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Susan M. Rigdon, "Oscar Lewis in Cuba: La Partida Final" (Berghahn Books, 2024)
01:07:48
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Susan Rigdon
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Prices and participation may vary.
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Susan Rigdon
Recently we asked some people about sharing their New York Times accounts. My name is Dana.
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Katie Coldiron
I am a subscriber to the New York Times, but my husband isn't and it would be really nice to be.
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Susan Rigdon
Able to share a recipe or an.
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Katie Coldiron
Article or compete with him in wordle or connection.
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Susan Rigdon
Thank you Dana. We heard you introducing the New York Times Family Subscription One subscription, up to four separate logins for anyone in your life.
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Susan Rigdon
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Katie Coldiron
Hello and welcome to the New Books Network. My name is Katie Coldiron and I am based at Florida International University in Miami, Florida. And today I have the great pleasure to be interviewing Dr. Susan M. Rigdon, who is the author of Oscar Lewis in Cuba, La Partida Final that came out in 2024 from Bergen Books. Welcome to the podcast Susan.
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Susan Rigdon
Happy to be here.
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Katie Coldiron
So I always like to start these interviews by asking our authors a little bit about the origin stories of their respective works. So if you don't mind, please tell us a little bit about how this work came to be.
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Susan Rigdon
Well, as you probably know, the Ruth and Oscar Lewis's Cuba project was quite controversial from beginning to end. And after it end a considerable amount was written about it which was say the least not factual. So that was one motivation. I wanted to write an account of the project from the inside. By the inside I mean the inside on the US side. I have no inside on the Cuban side. So that was one motivation. I wanted to put something out there that corrected all of the errors in print. And secondly, and maybe this was even greater motivation, I wanted the answer. This was a mystery to Ruth and to me. Why did it happen the way it Happened the charges about violating research permission just didn't really hold any water at all. So it was like a puzzle I wanted to solve a detective story. Why did they end the research permission after 18 months? And so that drove me. I just wanted to get it out there. I wish I could have published it while Ruth was still alive But I did find answers to a number of things before she died But I would have been much happier to let her see it. So those were the two motivations. One, to correct errors in print and two, to satisfy my own curiosity about why this happened.
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Katie Coldiron
Thank you so much for that and I'm just going to probe a little bit more because you obviously have a really unique relationship to the Lewis family and also this material. Could you tell us a little bit about that please?
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Susan Rigdon
Yes. As you know I'm on the same campus as the Lewis's were and every graduate student in the 1960s knew who Oscar Lewis was if they were in the social sciences or humanities. And he was an anthropologist just across the quad from where I was in political science. And I am a political scientist, not an anthropologist. I used to see him around, I heard him lecture but it turned out we had mutual friends. A friend of mine, my grad school cohort was married to a professor of economics here who was a friend of Oscar's. And these two couples became quite friends. Oscar and Fred Got Heil was a professor of economics. His wife Diane got Howell. I think Oscar and Fred were in a socialist studies group, scholarship group. Another member of that group was Carmilla Harris's father, Don Harris, who read some of the work and when I've been going through the papers I found letters to Oscar. Anyway, I digress. So that's how I met both Lewis's in person. I mean I was at a party at the Gothaus home. This was just maybe several months after Oscar got back from Cuba, after the project was closed down. I hadn't seen him in person for some time. He looked terrible, you could just tell his health had fallen apart and I didn't have any long conversation with him then he and Fred were talking about the Israel factor in the closure of the project. But sometime I didn't meet Ruth then she was out of town on that day. But later when Ruth was looking for. After Oscar died and Ruth was looking for someone to help her write up the data Diane sent me over to her office and said well hire Susan because I think she can do this. And Ruth read part of my dissertation which was on the Chinese military but basically was on the same topic, they were researching culture change in a revolutionized system. And so Ruth gave me some stuff to read. It was material from Neighbors, which is what she hired me eventually to write up. And she read some of my stuff, and I read some of the field data, and we got together and talked about it, and she hired me to write up Neighbors. And that was a specific thing. Oscar never worked on that project. That was. Ruth supervised it. And the fieldwork was all done by foreign staff, no Cubans involved in that. So Muta Munoz Lee translated it. She was in Spain by then. And I would just get the stuff in piles of stuff, you know, hundreds and hundreds of pages. And Ruth just said, find a way to organize it and write it up and write an introduction. So. And she thought it would take me six months, this joke, to the end of her life. I mean, I went from there to Social Security. It took a little longer than six months, but that's how I came to be working with her. And over the years, I got involved in the archiving of their papers. First of all, I knew all the Cuba stuff, and then that's just the tip of the iceberg. So we went through everything, inventoried when we're moving office, and I got to know all of that material. And I suppose I'm the only person left on Earth now who does. And that's how I became executor of the papers and at her death, owner of the unpublished papers. She would have loved for her children to have done it, but neither one was interested in that aspect of the work.
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Katie Coldiron
Well, it's a very fascinating story, and thank you for sharing. So I guess to start out the first, the obvious question is for those listeners that might not know who were Oscar and Ruth Lewis, and what did they do before going to Cuba?
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Susan Rigdon
Well, Oscar Lewis and Ruth Maslow met in New York in their teens. Ruth was still at Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, and Oscar was starting his undergraduate degree in history at CCNY. By the time they married in 1957, Ruth had graduated from Brooklyn College, where she studied psychology with Solomon Asch. And Oscar had finished undergrad and gone to Columbia and transferred out of history to anthropology, specifically to work with Ruth Benedict. They went on their first field trip to the Blackfeet Reservation in Alberta under Benedict's guidance. I mean, she was head of that field trip. And they split up over several reservations. They were studying the Ghost Dance, Sundance. But Oscar and Ruth were left on their reservation to just work out what they were going to do. And that became the first publication it was on Widow Grasse water. So from their first field trip they went to Mexico and that's the country the Lewis's are most closely associated with. They were hired as a team to go there in 1943. Ruth to do this was part of the Collier Thompson Cross National Study of Indian Personality. You can put quotes around personality if you want, but this is a very serious project in four countries. And Oscar was sent there by the Interior Department to be the representative to the interim American Indian Institute and to find a place, a research site. And Ruth would do the psychological research. And they decided on Tiposlan because Robert Redfield left them a kind of a base study of the community to begin with. And so then from there on, just to do this very quickly from Tapaslan. Of course, the war was on and Oscar was working for the government during most of these years. They went to Cuba in 1946 for the summer. He was teaching. I think he was the first, the first anthro course at University of Havana. And his field team went to Milena del Sur. And he also wanted to work in Lasaguas, which was one of Havana's. It's sort of like La Perla was in San Juan. La Chaguas had that reputation of being a fairly notorious place. So that's what when they came back in 1969 and 70, that's where they wanted to go. They already knew the places they wanted to begin the study. So then they went back to rural Mexico. They went to Estremundora, Spain, to follow up the ancestors of migrants to Teposlung. And he went to India, where Oscar was studying village life and doing program evaluation for Ford foundation. And then back to Mexico City for some of the work. The most famous for, well, both rural and urban Mexico. And then in the early 60s when Oscar was under heavy criticism for not studying poverty in his own country, they went to Puerto Rico. By this time Ruth was almost exclusively organizing and editing the material for publication. It was just too much stuff, just thousands of pages coming in from the field data he had on all his projects. He had a significant field team helping him. So she sort of reduced her time in the field and spent almost all her time writing up. And that work, most of it went uncredited. I mean, she's basically, in my view, in a lot of people's view, a co author and five families on children of Sanchez and Pedro Martinez and Larvida. So the university gave her an honorary doctorate in recognition of that work. And I think it was 1988. So that brought them back to Cuba then in 1969 where they both did fieldwork. And of course Ruth was left to edit all the material as she was on the previous projects.
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Katie Coldiron
Thanks so much for that. And I do like that your work really does bring back into focus the contributions of Ruth, because after reading the book, I can really tell it was a team effort. So you alluded to this in your previous answer, but could you tell us a little bit more? Obviously there was the connection there because Oscar had been there in the 40s. But how did Project Cuba come to be exactly?
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Susan Rigdon
Well, it was motivated mainly by his deep interest in revolutions. You know, how they got started, how they progressed, how they evolved after victory, or how they devolved. So that was a long time obsession. And in Mexico, of course, he was very interested in the Mexican Revolution and Pedro Martinez, the study of peasant life. He the main informant for that subject. Pedro Martinez had fought in the Mexican Revolution. So from the time the Cuban revolution got underway and the victory in 59, Oscar immediately wanted to go there to study. And of course his friend. Oh, help me, damn Yankees, you know, why is that name going out of my name?
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Katie Coldiron
Oh, C. Wright Mills.
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Susan Rigdon
Yeah, C. Wright Mills. When C. Wright Mills got permission to go and write, Oscar was intensely jealous. Why couldn't he go? Why couldn't he get permission? They had the same publisher in Mexico and he just exhausted every resource he had contacting people to try to get permission. So all during the 60s when he was working in Mexico, in Puerto Rico, he was trying to get permission to go. And again, the motivation was studying revolution. I mean, both Lewis's believed strongly in the need for the redistribution of wealth in the world. This was a deep commitment. So I mean, poverty was not a subject they just happened on. It was core to their belief in what needed to be done in the world. And they just thought, well, I won't say they in this case, I'll say Oscar really thought here was a real chance in Cuba to end a dictatorship, to adopt programs that really would help redistribute wealth, provide health care and so on. He want to see it done. So that was it. And he just kept at it until he got permission. And it was 1968 when he was finally. Well, he went there in 61 after the revolution on a reporter's visa. Bob Silvers from New York Reveal Books, it was at Harper's then got a reporter's visa for him to go in. And he was just there a short time. I think it was 10 days. Could have been two weeks, but I think it was 10 days. And he wouldn't write anything on the basis of that Oscar, thousands of pages of material. I believe he knew enough to write anything, so he didn't produce anything from that. And then it was 1968 when he got and Ade Santa Maria sent him an invitation to attend one of her cultural congresses and he couldn't get State Department permission in time to go. But that led to other things. And eventually he did get this invitation to come back and give a lecture. And that's led to the meeting with Castro. Castro's personal physician, Dr. Rene Vallejo, was the intermediary.
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Katie Coldiron
It's really fascinating. So once the project begins, how does it go for the first months or even year?
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Susan Rigdon
Well, it got off to a really rocky start. I mean, it had opponents from the absolute beginning. I mean, could I definitely say who was on which side? No, I couldn't. I mean, Castro gave his personal permission to Oscar for three years in their meeting in. In Cuba in February 19th or March 1968. But I never wrote down any of these terms. Vallejo was at that meeting in Rolando Rodriguez of the Book Institute, in Jose Yanuza of the Ministry of Education. So who was on the other side? I don't know. I think I said in the book, I just assumed that the Raul Castro forces at far at the Armed Services Ministry were not in favor. Was Pinero in favor or not? I mean, I don't know. He acted like he was and he. After the Lucis arrived in Cuba, Castro had said as soon as they arrived, he would come and see them, help them get started. Well, he didn't. He sent Pinero Incent, who called himself his personal emissary. But I think the fact that Castro didn't show up as promised showed that there was some significant opposition somewhere. And they tried all kinds of things to shut the project down. Being funded by Ford foundation was one of the main arguments. You know, it was a CIA agency and he was. If he was funded by them, then he must in some way be connected to the CIA. But Oscar had been funded by Ford foundation in Mexico, and Castro thought that work was great. So this is all just. They're just trying to throw barriers up to stop, you know, using whatever they can think of. And I won't go into all these different things they threw at him. But eventually someone decided it was going to go ahead. And was that Castro? I don't know. Was it Pinero? I don't know. So got off to a slow start then, because it took a month or two for this to all clear up and then to the government to release the stuff. I mean, they couldn't do anything without the government. They couldn't get supplies. They couldn't talk to. You know, they could. So it was slow. And in. In that time when they weren't really officially underway, they just walked around the neighborhood, they talked to people, they visited institutions. You know, they just. They started interviewing the Cuban field staff. The government had assigned 10 students. I think Oscar thought they were all volunteers, but it seems. And. But what's been written since, at least some of them were ordered to do this work. That was it. Once it got underway, it got going great guns. It took a while to train the Cuban students. Oscar had to throw out a lot of their first work. They didn't understand keeping distance or objectivity in the field. And that was. But in his progress report on the first year that he made to the university, Oscar described it in glowing terms. He said he had got enormous support from the government. And I think that's true. He did. He got supplies they needed in workspaces, and, of course, project was paying rent and all this stuff. It's like somebody was giving him these things. But it did take permission. It was very important that he got it. And so I think that first year, up until the end of the first year, it went really well. By the end of the first year, he had taken on some people he never should have taken on to the project. And they caused considerable friction among the field staff, and he let them go. And that created problems down the line. And that's all I said. I mean, he. He had to reorganize after the end of the first year. He had staff left, and new people, much more experienced people came in. He brought in Deb Budworth from the University of Illinois faculty, who had been his grad student. He brought in an Adele Linton from Mexico who had worked with him since the 50s. He had originally tried to get both his translators there, Munoz and Ezaz, but neither could come. He wanted to surround himself at that point with people he knew he could completely trust and who were very experienced. So that helped a great deal. So this. The first part of the second year went okay until it didn't.
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Katie Coldiron
So that actually leads me into my next question, which is about the surveillance and the control on the project and its participants, including Oscar and Ruth themselves, by Cuban authorities. Could you tell us a little bit about that, please?
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Susan Rigdon
Well, I can tell you what I know. I mean, it's sort of Vague. I mean I can't speak definitively. The Lewis's never knew that from the beginning the Cuban field team were spying on, were reporting on them daily to State Security. Oscar would never have believed that. I think it would have left him flabbergasted. Ruth didn't know it either. Maia Donate, who was a member of the field team and someone who said she was ordered to join the team, who wasn't a volunteer. She said that they reported daily on everything, you know, all of the informants. Now if Oscar and Ruth had known the reporting on informants, that would have been the end of the project right there. They would just pack their bags and go home. But they didn't know it. And Oscar is a person of, let's say by way of understatement, had a lot of self confidence and a sense of personal efficacy. I mean, and he got along with the students. I just don't think he ever would have thought this. I should add that to this field of Cuban students there was a foreign staff. There were five altogether from the United States and three from Mexico. Then there were these two he fired who I won't go into. They were not American or Mexican and they were just incompetent. So it was his all on him. This was just an extraordinary mistake he made. They were both related to friends of his and he took them on and he never should have done it. And as Ruth said, they really paid for it later. So all right, that's a form of surveillance. From the very beginning they didn't know. The fact that the chief of counterintelligence, Manuel Penheiro was sent as Castro's personal emissary is a little clue that somebody was going to be keeping tabs on him. How soon or what point the house was bugged, their phones were tapped, I don't know. And I don't think Ruth, Ruth gave a little different account of this. I mean she said going in they just assumed this would be true, that their phones would be bugged and they would be surveilled. But later on she said she thought the phone tapping and so on didn't occur till much later. But by her own account she used to was so exasperated, sometimes she talked to the chandelier in the dining room. Assuming, you know, there were taps in was just a very difficult situation. Then of course they had the surveillance everyone had the Committee for Defense of the Revolution and the chair of their block committee lived very close and in fact she, they interviewed her. She's part of the published informants, not that she ever discusses surveilling, reporting on the Lewis's. But of course she would have had to in her position. They got along with her very well. They were very neighborly and so on and she and her husband cooperated completely with the work. But of course that's another source of reporting for the government that she was in and out of their house a lot and so that's. Well, oh, I didn't mention the house staff. The Lewis had no choice where they lived. They were sent to a protocol house. And of course the government also picked their office space which is a couple miles away and the living quarters for the foreign staff. So all of these places could have been treated for the Lewis's or the staff ever moved into them. Do I know? I have no idea. I mean the way these things work, of course it's likely, I don't know. But they also appointed the house staff. So the Lewis's were surrounded all the time by. Ruth tried to get rid of staff and she couldn't. She just felt, you know, anthropologists doing fieldwork don't have house staff, you know, they don't have people making their meals and serving them. And it drove out of her mind to have formal meals all the time and guests and waiters hovering over their table and so on. This was just not for her. The only kind. And of course they were paying for all this stuff. The only kind thing Oscar had to say about it was that it freed Ruth up and him to just work all the time. And of course being who he was, he didn't worry about them. I mean they're people, you know, they're just. We get along with them. What's the, you know, why worry about that? It was I think made Ruth much more nervous than Oscar and that's just because they had different personalities and he was so confident and she was very cautious. And I've said someplace in the book it's what made them such a great field team. They had very different approaches to things.
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Katie Coldiron
Absolutely. So you've alluded to this a little bit and some of listeners might be familiar but others might not. When did things start to go south for the project?
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Susan Rigdon
Well from day one there were people trying to shut it down from the first week of the project. But I think one Oscar and Ruth really felt a change in atmosphere was in July of 1969 when the national head of the Communist youth committed suicide while he was on the phone talking to his wife at the Lewis's house. He had been interviewed by Oscar, but he wasn't and he socialized with the staff because he was married to a member of the Cuban team. But he was at the time an editor at the Book Institute and the head of the Book Institute. Rolando Rodriguez had been an enormous supporter of the project. And Oscar thought somehow he was getting blame for this suicide. And no reason to think that, I mean, I have no reason to think that Rolando Rodriguez believed that. I don't know anything about what his view was on this, but they just felt that the tenor change. The Cuban staff themselves, you know, really like this guy. And they were extremely upset. I mean, it just demoralized everybody. So even though he wasn't an active member of the team, so that was one sign. And then as things went on, I mean his contact with officials, let's say ayde. Santa Maria, who had asked him to come out to her home territory and interview people there and look at some of the state farms, those invitations just disappeared. Pinero stopped coming around. There are written accounts, especially by Alma Guillermo Prieto in Dancing with Cuba, who said Pinero led this confiscation of materials. He was nowhere present. I mean, was he running it? Very possibly he wasn't there. And Oscar hadn't seen him for months. She claims to have, that he had just been there or something. This is just. She just made this up for her memoirs, another one of those books that got lots of publicity. And the veracity of what she has to say about the project is nil. So there was just that steady decline of contact with people who had been his big supporters. And then of course there was the failure of the 10 million harvest goal, which created enormous controversy over Castro's economic strategy. And well known foreign intellectual supporters of the revolution began writing negative books. And that just increased the pressure on someone to close down the Lewis's project because they didn't want another well known foreign academic to write something critical of the revolution. And that's when, I mean, things. That was Oscar's last trip out in Cuba before the shutdown was about April. And it was right at that time there was an attack on foreign intellectuals in Cuba. And he was at the time trying to do a family study of someone who was really aggressively anti revolution. He had been arrested during the Bay of Pigs and so on. His family wasn't. He didn't come from a family that was active against that. He wasn't really active against the revolution, he just spoke against it. And he had friends or connections in places that mattered. I mean, there's a lot written about what the Revolution was worried about was criticism from poor Cubans who unhappy with. I don't think the government cared at all about them. Of course they'd like them all to be upbeat and say great things. But they worried about what influential people said. That whether criticism came from powerful sources. Or if anything was written that was negative about the leadership and the family that Oscar was working with. In the spring. They had these connections. And there's some supposition that that may have been what was a tipping point. You have someone very well educated, in a very solid position. Who's criticizing people who are seen to be heroes of the revolution, like the staff and at the Cuban Academy of Sciences. It was a kind of criticism, as has said in the book is like g book on the new class in communist countries in Eastern Europe. He was criticizing their work. Oscar didn't. Oscar never said anything negative about their work. I don't have any idea that he felt negatively. He never wrote anything or said anything. But if the government thought he would be publishing something which said this. Which accused their pride and joy of being not really all that great, that could have been enough. Do I know it was enough? I don't know. I know there's a review out there that said I say Castro shut it down. I don't know that. How could I know it? I have no insight into the thinking of the inner, inner circle. That's the thing about this stuff. You can believe anything. Do you have proof? And why say it if you don't have proof? It could have come from anywhere. It could have been Pinero alone. And as I think I've said to you in a conversation. I have no idea in the end who Pinero really was. I'm still not convinced whose side he was on. Oscar didn't like him because, as I say in the book, he was always coming by with bad news. There was always some restriction or other. Ruth liked him a lot. Ruth said he was very personable. She thought he treated them very leniently. He was known for ruthless behavior. And of course hated by a certain section of revolution supporters. As someone who betrayed Che Guevara, I don't know inside I have nothing on this. I'm just writing about what I know from the Lewis's side of it. So I can't answer who finally ended it, who made the final decision. But all those things I think contributed the economic situation, the criticism of foreign intellectuals. I thought that, and I say this in a book too, I thought it was the real slap at Ide Santa Maria and everyone who had ongoing conversations with foreign intellectuals inviting them into Cuba. And the kind of people who believed that art doesn't belong to the party. And that was certainly the Lewis's, they didn't believe art belonged to the party. You think you could separate these two things? You know, you can support the revolution, but you don't support the anti democratic part of it. Very, very, very hard line to walk when you're in Cuba and dependent on the government for pretty much everything you're doing. But that's what I think. I mean it's just that vague. And as Saul Landau said when I talked to him on the phone about this, he was told he crossed, Roscoe crossed a line that you couldn't cross, which of course totally refutes this idea, which some Cuban studies keep saying is because poor people criticize the government. He crossed a line. And I suppose the line he crossed is he talked to people in influential places who could say bad things about other people in influential places and that's what really mattered. So take it all with a grain of salt.
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Katie Coldiron
Well, it's definitely, I think you got it, a lot of the frustration of doing research not just on Cuba, but anywhere where you don't have access, complete or even like even just the slightest access to government documents. I mean some, it's increased obviously in Cuba, especially over the last 10, 15 years, but still there is a lot of mystery that of things that we don't know yet and we'll just have to see how things develop there. And if folks like myself and others that want to do archival research do get even more access. So how does this project end exactly? And what was the aftermath of it?
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Susan Rigdon
Well, the official end was in July 1970. The Lewis's were packed and ready to leave for their summer break. They had all their new material packed up, they had plane tickets, they were ready to leave the next day. And Raoul Rowe, the foreign minister, called Oscar to his office and Oscar was glad of it. He thought he'd been trying to arrange some meetings. He couldn't and he thought Rowe would help him. They'd had a cordial relationship, they had friends in common. So when he got into the office, Rowe didn't even really greet him. He just said, I'm reading a statement to you from the government. And it was a list of ways in which they said he violated his research permission. These were absolutely facetious things like, for example, he was funded by Ford Foundation. What was this, a surprise? I mean, they'd always known he was funded by Ford Foundation. So the Other things were pretty much on a similar level. There were a few charges that the intelligence community could have taken seriously, and that is that the. Louis used the pouch, the diplomatic pouch of the Israeli government to get things in and out of Cuba. Well, mostly to get things in. They almost never sent anything out that way. But mail was very difficult. Then they had tried to use the Cuban pouch and they didn't get things. They were trying to use the one in Mexico. Oscar's secretary would send things there. So the Israeli envoy. There aren't diplomatic relations. So there was no ambassador. But the envoy was a friend of the Lewis's and he volunteered to let them take things out and send things out or get things in. It was mainly, again, I think that Lewis has only sent galleys for a book out. I don't think they ever used it for anything else. But they got their mail from Urbana and from the publisher in the Israeli pouch. And Roa said this was just an incredible violation of international law. It was absolutely a mistake. I mean, there's just no doubt that they shouldn't have done it. They just never thought about it. I mean, the only thing going out from them were stuff from the publisher. They couldn't. They had books and press. They couldn't get the galleys. And Israeli diplomats brought them in. Well, a diplomat, they were sent from the Cuban Embassy in New York. Oscar's secretary would send things to him and we have a list of. I know everything when and out. She kept a list of everything. There's just nothing there but just normal mail or galleys, proof, stuff like that. But that could be certainly taken seriously by the government. I think he's sending special reports out or something ridiculous. He didn't. But it was very, very unwise to have used it. They also said they were getting. They were interviewing members of the Young Communists. Well, of course they were. All the members of the Cuban field team were members of the Young Communist Youth and they were told to give their stories. It was part of their assignment. So that was just ridiculous. They were trying to get stories from members of the military and the party. Well, if you were working in Cuba and you were looking at a broad section of the population, how would you not come across members of the party or the army? Of course they did, but they weren't interviewing them for that reason. It was just, you know, it's a cross section of Cubans. And the fact is that among the confiscated material, they didn't. They weren't interested in that material, that is interview transcriptions with there were a couple men in particular I remember who had served in Africa. They weren't interested in that. So these are just. Almost all of them just totally made up charges to give a reason to end the research permission. But then instead of letting the Lewis's leave as they were scheduled to leave, they told them they had to stay over and they went out after this meeting with Roa, Oscar was followed home and they took all of the material there and then they went to the offices and they took all the material there and he had to wait and they said they couldn't leave. They had to go through that material and decide whether he was a spy or not. So they were held up. They were not depicted reported. They were actually held up. They had appointments in the state. Oscar had doctor's appointments. He was quite unwell. And I think now I'm trying to should have looked this up. It was about three days. I think they held him up while they looked at this material. And Pinero came and talked to Oscar at night about Oscar and Ruth about this and told him, well, we're sure you aren't a spy, but you know, you just did some things. You don't really understand what it's like working in a socialist country and clearly you didn't. But. And he did return of the stuff he took. I'm trying to remember because I should remember because I used it all when I wrote up Neighbors. I think they returned about a thousand pages or so of material. And then Doug Butterworth. Even though it has been written that the foreign field team was deported, they absolutely were not reported, never charged with anything. They stayed on and according to Annadel Litton, they were sent out on a beach party together. The foreign staff and the Cuban staff.
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Susan Rigdon
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Susan Rigdon
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Susan Rigdon
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Katie Coldiron
See mintmobile.com well, that leads me really into my next question, which is about the material, both what was confiscated as well as what made it back to Illinois that you have been, you know, stewarding for, for so many years. So if you could please tell me about the efforts of yourself, the Lewis's over the years to recover the material that was taken in Cuba as well as the process of publishing with the materials that did make it back to Illinois.
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Susan Rigdon
Well, Oscar started immediately trying to get the material back. When he left Cuba, Pinero promised that he was going to save all this material and that Oscar could get it back. He was going to arrange a meeting with him with Castro and he'd come back to Cuba. In fact, Ruth and Oscar were given return tickets to Cuba, which was obviously, I mean really window dressing, but they do, I have the tickets. I mean they exist. So that was the first attempt that Oscar was, took this seriously, that he would be able to return and he'd get at least part of his material back. And he wrote when they immediately on leaving Cuba, they were still in Mexico. He wrote to aid Santa Maria. And this is a handwritten letter. He didn't, in that letter, which I have, he didn't explicitly ask her to intervene, but he told her the situation and he wanted to meet with her. Nothing came of that. And then he wrote Castro too, but nothing came of these efforts. So when he got back to the States, he asked Lee Lockwood to go into Cuba and use his contacts to hasten some kind of return, Oscar's return to Cuba or to hasten the return of the material itself. And Lockwood, he paid his expenses to go in and do this. And of course Lockwood had all kinds of contacts in the inner circle, but he never got any further, he told Oscar, than Rolando Rodriguez at the Book Institute. So nothing came of that. And when he came back, Oscar wrote Now I'm trying to remember. It's a 1214 page letter to Castro about all of this. And he asked Castro for three things. One, he had one of his informants was imprisoned. He said Castro needed to take personal responsibility to get him out of prison. Two, he had to return all his material and he should let him come back to Cuba to finish three unfinished life histories which were close to being finished. He doesn't say them. One of them would clearly have been Pilar, which was published in Four Women. All her related family material was confiscated for reasons. It's totally inexplicable because she's the kind of person they actually wanted him to interview. She was out of the so called rehabilitation program, you know, for sex workers. And I'm not sure who the other two were, but possibly, well, I won't even speculate. So he gave that letter to Lockwood and Lockwood was going to take it to the UN delegation and have them send it in to Castro. And when Lockwood was walking this to the un, he had the New York Times in his hand and he read Oscar's obituary. So he wanted to send it on to Castro with a note. And Ruth said, no, send it all back. I'm not sure she ever got it all back. Lots of inserts and there were lots of real names and so on, but I think he did, I'm not sure. So after that failed, then what? Ruth and I tried to approach it through the Cuban Academy of Sciences. At the time, our library had contacts there, had some good relationships. We wrote this letter and of course we never got a reply. This was written about the time we had finished the write up and I think we were getting ready to deposit all the materials in the University of Illinois library archives. And we wanted, we were hoping to get everything else back. The books were already published, but we got, of course we got no reply. And it seems to me we made one other effort, but I personally, after his death, I tried several things. I mean, I tried writing Ford foundation. Not even an acknowledgement of the letter. I wrote to our Illinois senators Duckworth and Durbin. Not even an acknowledgement of the, the letter. I had thought about trying some other senators who were involved in the negotiations under Obama's term to reopen diplomatic relations, but I gave that up. I thought my own senators aren't going to lift a finger. Needless to say, they have a few other important things on their plate. But it would have been okay if they just acknowledged receipt of the letter. So that's about it. The only person who ever answered me. And this was the last attempt I made. I wrote to Fernandez Restobar at the CASA and asked him if he knew where these papers were and he forwarded it on. But I guess he thought the foreign. Foreign affairs at Minrex, I think that's where he thought in their archives it would be. But I never got any response there. But Rethenbar himself at least replied and he's the only person who ever replied to this. And of course he knew Oscar and Ruth quite well. Everybody at La Casa then knew them. They were all friendly. La Casa was a great supporter of the project.
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Katie Coldiron
So I think just. I'd love to hear your point of view on this because this is an interest of mine. What does this case of the Lewis's and how everything went and ended up in Cuba tell us about doing research in authoritarian context more generally?
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Susan Rigdon
Well, I think that's very hard for me to say as a kind of inside outsider, if you know what I mean, because I wasn't there doing the fieldwork myself. But Ruth said in her draft proposal for the forward to the series and she never, I was just checking this morning, she never put this in the final version. She said she thought in cases like this that it would probably be smart for the researcher to put the whole plan before a university, university or some other professional ethics, some professional ethics committee or organization and discuss it all with them and get advice on what the smartest thing to do. Let me just say as an aside, you can imagine Oscar doing this. He ran his own show, so I don't think he ever would have done this. But she thinks that that is one way forward and to take advice from this group about how to tread in this area. And she just thinks, you know, to give some serious attention to whatever their advice is. Let me say, as someone who's lived and worked in China, which is my basic area of interest, when I was there teaching political science in the late 80s and early 90s, I met various graduate students who were doing their field work. And I remember them saying to me that people assigned to accompanying them, the kind of equivalent of a responsible, they would just volunteer to fill in. You don't want to go out and do this survey, I'll just fill in this data for you and that'll be done with. I never knew anybody who accepted that offer, but that was the kind of a problem they faced, the kind of attempt to intervene in data collection all the time. And of course the Cubans tried to do this with the Cuban field team. You know, encouraging them to give their life histories and so on. I don't know about the future. I was told when I was writing the book that the situation was far better in Cuba now. And I can't say now because we're talking 10 years ago and I'm writing this up than it was when Oscar and Ruth were there. But I don't see any sign of that. It seems to be maybe even worse. So I want to put in a little plug for the American Philosophical Society, which is having a conference on the future of fieldwork in October, October 24th and 25th. I'm not planning to go myself, but I'm on their mailing list and so always keep track of what they're doing. But again, I didn't want to give a paper because I was not collecting the data myself. And I just feel a little, you know, I like to stick to what I. My own lane. And my own lane in this case is writing up what I know about Lewis's experience. How far you can generalize from this is. It is very hard for me to tell. And of course, the situation would change so much if you took someone like myself back in when I was writing a dissertation in 1970, 71, on the Chinese military and the use of the military as a model for civilian life. You know, their version of the New man, you know, the. Yeah. So I could never. Even if I'd gone into the country, I couldn't done any research, and this is just hopeless. Of course, I couldn't travel there because you couldn't go on an American passport. But I couldn't have got close. If I'd gone to Taiwan, I couldn't have gotten close. I'd be grateful. Language. But you're learning, you know. But it would be hopeless. So I'm not very sanguine about this. But every situation is so different. Every country is different in the level of control it has. And the researchers are so different. As I said in the book, I think a lot of Cubans regarded Oscar as like a bull in a china shop. He got permission and he was going to do his project. That was it. He isn't a guy you could order around, isn't a guy who's going to. I mean, of course, when it came to the end and he was faced with someone going to prison, he talked about all kinds of compromises to get the guy out of prison. Would he ever have done them? I don't know. I can't imagine him. And Ruth certainly would not have offered to change anything. So you just, you have to know the personnel involved. You have to know the specific country in the state it's in at the time, who's running the country. I think if field work is in the biological or physical sciences, I think people probably do research most places. I think it's when you get into the social sciences and the humanities where the real problem comes in, collecting data and you have to carefully consider the informants. I mean, if the Lewis's had known someone was going to be arrested, you know, they just couldn't have gone. They just wouldn't have done it. Maida Donate, who wrote a two part account of her participation in the project and Kubo in Quentro. But do you know that? Have you ever seen it? You know, she talks about after Oscar and Ruth left security police going into the place we call Buenaventura and arresting people. She never answered my questions about who or how long they were held or whatever. But you just can't go into a research situation if you think that's going to be the consequence, no matter how valuable you think the data might be. So, I mean, and Ruth said she would do it all over again if she had to do it over, but she just changed the way they behaved. And she wouldn't have gone to Seder at the Israeli, what do you call it, a consulate? It isn't an embassy, of course, but I don't know, I mean, how you make those judgments before or after, maybe Ruthroy, there should be some outside consultation on it by people whose specialty is ethics, research ethics. I'm just not sanguine about any of this.
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Katie Coldiron
Yeah, well, I think it's the. I mean, you know, there is the irb, but you know, should IRB be, you know, should, should some sort of, depending on the context you're working in, like should IRB take that more into account or, you know, maybe in some places it does. It's a difficult question, so I want to. I always like to end these interviews by asking authors about some current projects. So if you have anything that you're working on currently that you'd like to share, we'd love to hear about it.
- [60:50]
Susan Rigdon
Well, I won't bore you with my little political science things. I've left Nang for years and need to finish up as the clock is ticking, lots of essays. And the main thing on my mind now as something I have to do is to finish the Puerto Rican manuscript Ruth Lewis and I were working on when she died. And she was working right up to the last few months of her Life we had a difference on this. Ruth was totally committed to oral history and first person testimony. And as a political scientist, I'm always committed to the analysis, you know. Yes, but what does it all mean? And I don't think we had reached complete agreement about that, but we were working on it according to her plan. And this is the largest family study they ever did. And it was in press at Random House when Oscar died. And after he died, Ruth became director of the Cuba Project and had more than she could handle. We had a lot of stuff to write up and all new things to think about. So she let it be withdrawn and she never resubmitted it. And part of that is because I don't think she like Oscar. I don't think she ever really knew what to say in an introduction. OSCAR TRITUS I've written an introduction to it, but even I'm not sure I believe in my introduction. But Oscar, it's about so many things. It's about that community, which of course has been decimated. San Juan Roost, that community, by about, I think, 2/3. I think only as maybe a third as many people as when they were working there. When it was a really dangerous, dangerous place. Field workers used to be asked, would somebody show them away to a shooting gallery, you know, and it was just that kind of a place. And so, you know, the thing is, when you're studying families in that situation, can you ever publish one family and have it mean anything about the community? And that's my problem with they studied intensively. Six different Bibles started off. There was a survey of the entire community and three others. But then they decided to work in La Perla and focus on these families. But they're all different, so you don't want to get into the trouble that they got into with Lalida, where, oh, everybody in Puerto Rico is a prostitute. Oh, come on. I mean, that's just stupid stuff. I mean, who would ever say that about one family anywhere? You know, if you had sex workers in it, oh, that must mean the whole country's full of sex workers. But even though it's stupid, you have to take great pains to show the limited nature of what you can show with one family. And on that, Ruth and I were somewhat disagree, in disagreement because she thought if you studied an extended family and there were many households in these families, I've plotted them all out on genograms. She thought you just got a tremendous cross section of the culture and society and you could draw conclusions from that. I'm just not so certain. And so what I want to do is I'm working on the rewrite of this. What I'd like to do is include all of the families in a single book in a more general way. You know, you present the circumstances of all of them and you wouldn't have all this detail of personal history as just writing up oral history as was done in La Vida. But can I do it? I don't know. It's just an enormous amount of work. And of course I'm a political scientist, I'm not an oral historian and I'm certainly not a specialist in Puerto Rico. I did work for a while with one of the Oscar's principal field assistant and she would always say, don't worry about knowing anything about Puerto Rico. It's a small country and you can fill yourself in very quickly on this. I'm not so confident about that. And then you run into the same problem Oscar ran into writing about poverty in Mexico or Puerto Rico. Mexico or India or wherever people say, study in your own country. You know, you don't really know this. Well, there's some truth in that. I mean, if I thought you have to be one to no one, I'd give up. What's the point of research if you can't write about people who aren't you? You know, the whole world would just be memoirs and autobiography and I think we got plenty of that. So can I do it? I don't know, but that's what I'd like to get done along with my political sciencey things.
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Katie Coldiron
Well, thank you so much. This has been an interview with Susan Rigdon who's the author of Oscar Lewis in Cuba, La Partida Final. The book is available for purchase via Bergen Books. And I just want to thank you again, Susan for being here today.
- [66:30]
Susan Rigdon
Thanks for inviting me.
- [66:43]
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