Sandra Levinson (Photos: Mary Reinholz)
It was a March night in 1973. Sandra Levinson was working late when a bomb exploded in the inside hall of the Center for Cuban Studies, a leftist non-profit she had co-founded eight months earlier with documentary filmmaker Saul Landau and photojournalist Lee Lockwood. At the time of the blast, CCS was located in a Greenwich Village building on Barrow and West 4th Streets.
Shards of glass sprayed Levinson’s third-floor office. She told me her glasses were broken when a window fell on them. But Levinson, a former reporter for the now defunct Ramparts magazine and a one-time political science instructor at City College of New York, was wearing a heavy poncho and escaped what could have been fatal injuries. The Iowa native believes that the perp was a Cuban exile opposed to the late revolutionary leader Fidel Castro, possibly part of a group of violent extremists.