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Origin Stories of Revolution, Exorcisms of the Past
Many Cubans know it. Thousands of visitors to the island have seen it too. Sold daily in Havana curio markets in countless imitation copies, the 1959 Album de la RevoluciĂłn Cubana (Album of the Cuban Revolution) offers the perfect souvenir of radical kitsch. As comic-book supermen, Fidel Castro and militants of his 26th of July Movement appear fit for childâs play, members of a toy army dressed in toy fatigues. For the tourist, the drawings reinforce an image of Cuban history as an improbable epic that is simultaneously quaint. The storyline seems inspiring but almost make-believe.
Yet, despite its status as a common travelerâs collectible today, the original Album de la RevoluciĂłn Cubana is a remarkable historical document.1 Partnering with a private sweets company in mid-1959 (the CompañĂa Industrial Empacadora de Dulces), writers at the Havana-based Revista CinegrĂĄfico S.A. (or the Cinematic Graphics Review Corporation) crafted a slim publication of thirty-plus pages with 268 blank spaces. Those spaces, in turn, were meant to be filled by cartoon cards depicting episodes of revolutionary resistance, which could only be aquired by purchasing cans of Felices brand jams. So popular were these postalitas as collectorsâ items that Zig-zag, the islandâs leading humor newspaper, dedicated a two-page cartoon spread to poking fun at the obsession.2 History sold well in the heady days of 1959, even as Cubans threw themselves headlong into the promise of a bold new future. Emblazoned on the albumâs interior title page, the slogan âConsume Cuban Productsâ advertised a brief, and today largely forgotten, juncture when private capital, middle-class consumers, and the incipient revolutionary government worked as a team.3
But if the storyboard squares hint at how quickly insurgent legend seeped into island societyâs every pore, the particular fable they told reveals much about the changing shape of Cubansâ interpretations of their past over time. On the one hand, the album manifested the power of a revolutionary movement whose guerrilla leaders and student allies had quickly become subjects of popular mythology. On the other, while the adventure-tale quality of Fidel Castroâs quest lay at the heart of this story of national self, the album also contained numerous features that would sit uncomfortably with dominant renditions of the Revolutionâs emergence in years to come. Secondary and later overlooked anti-Batista movements received legitimizing coverage in its pages. Cubaâs traditional communist partyâsoon among the primary factions competing for revolutionary political powerâwas nowhere to be found. Most striking of all was the mixture of faces in the bookâs concluding pantheon of heroes. As early as a few months after the albumâs publication, several of the men pictured would begin falling afoul of the Revolution as it radicalized, finding themselves imprisoned or making their way to exile to conspire. One of the earliest, most familiar representations of the Revolutionâs insurgent history, therefore, quickly became politically incorrect. Excised from official narratives thereafter, a handful of individuals in the bookâs pages would see their contributions to Batistaâs defeat discounted or denied.
Figure 1.1. Cover of Album de la RevoluciĂłn Cubana, 1952â1959 (Havana: Revista CinegrĂĄfico, S.A., 1959). Casanas Family Collection, Special Collections and University Archives, Florida International University Libraries, Miami, FL. Image reproduction courtesy of University of Florida Digital Collections and Digital Library of the Caribbean, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL.
The Album de la RevoluciĂłn Cubana provides a useful entry point, if not metaphor, for this chapterâs central concerns. Scholars have long emphasized the extraordinary sense of historic messianism that attended Fidel Castroâs rise to power. For most Cubans, this revolutionâFidelâs revolutionârepresented the awaited moral realization not just of the anti-Batista struggle, but of the nationâs long-frustrated dreams.4 Still, if the Cuban Revolution came to power with its story already partially written, competing claims over revolutionary bona fides, and for the historical legitimacy to speak in the Revolutionâs name, were still taking shape. While Cubaâs previously unsatisfied national aspirations finally seemed on the threshold of fulfillment, the anti-Batista front had been a moving target comprised of multiple, often-fractious organizations.5 Disparate groups embraced common hopes for national dignity and reform, but personality politics, past strategic rivalries, and ideological fractures within and between factions had the potential to drive them apart.
A close look, then, at rare press and other sources from the Revolutionâs first eighteen months offers a contradictory, and until now underhistoricized, picture of memory mobilization alongside simmering retrospective quarrels. This chapter also reveals the ways the Cuban memory wars did not simply proceed along a predetermined, polarized path, but instead involved multiple political actors engaged in active, complex wars of position. Vast swaths of Cuban society became determined to purge the human and institutional ills of their nationâs past. Yet political scores also remained unsettled, and the depth of the economic problems in Cubaâs history requiring transformation, not to mention the best way to address them, remained a source of disagreement. Contending visions of the Revolutionâs future thus quickly turned on not just differing understandings of the projectâs social and political roots but also on various individualsâ and groupsâ assertions of what they had or had not done in its service. As the rubber hit the road, arguments about the Revolutionâs direction were intimately related to confrontations over legacies, compromises, and decisions made before its âtriumph.â These battles persisted alongside unprecedented expressions of nationalist exuberance and faith.
Fidel Castro watched these disputes from a privileged position. As the unquestioned leader of revolutionary forces (even before having formally occupied a government post), his support or disapproval could take contending actors in and out of the political cold. At the same time, for most of 1959 Castro sought to appear above the fray, constructing an ostensibly nonsectarian narrative of Cuban history as deferred deliverance, one that naturally privileged his own movementâs leadership and encouraged Cubans to get on board or get out of the way. This does not mean, however, that his was the only relevant voice. This chapter thus decenters Fidel Castroâs words and appearances, covered so well by other historians, to foreground political actors and press outlets more commonly overlooked. By late 1959 and 1960, however, Castroâs insistence that anticommunism itself represented the historical blight that the Revolution most needed to exorcise would tilt the partisan memory balance in clear, influential ways.
Looking back, another dynamic stands out from these early counterpoints of retrospective argument and agitationâone that further complicates the work of interpreting their meaning. Namely, in the course of staking out their credentials, actors in and out of the new government said and wrote things that later they would find more convenient to forget. Whether Fidel Castroâs vague pledges to convene elections, or more moderate anti-Batista voicesâ defense of early revolutionary tribunals (subsequently remembered by many as the first sign of the Revolutionâs antidemocratic impulses), the domestic press overflowed with declarations that had the potential to embarrass once the ideological die were cast. The exercise in this chapter, thenâlike in this book as a wholeâbecomes double: to track the multiple origin stories and claims to historical standing that competed for credibility during the Revolutionâs tumultuous first eighteen months or so, while also recovering some of the positions, players, and assertions that a more polarized climate beginning in 1960 would conspire to erase.
As Cubaâs domestic memory battles increasingly collided with the international politics of the Cold War, mounting bilateral tensions with Washington deflected Cubansâ retrospective fissures away from internal matters toward the longer legacies of U.S.-Cuban affairs. Rivalries for historical position along factional lines from the Revolutionâs first stage took a back seat to an anti-imperialist dream. Thereafter, privileged narrators in the media and the emerging state would recast what had been a deeply conflicted process of political and economic transformation into a groundswell in favor of unitary change. In this new, radicalized scenario, which led to the declaration of the Revolutionâs âsocialistâ character, ideological labels or a nuanced understanding of Cubaâs recent history mattered less than patriotic belief.
âAhora sĂ âŠâ: Historical Communion and Rupture
âThis time, the Revolution is for real.â So proclaimed Fidel Castro upon his triumphal entrance into the city of Santiago de Cuba on January 1, 1959. Euphoria had already gripped the islandâs streets as news spread the night before that Fulgencio Batista had fled. As the undisputed âmaximum leaderâ of the Revolutionâs words made clear, much more was at stake than a mere political turnover. âIt will not be like in [the war of 18]95,â Castro declared,
when the Americans came and made themselves the owners of this place (Applause). ⊠It will not be like in [19]33, when just as people began to believe that a revolution was being made, Mr. Batista came along and betrayed the revolution, taking over power and installing a dictatorship for eleven years. It will not be like in [19]44, the year in which the crowds got fired up, believing that finally the people were coming to power, when really those who came to power were thieves. Neither thieves, nor traitors, nor interventionists! This time, the Revolution is for real.6
No matter how often these lines have been quoted, the clarity and reach of the Revolutionâs foundational myth continue to be extraordinary. As we saw in the introduction, Cuban politics had been haunted for decades by what felt to many like an âunfinished history.â7 Now, Cubans across the moderate-to-left side of the political spectrumâincluding some who later became Fidel Castroâs enemiesâunderstood the movementâs victory as the consummation of a longer quest. âThe [national] emancipation struggle,â wrote Mario Llerena, former chairman of the 26th of July Movementâs New York chapter and future anti-Castro exile, âcan be conceived as a continuous process, moving toward one goal, as much as it seems to present itself in different chapters or eras.â8 âThe Cuban Revolution,â agreed editors at the progressive but anticommunist Prensa Libre, âis one, only one, [and it] began at the dawn of the last century and it grew and perfected itself and took shape and authority and victory over the course of space and time, until arriving at our days.â These statements reflect the wide berth of the anti-Batista coalition at the start of 1959. Still, it is remarkable just how much the early prorevolutionary rhetoric of many who eventually found themselves in Fidel Castroâs crosshairs prefigured and echoed the words of the comandante (or commander, one of Castroâs many titles).9
After half a century of political turmoil, most Cubans were more eager than ever to end cycles of repeated disappointment to which they previously felt condemned. With respect to the politics of historical memory, however, such expectations presented the emergent political leadership with a thorny challenge. On the one hand, new officials needed to position their government as the continuation and outgrowth of nationalist struggles that had come before it. On the other, spokespeople for the nationâs new political project also had to differentiate their course, making clear that past mistakes would not be repeated. The first months of the Cuban Revolution in power thus bore witness to ubiquitous displays of historical communion and exorcismâceremonies headline-grabbing and mundane, all to ârender the revolution as vindication of the past and the past as validation of the revolution,â as the historian Louis A. PĂ©rez Jr. has written evocatively.10
Perhaps more skepticism was warranted. Morality, or the pursuit of moral redemptionânot Marxismâhad long functioned as the dominant idiom of Cuban political life. It was in this spirit that many believed the time had finally come to break with what sociologist Nelson P. ValdĂ©s later called the âidentical,â tragic âscriptâ of disillusionmentâregardless of ideologyâthat had tended to repeat itself in island affairs to that point.11 Yet what historian MarĂa del Pilar DĂaz Castañón has labeled the ahora sĂ or ânow, finallyâ impulse in Cuban political psychologyâthe idea, or hope, that Cubaâs moment had arrived once and for allâalready had an âancientâ and clearly discouraging track record in the islandâs history.12 After failing in his first attempt to start an anti-Batista insurrection at the Moncada Barracks of Santiago de Cuba in 1953, Fidel Castro confidently declared, âLa historia me absolverĂĄâ (âHistory will absolve meâ) at his subsequent trial.13 But, as writer Virgilio Piñera wondered âin silenceâ just two weeks after the rebel victory six years later, âThis time now, will it be like other times past?â14 Cubaâs âmyth of subjunctive possibilityâ cried out to finally come to fruition, but reality could once again disappoint.15
For most of 1959, those holding such doubts were few and far between. Popular mobilizations and rallies across the island, starting with Fidel Castroâs seven-day âCaravan of Libertyâ from Santiago to Havana, coalesced a sense of national optimism as never before. Photographs of the spontaneous celebrations greeting his and other rebelsâ arrivals in town after townâtaken by unofficial and soon quasi-official photographers of the Revolution alikeâquickly spread across the pages of the press, becoming iconic parts of an emergent collective visual memory of the Revolution in their own right.16 âWhen a people learns and knows,â wrote a Dr. Pascual B. Marcos Vegueri that September, echoing the sentiments of the majority, âall that the Cuban people have learned and know ⊠conscious of and justly enthralled with its destiny ⊠that people rejects with intelligence, energy, and courage, any pretension of regressing to its iniquitous, miserable, and despicable past.â17 The uniqueness of this moment in Cubaâs history for most seeme...