Twentieth Century History

Vietnam between the United States and Yugoslavia

By Deirdre Smith

A specter is haunting Europe (also the United States and, really, much of the globe)—the specter of a new Cold War. In recent years columnists have been invoking the memory of the global ideological conflict that governed much of the violence and geopolitics of the twentieth-century.[i] The reason for the comparisons is the eerie familiarity of the escalating conflict between Putin’s Russia and the United States and European Union. Tensions surrounding the annexation of Crimea, protests and military conflict in Ukraine, increases in sanctions against Russia, and divided support in the Syrian Civil War and refugee crisis have many people claiming redux.

On the cultural front, movies like Bridge of Spies and The Man From U.N.C.L.E. reflect a related desire to look back to the past for lessons about the present. As a student of the history of art in former Yugoslavia, I went to the archives held at the LBJ Presidential Library on the University of Texas at Austin campus following a similar impulse. I was looking for clues about the relationship between the United States and Yugoslavia during the critical years of the Lyndon Baines Johnson administration and how they reflected the larger divides between nations that are so frequently conjured today in the news.

Smoke in Novi Sad, Serbia after NATO bombardment in 1999, via Wikipedia.

When many Americans think about the history of United States relations with Yugoslavia, the Yugoslav Wars and the bombings in Belgrade in the 1990s likely come to mind. However, the two countries had long been ambivalent allies. As Yugoslavia’s President, Josip Broz Tito, had cut ties with the Soviet Union in 1948, he and his country were identified as useful in U.S. strategies to create divisions between communist nations.[ii] The United States provided military aid to Tito throughout the administrations of Truman and Eisenhower, hoping to keep the Yugoslav leader oriented toward positive relations with the West.

A Tomahawk cruise missile launches from the aft missile deck of the USS Gonzalez (DDG 66) headed for a target in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia on March 31, 1999. Via Wikipedia.

The LBJ archives at UT hold numerous documents that give a first-hand impression of the nature and texture of relations between the United States and Yugoslavia as it proceeded through the 1960s. Ambassadors Eric Kocher and C. Burke Elbrick were stationed in Belgrade and both sent frequent telegrams to the Department of State that have been declassified only within the past fifteen years.

John F. Kennedy and Josip Broz Tito at the White House in 1963. Via the Boston Globe.

One of the most fascinating things I found in reading through these materials were traces of the growing divide between the United States and Yugoslavia following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, often in the smallest details. A cable from December 1963 summarizes a meeting held with President Tito in which Eric Kocher assured the Yugoslav leader that friendship would continue between the two countries after Kennedy’s death. Tito, who had met personally with Kennedy not long prior, apparently voiced some foreboding skepticism on the subject of Johnson. He also pressured the U.S. to be more attentive to the needs of South Americans, and inquired about the motivations and identity of the Kennedy assassin.[iii] The document suggests the intimacy between Tito and the United States at that point in time. Tito felt moved to express condolences and show interest in the case of Kennedy. He also took the same opportunity to discuss things that he wanted from the United States. Kocher mentions that all of these heady topics were covered in a span of only forty-five minutes.

Josip Broz Tito greeting former American first lady Eleanor Roosevelt during her July 1953 visit to the Brijuni islands, PR Croatia, FPR Yugoslavia. Via Wikipedia.

In May 1964, President Johnson announced intentions to improve relations with Eastern European countries in terms of trade, travel and aid. Interest and activity around the United States embassies in Eastern European countries increased at this time. The Johnson administration attempted a détente with Moscow by becoming friendlier with Eastern Bloc countries at the same time that it amped up its commitments in Vietnam, creating a conflict that undermined the success of the former operation.[iv] Documents in the LBJ archives clearly convey a mounting tension in relations with Yugoslavia, which often manifested in events of daily life and personal interaction. Johnson’s more sweeping efforts at détente meant a diminished status for Yugoslavia as a key communist ally. In turn, Yugoslavia grew more open in its critiques of U.S. foreign policy.

On May 31, 1965, a telegrammed report from Eric Kocher alerted the State Department to signs of dissatisfaction with the United States appearing in the Yugoslav press, “Within the last year we have been under constant attack for our ‘misdeeds’ in the Congo, the UN, and especially in Vietnam and the Dominican Republic.”[v] Kocher’s scare quotes around the word misdeeds speak volumes about United States diplomatic attitudes. When reading in archives, being attentive to something as minute as a choice in punctuation and tone can offer tremendous insight. In this case, the special marking of misdeeds seems to reflect the same imperialistic attitude that the United States was being accused of by Yugoslav journalists. In June 1965, another cable summarized a meeting with Tito in which he made his loathing for the war in Vietnam clear. Tito told former ambassador George Kennan that U.S.-Yugoslavian relations would continue to suffer over their disagreements about the war. The document reads, “Tito said if U.S. took more relaxed posture toward world events things would work out to benefit of U.S. in long run.”[vi] If only it could be so simple.

US-Yugoslav summit, 1978. Via Wikipedia.

These and other telegrams offer insight into the increasingly turbulent relationship between the United States and Yugoslavia in the 1960s under Johnson. Although files related to Yugoslavia make up a relatively small portion of what can be read at the LBJ Library, they reveal the constant and delicate activity of balancing contradictory initiatives and maintaining diplomatic relationships on the ground.

You may also like our monthly feature article on the War in Vietnam Revisited.

[i] See Dmitri Trenin, “Welcome to Cold War II: This is what it will look like,” Foreign Policy 3 March 2014.

[ii] For more on the relationship between the U.S. and Yugoslavia during these administrations see Lorraine M. Lees, Keeping Tito Afloat: The United States, Yugoslavia, and the Cold War (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997).

[iii] NATIONAL SECURITY FILE: Cable, Belgrade 3996, 12/6/63, Box 2, Country File, Yugoslavia, National Security File, LBJ Library.

[iv] See Jonathan Colman, The Foreign Policy of Lyndon B. Johnson: The United States and the World, 1963-1969 (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2010), 116-118.

[v] NATIONAL SECURITY FILE: Cable, Belgrade, 5/31/65 #12, Box 1, Country File, Yugoslavia, National Security File, LBJ Library.

[vi] NATIONAL SECURITY FILE: Cable, Belgrade, 6/3/65 #11, Box 1, Country File, Yugoslavia, National Security File, LBJ Library.

Magical Realism on Drugs: Colombian History in Netflix’s Narcos

By Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra

Seen through the eyes of Steven Murphy, the DEA agent whose voice-over narrates the new Netflix series Narcos, Colombia appears to viewers all over the world as a land of sicarios (hired young assassins), putas (whores), and malparidos (the fucked-up). In short, Colombia becomes the quintessential Macondo of Gabriel García Márquez. The Colombian Nobel prize winner is renowned for introducing magical realism as narrative technique: the journalistic description of reality, in which the supernatural and the strange are woven together into matter-of-fact accounts. Narcos introduces the viewer to one of Macondo’s sons: Pablo Escobar, a savvy entrepreneur who was to become one of the most powerful drug lords in the history of the world, the leader of the Medellin cartel. In the early 70s, Escobar went from smuggling cigarettes and TV-sets to exporting cocaine into Miami. By the early 80s, Escobar was transporting one ton of cocaine per day.

Pablo Esobar. Via Biography.com

Narcos describes the transformation of both Colombia and Murphy. Before Escobar, Colombia was corrupt but poor. But with the arrival of Escobar’s billions, Colombia became a bustling, cosmopolitan hellhole. The narrative arc of Murphy’s metamorphosis is also cast in very simple terms. He was originally a naïve agent chasing after potheads in Miami. Once in Colombia, however, Murphy goes native. In the last episode, Murphy resolves the dispute over a mild car accident by shooting at the other driver, while his gringa wife and Colombian baby girl (who had been left orphaned in a murderous rampage by Escobar’s minions and who Murphy casually picked up to raise) witness in horror Murphy’s new penchant for blood and lawlessness. It is in the wake of this shooting that Murphy’s wife begs Murphy to take the baby and go back home (to the US). A nonchalant Murphy replies that home is now Colombia.

Viewers do not get to witness the effects of Colombia in the transformation of two other secondary characters working at the US Embassy in Bogota: the CIA chief agent and the marine representative of US Southern Army Command. These two gringos have already been “seasoned” and therefore understand that Colombians are moved only through the barrel of a gun. Narcos therefore explicitly suggests that there is a fundamental difference between an uncivilized Latino south and a peaceful Anglo north that is bridged when Anglos get to live for a long time among the savages. Narcos has the three representatives of the US government embracing every aspect of Colombian violence while proving incapable of learning a single word in Spanish over the course of ten episodes.

There is something, however, that Narcos gets right. The series shows the use of torture, terror, and electronic surveillance in the making of the modern US Empire. For three episodes, Escobar operates freely in the USA. Murphy documents the murder of some 3,000 black and Latino narcos in the streets of Miami in the late 70s and early 80s. This blood bath of expendables did not budge any US politicians into action. It was, however, a photo of Escobar moving crates on an airfield of Sandinista Nicaragua that persuaded Reagan to up the ante. It is only then that Murphy moves to Colombia as DEA agent and the CIA and the marines begin torturing Colombians as well pursuing the electronic surveillance of Escobar’s phone communications. The show documents with great accuracy how before Iraq, there was Colombia.

Colombian police and miltary forces storm the rooftop where Pablo Escobar was shot. Courtesy of AFP/Getty Images.

Narcos has Escobar’s minions pitted against a tiny elite of incorruptible bilinguals (politicos and army officers) in a violent struggle over control of the Colombian state. Every event in Colombian politics in the 80s and early 90s is made to revolve around the implementation (or lack thereof) of extradition of narcos to the USA: the assassinations of the Chief Minister of Justice Rodrigo Lara Bonilla and the presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galan, the election of Cesar Gaviria as President of Colombia, the M19 attack on the Palace of Justice of 1985, and the constitution of 1991. The picture is so skewed as to become absurd.

On November 6, 1985, M19 stormed Bogota’s Palace of Justice.

The M19, a social democratic guerilla movement that led the attack on the Palace of Justice and whose negotiated incorporation into the political process led to the Constitutional Assembly of 1991, is turned in a clownish club of dilettantes. In one episode, Narcos has a strangely taciturn, sad, and inept M19 leader (clearly not the historical leader of M19, Jaime Bateman, who was an exuberant Afro-Colombian who loved both life and politics) break into a museum with his voluptuous lover to steal Bolivar’s sword, a symbol of unfulfilled liberation, only to have the leader hand in the sword to Escobar in the next episode. The M19 was by far the most popular political movement of the 1980s, equipped with a regular army 2,000 strong engaged in a war of positions with the Colombian army in the Valley of Cauca. But in Narcos it is portrayed as a tiny urban cell doing all of Escobar’s dirty business. According to Narcos, the M19 attack on the Palace of Justice was financed by Escobar to have a cache of his papers, captured in a raid, burnt. This is nonsense. M19 seized the Palace to call attention to the systematic aerial bombardment of guerilla forces in the wake of a negotiated peace agreement with President Belisario Betancourt. The burning of the palace was the doing of the army, not the M19.

Photograph of the real-life Jaime Bateman Cayón (April 23, 1940 – April 28, 1983)

The great conflict of the 80s in Colombia was for sure messy. It did involve narcos, the state, urban guerrillas, and the USA. Yet the great protagonist of the 80s was the grass roots movement to transform the oligarchic Colombian regime into a viable constitutional social democracy. The movement partially culminated in the passage of the Constitution of 1991. Narcos completely distorts this process and by so doing overlooks the impulse behind the constitutional banning of extradition. The debate was not just over the threat of narco money corrupting politicos. It was far more ethically substantive: whose blood should be spilled in the global war on drugs and whose bodies incarcerated. This war is now being fought in Mexico and US ghettoes. The dead bodies of the war on drugs continue to be largely brown and the incarcerated ones black, while consumers in Palo Alto and Manhattan get to enjoy Netflix’s Narcos.

Notes from the Field: From Feasts to Feats (or Feet) on the Coals

By Mary Neuburger

This summer I conducted research in, but also beyond, my regular haunts, namely the dusty old libraries and archival reading rooms of Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria. After several days in Sofia, I took to the mountains to follow the paths of ethnographers, tourists, and pilgrims who have written about this distant borderland of Europe over the past 200 years. To this day, Bulgaria has remained a kind of distant terra incognita, beckoning “adventure” travellers to the edge of the European continent. All the more reason for travellers – foreign and Bulgarian – to record their journeys, to map the remote physical and cultural recesses of this Balkan periphery, always seemingly “backwards,” in transition, and “off the beaten track.”

The veritable sea of travelers’ accounts are among the sources that inform my current book project, a cultural history of food and drink in the Eastern Balkans, with a focus on Bulgaria from the 1860s -1989. Bulgarian foodways were clearly imprinted by the Empires that ruled or influenced the region, from the Ancient Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, Russian, Austro-Hungarian, to the Soviet.

Some of these travellers were Bulgarians, mapping their own homeland and defining their own nation as they went, with the culture of food and drink as important components. But many more were foreigners who consumed and assessed food and drink as sources of pleasure and anxiety. They mapped patterns of restraint and gluttony, as well as the connections of food with identity, healing and magic. They often used practices of food and drink—production, preparation, and etiquette—as a way of forming or confirming their own opinions about locals as savage and barbaric, or alternatively as vigorous and sensible. Such accounts include mouth-watering descriptions of home-cooked meals and local inn or restaurant fare from the days of treks on oxen-drawn carts. The denouement of the story is the 1960s and 1970s when cities of leisure grew out of the snake-infested sands of the Bulgarian Black Sea coast to accommodate millions of visitors from both sides of the Iron Curtain. My interest is in the ways that food and drink fit into old and new rituals surrounding leisure and pleasure. As critical to this story, I explore how foreign travellers and local tourists were part of the transformation of such patterns over the last century. I am also particularly interested in patterns of restraint and abstinence, whether they were intellectual movements of the interwar period or state-directed patterns of pleasure and leisure under communism.

One of my plans for this summer was to follow the well-worn paths of my traveller-authors. This led me to one particularly remarkable place, namely to the village of Bulgari in a spectacular mountainous region called the Strandja, which borders Turkey and spills down to the Black Sea coast in southeastern Bulgaria. I planned my visit to Bulgari carefully, so that I would be there on the feast day of Constantine and Elena, June 4 by the Julian calendar, the day when the nestinari or fire-dancers perform their well-known ritual. Numerous foreigners and locals have chronicled their observations of the nestinarstvo — the ritual of waking on hot coals — which reportedly dates back thousands of years to ancient Thracian times. Locals claim that the originally pagan ritual has been practiced more or less continually since that time. Eventually Christianized, nestinarstvo was also passed on to successive waves of Greek and eventually Slavic residents who moved into the region. The practice was once much more widespread, but Bulgari is one of the last places one can still see the practice in its most elaborate enactment.

1The Nestinarka or coal-walker (in white head scarf) swirls a small urn of burning embers in the air at the beginning of the procession with holy icons into the woods. (Village of Bulgari, in Southeastern Bulgaria, June 2015).

The Nestinarka or coal-walker (in white head scarf) swirls a small urn of burning embers in the air at the beginning of the procession with holy icons into the woods. (Village of Bulgari, in Southeastern Bulgaria, June 2015).

The morning of June 4, 2015 began with a series of prayers in the main church and the ceremonial removal of the icons depicting St. Constantine and Elena (The Byzantine Emperor, Constantine and his mother, Elena). The icons were taken in a solemn procession to the tune of a mesmerizing beat from a drummer and gaida (Bulgarian bagpipe) player. First, the local priest and a number of important participants, including the head nestinarka, or female coal-walker, led a small crowd to a chapel across the main square. There a series of rituals were performed, including a kurban or sacrifice of a sheep by the local priest. The procession continued, with the nestinarka carrying a vessel with burning embers, down a wooded path to a glen where a well and a small chapel were nestled. While blessings took place around the well, icons were placed in a small structure for those assembled to file pass, view, and kiss. Eventually the gathering dissipated until noon, when a huge bonfire was lit in the village square, with an accompanying horo (circle dance) to drumming and bagpipes. By evening folk singers and dancers were featured on an adjacent stage and the square begin to fill with hundreds of people, mostly Bulgarians. As live Bulgarian folk music was pumped over a loudspeaker, a line of hundreds of people snaked around the village square while the bonfire burned down to glowing coals.

2The kurban or sacrificial ram hangs from a hook, while being blessed by an Orthodox priest. The ram’s head is in the foreground on a chopping block. Village of Bulgari, in Southeastern Bulgaria, June 2015).

The kurban or sacrificial ram hangs from a hook, while being blessed by an Orthodox priest. The ram’s head is in the foreground on a chopping block. Village of Bulgari, in Southeastern Bulgaria, June 2015).

Finally, at a little after ten o’clock, the red hot coals were raked out into a starfish shape in the center of the square, with the crowd on all sides pushing against a protective rope. Suddenly the only music was the single drum and bagpipe and three women and three men began to dance across the burning embers. In a trance-like state they moved rhythmically back and forth across the coals to the drumming and bagpipes, icons in hand – held high overhead—a large crown oohing and ahing.

The hot coals are spread with a large rake in preparation for coal-walking ceremony to begin. (Village of Bulgari, in Southeastern Bulgaria, June 2015).

It may be possible to explain how people can walk on hot coals, but I am more interested in the layers of historical sediment that surround the event. First there is the notion that this ritual has been practiced for thousands of years and the current commitment to honor, if not partially reinvent, that tradition. But even more interesting for my current work is the ways in which the event became a site for the intrepid tourist pilgrimage. By the interwar period it is featured in numerous travelogues, and a form of the practice was featured at Black Sea tourist hotels in the communist period. As a site for local tourist observation and participation, the nestinarstvo was and still is deeply connected to food and drink. For example, as chronicled in Ikons and Oxen, Philip Thornton and his resolute party, traveling in 1938, bring to Bulgari a cook from their Black sea hotel and, “Ten pounds of lamb, a gallon of red wine, five bunches of onions and two of carrots, a bottle of butter, a three-pound bag of rice, and a pound of salt.” The salt, the cook explained to Thornton, was to trade to locals for use of their hearths to cook the hearty lamb stew, which they washed down with tasty local wine.

Food and drink were more than just sustenance and pleasure for the traveling visitors. They were (and still are) deeply implicated in the day’s events and rituals. Food was always central in pagan religious rituals and feasting and fasting were deeply embedded in Orthodox Christianity. St. Constantine and Elena Day was a feast day, in which locals pitched in to purchase the kurban, or animal for sacrifice, that was later eaten by the nestinari and others in attendance. Bread has also historically been part of the day’s ritual, and this time pieces of a large loaf were offered to all present at the morning ceremony. Today, a whole street of food vendors catered to tourists and pilgrims who ate and drank throughout the whole day. The ritual feasting included a lamb roasting all day on a spit, a range of other grilled meats, breads, traditional local salads of cucumber, tomato and feta, and generous amounts of local wines, plum brandy, and beer.

Wine has been produced in this region of Bulgaria, which is part of the larger region of Thrace, since ancient times. This is, in fact, the land of the cult of Dionysus (or Bacchus), the Greek (and Roman) God of wine and pleasure. Even more so than food, alcohol consumption is the subject of enjoyment, but also intense scrutiny by foreigners and locals in the period I study. In addition to the cult of Bacchus, this region was also the source of the 11th century Bogomil heresy – one of the first “Proto-Protestant” rebellions against the decadence of the established Christian church. Among other things, the Bogomils practiced temperance and vegetarianism, and as such were a cult of restraint in all manners of consumption. Eradicated by the Byzantines in the 13th century, the “Bogomil legacy” seemed to live on, according to foreign travelers, among other Slavic “fanatics,” including the largest Tolstoyan movement established outside of Russia in early twentieth century. In fact, the Bulgarian village of “Yasna Polyana,” was not far from Bulgari in the Strandja region. Bulgarians set up a commune here in 1908, naming it after Tolstoy’s commune and estate in Russia, Yasnaya Polyana and where they published many of Tolstoy’s works that were banned in Russia. This summer I visited Yasna Polyana, where a recently consecrated bust of Tolstoy presides on the main square.

Bulgari and Yasna Polyana serve as different kinds of markers on what Ivan Hadzhiiski, the founder of Bulgarian sociology, called the “moral map of Bulgaria.” His copious writings from the 1930s, charted the contours of Bulgarian everyday life.. As he rightly notes, the morals of “gastronomy” were defining features of Bulgarian tradition, as well as its transition to modernity. Of course this is not just for Bulgarians. As my favorite historian of food, Felipe Fernández-Armesto notes in his Near a Thousand Tables, food “matters most to most people for most of the time.” The words of Armesto, like Hadzhiiski, accompanied me on my tour, from town to town, from table to table.

Che in Gaza: Searching for the Story Behind the Image

By Yoav Di- Capua

On June 18^th 1959, dressed in full army fatigues and accompanied by several comrades exhibiting an equally imposing revolutionary appearance, Che Guevara landed in Gaza. Considering his reputation today, one might have expected the 31-year-old Che to, perhaps, instruct the Palestinian resistance fighters (the Fedayeen) in the ways of guerrilla warfare, tell them in detail about his grand foco tactics, or take notes on their then-decade-long battle of resistance against Israel. Indeed, upon first learning of Che’s first – and only – visit to Gaza, I myself was filled with such questions. Was such an exchange of revolutionary tactics the legacy of his visit? Did he come there on purpose in order to build long-term relationship with Palestinian fighters? Was he attracted to Gaza as a hotbed of universal resistance to colonialism? What exactly came of this visit and who did he meet there? I was curious to know.

The handwritten text reads- “With Guevara, hero of the Cuban Revolution. Mansion of the Governor General, Lieutenant General Ahmad Salim. Gaza, 1959.” Via Wikimedia Commons

I first heard of Che’s intriguing visit about three years ago. The random person I met in the archives could not tell me much besides the fact that he read somewhere (but where?) that Che visited the Shati refugee camp and was warmly welcomed by its Palestinian inhabitants. That was not much. Searching the web yielded the image above which shows Che and other dignitaries with Ahmad Salim, the powerful Egyptian governor of Gaza. Che’s trustworthy biographer, Jon Lee Anderson, added a few more details and a date but nothing else. So, with this modest beginning, I ventured into the archive to find the story behind the visit and the photo. I started with the Israeli State Archives. From the end of the 1948 war until 1956, and again between 1957 and 1967 (when it was conquered by Israel during the Six Day War), Gaza was under Egyptian rule and their army controlled every aspect of Palestinian life, including their resistance to, and infiltration of, Israel. The Israeli State Archive seemed promising because of how closely they had monitored Gaza throughout this period and into the period of Israeli occupation. I thought that the Israelis could not possibly have missed such a high-profile visit by one of the chief theoreticians and practitioners of guerrilla warfare. To my surprise, it turned out they did. In fact, Che’s visit to Gaza left no impression whatsoever in the Israeli archives. Thus, in the absence of evidence from the Israeli archive and the absence altogether of an Egyptian archive, I turned to the Arab press. What I found was somewhat surprising. Che, it turned out, was a Cuban nobody that the Egyptians mostly ignored.

Indeed, as it turned out, Che’s visit to Egypt – then known as the United Arab Republic – was a brief, low-key event that was tightly controlled by Egyptian authorities reluctant to acknowledge competing revolutionary projects such as Cuba’s. His trip to Gaza was even further played down. The press contingent was kept to a minimum, no iconic photographs were published and – so it seems – only a single image survived. Though Che and the Cubans visited several refugee camps, by day’s end, they dined not with top leaders of the Palestinian revolutionary Fedayeen, but with the Brazilian contingent of the UN Emergency Force. In fact, not a single member of the Fedayeen was present, and there was no talk about revolutionary theory, neo-colonialism, Zionist imperialism, or any of the other 1960s sub-categories of global resistance. Twenty-four hours after Che arrived in Gaza, he was back in Cairo. The newspapers the next day buried the story.

Haile Selassie of Ethiopia circa 1960.

Back in Cairo, the theme continued. The Cubans were far from the talk of the town, and Egyptian attention was visibly elsewhere with the more important visit of Ethiopia’s Emperor Haile Selassie. While Selassie received heavy press coverage, the Cubans, except for a few back-page reports, got hardly any. It was not that the Cubans were ignored. Though he was apparently too busy to officially greet Che in the airport upon his arrival, the following day, Nasser awarded him the United Arab Republic’s Decoration of the First Order in a quaint, sparsely-attended ceremony. The rest of the visit was characterized by a paternalistic tone, wherein the Egyptians lectured the inexperienced Cubans on methods of engendering an agricultural revolution in the interest of social equality, and various theories and suggestions were provided as to how the Cubans ought to approach the industrialization of their country. Thereafter, the Cubans left to Damascus, visited the tomb of Salah al-Din (Saladin), a renowned symbol of resistance and sacrifice, and continued on their journey to other locales in Africa and Asia.

This visit to the revolutionary heartland of the Arab world tells us in no uncertain terms that the bearded, cigar-smoking Che was not yet an international icon of global resistance and that that iconic revolutionary decade, the 1960s, had not yet truly begun. In fact, the point of his visit appears not so much to have been to launch an international revolutionary movement but to launch instead a three-month tour to the Third World so Che could introduce himself to the various countries’ progressive elites and, perhaps, along the way, forge commercial ties and hopefully sell some sugar. Yes, that’s right: sugar took precedence over guerilla warfare. But with this tour, Cuba also began a search for its revolutionary role in world affairs. Three years later, Che would emerge the universally recognizable Third World icon of the New Man, worthy of front-page coverage even in Egypt. Indeed, in his future meetings with Nasser, the tables were turned and Nasser presented himself as Che’s attentive and modest acolyte. By this point, of course, the global resistance culture of 1960s was already an integral part of daily Arab politics.

Che Guevera shakes hands with Gamal Abul Nasser. Via the Middle East Institute Journal blog.

As for Palestinians, the Fedayeen fighters of the 1950s had little to do with the guerrilla culture with which they are now anachronistically associated. But this too was about to change, as during the 1960s Che forged a close relationship with the Palestinian Liberation Organization and a new generation of Palestinian fighters were heavily influenced by his example as well as by the global culture of resistance. Their moment to act came after 1967 when Israel occupied the Gaza Strip, settled in, and began making itself comfortable. In response, left-wing Palestinian guerrillas launched a sustained campaign that reached a zenith under the leadership of Muhammad al-Aswad, known at the time as the “Guevara of Gaza.”

A Commemorative poster by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine marking the death of Guevara of Gaza (1978). Via Palestine Poster Project

Al-Aswad proudly carried Guevara’s legacy all the way to his tragic end, which came during a battle with Israeli soldiers in 1973. A few years later, due to a sustained Israeli campaign, Gaza’s left-wing Palestinian resistance movement was in ruins, and a decade later, the revolutionary left did not have much to offer. Indeed, by then, military opposition to Israel was organized along Islamic lines with organizations such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad taking a central role. Today, after two popular rebellions (intifadas) and after a score of other bloody skirmishes, all that is left of Che’s Gazan legacy is a few middle-aged Palestinians who, back in the 1960s, were given the name Guevara by their idealistic parents. So goes the history of Guevara in Gaza, an engagement that began modestly with a visit by an anonymous, cigar-smoking Cuban but ended, famously, with the making of an icon of resistance for Palestinians, one who sought to liberate his country as well as the world.

Boomtown, USA: An Historical Look at Fracking

By Henry Wiencek

Over the past five years or so, the United States has been experiencing an enormous oil boom. Hydraulic fracturing, known as “fracking,” has made it possible—and profitable—to drill through thick rock formations, opening up vast pockets of domestic oil and gas across the country. But nowhere has this process had more of an impact than in the Eagle Ford Shale and Permian Basin of Texas and in the Bakken formation of western North Dakota. New jobs, new workers, and new money have transformed remote prairies into humming boomtowns. Wood cabins in Midland, Texas typically rent for $1,500 a month; Karnes City in south Texas plans to build a $30 million high school; and Williston, North Dakota has absorbed 15,000 workers alone.

An oil derrick operated by Raven Drilling drills for oil in the Bakken shale formation on July 23, 2013 outside Watford City, North Dakota. (Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images)

But the party may soon be over. Largely due to high American production, the international price of Brent crude has fallen below $50/barrel, a six year low.

This is not the first time America has experienced the intoxicating highs and dispiriting lows of the oil patch. Between 1901 and 1930, Louisiana, one of the first major centers of domestic oil and gas production, encountered the same dilemma at various moments. Over the course of two decades, areas of the state went from isolated swamp to tent cities of 20,000 people…and then back to isolated swamp again. As demand fell or wells just dried up, boomtowns like Homer, Ida, Vivian, and Oil City—yes, Oil City—suddenly lost their raison d’être. Their stories may augur what comes next for present day boom communities like Karnes City or Williston—and perhaps impart some lessons on how to survive the bust.

Oil City, 1912

Although a great deal has changed in the oil industry over the past century, certain “boomtown” traits seem to be timeless. As production has increased in North Dakota and Texas, sprawling “man camps” of hastily built trailers quickly proliferated to house all the new workers. The migration has created a boon for local business, but also spikes in violent crime and drug addiction. When journalist Laura Gottesdiener visited Williston, ND, she found “an abundance of meth, crack, and liquor; freezing winters; rents higher than Manhattan; and far, far too many men.” The oil industry’s encroachment into rural parts of Texas and North Dakota has also dramatically changed their natural landscape. Meandering hills of prairie grass now compete with truck convoys, pipeline construction crews and perpetually dipping pumpjacks. In Williston, toxic gas flares illuminate the sky all night.

A trailer park occupied mostly by oil workers is seen in an aerial view in the early morning hours of July 30, 2013 near Watford City, North Dakota. Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images

The oil boomtowns of early twentieth-century Caddo Parish, Louisiana bore a striking resemblance to those of today. Located atop the highly productive Sabine Uplift, Caddo transformed from a desolate stretch of swamp to a boisterous collection of boomtowns after oil was found around 1905. Between 1907 and 1908, land prices spiked from $25-50/acre to $500-1,000. 25,000 people descended on Oil City alone. Much like in present day Williston, oil production dominated Caddo’s natural landscape. Driller Carl M. Jones remembered that so many oil wells were flaring off natural gas you could “read a newspaper at night several miles away.”

Drilling for oil on Caddo Lake

Given the enormous worker populations, housing was cheap and improvised. Driller Claude McFarland recalled that newcomers “had to live where they worked,” generally settling “all over the woods in tents.” “Main Streets” in Caddo were generally unpaved roads lined with ramshackle saloons, banks and general stores housed in shabby buildings ready to disassemble whenever the bust came. The tent cities of Caddo also became notoriously riotous. With virtually no law enforcement or civic institutions, gambling, drinking and violence prevailed. Oil City’s Reno Hill was infamous for its saloons and “hotels” of ill repute. Madams with aliases like Diamond, Oklahoma Mamie, Big Alice, and Old Mooch became experts at selling liquor and sex to the huge market of wage earning men who were either unmarried or far from their families.

Downtown Trees City c. 1915

Eventually, the drinking and violence became so extreme that Mike Benedum and Joe Trees, prominent oilmen with considerable interests in Caddo, decided to build Trees City, an enclave of comfortable, brick homes that would encourage more wholesome family-oriented lives among the workers. Drinking, gambling, and “loose women” were strictly forbidden. But Benedum and Trees’s efforts to control their workforce had only mixed results. When they hired a former Texas Ranger to shut down Caddo’s whiskey and prostitution rings, the bootleggers simply bribed him to look the other way.

Law enforcement tied drunks to tree in the center of Oil City until they were sober, September 15, 1912.

So how did these communities respond when the bust came? In many cases, the loss of oil revenue was devastating. When demand for commodities fell across America during the Great Depression, Caddo’s boomtowns had little to cushion the fall. Most of the new infrastructure built over the past two decades specifically related to oil and gas—pipelines, storage tanks, refineries—and had only limited applications in other fields. Most of the investors, lease hounds and oil workers left town, many in search of the next boom in Texas or Oklahoma. As Longtime Jennings, Louisiana resident J.M. Hoag recalled it, once “the oil started to slow down…the money mongers left with it.”

Fire at Mooringsport, Louisiana, 1913

Businesses reliant on those wages left as well. After revenues in Jennings—the site of Louisiana’s first oil well—declined, a country club and opera house catering to oilmen promptly shut. Hotels housing all the newcomers to the oil patch could no longer fill their rooms. Even the women of Reno Hill moved on once the market changed. Just as oilmen crisscrossed from boomtown to boomtown along the Sabine Uplift, female sex workers migrated along their own parallel network, an “interrelated community of vice” as one author called it.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t positive lessons to glean from Louisiana’s early boom days. The most obvious advice is for local governments to save while the oil is profitable—Norway is a great example of this virtue. Having a diverse local economy is another. In 1901, Jennings became the first zone of modern oil production in Louisiana, only to peak just five years later. But local jobs in rice production and transportation pre-existed the oil boom—and continued to keep many families afloat after the bust. Today, Jennings is a handsome, small town of 10,000. In contrast, Trees City, once a testament to the sturdy prosperity that oil created, gradually reverted back to a remote patch of bayou. Some privately owned pumpjacks still dot the landscape today, but only produce a fraction of the heady boom days. By remaining an oil-centered economy, Trees City had no way of coping when the bust came.

Trees City Bank, c. 1910

Many present day boomtowns have applied such lessons. Karnes City, Texas has actively prohibited bars and “man camps” from its city limits, instead channeling oil revenues into local schools, a new city hall, and a convention center that will hopefully pay long term dividends. Even the wild and rowdy Williston has begun investing in sewer improvements, a new recreation center and limiting permits for the construction of new “man camps.” Nonetheless, these boomtowns will still feel the pinch of fewer jobs, smaller government coffers and higher unemployment. That much is probably unavoidable.

Welcome sign to Karnes City, Texas. Via Wikimedia Commons.

And when the bust does come, perhaps Williston, Karnes City, and other oil patch communities will direct their energies towards reinvesting in their natural landscape. Years of breakneck growth in oil production have severely impacted local environments: farmland made fallow from contaminated wastewater; toxic oil spills; higher prevalence of earthquakes. And this is to say nothing of the global issues that accompany pumping yet more carbon into the atmosphere. I don’t want to be naïve—restoring grasslands and watersheds won’t sustain the 2.8% unemployment that North Dakota has been enjoying (the lowest in America). But it might provide a well-needed respite from the excesses—both social and environmental—that tend to follow in the wake of America’s oil boomtowns.

Bull Bayou Field, 1920

An oil drilling rig is seen in an aerial view in the early morning hours of July 30, 2013, North Dakota. (Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images)

Recent Posts