Jonah Raskin : Maverick Judge Reichbach Offers Verdict on Cuba

Judge Gustin Reichbach on the bench. Image from AP.
Rag Blog interview:
Maverick U.S. Judge Gustin Reichbach
offers verdict on Cuba today

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / January 19, 2012

For nearly 14 years, the Honorable Gustin Reichbach has served as a Supreme Court Judge in Brooklyn, New York, where he presides over grim murder trials and sentences defendants found guilty to long prison terms.

He’s one of a kind -- a compassionate judge without peers -- and he presides over a courtroom unlike any other in the nation. Clarence Darrow, Paul Robeson, and Nelson Mandela stare out at defendants, witnesses, and jurors alike. There’s also a poster of Augusto Sandino, the Nicaraguan revolutionary, on the wall, and a photo of an underground coal miner.

You know where Judge Reichbach’s sympathies lie when you walk into his courtroom. I’ve known him since 1967 and have thought of him as a friend ever since. He’s been my lawyer and has represented me in civil matters and he’s been a wise kind of consigliore, too.

Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, in a blue collar family and educated at the State University of New York at Buffalo, he attended Columbia Law School, where I first met him, and where he took part in the protests of 1968, appearing on the cover of Newsweek that year in a photo that depicted confrontational student radicals.

Not surprisingly, the New York Bar Committee on Character and Fitness refused to approve his application to practice law. But bigwig lawyers went to bat for him and after nearly two years the Committee relented. In the early 1970s, he joined the Law Commune in New York and represented Black Panthers and Yippies, such as Abbie Hoffman.

In an article in The New York Times, reporter Chris Hedges noted that Reichbach was a judge in the spirit of Abbie not Julius Hoffman, the federal judge who tried and failed to squelch the antics of Abbie, Jerry, and their co-conspirators at the Chicago Conspiracy Trial.

From 1976 to 1998, when he was in private practice in Manhattan, Reichbach represented tenants in battles with landlords. In his first go-round as a judge, he urged prostitutes, who had been arrested and were on trial, to use prophylactics to prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.

The New York Daily News promptly dubbed him “The Condom Judge.” The label has followed him around for years. More recently, the New York tabloids have called him “soft on crime” and “soft on criminals” because he’s old-fashioned enough to abide by the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution that protects against “unreasonable searches and seizures.”

Occasionally, he’s strayed beyond Brooklyn. In the 1970s, he practiced law in California and in 2003-2004 in Kosovo he presided over the UN-sanctioned war crimes tribunal and sentenced defendants to terms that ranged from 10 to 20 years.

He visited Cuba in December 2011 and in January 2012. I caught up with him soon after he returned to Brooklyn.

Former activist Gustin Reichbach reflects on the 1968 student strike at Colombia University with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now.

Jonah Raskin: Is travel to Cuba easier these days than it was during the dark days of the Cuban Missile Crisis?

Gustin Reichbach: Obama opened up travel for Cuban families, but otherwise hasn't eased the blockade at all. I was an invited guest of the Foreign Ministry and the Association of Jurists and flew from New York to Havana, but most Americans fly from Toronto or Cancun. Cubans think that if Obama is reelected he’ll lift the blockade. They show the same sort of optimism about him that many of us did three years ago.

What was the first thing you saw that really hit you?

Havana appears as a charming colonial town until up-close you see that most of the buildings are falling apart.

Did you feel that you went back in time, say, to the 1950s?

While the old cars provoke 1950's nostalgia, that isn’t the dominant leitmotif. Things are loosening up a bit, but you sense the dynamism is in the small private sector with people turning their homes into restaurants and boarding houses. The only people still imbued with revolutionary zeal are the old, old leaders, not the generation in its 20's.

Would you say Cuba is backward economically and politically?

Cuba is a poor country. Their economy hit rock bottom with the collapse of the USSR. This caused them to open up the economy very slightly, especially in the tourist sector for foreign exchange. As one older, disgruntled pensioner put it: “We have free doctors, but no medicine. We have free education but no books. We have free rent, but no money to fix the crumbling buildings.”

How does it compare to Venezuela which you also visited not long ago?

Venezuela has lots of oil and that makes a huge difference, though how well the oil industry and its revenue is being managed I can't say. Caracas is jammed with cars and gridlock and gas is 25 cents a gallon. In Cuba, gas is expensive. Chavez sends it from Venezuela and Cuba sends him doctors.

But the Cubans still have wonderful music, don’t they?

The music is great and everywhere at all hours. We saw the Buena Vista Social Club our last night in Havana and they were terrific.

What can you tell us about Cuban courts and judges?

The new law permits the ownership and sale of family occupied property so a new body of real estate law will have to be developed.

Is there justice in Cuba?

What did you learn about repression and political prisoners?

People seemed to mock the government more than fear it, but no one thinks it’s a democracy. When I asked a driver who would succeed Raul, he said, "Oh, some old general." The Cuban leaders have not groomed young people to take over after they’re gone.

I’ve heard the food is lousy. Is that accurate?

Food is terrible, though much better in private restaurants than in those run by the state. How they manage to make lobster taste like overcooked chicken breast is quite a trick.

When you talk to “Jose” and “Maria” in the street what do they have to say about their own country?

Jose grew up wanting to help the state develop and recognized that it gave him opportunities that he wouldn't otherwise have had. His daughter is in the States because of the freedom she’ll have to do her own thing.

So, it’s a nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there?

One could easily live in a beach house largely insulated from the daily life of most Cubans.There’s a lot of talk about influence peddling and corruption. Our friends were involved in a car accident and the police seemed to act appropriately, but they talked skeptically about the role connections might play. Law suits as we know them are less necessary, since people have medical coverage for free and they get their salary while disabled.

I’m not disillusioned because I have had few illusions. While a supporter of the Cuban revolution in the 1960s, and a perpetual opponent of the blockade, I start from the premise that no revolution is a success if it needs the same leaders for 50 years. Jesus's picture has been replaced by Che’s. That’s Cuban iconography.

What was the last thing you saw before you left?

The most disappointing thing was to experience how much hustling was going on, from steering to restaurants to selling street cigars. Cubans are curious about the United States. They want to talk with North Americans, but the hustling, which puts many travelers and tourists off-guard, makes it difficult to have genuine contacts with them. Still, despite the barriers, I managed to bridge the gap and to have conversations.

[Jonah Raskin is a frequent contributor to The Rag Blog and the author of The Radical Jack London, Marijuanaland, and For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman. He is a professor at Sonoma State University. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]

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John McMillian : For Manning Marable

Manning Marable. Photo by Mario Tama / Getty Images.

Renowned African-American scholar, Dr. Manning Marable, 60, died April 1 of complications from pneumonia, three days before the publication of his long-awaited biography of Malcolm X, a book he had been working on for the last 15 years.

Marable was founding director of the Department of African American Studies at Columbia University. Since 2002 he had directed Columbia’s Center for Contemporary Black History.

According to National Public Radio, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, “introduces new information that could reshape the widely accepted narrative" of Malcolm's life.

For Manning Marable

By John McMillian / The Rag Blog / April 7, 2011

In hindsight, this is embarrassing to admit, but here goes. When I first met Manning Marable in 1996, at age 26, I was nervous. Partly I was on edge because I was trying to make a big decision: Should I pursue a Ph.D. in African-American history at either Rutgers or Michigan, where I’d been offered full funding? Or, should I go to Columbia (my first choice), with no money upfront, but with some vague possibility of securing a teaching fellowship down the line?

Months before, Manning had already written me to say that if I were admitted to Columbia, he’d be keen to take me on as one of his graduate students. (That was a thrill unto itself!) Nevertheless, I couldn’t help but wonder (and this is the embarrassing part): did he know I was white? And if so, would he have any doubts about my commitment to Black Studies, or my intellectual authority to work in the field?

Keep in mind, by then I’d read virtually all of Manning’s major works, including the earlier, more polemical stuff, like How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, where he declared, “Progressive white Americans must succeed in overturning their own racism.”

No problem there, I chuckled. I’d long made a point of challenging racism in others, and I’ve always tried (to the best of my ability) never to tolerate it in myself. But then, he added this:

“Nothing short of a commitment to racial equality and Black freedom such as that exhibited by the militant white abolitionist John Brown will be sufficient.”

Oh.

There was only one way to gauge Manning’s attitude, and that was to show up at his office. I made the haul all the way from mid-Michigan to New York City in my Chevy pickup truck. At that point in my life, I’d never been anywhere near an Ivy League campus. My first memory of the area around Columbia comes from driving up and down Broadway, Amsterdam Avenue, and perhaps a dozen cross streets in-between, again and again, trying to find a parking space.

As soon as I met Manning, though, all of my anxiety melted away. As anyone who knew him would agree, one of his most striking qualities was his affability. And although I probably would not have said this in print while he was still alive, the plain fact is, he really did look a lot like a teddy bear.

One thing I remember from that day is how vigorously he stressed the fact that he saw himself as both a scholar, and an activist. For him, the two vocations were inseparable. What’s more, he wanted me to know that when he became the founding director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies (IRAAS) a few years earlier, he’d envisioned it as fundamentally a community resource.

And by “community,” he pointed out, “I don’t mean just Columbia, or even Morningside Heights.” He gestured toward the window of his sixth floor office, which afforded views to the north and the east. “We’re not in Morningside Heights. We’re in Harlem!”

To this end, he had a remarkable capacity for making time for virtually anyone who wanted something from him, even including the conspiratorial-minded guy with the rusty stains on his shirt (or was it blood?) who would occasionally show up unannounced at Manning’s door, asking to bend his ear.

Then there was this other fellow: he was never around, except for on the periodic occasions when the Institute would lay out a very nice buffet in honor of some distinguished guest speaker, in which case he would always be there, first in line, testing the capacity of his Styrofoam plates with enormous mounds of chicken wings, mini-quiches, cocktail shrimp, and whatever else. (Okay, I’ll confess: I once watched as Manning observed this guy from the corner of the room in silent disbelief, before finally sighing and rolling his eyes.)

Manning also seemed like one of the hardest workers in all of academia. In the mid-to-late 1990s, you might recall, a contingent of “black public intellectuals” was suddenly gaining more exposure than they’d probably ever dreamed of. After a long period during which black scholars were more likely to toil away in obscurity, with their contributions being slighted or overlooked, now at least a few of them -- through a combination of intelligence, charisma, and moxie -- seemed to be everywhere.

And while some celebrated the new visibility of people like Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Cornel West, and Michael Eric Dyson, others sensed a certain entrepreneurialism in their approach. Sure, they could all talk a very good game, people used to grouse. Hell, put them in range of a microphone, and they’ll talk about anything! But when it came to scholarship, what did they actually do?

That was never quite my own view, but regardless: nobody ever credibly said such a thing about Manning. True, he made TV appearances and gave paid lectures (oh, how he must have loved Black History Month). But he was also an author of god-knows-how-many books and articles, the great bulk of which showcased his immersion in fields as diverse as history, sociology, political science, economics, and even literature.

His new, nearly 600 page opus, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, is already being celebrated as an exhaustively researched tome, one that will completely upend our understanding of that fabled leader.

What an incredible exercise in self-restraint it must have been to keep plugging away on that biography for 15-odd years, all the while sitting on so many explosive revelations. I remember him excitedly making a few vague allusions to the discoveries he was making, way back in the day. Now we all know just what he was onto..

The past few days, I’ve been sad about the fact that I didn’t stay in better touch with Manning in recent years, though I can take some solace from the fact that about six weeks ago, I sent him a warmly inscribed copy of my first monograph. I have so many fond memories from the three-year period that I worked for him, but I’ll always treasure that first meeting the best. After listening to my concerns, putting me at ease, and making me laugh, he said something I did not expect: “I might be able to help you out.”

Five months later, I’d relocated to Manhattan, and I was meeting a considerable portion of my grad school expenses by working as his research assistant. (We collaborated on two books.) Without him, I’m not sure I’d have mustered the courage to go to Columbia, something that later turned out -- without question -- to be one of the great blessings of my life.

And yet whenever I tried to thank Manning for anything -- whether for helping to pay for my education, or for buying me a sandwich (as he sometimes did), I always got the same response. He’d shrug, smile impishly, and say, “Hey, what do you expect? I’m a socialist!”

[John McMillian is Assistant Professor of history at Georgia State University. His most recent book is Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America (Oxford, 2011).] A version of this article was published at The Atlantic.]

Manning Marable. Photo from the New York Daily News.The Rag Blog

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