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FREEDOMWAYS           THIRD QUARTER 1969

In his first essay, "Cuba Libre," written in 1960, Jones reveals his previous political naiveté and subsequent introduction into the radical ideology of the Cuban and all revolutions. In Cuba, he began to understand the hypocrisy of the U.S. in its condemning the violence of the Cuban liberation (revolution), yet thinking little of the real, immoral, repugnant violence she carried out in dropping A Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He began to realize all the lies that have been directed against the American people by the U.S. ruling class in the name of "democracy." Jones remembers: 

The idea of "a revolution" had been foreign to me. It was one of those inconceivably "romantic" and/or hopeless ideas that we Norteamericanos have been taught since public school to hold up to the cold light of "reason." That reason being whatever repugnant lie our usurious "ruling class" had paid their journalists to disseminate...That thin crust of lie we cannot even detect in our own thinking. The rotting of the mind which had enabled us to think about Hiroshima as if someone else had done it, or to believe vaguely that the "counter-revolution" in Guatemala was an "internal affair." 

It is interesting to note that in this essay, Jones identifies himself as an American and not as a black American. He sees no salvation for him as an American or the country as America. He considers himself one who will dissipate like the entire nation; for he writes: 

It is much too late. We are an old people already. Even the vitality of our art is like bright flowers growing up through a rotten carcass.8

A year later, in his "Letter to Jules Feiffer," Jones condemns the liberal Village Voice political cartoonist for urging "moderation" in the civil rights struggle. He beckons Feiffer to realize that with the majority of people around the world, their problems have little to do with freedom of the press or any other political guarantees. That rather, their problems center around getting enough to eat and all the other basic necessities of surviving that the middle-class American doesn't even question. And "no amount of thin-willed, middle-headed talk about moderation is going to change it." In addressing himself to the matter of "reverse-racism," Jones tells Feiffer that: "Afro-Americans (Negroes, spades, shades, boots, woogies, 

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Transcription Notes:
---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-15 11:13:43 ---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-15 13:29:25 ---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-15 13:37:53 the word "nativeté" was edited to include the e acute diacritic (é)