ABSTRACT
The effective founder of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) is a newsman working for CBS called Robert Taber. Taber compares Turquino with Pike's Peak in Colorado, just as he compares Castro's hero, Jose Marti, with George Washington as he strives to give his US viewers some cultural comparisons. Another prominent member of the FPCC is the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whose trajectory has obviously been very different. Ferlinghetti is particularly interested in the cultural milieu of the Revolution, meeting figures like Pablo Armando Fernandez and Guillermo Cabrera Infante, as well as Pablo Neruda, and then visiting Havana. Jones has gone to Cuba in 1960 as part of an all African American visit which featured several other writers such as Julian Mayfield and Harold Cruse. Jones's "Cuba Libre" is a seminal essay in that important writer's development and one of the best examples of African American modernist writing: it easily outlives its journalistic moment.
