To the Editors:
I would like to comment on several errors and misinterpretations in Professor Womack’s long review of Four Men (NYR, August 4). Like so many reviewers in the NYR, Womack devoted much space to subjects other than the book being reviewed, in this case to Oscar Lewis’s career in anthropology and to a very minor aspect of his life’s work, namely the concept of the “culture of poverty.” This would be all very well except for the fact that the “culture of poverty” has already been chewed up and spat out by many critics and Womack has nothing new to offer. It also becomes clear that the web of words being spun about Oscar is not to give the reader straightforward background material or even to present an honest critique of his work but to carefully build up Oscar in such a way as to make it easy to knock him down.
Womack declares, for example, that the “culture of poverty” concept was Oscar’s most impressive “recent notion” (which Oscar would certainly have denied), then he proceeds to “prove” that it is not. In another place, Womack incorrectly interpreted Oscar’s use of the term “redistributing wealth” to be synonymous with “ending poverty”—which cannot be true of countries with little wealth to distribute—then Womack used this error to accuse Oscar of circular thinking. It also seems unfair for Womack to admit on the one hand that Oscar did not blame the poor for their poverty, and then to criticize him because others did blame the poor. Oscar may rightly be held responsible, as Womack does, for the looseness in the concept of the “culture of poverty” that made it so liable to misinterpretation and misuse by “the bourgeois public and by politicians,” but it is not right to ascribe to him their same prejudices.
In discussing Project Cuba, Womack combined my account with that of “other reliable sources” who differ from me on some questions. Without mentioning any of these questions, Womack wrote to me before his review was published, asking me if there was anything I would like to add to the Foreword. I declined the open-ended invitation and now I wonder why he didn’t take that opportunity to ask me to comment on the accusations raised by his informants.
Womack doesn’t state who his informants were but they sound as though they might be one or more of the non-Cuban field staff whom Oscar had fired, or perhaps they were their friends, or friends of their friends. Oscar was admittedly a hard taskmaster and difficult for some people to work with and I can understand students and assistants becoming disgruntled, but I am nonplussed that any of them could say that he kept his non-Cuban staff separate from the “natives” and from the Cuban trainees. The non-Cuban staff was there to learn about Cuba from Cubans and it would hardly make sense to keep them isolated, nor would it have been possible to do so. Why Professor Womack accepts such information uncritically I do not know.
As to the relations between the Cuban and non-Cuban staff members, the latter’s residence and the project office were in adjacent buildings and there was constant interchange between them. Whatever their personal relations with each other were, the Cubans and non-Cubans saw each other professionally and socially every day, those doing field work attended the same training sessions, the entire staff participated in parties, went to the beach together, did volunteer labor as a group, etc. They did, however, have different living quarters (a requirement of the Cuban government) and different work assignments. For pedagogical purposes and for reasons of rapport with the ex-slum dwellers, Oscar assigned the Cuban students to work in the Bolívar and Buena Ventura housing developments. Some North American staff members worked with the Cuban staff and at least two of the Cubans worked with informants in other sections of Havana. In any case, it is absurd and somewhat paranoid to think that work assignments were made for the express purpose of keeping anyone apart from anyone else.
In reference to Oscar’s treatment of the Cuban students, I do not doubt that they had never worked as long and hard or as meticulously as they did on Project Cuba, doing and re-doing their surveys and interviews until Oscar found them methodologically acceptable. Undeniably he was impatient and demanding but if in his conscientiousness and frustration he “made them pay in pride,” a judgment Womack accepts from a second-or third-hand source, I can only hope that the Cuban students who are now supervising research projects of their own or holding responsible jobs in Cuba think it was worth it.
Womack is in error in stating that Oscar sought the “low-down on the love lives” of Cuban leaders and I resent the insinuation that he was interested in such information for political or “spooky” reasons. Womack doesn’t give his source for this one either, but at least he is consistent in believing the worst about Oscar. Actually, Oscar was worried when in interviewing the X family, there came to light something along those lines in connection with one (please note there was only one) highly placed government official. It was the kind of explosive material we occasionally stumbled upon, but it was a legitimate part of the life experience of the informant and was accepted as such.
Womack stated that Lewis suspended Project Cuba for the summer of 1970 because he “figured he had enough on Havana.” (What a talent Womack has for giving a phrase a sinister sound!) The fact is that the work was to be continued by the staff and we planned to return to Cuba at the end of the summer for another year and a half to do the rural study, as well as to continue the work in Havana. The research in the more “integrated” Bolívar housing development was incomplete, not because “success stories bored” Oscar (what an idea!) but because the work in Buena Ventura had taken so long. Contrary to Womack’s theory about Oscar’s interest level, Oscar very much wanted to present a contrast to Buena Ventura where the revolutionary mass organizations were almost non-functioning. It was one of his big disappointments that he could not finish the Bolívar study. The implication that Oscar preferred “fine turmoil” to “success stories” and that he allowed it to influence his research is another example of the not-so-subtle technique Womack uses to attack Oscar’s character.
Turning to a discussion of the book itself, Womack is less polemical. But almost immediately he made a careless error in stating that Ruth Lewis wrote Four Men and Four Women, and several times he refers to “Ruth Lewis’s stories,” which they in no sense are. As stated in the Foreword, the life stories in all three volumes of the series were edited and prepared by Ruth Lewis and Susan Rigdon, with the assistance of various editors who did preliminary editing. Susan Rigdon wrote all three of the introductions, as well as an Afterword and two appendices on rationing and on family budgets for the final volume which is to appear in January. Susan has also done the difficult job of footnoting, and of up-dating them as time went on. The Afterword also brings the material up-to-date by discussing developments in Cuba since 1970 when the research ended. In the light of this, I cannot agree with Womack that it is misleading to say the books are about contemporary Cuba and that only journalists can do contemporary studies on revolutions. The dictionary meaning of “contemporary” is not half so narrow as Womack’s.
Our material does not agree with Womack’s view that people in the “culture of poverty” live in fits and starts between poverty and periods of relative affluence. Here he is confusing the poor working class with those on the very bottom rung of poverty, who live a grinding, hand-to-mouth existence all their lives. Nor do I agree that it is “specious” to apply ethnographic methods such as inventories or recorded “days” to slum-dwellers. How else would people like Womack be able to say “the urban poor” changed their “inventories” from week to week, and rarely had a “typical” day? And if Womack sees a cultural and psychological resemblance between the very rich or a Harvard Professor and a man like Nicolás Salazar, who grew up in miserable poverty, he is optimistic indeed, or very near-sighted. The problem of Womack’s vision also comes up when he compares Oscar’s writings on the poor with Moynihan rather than Mayhew, again taking the “culture of poverty” concept to be Oscar’s main contribution rather than his extensive work with recording the lives of slum-dwellers.
There are other points of disagreement but I will make just one final complaint about one more of Womack’s statements. He says, in his strangely negative way, that our book is a “commodity” that “comes in a package shrewdly (and falsely) designed for the intellectual market.” If he had a more positive, cheerful frame of mind he might as easily have said the book is well-designed to appeal to discriminating readers and to sell. This it is, and I hope it does, Mr. Womack.
Ruth M. Lewis
Department of Anthropology
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Urbana, Illinois
To the Editors:
In her Foreword to Four Men Ruth Lewis wrote that the “general purpose of our project in Cuba was to study the impact of a revolution-in-progress upon the daily lives of individuals and families representing different socioeconomic levels in both rural and urban settings…. We also hoped to observe the mass organizations and revolutionary institutions as they functioned at the local level and to evaluate, albeit tentatively, the degree of success or failure in achieving some of the goals of the Revolution.” The proposal also called for “a special study of slum families….” This study, as is clearly stated in the Foreword, is not a part of this series but will appear separately at a later date.
John Womack did not want to review Four Men as it stands, or as one volume in a series whose stated purpose was quite different from what he wanted it to be. Womack wanted to write a critique of the culture of poverty and of Oscar Lewis, and he has reviewed the book with that purpose—but not ours—in mind….
The culture of poverty “notion” is an easy target for criticism; the name alone presents a labyrinth of definitional problems. When first used in Five Families (Basic Books, 1959), culture of poverty was little more than an evocative phrase for characterizing the lifestyles of certain poor people. But when the concept was picked up by others and when Oscar was asked to elaborate on it, unfortunately he tried, and the result was, as Womack says, that he just kept repeating himself. The primary reason for this was that, while Oscar was eager to maintain his association with so popular a concept, he was not willing to apply it in his research. His original idea about the existence of a subculture was an impressionistic statement about what he thought, after years of working among the poor, was true and what he believed would be confirmed when he did a systematic analysis of his material. This he never did, nor did he redesign his field work to test the concept.
