photographic and recording equipment, St. George quickly fulfilled his hopes and became the author of one of the first full-length interviews conducted with Fidel Castro and his guerrillas in the Sierra Maestra during the fall of 1957. Published in the February 1958 edition ofLook magazine, the article featured never-before-seen images that documented guerrilla life and provided evidence for the kind of authority that the 26th of July Movement commanded among peasants in Cuba's far-eastern region. Among admirers of the piece was Fidel Castro himself. He personally contacted St. George through the Civic Resistance Movement's New York City-based headquarters, directed by Mario Llerena, and invited him to make subsequent trips to the Sierra Maestra. In all, St. George made six trips to the Sierra Maestra, staying and living with the rebels for close to seven months. Additionally, St. George was one of only two journalists to accompany Fidel Castro as he and his forces descended from the mountains of Oriente to declare victory in Santiago de Cuba and proceeded by caravan on a long, seven-day victory march to Havana. For his work on behalf of the Revolution, Fidel Castro awarded St. George the same gold medal he presented to Herbert Matthews during his first trip to the United States in April 1959 as Prime Minister of Cuba. In addition to the article inLook magazine, St. George also published firsthand accounts of his time with the guerrillas before and after the fall of Fulgencio Batista in such magazines asCoronet,Cavalier, andLife. During 1959 and most of 1960, St. George lived in Cuba, eventually bringing his wife and small child to Havana. By the summer of 1960 when the Cuban government began the first nationalizations of foreign property, St. George had become increasingly disillusioned with the Revolution's authoritarianism. He was also wary of Fidel Castro's apparent disposition to forsake the many promises he had made to combat Communism in Cuba that St. George had dutifully reported from the time of the guerrillas' war in the Sierra through the first year of the Revolution in 1959. When Fidel eventually announced that the Revolution was socialist and would align itself with the Soviet Union, St. George felt personally betrayed and morally outraged, as did many of the revolutionaries with whom Fidel had fought and whom St. George had known. When some of these men began to organize armed expeditions to Cuba from bases in Florida to carry out acts of counterrevolutionary economic sabotage and terror (such as the burning of cane fields), St. George reported on their actions, especially forLife magazine. However, after nearly losing his own life during one such mission to Cuba as a journalist in the company of exiles, St. George eventually stopped reporting on Cuba. He parted company with the legacy of what his wife, Jean St. George, has described as his "passionate love affair" with the Cuban Revolution.

Although a number of writers have alleged that St. George worked for United States intelligence agencies such as the CIA, it is unlikely that he did so. Indeed, in the 1960s and 1970s, both the CIA and Fidel Castro's government used the charge of an affiliation with the United States intelligence agencies to discredit journalists whose reports on the Revolution ran counter to their respective political ends. Additionally, in the late 1950s, most journalists who interviewed Fidel Castro and other opponents of the United States-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista were routinely interviewed by United States officials with dual roles in both consular and intelligence affairs. While it is likely that St. George submitted to such interviews, both he and his family consistently pointed out that this did not make him "an agent" of any United States intelligence organization. St. George's only known contact with the CIA came when he made his first trip to the Sierra Maestra in 1957 and was subsequently arrested by Fulgencio Batista's own security agents. The CIA, which maintained close contacts with Batista's security forces and sometimes doubled as agents for them, was responsible for freeing him. At the time, Batista and the United States government were under increasing fire from the press and public for the atrocities against civilians (including the death of at least one Cuban journalist) that the Cuban government was committing. Thus, the CIA's intervention on behalf of St. George was part of a wider effort to prevent further negative publicity. There is little doubt that St. George and his family were themselves the subject of constant surveillance from United States intelligence agencies throughout the 1960s and 1970s, an experience that St. George documented in an article forEsquire magazine in June 1975.

Andrew St. George died in May of 2001.

Little is known about David C. Stone (December 30, 1932 - April 30, 2011). Characterized by Anthony Maingot as a "self-styled New York Marxist" and "a radical" with a vast network of contacts that included the Black Panthers, urban guerrillas and other antiestablishment groups, Stone's body of cinematographic works includes many independent films produced between 1963 and 1975. Almost all of the films produced before his project in Cuba received glowing reviews in theNew York Times. Largely focused on such counter-cultural themes as the day-to-day lives of a group of urban guerrillas living in New York ("Ice" 1971) or a seven-year love triangle among beatniks in Vermont ("Hallelujah the Hills" 1963), Stone's films combined political parody and cynicism with a dark wit and doomsday social analysis. For Stone, filming in Cuba over the course of an eight-month stay during the late 1960s provided the chance to record a living social experiment in political justice that he and other leftists believed had worked. The footage he created formed the raw material for a 1970 documentary on Cuban youth titled "Compañeras y Compañeros." Given Stone's ideological orientation and commitment to supporting Cuba's struggle to defend its national sovereignty against the United States, the film depicts the Cuban Revolution as socially and politically justifiable.

Made with the authorization of the Cuban government, the film stands out for being what all the rest of Stone's previous and subsequent films were not: upbeat, celebratory and positive. In this respect, the silences in "Compañeras y Compañeros" may speak more loudly and clearly than its messages. As a critic for theNew York Times noted at the time of the film's release in October 1970, "[Stone's real-life protagonists] believe so completely in the accomplishments of the revolution to date, and in its goals, that they waste no time trying to balance all the pros with even a few cons…. In fact, in addition to ideals, they seem to share a collective vocabulary that is so small and austere that it would seem to do a disservice to the grandeur of the revolutionary dream, the goal of which must be humanism." The Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industria Cinematográfica (ICAIC) sponsored Stone's trip in 1969, and Stone, his wife Barbara, and Ukranian co-producer Adolfas Mekas were accompanied by two state intelligence agents acting in the guise of chauffeurs. This does not, in itself, explain the glossy, triumphant tone of the finished film that was the fruit of their endeavors in Cuba. It is unlikely that the Stones ever knew of their chauffeurs' hidden agendas; given the filmmakers' trust in the Cuban revolutionary state, it is even more unlikely that they would have ever ventured a guess. Like many opponents of United States cold war policy who supported the Cuban Revolution unconditionally because of its defiance of United States power and championing of socialism, the Stones may have believed that the Cuban state did not rely on such methods for policing the movements of visitors and controlling the views that foreigners had of Cuba and Cubans. Ironically, it may have been precisely the Stones' own blindness to the Revolution's flaws and contradictions that enabled them to film so many scenes rich in the evidence of those flaws and contradictions. In their unedited form, these films do not depict Stone's edited version of a society unanimously echoing the official definition of revolution, nor do they mirror the Cuban state's contemporary media portrayals of a society free of indoctrination, militarism and authoritarian methods. Rather, the films speak in unexpected and complex ways that invite multiple interpretations of the revolutionary process