Where the Boys Are

The ignominious failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 marked the culmination of a curious episode at the height of the Cold War. At the end of the fifties, restless and rebellious youth, avant-garde North American intellectuals, old leftists, and even older liberals found inspiration in the images and achievements of Fidel Castro’s revolutionary guerrillas. Fidelismo swept across the US, as young North Americans sought to join the 26th of July Movement in the Sierra Maestra.

Drawing equally on cultural and political materials, from James Dean and Desi Arnaz to C. Wright Mills and Studies on the Left, Gosse explains how the peculiar conjuncture of 1950s America produced the first great Third World solidarity movement, the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which became a locus for the New Left emerging from the ashes of Kennedy’s New Frontier.

Where the Boys Are captures the strange essence of that much-abused decade, the 1950s, at once demonstrating the perfidy of Cold War American liberal opinion towards Cuba and its revolution while explaining why Fidel and his companeros made such appealing idols for the young, the restless, and the politically adventurous.

Van Gosse teaches modern US, African American, and Cold War history at Franklin & Marshall College and is a longtime member of the Radical History Review Editorial Collective. He is the author of Where the Boys Are: Cuba, Cold War America and the Making of a New Left; Rethinking the New Left: An Interpretative History; The Movements of the New Left, 1950–1975: A Brief History with Documents; and editor, with Richard Moser, of The World the Sixties Made: Politics and Culture in Recent America.?He has served as director of the Center for Democracy in the Americas and as organizing director of Peace Action, and has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.