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(however briefly) in the new edition the tours of "Western intellectuals, who,
visiting Hanoi, during the war, experie'nced some enchantment and suc–
cumbed to familiar illusions,"
It
may be self-evident why such episodes
represent a continuation of the earlier pro-Soviet attitudes but not ifCaute's
understanding of "fellow travelling" remains the guiding concept. Nor is there
much of an explanation for including in the new edition a chapter on pro–
Cuban fellow travelling, especially since, according to the author, "fellow
travelling" is not the appropriate concept for the favorable attitudes regarding
Cuba, He does explain, though, why this topic was omitted from the first
edition as he seeks to distinguish the fellow travellers of the past from those
of the present, that is, the old from the new left. He writes:
In the introduction to the first edition of
Fellow Travellers
I argued
Cuba out of these pages on the premise that Castro's revolution was
an altogether different phenomenon attracting a different species of
Western admirer: "The aims, ideology and life styles of the New Left
have practically nothing in common with those of yesterday'S fellow
travellers: they squarely belonged to the Old Left, Those militants of
the New Left who ardently admire Mao's China or Castro's Cuba
adopt those regimes as models for their own revolutionary activities."
One would like to know if he still believes that old and new left have
nothing in common, having added Cuba and its admirers to the new
edition.
Nobody would dispute that there are differences between the leftists of
the 1930s and those of the 1960s and 1970s. But there have also been
weighty and unifying similarities which are given short shrift in
The Fellow
Travellers,
old and new edition alike. The major similarity, needless to say,
has been that both groups fervently embraced wildly idealized, almost delu–
sional conceptions of various Marxist-Leninist one-party systems, perceived
as far superior to their own societies. Old and new left shared a passionate
rejection of capitalism and "bourgeois democracy" and an urge to find
alternatives, new social systems which could command their loyalties.
There are numerous indications that the division between the erstwhile
admirers of the Soviet Union and the partisans of the newer socialist states
were not nearly as sharp as Caute seems to believe. Many former support–
ers of the Soviet Union had effortlessly switched to championing the new
Communist states: Cuba, China, North Vietnam and others in the so-called
Third World. Waldo Frank, venerable admirer of the Soviet Union, produced
not only
Dawn in Russia
(in 1932) but also
Cuba: Prophetic Island
(in
