But that is the great romantic tradition of the 19th century—that of the dungeon, the absence, the image, and death—, it manages to create the American fact, whose destiny is more made of possible absences than of impossible presences.
José Lezama Lima
A few months ago, Agustín Serrano de Haro’s book Arendt y España (Trotta, 2023) was published. It reconstructs the passage of the philosopher and her second husband, Heinrich Blücher, through the Iberian Peninsula in the winter of 1941, on their way to Lisbon to embark on their way to New York. There is not much news of this trip in Arendt’s copious correspondence. This passage hints at a potential reason for the brevity with which biographies, including the comprehensive work of her disciple Elizabeth Young-Bruehl in “Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World,” address Arendt’s journey through post-Civil War Spain. Despite the profound impact of Spain’s enduring strife, these narratives merely mention Arendt and her husband’s brief stopover in Portbou, the Spanish border, in January 1941, before continuing their travels to Lisbon. Ironically, such a train never existed, and even less so in a country whose railway system had just been damaged by a war.
This is the starting point of this mysterious journey, which has become less so since Serrano decided to investigate and organize the little data that is known not only about Arendt’s journey but also about other similar journeys of stateless people of Jewish origin who crossed the peninsula fleeing certain death in the then still ignored extermination camps that the Nazis were beginning to set up in Eastern Europe at that time.
After a hypothetical reconstruction of the journey through ruined stations and battered trains, Serrano devotes chapters 3 and 4 to analyzing the allusions to the Spanish Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship in the work of the German thinker. He thus recovers other links that can be found in Arendt’s work with “the Spanish,” such as Hannah’s reading of The Revolt of the Masses in the English edition of 1932, the executive direction of the Spanish Refugee Aid, the relief organization for exiled Spanish Republicans, which she exercised in the sixties (chapter 8), or the critical comments she devotes to the translations that Spanish publishers were making of Arendt’s work, many of them during Franco’s regime, which caused censorship to affect, although not seriously, the integrity of her texts. Serrano’s criticism is directed at the fact that, several decades later, publishers have not revised the translations, despite the remarkable success of the author in our publishing markets. It is worthwhile to go into details by reading “Un dislate editorial” (chap. 9).
There remains yet another topic to which Serrano devotes two chapters, which are precisely those I intend to comment on in a little more detail and which justify, I believe, the chosen title: Arendt and the “other America.” The author uses this expression to underline a well-known fact: the appropriation of the term “America” to connote the United States of America, which Arendt adopted. Thus, two Americas of very different cultural and political traditions: “The ambiguity of the proper name gives reason for our gaze to take into consideration also the few, neglected, and interesting observations that Arendt left about Latin America. They are comments on the political relations between one America, the powerful Republic of the North, towards which she always felt gratitude, and the other America, that of multiple nations, mostly Spanish-speaking and with sadder political destinies.” Thus, chapters 6 and 7, entitled respectively “About the Two Americas” and “The Night Arendt Listened to Fidel Castro” are dedicated first to tracing and then analyzing the reflections left in her work on the relationship between the United States, her adopted homeland since she disembarked in New York, and the Hispanic republics.
After finishing her great books, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and The Human Condition (1958), Arendt began to pay more and more attention to the political current affairs of her adopted country. The global climate of the Cold War seemed to increase the ever-present temptation for the executive branch to engage in imperialist policies. It was one thing for Arendt to consider U.S. resistance to Soviet expansionism legitimate, but another to ignore in its foreign policy the principles of its republican constitution and its universal enlightened ideals of equality before the law and civil liberties.
In the early 1960s, with her fundamental thesis fixed—human action, understood as freedom that acts in the public space is the only legitimate way of understanding and practicing politics—her attention turned to less speculative, more concrete spaces of the history of political ideas concerning the events that provoked them. Arendt saw in revolutions the specifically modern form of political “founding,” destined to change the course of history. In 1960 she published her first exercise in political reflection entitled “Freedom and Politics” and shortly afterward began her research on the two revolutions that triumphed in Modernity, the American and the French. It is not surprising, then, that it is the Cuban Revolution that interested her the most when observing the “other America.”
The first of the above-mentioned chapters brings together notes on the relationship between the U.S. and its southern neighbors in her essays and correspondence. The topical background against which she interpreted this relationship was the article published in Partisan Review in 1962, “The Cold War and the West.” The most frequent allusions are around Kennedy’s mandate between 1961 and 1963, towards whom Arendt felt considerable admiration. Serrano recognizes that there are “few” references to the policy that the northern Republic practiced with its southern sisters, but they are not without interest; they connect with central motifs of Arendt’s reflections on politics. In an unpublished text from 1960, Arendt echoes the platform of presidential candidate Nelson Rockefeller, who, unlike the other candidates, Kennedy and Nixon, did contain concrete proposals on foreign policy in a direction that Arendt found valuable. The first point of this platform, according to Serrano, mentioned the “formation of a confederation of free nations” throughout the Western Hemisphere, therefore, not only with Europe but also with America. The relevance Arendt gave to this proposal is based on the fact that Rockefeller’s platform included as its second point the creation of a Marshall Plan for Latin America, an idea that was “celebrated by Arendt without the slightest reservation.” The answer to the question “what is politics?,” which Arendt elaborates from the analysis of action in The Human Condition, demands keeping separate the sphere of necessity, therefore of the economy, and that of freedom in the sense of “freedom to act together with other men.” It is therefore noteworthy that Arendt was sensitive to the economic inequalities between the American neighbors to the north and south and approved Rockefeller’s proposal: “It seems to me of great urgency; certainly,” Arendt writes in the aforementioned unpublished paper, “it is the only way to make the policy of good neighborliness cease to be just a slogan and become a reality.” Arendt thought that the economic difference constituted, in fact, an obstacle to the creation of a confederation that could be a first step towards overcoming the framework of the nation-state, which Arendt considered inappropriate for the safeguarding of freedom and political action. The republics of the South could benefit from “the inspiring principles of the American Republic.” Arendt was never naïve in politics, so she was not ignorant of the two-faced character of the USA, republic, and empire, but she judged the American constitution to be the only “foundation of liberty,” the only successful revolution in modern times. Later, when the so-called “Pentagon Papers” appeared, Arendt would be a merciless critic of the foreign policy trickery and deceit that the American presidents after Kennedy’s death set in motion. Serrano leaves a record of that moment of expectation and longing that Arendt, always attentive to the world’s reality, picked up in her observations.
As we have said, Arendt was interested in the fate of the Cuban Revolution from the first moment, since chance favored that Hannah and Fidel coincided at Princeton University, both invited in April 1959, a few months after the insurrection led by Castro forced the dictator Batista to abandon the island. The fact of Arendt’s attendance at the conference and subsequent debate of the Cuban leader was known since it was reported by Rafael Rojas, recalls Serrano. Castro presented himself to the audience of distinguished scholars, gathered for a seminar dedicated to the differences between the French, American, and Bolshevik revolutions, as “someone who did not study, but rather produced a revolution.” Castro’s lecture seemed designed to please his audience of American progressives by stressing that his model did not reproduce that of the Bolshevik revolution, based on class struggle, but that it had been a political and moral revolution that had the support of the vast majority of the people.
Arendt was then focused on the study of the meaning of the modern concept of revolution, precisely, in the seminar that Princeton had organized on “The Spirit of Revolution.” She would present shortly afterward at the same seminar her research on the two models of revolution that modernity had given birth to, the French and the American, which a few years later would become her famous and controversial On Revolution (1963).
The lecture by “Doctor Fidel Castro,” the title that appeared on the invitation cards to the event, was well attended. The “prime minister,” a title chosen by Serrano in his narration, no doubt with a certain ironic intention, after exposing his ideas on the “spirit” of the Cuban Revolution, answered questions from the audience. Here we are surprised to learn that some of the decisive ideas argued by Castro anticipate or coincide with those elaborated by Arendt in her analysis of modern revolutions. What is essential—and extraordinary—is that Castro describes “his” revolution as close to the spirit of the American one: Cuba’s is based on “public opinion,” it shares the same aspirations as the founders of the American republic, its revolution was made “without class hatred,” it was shared by an immense majority of the Cuban people and its objectives aspire to consolidate a society based on “social justice” that does not sacrifice freedom. “In his perspective—summarizes Serrano Castro’s intervention—, if ‘public opinion’ had been the true engine of the Cuban Revolution, this, by satisfying the material needs of the people, would not sacrifice freedom: ‘That is what we are doing, without dictatorships.’”
It could be that Castro, at that moment so close to success and in that scenario, felt genuinely inspired by the founding fathers of a democracy based on the defense of freedom. It could also be that the Jesuit student correctly “took stock” of the situation and judged it more productive to state what he believed his audience wanted to hear. Serrano proposes another interpretation. It is known that Castro eventually allowed himself to be influenced by the French model of revolution, imitated by the Bolshevik one, both dominated by what Arendt calls the “social question,” thus placing itself in the “sphere of necessity.” That is not what Castro said in Princeton. Had Castro read Arendt’s thesis on the two models of revolution when he prepared his lecture? It is a fact that Arendt spoke at the same seminar a week after Castro’s lecture and it is possible that the speakers at the seminar had “previous summaries of the content of the other speakers’ interventions.” In that case, Castro found it opportune to defend before his audience the revolution that had founded the republic of his hosts, while postponing the proletarian model that had established the foundation of the Soviet republic.
Arendt distrusted Castro’s well-intentioned words from the very beginning. When the missile crisis broke out, she did not doubt for a moment that the US was right in rejecting the installation of nuclear rockets in Cuba and she celebrated how Kennedy’s team resolved the conflict: “The Cuba thing has ended well,” she wrote to Jaspers. And she advanced some reflections on the effects that the outcome could have in the immediate future: “For America [i.e., the United States] it is now above all a question of taking advantage of the situation with a view to a basic reformulation of its policy towards Latin America.” And she was pleased with the message Fidel Castro had received from his Russian comrades, namely, “that they are not driving the world revolution, but Russian foreign policy.” Although I think Arendt might have assumed that Castro did not care, for she foresaw, already in 1961, the path Castro preferred for “his” revolution: “‘Since these people passionately aspire to walk with dignity, without yet knowing what it means to act with freedom, it will take longer than the so-called governmental experts […] to realize that perhaps they have been deceived and pushed onto a path that leads not to freedom but to tyranny.’” No wonder Arendt opposes the feeling of dignity to the always necessary political experience of freedom. There is something prophetic in this opposition, since in recent years the Spanish left, and I presume also those operating in many Latin American republics, have frequented the motive of dignity, always linked to economic issues, while postponing the motive of freedom, dismissed as a minor issue in their “liberating” agenda.
Serrano de Haro’s book still includes two topics that I cannot deal with here: the chapter, the longest and most philosophically significant, which he devotes to commenting on the presence of Ortega y Gasset, specifically The Revolt of the Masses, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, and a coda or epilogue in which Serrano interprets Spanish political life in recent years using the categories and judgments of that great thinker of the political from the experiences of the twentieth century, Hannah Arendt. Let us leave that for another time.
