Cuba's Revolution from Within

THE POLITICS OF HISTORICAL PARADIGMS

JENNIFER L. LAMBE AND MICHAEL J. BUSTAMANTE

"When this year comes to a close," the Cuban writer Virgilio Piñera observed in the newspaper Revolución on November 11, 1959, "what has been written about the Revolution will comprise little more than a novelette, a couple short stories, a dozen poems, and a few hundred articles. No one would downplay the importance of this panoramic production about the Cuban Revolution. Nevertheless, the organic book, the history of the Revolution, has yet to be written."

As Piñera reflected upon "the Revolution" in 1959, he was referring to the anti-Batista struggle that had unfolded before that year of insurgent triumph. Today, in contrast, "the Revolution" generally denotes a historical age that only begins with Batista's flight — for some ongoing and unbroken, for others inconclusive or even terminal. Neither could we categorize what has been written about the 1959 Revolution as a mere "novelette." Sixty years later, that event has received as much attention as any other in recent Latin American history. Moreover, as self-interested academics dependent on the "wheel of revisionism" (per Florencia Mallon), we would be hard-pressed to stand behind Piñera's plea for one "organic" book that might present "the History of the Revolution." Certainly, the Cuban Revolution has not wanted for a constant stream of experts, churning out decades' worth of observations, analyses, and critiques.

Yet in spite of the profusion of work about the era in question — both critical and deferential, serious and superficial — our knowledge of the social, cultural, and political history of revolutionary Cuba remains fragmented and, in many places, underdeveloped. In recent years, the scholarship has gained a fresh vitality, spurred by a more receptive, if still politically constrained climate for researchers on the island, as well as the emergence of a new cohort of senior and junior scholars abroad. Nonetheless, historians continue to be challenged by a dearth of primary sources, the vagaries of archival access, and the broader politicization of the field. "In more than one respect," noted the Havana-based historian Oscar Zanetti in 2010, "the Cuban Revolution has yet to be historicized." Or, as the expatriate intellectual Rafael Rojas put it in 2008, "fifty years is enough time for a historiographical school to emerge, and yet the Cuban Revolution wants for canonical studies." Historical work published since then does not fully address these concerns, even as the 2009 fiftieth anniversary of the Revolution, and now the sixtieth, have brought renewed attention to what has been — and has yet to be — written of its history, particularly on the island.

How can a historiographical school be simultaneously overpopulated and underdeveloped? In this context, what might it mean to write histories of the Cuban Revolution anew? This tension between analytical saturation and historiographical absence stems from the myriad ways in which history itself was central to the revolutionary project. After all, the barbudos not only assumed political power; they also effected, as Louis A. Pérez has written, an "appropriation of history": "Central to the claim of historical authenticity was the proposition of the triumphant revolution as culmination of a process whose antecedents reached deep into the nineteenth century." The Revolution's master narrative (and the exile variations that emerged to counter it) thus yoked the past to its vision for the present, collapsing Cuban history into the teleological arc of an overdetermined future. Official discourse, in turn, helped set the stage for its scholarly counterpoint. For years, researchers have had little choice but to take revolutionary leaders at their word, either to laud or to criticize them. From official claims and statistics, they have often generalized to popular experience more broadly. Those temptations still confront scholars today.

It is this old, often intramural conversation to which more recent critics, including some represented in this volume, have been responding with renewed energy. Taking inspiration from pioneering scholars in the past, commentators across the ideological and geographical landscape have rekindled the call for a historiography that might overcome partisan differences, whatever the obstacles. Without rejecting the imperative to revisit old debates with new evidence in hand, this volume embraces the need to move beyond preexisting polemics — whether questions about the Revolution's success or failure or the root causes of its evolution over time. Nonetheless, it also challenges the idea that analytical synthesis, or apolitical scholarship, is the necessary result. The Revolution from Within: Cuba, 1959–1980 thus meets Piñera's call for an "organic" history of the Revolution with an assertion of plurality and antiteleology — what we might characterize as an essentially historicist spirit. This emphasis on diversity, however, should not be taken for an analytical free-for-all.

What connects all of the essays in this volume is their insistence on a Cubacentric approach to the first two decades of the island's post-1959 history. Decades of scholarly production have brought us sophisticated accounts of the influence of major Cold War power brokers — the United States and the Soviet Union, especially — on Cuba's revolutionary path. While gesturing to the importance of these and other transnational connections,...