Cien Años de Lucha : Narratives of Cuba’s Revolutionary History

“Revolution means . . . changing everything that must be changed,” said Fidel Castro on May 1, 2000. This slogan has become the watchword for the far-reaching changes under way since 2008, when Raúl Castro succeeded Fidel as president. ¹ In 2011 Cuba embarked upon a fundamental reorganization of the economy as outlined in the Guidelines of the Economic and Social Policy of the Party and the Revolution adopted at the Sixth Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC, 2011). Then on December 17, 2014, President Castro and President Barack Obama stunned the world by announcing their agreement to begin normalizing U.S.-Cuban relations, setting aside half a century of hostility.

Although only one of the books reviewed here deals directly with this torrent of change, all cast light on the historical trajectory that brought Cuba to this contemporary conjuncture. Lamrani and Morais chronicle some of the final battles of the cold war in the Caribbean— Lamrani attacking what he sees as the ideological war against the revolution and Morais narrating the inside story of the Cuban Five. Pérez surveys the long arc of Cuban history to understand how the idea of Cuban nationhood set the stage for revolution, and Guerra dissects the revolution’s own “grand narrative” to understand how an insurrection against a hated dictator became a socialist revolution that changed everything. Martínez-Fernández offers a more traditional take on the history of the revolution, citing Cuba’s penchant for caudillos and Castro’s Machiavellianism to explain its survival in the face of U.S. hostility. Ritter and Henken examine the political economy of the revolution’s uneasy relationship with small business, focusing mainly on the changes set in motion by Raúl Castro’s (2014) determination to restructure the economy “in order to build a prosperous and sustainable socialism.”

When a book begins with a dedication to Robespierre, you know it is not going to be dispassionate. Salim Lamrani’s Cuba, the Media, and the Challenge of Impartiality presents itself as a critique of media bias against Cuba in the Spanish daily El País. Lamrani opens with a convincing argument that El País’s editorial policy toward Cuba shifted dramatically from sympathy in 1997 to withering criticism by 2007. Rather than explain the change or conduct a systematic review of the paper’s reporting, however, he extracts sentences here and there from stories on Cuba to use as foils. His real aim is to present a lawyer’s brief for the revolution, cataloguing its accomplishments in health care, education, international assistance, and foreign policy. He defends it against what he regards as unjust and hypocritical attacks not just by El País but by the United States, the European Union, and Cuban dissidents. His narrative is not so much inaccurate as it is one-sided. When lauding and documenting Cuba’s accomplishments, he glosses over shortcomings that even the Cuban government candidly acknowledges, especially on the economic front. Raúl Castro is far more critical of Cuban reality than Lamrani.

In The Last Soldiers of the Cold War, the Brazilian journalist Fernando Morais recounts the story of the Cuban Five—intelligence agents dispatched to Miami in the 1990s to infiltrate exile organizations suspected of financing a wave of bombings in Havana’s tourist hotels. When the FBI broke up the Wasp Network, as the ring of 13 spies was known, five refused to cooperate with the U.S. government, were tried in Miami (in the heated aftermath of the Elián González affair), and were sentenced to long prison terms. With access to Cuban archives, Morais is able to describe in unprecedented detail how the Wasp Network originated and operated. He also weaves together three other stories around the central narrative: the shooting down by the Cuban air force of two small planes piloted by the exile group Brothers to the Rescue (one of the groups the Wasp Network infiltrated); how former CIA operative Luis Posada Carriles recruited young Salvadorans to carry out the hotel bombings; and Havana’s attempt to gain Washington’s cooperation to halt the terrorist attacks.

Although Morais’s book was first published in Portuguese a decade after the Cuban Five were convicted, it stops with the end of their trial. Unfortunately, it does not include the Cuban government’s worldwide campaign to win their release, the hagiography that transformed them into the “Five Heroes” on the island, or the 18 months of secret negotiations between Washington and Havana that finally led to their release—along with the decision by Barack Obama and Raúl Castro to normalize U.S. Cuban relations.

The “updating” of their economic model, as Cubans refer to the changes mandated in 2011 by the Sixth Party Congress, aims to replace the hypercentralized planning system that Cuba adopted from the Soviet Union in the 1970s with a decentralized form of market socialism akin to those in Vietnam and China. It also envisions a robust nonstate sector (private enterprise and cooperatives) as a permanent, legitimate, and significant part of the economy. In Entrepreneurial Cuba: The Changing Policy Landscape, Ritter and Henken build on pioneering work by Jorge Pérez-López (1995) and Phil Peters (2006; 2012) to provide a theoretically sophisticated and comprehensive history of small private businesses in Cuba since 1959: from initial tolerance of them to their eradication in the Revolutionary Offensive of 1968, their temporary revival—allowed only grudgingly by Fidel Castro—during the late 1970s and Special Period, and finally their new legitimacy after 2011. At every step, the authors are careful to situate policies with regard to the private sector within the broader context of the government’s shifting economic strategies, as previously documented in detail by Carmelo Mesa-Lago and Pérez-López (2013): the moral economy of 1960s, Soviet-style pragmatism of 1970s, Rectification in late 1980s, the survival economy of the Special Period in the 1990s, and the post-2011 turn toward market socialism. ²

Running throughout the book is the theme of informality and outright illegality. Even when state policy was intolerant of private business, Cuba had an informal economy in which most people participated as a necessary condition of survival. When the government loosened controls, allowing private entrepreneurs to come in from the cold, many chose to remain in the shadows to avoid burdensome regulations and hefty taxes or from the fear that the next turn of the policy wheel might declare them illegitimate once again.

Although private businesses and nonagricultural cooperatives have gained legitimacy since 2011, most still operate on the margins of the law because the state has yet to provide them with essential infrastructure. Small-business loans are scarce and wholesale markets rare. Supplies are often available only through the black market. As one entrepreneur put it, “Everyone is so accustomed to breaking the law that the law itself has become meaningless” (256). Scattered throughout the book are brief vignettes of individual businesses, the problems they face, and how their owners manage to resolver—find some way around them.

Ritter and Henken are explicit in their verdict on Cuban policy toward the nonstate sector. Its suppression before 2011 stunted economic growth and stimulated illegality. Raúl Castro’s new policy is “significant, but insufficient” (304) because excessive regulations and taxes continue to hamper the nonstate sector’s development. The authors present a long list of needed reforms the upshot of which is to give the private sector much freer rein—recommendations that parallel those of economists like Mesa-Lago and Pérez-López (2013) and Feinberg (2016). Ritter and Henken briefly discuss bureaucratic resistance to the new policy, suggesting that the government and party have yet to leave behind their ideological hostility to private enterprise and markets, along with the inequality they engender and the political risks they pose. Castro himself put the issue starkly in December 1993: “Economists frighten me,” he said. “If they are going to propose something that may be good technically but politically catastrophic, our mission is to stop them” (quoted in Gunn, 1994: 12). Information is scarce on how Cuba’s contemporary leaders judge the political risks of proliferating markets. Ritter and Henken review the theoretical terrain on the political impact of the “second economy” in Eastern Europe before 1989, concluding that the growth of private enterprise contributed significantly to the collapse of European communism. If that is correct, Cuban leaders who want to tread carefully into the land of market socialism are acting rationally even if not optimally from an economic point of view.

It is, however, not inevitable that the growth of a private sector has such destabilizing effects. The theoretical literature that Ritter and Henken review generalizes from the European cases. China and Vietnam suggest an alternative path in which the state can unleash the economic potential of the market and private entrepreneurship without surrendering control over the commanding heights of the economy or endangering political stability. ³ To be sure, greater reliance on markets comes at a price—there are winners and losers. Inequality has been growing in Cuba since the Special Period, and the reforms of the Guidelines have increased it. Cuba’s leaders seem resigned to this as the price of boosting productivity. “Socialism means social justice and equality but equality of rights and opportunities, not salaries,” Raúl told the National Assembly in July 2008 (Castro, 2008). “Equality does not mean egalitarianism.” Yet at the same time, he has repeatedly declared that “the Revolution will not leave any Cuban helpless” and the party will not allow the nonstate sector to produce an accumulation of wealth (Castro, 2011). Inequality may be an unavoidable by-product of markets, but Cuba’s leaders seem determined to prevent it from climbing to the dizzying heights it has reached in China.

“The past is never dead.” wrote William Faulkner. “It’s not even past.” The more so for Cuba, argues Louis A. Pérez Jr. in The Structure of Cuban History: Meaning and Purpose of the Past, an evocative reflection on that history by its preeminent scholar. Pérez guides us on a journey from the mid-nineteenth century to the Special Period in the 1990s, focusing always on the central idea of Cuban nationhood and the reverberations of the past in the present. You cannot fully appreciate the depth and intensity of Cuban nationalism until you read this book. The sacrifices borne by Cubans during the struggle for independence, lasting almost half a century, left indelible marks on the national psyche—on Cubans’ conception of themselves and what it meant to be Cuban. The trials of those years forged a powerful sense of national identity based on egalitarianism, sacrifice for la patria, and the common good.

At the long-anticipated moment of triumph, when the nation stood on the threshold of independence and sovereignty, victory was snatched away by U.S. intervention in 1898. “It seemed as if Cuba had been overtaken by another nation’s history,” Pérez writes (11). There followed half a century of desperate disappointment, of economic, political, and even cultural subordination to the United States. Venial Cuban governments—corrupt, brutal, and ineffective—debased the national heritage, leaving “a yawning moral void . . . a pervasive condition of moral squalor” (135). Every time Cubans tried to do something about it, to reclaim their history, the United States stood in the way, a bastion in defense of the status quo, in the service of U.S. interests (but always believing that what was best for the United States must be best for “uplifting” Cuba, as Lars Schoultz [2009] documents in his history of the bilateral relationship).

For 50 years, Cubans lived with a sense of “interrupted history” (158). They looked to their heroic past—to the sacrifices of José Martí, Antonio Maceo, and Máximo Gómez—to sustain their sense of nationhood, of national dignity, as they endured the humiliations of what Fidel Castro would call the “pseudo-Republic.” When Castro and his 26th of July Movement launched an armed struggle against Fulgencio Batista’s dictatorship, they invoked those heroes of history, claiming their mantle, insisting that the new struggle was a continuation of the struggle for national independence, sovereignty, and dignity begun in 1868—cien años de lucha. They appealed to the Cuban people’s sense of themselves, of their potential, of what they believed Cuba could become—what Cuba would have become had it not been for the United States. The work of the founders remained undone, Castro said time and time again, and members of the new generation—the generation of Moncada– would take up arms, as had their fathers and grandfathers before them, to complete it.

This formulation of the revolution’s purpose resonated deeply with Cuban political culture and Cuban history—a history still very much presente for even the humblest of Cubans. As José Martí said, “The past is the source of the present.” Pérez demonstrates just how deeply the revolution of 1959 was rooted in Cubans’ sense of nationhood and the 100-year quest for national sovereignty. Understanding this is essential for understanding the fervor, the almost euphoric support the revolution enjoyed in its early years—a phenomenon remarked upon though little understood even by the revolution’s enemies.

This same history paved the way for a one-party socialist state. Because the revolution represented the apotheosis of Cuba’s struggle for independence and national sovereignty, to oppose the revolution was to oppose the patria. “True Cubans,” Fidel said, were willing to sacrifice even their lives for the revolution—todo por la patria. “Anything less implied disloyalty,” Pérez notes (80), “or worse, it implied treason.” In this context, U.S. hostility actually affirmed and strengthened the revolutionary narrative of liberation from foreign domination; it “provided the government of the revolution with an enormous fund of political support and enduring moral sustenance.” At the same time, however, it contributed to the revolution’s intolerance by “bring[ing] out some of the most intransigent tendencies of the Cuban leadership” (230).

The egalitarian element in Cubans’ sense of national identity—perhaps originating with the role played by slaves and former slaves in the first two wars of independence—made the 26th of July Movement’s demands for social justice resonate just as deeply. If socialism promised an egalitarian future based on social justice– in the words of José Martí, “With all, for the good of all”—then Cubans were for it. Fidel Castro did not need to import these values from Marx or Lenin; they were already present in Cuba’s own history. The achievements of the revolution’s early years—the redistribution of income from rich to poor, the establishment of free education and universal health care, the promotion of women’s equality, and the end of juridical racial discrimination—made the promise of social justice a reality, cementing the loyalty of poor and working-class Cubans to the revolution.

In 1959, Cubans gloried in the belief that they had finally seized control of their own destiny and redeemed their past, but the future proved not to be so bright as many had imagined. The Special Period after the collapse of the Soviet Union produced terrible suffering and was especially demoralizing. Cubans were willing to sacrifice in the 1960s for a brighter future, but by the 1990s they were tired of endless rationing, inadequate wages, and excuses. If such hardships were the result of Cuba’s controlling its own destiny, what did it say about the Cuban character? What does it say when one of the highest aspirations of Cuban youth is to leave the patria altogether?

Pérez endeavors to end on a positive note, reflecting that the past decade has seen greater tolerance and greater appreciation for the diversity of Cuban experiences—of women, Afro-Cubans, religious believers, even the LGBT community. These may be a harbinger of a new sense of nationhood “less collective” and more “constitutive” (284). The new generations, after all, “had to travel through a different past and were formed by a different history.”

In Visions of Power in Cuba: Revolution, Redemption, and Resistance, 1959-1979, Lillian Guerra engages many of the same themes as Pérez but in the compressed time frame of the revolution’s first decade. Guerra leaves no doubt about her distaste for the way Castro and his communist allies killed hopes for a pluralist democracy after the triumph of the revolution, but she is intent on understanding how they managed to do it while retaining overwhelming popular support.

Castro and the revolution’s other leaders accomplished this feat, Guerra contends, by constructing a “grand narrative of redemption” that reframed Cuban political culture and defeated the “counter-narrative” of social democracy. Like Pérez, Guerra employs discourse analysis, a forensic unearthing of the ideas of the time and how they were expressed. Moreover, the two writers are pursuing the same quarry. Guerra’s “grand narrative of redemption” is the same phenomenon as Pérez’s “master narrative of the nation” (194). The difference is that Guerra sees the narrative as largely a construct of the revolutionary government, whereas Pérez sees the post-1959 era as an expression of Cuban history stretching back a hundred years.

Guerra does a phenomenal job of tracing the battle of ideas across the “discursive terrain” of the 1960s. Drawing on contemporary Cuban newspapers and magazines, films, memoirs, and interviews with surviving participants, she provides one of the best available accounts of the ideological struggles during those formative years. She recounts how the government rid itself of anticommunists like Manuel Urrutia and Huber Matos, tamed the trade unions, demolished the independent press, and promulgated a Manichean dichotomy of “good” Cubans and “bad”—those who were with the revolution and those who were against it. As Fidel wrote to Carlos Franqui (one of the people to whom this book is dedicated), “All criticism is opposition. All opposition is counterrevolutionary” (quoted in Bardach, 2003: 280). But, as Pérez notes (79), the dichotomy of good and bad Cubans originated not with Fidel Castro but with the independence movement in 1895.

The revolution’s “narrative of redemption” promised “prosperity, collective liberation, and classless unity,” as well as independence from U.S. neocolonialism (2), but redemption had a price. National unity and, by implication, a one-party state were portrayed as necessary conditions for surviving U.S. hostility. Guerra, along with Pérez, concludes that Washington’s efforts to overthrow Castro strengthened this narrative and marginalized those who resisted the revolution’s radicalization, but she seems to regard U.S. policy more as an excuse for the revolution’s intolerance than as a cause of it. Guerra repeatedly contrasts how the revolutionary narrative construed events (which she dubs “hyper-reality”—a reality of black-and-white, without nuance) with the views of those who resisted the narrative, especially the gusanos (a term she uses without negative connotation), whose counternarrative she clearly regards as closer to the truth. She recounts how the cultural effervescence of the revolution’s early years gave way to demands for conformity, exemplified by the suppression of the avant-garde film P.M., closure of the literary magazine Lunes de Revolución, critical attacks on filmmaker Guillén Landrián, and the persecution of poet Heberto Padilla.

Guerra implies that Cubans who accepted the revolution’s hyper-real narrative were duped. They awakened from this matrix of illusion only when the distance between the narrative and reality became so vast it could no longer be ignored—first in the 1970s with the failure of the 10-million-ton sugar harvest and then, decisively, during the Special Period. Her account of the deflation of the revolutionary zeal of the 1960s is reminiscent of Marifeli Pérez-Stable’s (1999) analysis of the exhaustion of Fidel Castro’s “mobilization” politics despite the authors’ very different methodologies.

Guerra’s argument that ordinary Cubans were deceived by the revolution’s narrative is reminiscent of earlier efforts to explain Fidel Castro’s popular support by invoking his charismatic authority—personal attributes of strength, courage, and vision reinforced by his legendary oratory. Yet Castro’s charismatic appeal rested upon a more complex foundation than simple personality. He was popular not just for who he was or what he said but for what he did. He not only articulated themes deeply rooted in Cuba’s political culture—a narrative of nationalism and social justice—but pursued those goals aggressively through state policies, as Nelson Valdes (2008) has explained. As a result, in that first decade of the revolution, a majority of Cubans were better off than they had been before 1959—both economically and as proud citizens of a finally independent nation. That material reality is indispensable for understanding the public’s willingness to accept the revolutionary narrative—and the reason the generation that lived through those years remains even today the least critical of its failings.

In Revolutionary Cuba: A History, Luis Martínez-Fernández offers no unique theory of the revolution, its dynamics, or its narratives. Instead he traces “seven threads in the labyrinth” (5–11), themes that wind throughout the book: (1) the idea that there are “many Cubas” divided by class, gender, geography, and exile; (2) the “island on horseback”—a Cuban propensity to “venerate strong military caudillos”; (3) Cuba’s relationship with the United States; (4) the “pendular” swings of economic policy; (5) “the art of triangulation,” referring to Fidel Castro’s skill at playing off adversaries (and even allies) against one another; (6) the “third man,” referring to the parade of people who have at one time or another risen to the apex of the regime behind Fidel and Raúl; and (7) Cuba’s persistent dependence on sugar.

Martínez-Fernández begins by declaring that, despite the negative impact the revolution had on his family, he has tried to write “an honest book” that “applauds the democratic, social justice, and anti-neocolonial aspirations” of those who fought against Batista, “celebrates the idealism and manifold social achievements of the first few years of the revolution, and criticizes the Castros’ imposition of repressive and authoritarian rule” (12). For the most part, he succeeds, especially when discussing economics, social policy, foreign policy, and the Cuban diaspora. As for politics, well, no es fácil. Analyzing Cuban politics, especially decision making within the tight circle of the leadership, is difficult because we know so little about how it really works. Drawing conclusions about whose star is on the rise, whose is fading, and what motives lie behind the decisions emanating from the black box of the Cuban cupola is always a matter of educated guesswork bolstered by a dose of Kremlinology. Analysts are apt to unconsciously fill in factual lacunae with their ideological preconceptions.

Martínez-Fernández’s references to triangulation, caudillism, and the “third man” combine to paint a one-dimensional portrait of Fidel Castro as a man without beliefs other than the acquisition and retention of power. Unanswered is the question: power for what? Castro had a purpose when he launched the near-suicidal attack on Moncada barracks—a purpose that held surprisingly constant over the years: to secure Cuba’s complete independence from the United States and upend Cuba’s unequal social order. The purpose of power was to fulfill what Pérez describes as the mandate of Cuban history. In fact, the shifts in economic policy that Martínez-Fernández (and Ritter and Henken) chronicle demonstrate how stubbornly Castro held on to his distrust of markets and his belief in radical egalitarianism, even after it failed repeatedly to deliver the goods economically.

Clearly, prodigious research went into this book, and most of the time the result is a balanced, nuanced account of the revolution’s turbulent half century. In places, however, Martínez-Fernández could have been more discriminating about the reliability of his sources. He repeats Tad Szulc’s (1986: 528–529) mistaken claim that the U.S. National Security Council decided in March 1959 that Castro had to be removed. ⁴ Actually, senior U.S. officials reached that conclusion informally in June 1959 and President Eisenhower made it official in November (LeoGrande and Kornbluh, 2014: 23–38).

Martínez-Fernández argues that U.S.-Cuban relations deteriorated because of Castro’s “wholesale confiscation of U.S. properties” (55). In fact, the nationalizations followed Washington’s declaration of economic war by cutting the sugar quota in July 1960—four months after Eisenhower approved planning for the Bay of Pigs invasion. Martínez-Fernández twice claims that Aníbal Escalante, the disgraced former leader of the Popular Socialist Party, was a member of the 1965 Central Committee of the newly formed Communist Party of Cuba, though he was not (the membership is listed in “Nueva etapa,” 1965). Later, he writes that the Cubans detained at Guantánamo during the 1994 balsero (rafter) crisis were sent back to Cuba as a result of the 1995 migration accord. In fact, they were paroled into the United States (U.S. Department of State, 1995). He also misconstrues the “wet foot/dry foot” policy adopted by the Clinton administration, writing that Cubans reaching U.S. territory (“dry foot”) had to claim asylum and prove a well-founded fear of persecution in order to be admitted. They did not; Cubans reaching the United States were (and still are) routinely paroled directly into the community without having to make an asylum claim (Wasem, 2006).

Martínez-Fernández also tends to give undeserved credence to reports and innuendos that Castro was behind the death and disappearance of a long list of potential rivals and adversaries: José Antonio Echeverría (32), Frank País (33), Camilo Cienfuegos (95), Che Guevara (100), Arnaldo Ochoa (175), José Abrantes (176), and John F. Kennedy (111). While these reports are always cited with a caveat (since there is, in fact, scant evidence to back them up), their repetition is not without effect. By contrast, when reporting that Luis Posada Carriles implicated the Cuban American National Foundation in the financing of his bombings of Cuban tourist hotels in 1997, Martínez-Fernández is quick to add, “a charge that has never been substantiated” (195).

The Ochoa case is illustrative of the problem. Martínez-Fernández argues that General Ochoa was a popular political figure who leaned toward Gorbachev-style perestroika and therefore “constituted a threat to the Castro brothers” (175). The arrest for drug trafficking of Ochoa and his co-conspirators in the Ministry of the Interior is labeled a “purge” with political motives, and Martínez-Fernández implies that it was actually the Castros who ordered the drug trafficking operation for which Ochoa was convicted and executed. This argument just does not make sense. If Ochoa was a political threat, there was a simple solution that Castro had used many times before—“the pajama game” (a.k.a. forced retirement). Instead, just before the conspiracy was uncovered, Ochoa was given command of the Western Army—one of the most important commands in the armed forces. Moreover, when the conspirators were arrested, authorities found the cash they got for aiding the Colombian traffickers stashed in the walls of their houses—not what one would expect if the whole operation had been officially sanctioned. In support of the idea that Ochoa was a serious rival to Castro, Martínez-Fernández repeats reports that graffiti reading “8-A” (a phonetic analog of Ochoa’s name) appeared around Havana. At the time, the U.S. Interests Section, wanting to gauge Ochoa’s popular support, sent a diplomat out to look for the graffiti. Upon returning at day’s end, he reported just one sighting of 8-A—over a door, right next to 8-B.

Despite its shortcomings, Martínez-Fernández’s history shares broad themes in common with those of Pérez and Guerra: that the early years of the revolution were marked by “heroic idealism” (46); that popular support for the regime was reinforced by policies that benefited much of the population (52); and that U.S. hostility proved counterproductive, enflaming Cuban nationalism (98). All three see the Special Period as not only a profound economic hardship but a profound ideological crisis as well—a turning point in the relationship between the state and the people (a point that the Cuban writer Rafael Hernández [2010] has eloquently made as well). For Guerra, it was the final blow to the revolution’s “narrative of redemption” after the disillusionment of the 10-million-ton harvest in 1970. For Pérez, it was a shock to Cubans’ sense of themselves and the ability of national sovereignty to yield a better life. For Martínez-Fernández, it was proof that Cuba had never really won its sovereignty at all but merely traded dependence on the United States for dependence on the Soviet Union—with disastrous consequences.

Finally, each concludes with the hope that as los históricos in Havana and their exilío contemporaries in Miami pass from the scene, a new generation will write a new chapter of Cuban history—that they will change all that needs to be changed, reconciling the many different Cubas, finding a relationship of mutual respect with the United States, and building the patria that José Martí envisioned: “With all, for the good of all.”