History is cumulative. One never begins from zero, for every revolutionary experience—including failed ones—contributes to the collective consciousness of a people and serves as the basis for the inauguration of new processes.
Nothing is more central to Cuban revolutionary ideology than a sense of history. The nationalist “Generation of 23” and the anti-Machado forces looked to the Cuban past for inspiration. . . . It is not merely that the Moncada attackers knew and identified with Cuban history, but that they perceived that their actions were in themselves events, events that counted, actions that made history. The attack and aftermath greatly reinforced this self-perception as historical actors.
Cuba has a history, and for that reason Cuba has a revolution.
We believe we are history / Because we know we are history.
History is often what you believe.
On January 1, about 2:15 a.m., Castro returned to the balcony. . . . His mind was already rushing far ahead, and he decided that he didn’t want this moment to be wasted by merely gloating in the defeat of the Batista dictatorship. . . . It was important the people realized all the work, all the Cuban history that had led up to this moment.
Cuba has returned to the future.
The past was a presence everywhere: learned at home and taught in the classroom; eulogized in poetry and celebrated in song; dramatized in film and narrated in fiction; memorialized in the form of monuments and statuary, commemorated on national holidays, and observed on patriotic anniversaries.
But this was also a living history. The past persisted as a presence precisely because it had not fully passed—literally. Not that many years had elapsed between the conclusion of the war for independence in 1898 and the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the republic in 1952. Cubans at mid-century continued to live closely with their history—often in intimate proximity—with surviving mambises very much in their midst. The census of 1953 recorded an estimated 142,000 inhabitants over the age of seventy, a population that included vast numbers of men and women who had participated in and lived through the independentista experience.
Almost everywhere across the island, memory passed for history, or to be more exact, memory served as a representation of history, susceptible always to the passage of time and the changing times, of course, but enduring over time: deeply personal narratives of the men and women who remembered themselves as protagonists in a history of their making. This was remembrance as reverence, memory of the nation in formation passed on by word of mouth, a means by which knowledge of the past passed from one generation to the next. The parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents of the 1950s were the mambises of the nineteenth century, a link to the past in the form of living voices with which successive generations of children came of age in the twentieth century. The historical imagination of the twentieth-century Cuban childhood was nourished within familial intimacy, by way of received memory, as first-person reminiscences and remembrance of heroic deeds and the noble cause of the independentista effort. “My mother kept our Cuban history alive,” María de los Angeles Torres remembered fondly.1 Gladys Marel García-Pérez acquired a “sensibilidad mambisa” from her grandmother. “I learned to be a patriot from my mambisa grandmother,” she reminisced, “who always recounted to me stories of the war of 1895.”2
Narratives of memory developed into one of the principal sources of historical knowledge, offered in the form of testimony and received as a matter of testament, always possessed of the capacity to render the past as something profoundly personal, a way that successive generations of Cubans came to claim direct lineage with their past. This was history structured around retellings. Rodolfo Sotolongo recalled the adult conversations of his childhood: “My father and several other veterans would come to the farm and from time to time sit around to reminisce about the war and how some of them were members of the insurgent cavalry and how they used the machete, which was their favorite weapon.”3 Writer Alicia Hernández de la Barca, the daughter of a colonel in the Liberation Army, recalled that “almost every day at home, during lunchtime, there were always discussions of some episode of our wars for independence.”4 Jorge Domínguez was among the many Cubans who learned history through the memory of a parent: “My father spoke to me a great deal about the War for Independence and Martí.”5 As did Giraldo Mazola Collazo, who remembered his mother “recounting with pride stories of my grandfather who had been a captain in the Liberation Army.”6 Carlos Franqui recalled visits with his grandfather, who “would tell me stories about the wars for independence.”7 Novelist Dora Alonso acknowledged that her writing was influenced by “the histories of the war that my great-uncle, who fought for Cuban independence, recounted to me.”8 The narrator in Alvaro de Villa’s novel El olor de la muerte que viene (1968) recalls “memories of his own childhood, the summer evenings on the old porch of the farmhouse, when his father recounted stories of his struggles in the War for Independence.”9 Lourdes Gil wrote of her “old Cuban family,” through which she “acquired a sense of history, of continuity, as a child, a notion of our presence in the world.” She added: “So I grew up with a particularly loaded cargo—all of that is transmitted in the bosom of an old family, a family with great respect for the life of the country. It was a very strong influence, a sort of initiation rite. It endowed me with a notion of who I was—or, at least, of where I came from.”10
That these were personal reminiscences meant that the aspirations that informed the hopes of a generation contained within their telling deeply emotional content: a people learning history through the lives of loved ones. Vast numbers of young men and women of the republic sat in the presence of their history, privy to the past as a matter of first-person experiences and through which they developed emotional bonds to their history. Two generations of Cubans had come of age between the 1920s and the 1950s with mambises in their midst, as residents in their communities and as members of their own families. Flor Fernández Barrios recalled ninety-eight-year-old Salvador Gutiérrez in Cabaiguán:
The ninety-eight-year-old used to tell stories about the turn-of-the-century war of independence against the Spaniards. In the evenings, we children sat around him with great anticipation, waiting for another colorful tale of the old days. Salvador’s repertoire seemed unlimited, and every night he had a new story for us. . . . I learned more about Cuban history from Salvador Gutiérrez than from any textbook. His stories were filled with anecdotes and vivid images of the people who gave their blood for the freedom of our country and people. . . . The old man’s raspy voice transported us to the battlefields, capturing our attention with imaginative sounds and images: I could hear the old shotguns and the machetes of the Cuban independence fighters, and see the morros and the cañones firing at the enemy. . . . To me, Salvador was the wise old man, the one who remembered the link between the ancestors and the soul of our town.11
These were personal memories, to be sure, subjective and selective, different things remembered differently. But it was also true that these were memories inscribed into an all-encompassing narrative that assumed the form of a history understood as something pending and unfinished. “To remember is not to know what happened, but rather being capable of living it again,” the narrator in Aida Bahr’s short story “Ausencias” comments on the meaning of history.12 The remembered past was indeed relived as a reference point of national origins, something to transport the imagination, of course, but also the means through which history acted to shape the sensibility of Cuban.
Memory served as a means to integrate Cubans in a historically informed conception of nation: a body of historical knowledge disseminated as first-person narratives to celebrate heroic deeds and which in the aggregate fashioned the moral context in which a people came to an understanding of the ways they were bound together as Cubans. Francisco José Moreno recalled a childhood listening to “conversation, references, and arguments . . . always couched in terms of war or its political variants: struggle, strife, confrontation, rebellion, insurrection, revolt, revolution,” and discussions bearing on the “mutilated independence” and “the colonial tutelage of the Platt Amendment.”13 Guillermo García lived his childhood in the remote interior of the Sierra Maestra, without schools, without access to radios, books, and newspapers, where illiteracy was considered normal and isolation was a way of life. But García was fully conversant with the history of the nineteenth-century independentista struggles, a knowledge that included the Ten Years War, in which his grandfather had served in the Liberation Army. “The stories that our parents recounted when my brothers and I were small,” remembered García, “provided a way passing the time.”14 At the other end of the island, Neill Macaulay recalled his experience in the late 1950s with Cubans at the guerrilla front of Pinar del Río: “Although few had gone beyond elementary school, all had absorbed a great deal of Cuban history. They enjoyed telling me about the Cuban War for Independence and the march of the great mulatto general, Antonio Maceo, through Pinar del Río.”15
Many of the men and women who had participated in the nineteenth-century liberation project—in the army, as members of the Provisional Government, or in the patriotic juntas abroad—were among the persons who subsequently filled the ranks of public schoolteachers, a living link to the past for successive generations of schoolchildren. Juan Marinello remembered his elementary schoolteacher, “who very much influenced my formation because he was truly a mambí who had fought in the revolution for independence, . . . a veteran of integrity and profoundly Cuban.”16 Years later, Giraldo Mazola Collazo wrote of his mambí schoolteacher, “who inculcated in me a devotion to the history of our great leaders of the independence wars.”17 Enzo Infante Uribazo remembered being schooled by two aunts: “My aunts had been formed as teachers in the very early Republic, and they still preserved that patriotic aura [halo patriótico] of the struggles of 1868 and 1895. They began to teach at the beginning of the twentieth century, and they transmitted to us all those traditions that were still fresh in their memory.”18 Rita Suárez del Villar, a conspirator during the war for independence, was appointed an elementary schoolteacher in Cienfuegos at the conclusion of the war, and she dedicated herself to the consecration of the memory of the mambises. “I spoke of the glorious deeds of such brave patriots as Antonio Maceo and Panchito Gómez,” she recalled years later, “and what the Pact of Zanjón signified. When I spoke I could see the tears well up in the eyes of the girls. This was all such recent history, that to remember was to be overcome with emotion. Many of the family members of those girls had perished in the effort to win liberty for our Patria.”19
The presence of mambises was a facet of everyday life, celebrated and commemorated across the island in multiple performative acts of tribute and testimonials, on patriotic holidays and historic anniversaries, one more way that remembrance of the past acted to implicate Cubans in the moral of their history in very personal ways. “Remember that when I was born in 1910,” José Juan Arrom recalled his childhood in Mayarí, “the war for independence had ended a mere twelve years earlier. As a result, there were many veterans in Mayarí who had participated in that war.” The death of each veteran provided an occasion for solemn commemoration of the past:
When one died, the coffin was transported across the river . . . en route to the cemetery, brought by a black hearse tied to two horses. The municipal band followed the hearse, playing a funeral march. The band was followed by family members and dignitaries of the town, and they were followed by a squadron of soldiers as an honor guard prepared for a military salute for the deceased veteran. Later all the farmers [campesinos] arrived on horseback, forming two very long single files on each side of the Street. And I, who felt very patriotic, always wished to pay honor to my [deceased] compatriot.20
In the years that followed, Cubans organized a myriad of associations dedicated to remembrance of the wars of independence. These included the National Association of the Veterans of Independence, the National Association of Revolutionary Cuban Emigrés, and the National Association of the Daughters of the Liberators. Veterans organized into provincial associations, and almost every town had a local veterans’ association. In cities and towns across the island, Centros de Veteranos and the Hogares del Veterano—part retirement home, part recreation center, and part museum—developed into sites of living history and the preferred locations to commemorate events of national and local historical significance. Centros and hogares provided a powerful moral presence, fully engaged in the civic life of the community. Distributed across the island, the local centers were themselves organized into the larger National Association of the Veterans of Independence dedicated to “honoring national sentiment and sustaining devotion to the memory of those who gave their lives for the freedom of the Patria.”21 Against a national landscape noteworthy for the squalor of public life, the veterans were increasingly looked upon—Jorge Mañach commented in 1952—“as the only real moral authority that remains to us in the nation.”22
As sites of first-person history, the Centros de Veteranos were visited often by families with small children and by primary-school classes, and they served as centers of local reunions and public gatherings on occasions of patriotic holidays. Tania Quintero recalled one February 24, in 1952, on which as a third grader she visited the local Hogar de Veteranos in El Cerro “to present cigars to the old mambises who were residents in the home.”23 Filmmaker Juan Padrón remembered vividly his childhood in Cárdenas, and he especially recalled the local veterans center: “In Cárdenas there was a Centro de Veteranos, something of a meeting place reunion of the old mambises. As can be imagined, during the 1950s they were of advanced age. But one had to see them so dignified in their humility, recalling their experiences in the war. What I most appreciated were the photographs of the last war for independence and the first years of the twentieth century that were hanging on the walls. On display were the field uniforms, the machetes—in sum, for me an elegant portrait of the men who had taken up arms in the fields of Cuba.”24 Julio Carreras recalled growing up within a family of mambises fully immersed in the memory of the veterans: “My uncles were active in the Consejo de Veteranos. I always overheard conversations there in the Centro de Veteranos that was located on Zulueta Street. . . . I lived within the world of the liberators [dentro del mundo de los libertadores], among the officers of the insurrecto army and the enlisted men.”25
Veterans of the 1895 war for independence (mambises) on the occasion of the centennial of the Ten Years War in 1968. From Cuba (Número Especial) (October 1968).
Cubans all through the first half of the twentieth century lived with and within their history. The past was remembered—relentlessly. The meaning of nationality was itself fashioned largely by way of memory, through remembrance of experience and expectation, deeply personal and individual and forged into a shared historical sensibility. What was personal and individual was transmuted into something national and collective. Memory joined past and present together by way of published memoirs and autobiographies, as reminiscences and recollections, men and women looking back on their lives and recalling themselves in a history of their making: a way through which to bequeath a legacy of agency from one generation to another and in the process shape the knowledge with which children came to an understanding of the meaning of their past. These were the conventions of a culture given to remembrance, enacted as canons in discharge of oral traditions, within kinship systems and across generations, between teachers and students, among friends and families. Memory—selective as it indeed often was—“worked” powerfully to inform the values and influence the dispositions of successive generations of Cubans, a way to carry the past forward into the future in deeply personal terms.
The remembered past also recalled thwarted aspirations and dashed hopes, which meant too that twentieth-century sensibilities were eminently susceptible to the purpose that informed the Cuban understanding of the past. Cubans fixed on the decisive moments and the defining deeds from which the idea of nation took form, a people in constant exaltation of a past from which to derive pride and—as important—a past to which they were inexorably bound as a matter of duty, what the narrator in Lorenzo García Vega’s novel Rostros del reverso (1977) characterizes as “the responsibility of history.”26 In claiming lineage from their history, Cubans also contracted obligations. They carried their history within themselves, and they understood too the need to live out and live up to the moral of their past, to make history happen. Historical narratives achieved something of mythical proportions, highly sentimentalized and intensely idealized, the way that heroic deeds and righteous purpose are often transmuted into legend and then into legacy, thereupon celebrated as model of conduct and standard of comportment which all were enjoined to uphold: in sum, those values that inform and influence the character of a people.
These are hallmarks of national histories almost everywhere, to be sure. But in Cuba there was added complexity. Cubans indulged their history, rich with heroes and filled with heroic deeds, of righteous purpose and noble conduct: nothing unduly remarkable in these tendencies to celebrate, of course, for this was the stuff of founding myths of many national histories. But there was a dark side to this history, for the sense of a people wronged deepened in direct proportion to the exaltation of the past: the greater the idealization of the Cuban purpose the greater the resentment of the outcome, for in the end, there was no “founding”—not at least the way Cubans had imagined the founding of the republic. A popular undertaking of heroic proportions for a righteous cause had failed to realize the task around which the normative structures of nationality had developed.
Cubans had been formed within a moral system that had failed to realize a corresponding moral republic. The proposition of sovereign nationhood had fixed itself as the mooring of nationality, an ideal from which consciousness of Cuban had formed: the very purpose for which Cubans had committed themselves to one another. This was a past that could not be let go of, for it was the principal means through which to preserve the value system from which the terms of nationality had derived meaning. Commonly shared knowledge passed on as received wisdom, a people living with a reality of a condition of dashed hopes and thwarted aspirations, with a brooding sense of an inability to move history along the desired course.
Because knowledge of the past had insinuated itself deeply into the collective memory, Cubans could construct something of a vernacular based on a history-specific vocabulary with which to converse with one another, a language that carried within it the metaphysics of remembrance—not exactly in code, but through tacit insinuation inscribed in a shared knowledge of the past, transacted by way of figures of speech, as a matter of analogy and allegory, through the use of metaphor and symbols. All in all, it was a stock of common reference points by which a people addressed the pending purpose of their past as legacy. This involved nuance of phrasing and word choice, a way that Cubans were conditioned to look and listen beneath the surface: history as the language with which to sustain the politics of nation, something of a culturally privileged discourse loaded with figurative allusions to the past whose interior meanings were readily discerned—intuitively—among the men and women formed within that history. “Our identity,” novelist Noel Navarro suggested through his protagonist in El nivel de las aguas (1980), “is not only theoretical—it is eminently intuitive.”27 By the mid-twentieth century, historical knowledge had indeed passed into realms of intuitive familiarity, to know something without having to think about it: a history that could be felt well out of proportion to what was known.
The past could not be undone, of course, but it could be understood. There was prescriptive purpose embedded in Cuban historical narratives, a summons to verdaderos cubanos to honor legacy that contained within its very logic the imperative of redemptive purport. This was the past at once as patrimony and as purpose. It propounded duty of such compelling moral force as to command compliance, an honorable purpose which Cubans were obligated to pursue by virtue of being Cuban. Successive generations of Cubans were formed within the conventions of their history, so that consciousness of Cuban was inscribed in consciousness of the past and its legacy as matters of duty and responsibility. “Our civic education,” Fernando Martínez Heredia recalled of growing up in Yaguajay, “was formed with the help of narratives and the exaltation of the revolutionary struggles for independence. Almost every facet of local life was given to this task: family, school, childhood games, commemorative events, regional historical narratives, and the local media. All Cubans considered themselves heir to that patriotic tradition.”28
It is important to emphasize again that not all Cubans inferred a sense of duty from their past, or fully lived up to the ideals by which the standard of verdadero cubano was measured. Many engaged their history as a matter of passing interest, certainly conscious of their past, more or less conversant with its course and content, but otherwise absorbed in the overriding demands of daily life, getting by and getting ahead, preoccupied with concerns of family and friends, in pursuit of security and happiness, making a living and making ends meet. History was something to study and learn, certainly, dutifully as required: dates to commemorate and deeds to celebrate. The conduct of politics—past and present—was often observed from afar with detachment and disdain, but until and/or unless political developments disrupted established patterns of daily life, politics was something to stay away from. Indeed, vast numbers of Cubans lived estranged from a politics that seemed incapable of serving their needs. Politicians were deemed corrupt, and politics was considered corrupting. That was the way things were: unchanging and unchangeable.
But it is also true that Cubans had been formed within a historically determined moral environment as a condition of nationality, imbued with didactic meaning and prescriptive purpose. To a lesser or greater extent, all Cubans lived within their history, implicated in the proposition of verdadero cubano as an ideal, to which all were expected to aspire even if not always meeting aspirations. In circumstances of adversity, on those occasions when the routines of everyday life plunged into disarray, the model of the ideal could be relied upon to serve as the standard of conduct by which men and women would acquit themselves as a matter of duty as a Cuban. What is especially compelling to contemplate is the degree to which at times of national crisis, like the early 1930s or the mid-1950s, when the political became personal, the past suggested paradigm—something with which Cubans were familiar—possessed of the moral capacity to summon a people to dramatic action by example, as a matter of principle and in the form of precedent, as ideals that had been learned by heart and borne as faith.
Cubans disaffected with the circumstances of their times, disposed by political conviction and moral persuasion to take action to remedy the sources of their disaffection, found more than adequate inspiration in their past. This was a history possessed of an inherent moral warrant with which to challenge conditions of iniquity and injustice. The past implied a purpose, celebrated as a cause to make good on, which, when rendered as a moral imperative, imposed on all Cubans in the thrall of its meaning a duty to discharge. Verdaderos cubanos could not be insensible of the responsibility to which they were heir as a matter of being Cuban. That the past persisted as an unfinished condition in which fulfillment of nationality had foundered suggested that remedy to the sources of Cuban discontent was to be found where it had always been: in the past.
Cubans bore the weight of their history in the form of a quest, as a wrong to right and aspirations to realize. The Declaration of Principles approved as the Final Act of the Tenth National Congress of History in November 1952 revealed the persisting angst that was itself symptomatic of the national mood all through the first half of the twentieth century. Denouncing the American decision to deny the Cuban Liberation Army entrance to Santiago de Cuba and exclude Cuban participation in the postwar treaty negotiations in 1898, the Final Act affirmed that the “Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1898 was the final phase of the Thirty Year War of Cuban Liberation, the rightful triumph of which belongs to those who since 1868 had struggled with purposeful determination to win their independence,” and continued:
The Republic established on May 20, 1902, was without doubt not the one that several generations of Cubans had envisioned and for which they fought and died, [not] the one they had fully achieved by their efforts during the Thirty-Year War of Liberation. . . . The nation of [Félix] Varela and [José de la] Luz y Caballero, [Carlos Manuel de] Céspedes and [Ignacio] Agramonte, [Máximo] Gómez and [Calixto] García, [José] Martí and [Antonio] Maceo, was thwarted by the shameful intervention of the United States in the larger conflict between Cuba and Spain. Immediately upon the end of the war, the ideals of liberation were suppressed by force as a result of a foreign intervention. The departure of Spain notwithstanding, Cuba was neither independent nor free.29
This was historical knowledge shaped purposefully with instrumental intent, history as a means of change, a wellspring from which to draw inference as a matter of argument—history used as a frame of reference for political discourse designed to authorize change and possessed inherently of moral mandate with which to challenge the status quo. Knowledge of the past was inscribed within a discursive framework of oppositional politics, within a narrative structure that privileged the proposition of the unrealized nation as a means to condemn the failings of the republic. The moral was clear. Things were bad because the hopes that had given meaning to nationality had been betrayed in the republic. Historical narratives contributed to the collective disquiet of the national condition, sometimes more, sometimes less: a facet of a political culture in which the ideals of the past served as a readily available means to discredit the conditions of the present.
But if the past contributed to dissatisfaction with the republic, it also offered the possibility of redemption: the past as a summons to complete the project of liberation as envisioned by the próceres. Raúl Roa spoke for a generation in exhorting Cubans “to complete the unfinished project of José Martí and realize ourselves in a manner consistent with our history, without foreign interference.”30 The past offered a way forward. It served as a reference point from which to take measure of the degree to which the twentieth-century republic had fulfilled—or not—the nineteenth-century ideal of nation. That the project of nation remained “unconcluded” and pending—in multiple representations and characterized variously as an incomplete history, or an unrealized nation, or unfulfilled ideals, or an unfinished liberation project—served as an ever-present reminder that Cubans lived within the interstices of an interrupted national project. The proposition of “unfinished” gave decisive shape to the political culture of the republic, where the ideals of the past served as the means to envision a better future and political contenders aspired to power as proponents of a historical purpose to consummate. That the republic was almost universally perceived to have fallen short of expectations implied a standing mandate for change, for indeed at issue was the republic itself. Cubans had acted in concert, with a sense of purpose and commitment to cause, but without effect: they had been denied the outcome from which consciousness of Cuban had formed. Everything seemed to have come to nothing.
It is possible that the structural tensions of the republic could have persisted unresolved, perhaps indefinitely. These were profoundly complex issues which in the ordinary course of events did not lend themselves to simple solutions and even less to obvious remedies. Electoral politics provided something of an outlet, raising hopes that were soon dashed, only to be repeated in the following election cycle. The election of Ramón Grau San Martín in 1944 was one such occasion. The rise of Eddy Chibas was another. Cubans addressed their discontent through imaginative if often ill-fated strategies, mostly as acts of personal perseverance and individual resolve. They did all the right things. They showed enterprise, they studied and resisted discouragement, they persevered with determination and spirit. They responded to historical conditions as a matter of individual circumstances, doing the best they could. Failure or success was understood as private misfortune or personal triumph.
A national crisis could change everything, however, an occasion of disruption and disarray in the established patterns of daily life, experienced simultaneously by a people as a shared revelation in which accumulated grievances were discerned as a commonplace and collective condition. Discontent previously endured as a matter of individual disgruntlement found expression as collective disquiet. Multiple currents of dissatisfaction with the status quo converged upon one another with startling force, thereupon to gather momentum as powerful impetus for action and catalyst for change.
Such a crisis occurred on March 10, 1952. A military coup led by General Fulgencio Batista ended twelve years of constitutional legality—a seizure of power, the general explained at the time, that was necessary to halt the chronic abuses of civilian government.31 Civilian rule had indeed been characterized by years of malfeasance and misconduct, of disclosures of shameless graft and shoddy scandals, of venality so all-inclusive as to implicate almost everyone at the highest levels of government.32 Perhaps the only virtue that civilian government could have plausibly offered in its defense was respect for constitutionality. March 10 ended that too. The constitution was suspended. Elections were canceled. Congress was dissolved. Censorship was imposed. A military dictatorship was installed for three years, and through fraudulent elections in 1955 it perpetuated itself in power for another four-year term.
Cubans across the island experienced the 1952 coup with a mixture of incomprehension and incredulity. Mario Coyula recalled March 10, 1952, as “a tremendous blow,” one that “caused me surprise and confusion.”33 This sentiment was shared by poet Rubén Darío Rumbaut, who wrote at the time: “The first reaction I had when I learned of the coup was uncontrollable indignation. . . . The republic had been taken over by a military dictator whose favorite pastime, it seemed, was to make and unmake history. And now: what to do, I asked myself, filled with a sense of rage and impotence in the face of other nations of the world, of my fellow citizens, before my very children.”34 Cubans were bewildered. “I will tell you,” playwright Raúl González de Cascorro spoke through his protagonist in El mejor fruto (1958), “all of us were surprised. It is like when you are taken by surprise and you are left stunned and helpless. I don’t know. It was something that no one could have imagined. . . . We were left indecisive, not knowing how to react.”35
A pall of uncertainty settled over households across the island. The murmurs of discontent were everywhere audible; the signs of disquiet were everywhere visible. “Whoever lends an ear to public opinion,” columnist Ernesto Ardura despaired in 1953, “can appreciate the state of uncertainty and confusion in which the Cuban people live. There is something of a sensation of shipwreck. That psychological state of desperation can be observed in all social classes: among workers, industrialists, and merchants, in the suffering middle class. The common psychological denominator of the national moment is lassitude and profound disillusionment. . . . There is no enthusiasm, there are no great plans with an eye to the future, for the future is a huge cloud and offers security to no one.”36 Lisandro Otero remembered the national mood in the 1950s as a condition “between disquiet and bewilderment, between anxiety and shame.”37 Jorge Mañach agreed. “We are a disoriented people,” he wrote in 1954. “More correctly, a people without orientation.”38
The March 10 coup changed everything, and what changed most was how Cubans saw themselves: with embarrassment and humiliation, with deepening doubt and diminished confidence. Auténtico Party candidate for the presidency in 1952 Carlos Hevia wrote of “the humiliation of [Cubans] losing their right to elect their Government.” U.S. ambassador Arthur Gardner reported that the coup had “wounded the pride of many Cubans.”39 John Dorschner and Roberto Fabricio would later write that Cubans joined the opposition “out of a sense of embarrassment, a feeling that while they could boast of their air conditioners and TV sets that seemed to put them almost on a par with Americans, they had as government a shabby military dictatorship that seemed more worthy of an old banana republic than a country aspiring to join the modern world.”40
Things were never quite the same after March 10. “Cuba ceased to belong to the world,” writer Andrés Felipe Labrador later reflected.41 Columnist Hernández Travieso was filled with self-doubt and wondered if “we are incapable of exercising democracy and, as a result, spiritually we have gone back to the colonial era, where our grandparents lived reconciled to law being the caprice of a Captain General.”42 The moral was only hinted at and alluded to, by way of insinuation and innuendo, but it was on the minds of many. “Control of the country was taken in such an illegal manner,” journalism professor Arnaldo Ramos Yániz lamented, “as if Cuba were a country where the laws of the jungle prevailed.”43 The military coup, Herminio Portell Vilá reflected, “makes one wonder if perhaps it would be preferable not to have laws that will be violated, even though by not having them we would find ourselves in regard to civilization below the savage tribes of New Guinea and the Amazon. . . . The foreign visitor departs from our country thinking that the gloss of civilization has not penetrated very deeply.”44
The illegal seizure of power served to expose all that was wrong with the republic, all at once, and all in plain view. Rule by force begot opposition by violence. Resistance increased, and so did repression. The economy stalled, and when it began to move again it was all downward.
The character of the republic was again subjected to scrutiny, and again it was found wanting. These were troubled times, unsettled conditions as a facet of daily life calling attention to the larger malaise that was the republic. Writer José Lezama Lima despaired privately, confiding to his diary in September 1957: “We are now in the chaos resulting from the disintegration, confusion, and inferiority of Cuban life of the last thirty years. (It could be equally said: of the entire period of the republic.) On one hand, fear, bewilderment, confusion. On the other, desperation.”45 Three months later, Cintio Vitier brooded: “It is obvious that within a very few years of the founding of the Republic, what remained of the political inspiration of the founders [los fundadores] . . . was hardly anything more than a grotesque phantasm. Today, not even that.”46 To interrogate the character of the republic was to confront conditions with origins in the nineteenth century. “The colony has survived in the Republic,” lamented Joaquín Martínez Sáenz.47
These conditions could not be attributed entirely to Batista, of course, but his illegal seizure of power made everything so much worse. He brought Cuban discontent into sharp focus—in political terms, an objective; in moral terms, a cause—and in the process drew upon himself the wrath of a people bearing grievances decades in the making. Batista represented all that was objectionable about the Cuban condition. He was both symbol and symptom of the failure of the republic, the corruption of public life, the venality of political leaders, the futility of political institutions. The political reaction that followed could not but identify the historical origins of the demise of Cuban constitutionality. The deepening crisis of the 1950s implied more than a military coup, what the narrator in Noel Navarro’s novel El nivel de las aguas (1980) says about the protagonist: “He was convinced that Batista, the army, all their minions, and all that, were nothing more than one aspect—a grim one, to be sure, but only one aspect—of the problem.”48 This was understood at the time by Francisco José Moreno. “The Cuba in which we lived was not Batista’s doing,” he later recalled, “but the doings of Batista were the results of the Cuba we lived in.”49
Men and women across the island were coming slowly to question the assumptions of everyday life, uneasily, and they despaired, becoming ever more predisposed to break with the prevailing order of things. The Batista coup acted to “push” Cubans further along, deeper into those realms of solutions that incline a people to dramatic action. The possibility that the removal of Batista would provide the means to address larger—that is, historic—issues was very much inscribed within the calculus of resistance all through the 1950s. Rufo López-Fresquet was indeed correct to observe that the Batista government “converted nearly every Cuban into a revolutionary.”50
It happened too that Batista governed during years of recurring historical commemorations, a convergence of circumstances and coincidence, to be sure, but one that provided poignancy to the Cuban angst: years of remembrance in times of grievance. The 1950s were years dense with history. The year 1952—the year of the coup—was the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the republic—under the circumstances, a singularly portentous occasion to take stock of half a century of nationhood. No less portentous an occasion, in 1953, was the centennial of the birth of José Martí. Indeed, the 1950s were noteworthy for centennial celebrations. Towns and cities across the island commemorated the birth centennials of men and women of local origins who had distinguished themselves during the wars for independence: Víctor Ramos Hernández in Guisa (1852), Alejandro Rodríguez in Sancti-Spíritus (1852), Vidal Ducasse in El Cobre (1852), Bernarda del Toro in Jiguaní (1852), Juan Gualberto Gómez in Sabanilla (1854), Agustín Cebreco in El Cobre (1855), Emilio Núñez in Sagua la Grande (1855), Demetrio Castillo Duany in Santiago de Cuba (1856), and Tomás Padró Griñán in Santiago de Cuba (1856), among many others.
In an environment of deepening political tensions, public acts to honor heroes and commemorate heroic deeds provided occasions for protest, to make the meaning of the past relevant as a moral for the times. The organizers of the centennial commemoration of Martí’s birth in January 1953, Alba Martínez Fernández acknowledged years later, used the centennial occasion to distribute pamphlets containing quotations of Martí selected explicitly as allusions with which to attack the Batista government. “We determined,” Martínez Fernandez reminisced, “that in all public acts the ideas of Martí would be prominent not only to render homage to the distinguished teachings of the Apostle, but also as a means to combat the insolent and backward dictatorship that had made a mockery of the centennial anniversary of Martí’s birth.”51 Gloria Cuadras de la Cruz remembered that on December 7, 1952, the anniversary date of the death of Antonio Maceo, women in Santiago de Cuba organized a commemorative march that resulted in “a protest that proclaimed ‘down with the dictatorship’ that resonated throughout the entire city.”52 Observance of December 7 in Manzanillo in 1954 was marked by the affirmation that “those us who sincerely love the Patria. . . mourn this date as a time of a loss of liberty.”53 Organizers of the Maceo commemoration in December 1957 summoned “all Cubans of dignity” to continue the patriotic task inaugurated by Maceo: “There is not a single true Cuban [cubano verdadero] who does not demand the restoration of liberties and who does not call for a return to the road leading to a democratic government.”54 Belarmino Castilla Mas later remembered Santiago de Cuba during the 1950s: “The entire student movement of Santiago de Cuba . . . converted every historic date—January 28, February 24, November 27, and December 7—into an opportunity to take to the streets and use the occasion to protest against the [Batista] tyranny.”55
The deepening crisis of the 1950s called attention—again—to the persisting condition of malaise that Cubans seemed unable to undo and overcome. The shortcomings of the republic seemed to reveal themselves in magnified form during the 1950s: the problems seemed so vast, the solutions so beyond reach. All in all, a people overwhelmed by seemingly persistent circumstances of adversity, not certain they knew where to begin, or how.
In search of direction, Cubans increasingly turned to the past for signs and solutions, a way to understand the circumstances of their times by way of their history. Because it was a past without end, accessible and always usable as a politics, its moral and meaning seemed to possess something of a timeless relevance. The past offered perspective and purpose, a way to articulate a politics of change readily accessible to all.
No less important, the past also offered methods of remedy and means of solution. The historic manifestos, the pronouncements, and the programs—that is, the texts by which the nineteenth-century liberation project had fixed itself in the popular imagination—retained their relevance precisely because they addressed grievances with origins in the nineteenth century, almost all of which persisted unremedied in the twentieth. José Martí served as an inexhaustible supply of truths, for all occasions, on all subjects. So too with the foundational texts of the independence movement—the Constitution of Guáimaro, for example, or the Bases of the Partido Revolucionario Cubano, or the Manifesto of Montecristi: all, it seemed, could be revived to address the ills that continued to afflict the island. “The revolution [against Batista] as a historic intent,” proclaimed the Federación Estudiantil Universitaria in 1956, “has its roots in the wars for independence. The Manifesto of Montecristi is our basic document.”56 The organizers of November 30, 1956, in Santiago de Cuba invoked “the Revolutionary Proclamation of Demajagua [the Ten Years War], the Manifesto of Montecristi, and the words of José Martí . . . in discharge of a debt to our generation and to the History of Cuba.”57
The power of the past to inform the politics of protest and influence a course of action is, of course, a profoundly complex phenomenon. The very invocation of the past as purpose implied a challenge, as it always had, less to a person than to a political system, less to a government than to a national condition. The desired outcome was inscribed in the premise. Cubans experienced their times as a history in progress, understood as a commitment to the ideal from which the meaning of nationality had originated and into which they self-consciously inserted themselves.
Across the island, all through the 1950s, men and women joined an expanding insurgency as a matter of legacy, disposed to discharge duty long consecrated in the narratives of nation. For many, the act of resistance responded to an outpouring of indignation and offended sensibility, the need to do something: to act. The protagonist in Luis Ricardo Alonso’s novel Los dioses ajenos(1971), comments the narrator, “joined the revolutionary movement in order to maintain self-respect.”58 The desire “to participate in concrete deeds [participar en hechos concretos]” was how Conrado del Puerto remembered his decision to join the Civic Resistance in Matanzas.59 “What is important,” pronounces the protagonist in Marcos in Julio Travieso’s autobiographical novel Para matar el lobo (1981), “is to do something, and not just stand there doing nothing”60—what Guillermo Jiménez of the Directorio Revolucionario recalled years later as “the need to do something—something, anything.”61 Many joined the resistance, General Harry Villegas remembered, “out of a sense of justice, to struggle against the status quo, that which had been imposed upon us, and to fight existing ills. Many people did not know exactly why they joined.”62
The resistance included men and women motivated by the moral of their history, conscious of an obligation to live up to legacy, a summons drawing them into a flow of continuity with their past, acting on the determination—articulated often during the 1950s—to enter into history (entrar en la historia). “I loved the history of the wars of independence of my patria with a passion,” as Giraldo Mazola Collazo, a member of the Civic Resistance in Havana, reminisced about his secondary-school years. “At the time I thought it to be a bygone era, not to be repeated again, without realizing that within a few years I would be incorporated into a movement that would signify continuity with that process.”63 For Roberto Hernández Zayas, the decision to join the Civic Resistance was a matter of devotion to the purpose to which the past had been given. “When the Cuban people launched the war for liberty and independence on October 10, 1868,” Hernández Zayas later wrote, “a long process of struggle was inaugurated, one distinguished by historic phases and milestones, one that still continues.” Hernández Zayas wrote of himself in the third person, a young man who took up arms to redeem the “patria envisioned by Martí: free, independent and sovereign, honorable, noble, proud, united, and just,” and added: “That young man proceeded to develop his love for the patria while immersing himself in the history of Cuba, in its wars for independence of the nineteenth century, in its legendary figures, their heroic acts, and the nobility of their cause. Accordingly, his spirit was nurtured and his consciousness strengthened. The words of Martí influenced him profoundly and through them fostered an attachment to noble sentiments and human values.”64 Gladys Marel García-Pérez remembered being drawn into the armed struggle against Batista out of the desire “to be like the patriots of the nineteenth century. I was conscious of acting in the role of the mambisas, like my grandmother.”65 Enzo Infante Uribazo later reflected on the effect of studying history: “Something very curious happened to me. When I read and heard about our heroes of independence, I always asked myself if I would someday have the opportunity to do something like they did. Maybe that was the stuff of childhood, but I always did dream with doing some heroic deed in order to change the situation in which we lived our lives.”66
These were historically conditioned sentiments, very much what made for consciousness of Cuban, a people acting in accordance with what they understood the moral of their history required of them. For many Cubans, historical knowledge was integral to the moral calculus of nationality, understood as the need to participate in a historical process, to live history and more: to participate in a living history understood as legacy. Blanca Mercedes Mesa recalled the despair to which she succumbed as a result of the 1952 coup, and it was to the past that her thoughts turned: “It was almost a physical blow, and brought me to tears and indignation. . . . What to do? Seemingly, nothing. Nothing to do against brute force. But the lesson of 1868? And the lesson of 1895?”67 This was similar to the experience of Vilma Espín, who remembered March 10 “as something that for me was explosive. . . . It was for me almost a personal offense. . . . [But] I jumped for joy thinking about the prospects of joining an armed protest. In reality, I always had romantic longings of being able to participate in heroic struggles like the War for Independence, the struggle against Machado, etc. At that moment I truly believed that armed protest was the only recourse. I was as happy as a child in a party, and wanted immediately to pick up a rifle and go to fight.”68 Mario Coyula experienced the 1950s through knowledge of the 1890s. “From the outset,” he recalled years later, “in accordance with the lessons I had learned at home based on patriotic traditions, for my ancestors had fought in the wars for independence, I understood that this was an utterly intolerable situation.”69 Julio García Olivares of the Directorio Revolucionario later reflected that “something impelled us to seek in the past the connection that would link us to the frustrated revolution that began with the War for Independence and which would at the same time serve as a point of departure in the process of struggle against the tyranny of Batista.”70 The illegal seizure of power of March 10, Guillermo Jiménez remembered years later, gave “definition to a life of action based on the deeds of the nineteenth century, in fulfillment of the legacy of independence [el legado mambí].”71
The logic of armed struggle obtained its most compelling validation in the form of discharge of duty as Cuban. This implied conduct and commitment to enact the ideals upon which the nation had been conceived. The men and women who joined the armed resistance during the 1950s looked back as much as they looked forward, and they understood too the former as a means to the latter. They drew inspiration and motivation from the past and inserted themselves consciously into their history as a matter of legacy. The combatants of the Sierra Maestra, recalled Arnaldo Rivero, were imbued with the “precise discipline and clear concept of duty to the patria,” for Cubans could not “remain downtrodden when confronted with the names of Maceo, Martí, Agramonte, Céspedes, and Guiteras.”72 The past contemplated a purpose pending in which all Cubans were implicated by virtue of being Cuban. Asked by Jules Dubois in 1958 to explain the political philosophy of the Movimiento Revolucionario 26 de Julio (MR 26–7; the 26th of July Movement), Raúl Castro responded, “the doctrines of Martí,” and added: “We consider ourselves followers of his unfinished work. If we cannot conclude it we will nevertheless have fulfilled our historic role, sustaining until the end the standard of his ideological principles. Behind [us] will come new generations, which rising anew will know how to carry it forward another step.”73
Historical knowledge had insinuated itself deeply in realms of received wisdom, in widely accessible and readily comprehensible narrative forms, celebrated as those understandings from which a people derive the values they feel represent their best qualities, a way to comprehend being in the present as a condition of the past. The men and women who took up arms in resistance during the 1950s drew freely upon what were already well-established narratives of the unrealized nation and unfulfilled aspirations as the larger rationale of the armed struggle. They spoke to a purpose with which vast numbers of Cubans were sympathetic, and to which they were eminently susceptible.
Once the premise of the legacy insinuated itself into the logic of resistance, the duty of armed struggle seemed as obvious as it was obligatory. It signaled resumption of the project of nation, of Cubans inserting themselves into the continuity of their history as a matter of moral obligation inscribed in Cuban. The decision to participate in the insurrection, Belarmino Castillo Mas remembered, was a matter of “loyalty to the legacy of our predecessors.”74 Luis Saíz Montes de Oca took up arms as a matter of “duty as Cuban” (deber como cubano), in “the firm belief that the duty of our generation [was] to fulfill our destiny and realize the revolution that Cuba has awaited for a century, whatever it may cost.”75 The commitment to struggle and sacrifice, Camilo Cienfuegos insisted, “is our duty [es deber nuestro], and if not, we were ill-born as Cubans.”76 The assailants of Moncada, Pedro Miret explained years later, “participated in fulfillment of a debt,”77 while Faustino Pérez remembered returning to Cuba aboard the yacht Granma “conscious that I was fulfilling a duty of Cuban [cumplía un deber de cubano].”78 Mario Lazo Pérez participated in the attack on Moncada to uphold “the revolutionary tradition of our people, [which] pointed to the course to follow and allowed the vanguard of Cuban youth to follow the example of Céspedes, Agramonte, José and Antonio Maceo, Gómez, Martí, Mella, Trejo, and Guiteras.”79 Enzo Infante Uribazo later characterized his participation in the revolution in modest terms: “I was an idealist person who joined the revolution because I deeply believed that it was my duty as an honorable citizen [ciudadano honrado].”80 “A free man,” the narrator in José Soler Puig’s novel En el ano de enero (1963) comments on the meaning of Cuban, “is the one who knows that he has a duty to fulfill and fulfills it entirely of his own volition, without having to be told, because he knows he has to a duty to fulfill.”81
Armed resistance drew its principal rationale from the past, a sentiment with antecedents in the nineteenth century, to act as a matter of common task in a manner consistent with the obligation of shared duty. The resort to arms was understood not only—and perhaps not even principally—as a reaction to Batista, but as a response to historically determined imperatives with antecedents in the nineteenth century. “We are determined to liberate Cuba,” a barbudo (guerrilla) says to seventy-year-old mambí Panteleón Núñez in Bernardo Viera Trejo’s short story “El precio,” “the same way that you and men like you liberated Cuba in 1895.”82 The narrator in Juan Almeida Bosque’s autobiographical novel La única ciudadana (1985) reflects on the continuity of purpose implied in the armed struggle during the 1950s: “Just like those heroic men [of the nineteenth century], today we too struggle to see our flag waving in the breeze, as symbol of the real independence for which so much noble Cuban blood has been spilled.”83 This was the point Camilo Cienfuegos made explicitly: “We cannot but recognize the difficulty of the insurrectionary war, that war to realize a free patria, to see the patria liberated and to realize the great patria that Martí had dreamed about.”84 Huber Matos was among the many Cubans formed within the logic of the unfinished nation. “I embraced the commitment to continue with the task of founding the Republic of Cuba,” he reflected—“that we were a republic, but incomplete; that we were a republic, but debased. . . . My generation and the generation of the first half of the twentieth century were formed within that commitment.” Matos was lucid in recalling his decision to join the insurrection: “Others had sacrificed themselves to break the chains of the colony, forging step by step the Republic . . . at the end of the nineteenth century. It was the result of several generations at a cost of many thousands of lives and indescribable suffering. It is now our turn to defend the rights and well-being of the Republic that they bequeathed to us.”85 Julio García Olivares joined the resistance “determined to sweep away once and for all the corruption and immorality that had characterized the political life of the country and organize the Republic on the basis established by José Martí: to achieve the objectives for which the mambises had striven since 1868, to improve the conditions of life of our people. . . . We were simple students, but the moment had arrived to bear arms, the way we had learned from our ancestors in the wars for independence. . . . We were mindful of our duty, if not to consummate the task inaugurated at Yara [the Ten Years War], at least to advance further toward that purpose.”86 The protagonist in Benigno Nieto’s novel Los paraísos artificiales (1999) affirms this: “To sweep away once and for all the ignominious past.”87
The ideal of national fulfillment, even as—especially as—dashed hopes, inscribed itself deeply into the consciousness of Cuban. As a sentiment—as a feeling—it “worked” within those intuitive realms of presumed certainty. It needed neither justification nor explanation. On the contrary, it was an outcome Cubans claimed as a matter of faith in their history. The redemption of “the oppressed patria,” a coalition of opposition groups affirmed in the unity Pact of Caracas of July 1958, “will be achieved by all of us who believe deeply in the historic destiny of our nation, its right to be free and to constitute within a democratic community . . . the magnificent future to which our people have a right by virtue of their History.”88
The master narrative of the nation, loaded as it was with aspirations as anticipation, readily drew Cubans into the plausibility of revolution as remedy, largely as a matter of culturally determined dispositions, for these were the articles of faith from which the normative determinants of nationality were derived. It was in this sense that the historical knowledge by which a people came to a sense of themselves was revelatory, for it evoked the promise of a past to fulfill as a premonition, at once prescriptive and prophetic, an ideal Cubans had been enjoined to pursue as legacy in the form of destiny. Columnist Agustín Tamargo called for new political leaders “who will confront the problems of Cuba the way that Martí faced the truth.”89 The weekly Carteles concluded in 1953 that “what we do know is that the process of deterioration appears unstoppable. On the contrary, it is accelerating. What is the possibility that men like those of 1868 still exist, who desire that Cuba dignify its national life and seek the culmination of its most promising destiny? Where are they?”90
Fulfillment of the promise of the future was possible only through the realization of the aspirations of the past, Cubans were certain. It was a way that many came to see Fidel Castro. “I would say,” affirmed René Díaz in 1957, “that Fidel Castro is the Apostle of the new generation. He possesses sublime ideals and the dignity of Martí [vergüenza martiana]. It was with men like him that José Martí dreamed of our Patria.”91 Alfredo Guevara later remembered these years as a time when “our generation dreamed of José Martí, that José Martí was needed” and that Fidel Castro was looked upon “as someone who could perhaps become the José Martí that my generation was awaiting, had searched for, wished to discover.”92 Rafael Rojas was entirely correct to note that the plausibility of the revolution was in part derived from a susceptibility to a messianic moral embedded in Cuban history.93
The Batista coup provided a new generation of men and women with the opportunity to join their history. Almost all the revolutionary groups that emerged to oppose the Batista government inscribed themselves explicitly within the framework of historical legacy. Only days after the military coup, the Federación Estudiantil Universitaria (FEU) proclaimed its determination to resist the Batista government as a matter of solemn duty based on a covenant with the past. “Cuban students,” the FEU affirmed, “will maintain respect and reverence only for the symbols that the mambises provided us, soaked in the blood of the battlefield for liberty: our national anthem, our coat of arms, our flag. Never before have those symbols had as much historical meaning as they do now. We want a Republic free of foreign intermeddling and internal deception.”94 In its Declaration of Principles, the FEU proclaimed its commitment to “the defense of the Patria bequeathed to us by the mambises.”95 José Antonio Echeverría, president of the FEU, alluded often to “the historic destiny of our Nation” and expressed confidence in the realization of the “revolutionary ideals that constitute the very essence of our Nationality.”96 With the founding of the Directorio Revolucionario (DR) by the FEU in 1956, students committed themselves to armed struggle to complete “the revolution inaugurated by Joaquín de Aguëro [1851] and which to this date remains unfinished and yet to be realized” as a means to “honor our martyrs.”97 The formation of the DR guerrilla front in 1958—the Second Front of Escambray—the DR pronounced, was to keep faith with the duty that the past imposed on all Cubans. The Proclamation of Escambray (1958) was explicit:
The men who enroll in the ranks of the Directorio Revolucionario are conscious of the role that we play in the historic process of our people. . . . “The war that today we initiate”—affirmed José Martí in 1895—“is the continuation of the one begun by Céspedes in 1868 in La Demajagua.” We know that our generation is connected to the generations that preceded us yesterday. For that reason it is the same cause. . . . That is the dialectical process of our history, which is the history of the Americas. This is our understanding, and it is the process of history into which we integrate ourselves.98
The Movimiento Nacional Revolucionario (MNR), organized within one year of the 1952 coup, inserted itself directly into the larger narrative of nation as the basis of principles and from which it affirmed its claim to “historical continuity” in the form of “true revolutionary spirit.” The MNR proclaimed its determination to fulfill long-deferred national aspirations: “All the great cycles of historical developments,” the MNR reminded the nation, “have ended without achieving the fullness of purpose: the Ten Years War ended in defeat, that of [the Pact of] Zanjón; the war of 1895 ended with a mediated and semi-intervened republic that did not resolve the fundamental problems of the Cuban people.” The new generation, the MNR vowed, would realize the “historic destiny” of the nation: “The Movimiento Nacional Revolucionario is organized to bring to a completion the work that the Cuban independentista conspirators initiated at the dawn of the last century, continued by the patriots of 1868, carried on by the liberators of 1895, and which the revolutionaries of the 1930s sought to bring to fruition: to realize the definitive integration of our nationality.”99 The MNR, affirmed its founder, Rafael García Bárcena, was prepared to assume the duty imposed by history: “The national history of Cuba has been the history of a prolonged revolution, to whose fulfillment diverse generations of Cubans have been entrusted . . . and to which the MNR was committed.”100
No group more fully adopted the past as purpose of politics than the Movimiento Revolucionario 26 de Julio (MR 26-7). Under the leadership of Fidel Castro, the MR 26-7 elevated the historic narratives of nation into an all-encompassing paradigm for revolution. This was the past used as source of actionable knowledge, a narrative structured as a continuum which Cubans were enjoined to insert themselves into: a leap of faith so central to political purpose as to assume fully the form of moral imperative, precluding and preempting all outcomes not given to the realization of the ideal of sovereign nationhood as means of fulfillment of Cuban.
The genius of the leadership of the MR 26-7 was its ability to inscribe itself into the past and to reemerge as its proponent, to represent itself as the bearer of nineteenth-century truths—in part conscience, in part consciousness—to summon Cubans to dramatic action as a matter of duty inherent in the meaning of nationality. The sentiments were themselves a sensibility possessed of a proper history, and indeed it was precisely this condition of the past that made for the efficacy of history as a politics. The political culture of the republic had formed within a history understood as unfinished, imbued with a sense of expectation intrinsic to which was the possibility—and precedent—of agency: a condition that invited “participation” in the deliverance of the promise of the past as a matter of redemption.
Fidel Castro brought passionate intensity to the pursuit of political change, profoundly steeped in and sustained by a conviction of historical purpose based on the premise that the sources of Cuban discontent could be addressed only through the realization of the promise of sovereign nationhood. The past offered a moral of portentous purport. To claim legacy of the past as the basis of a politics was to demand duty as a matter of nationality, a way to inscribe Cubans into a historical continuum as means of legitimacy of purpose.
History had been Fidel Castro’s passion.101 That he was clever, even brilliant, manipulative and shrewd, cunning and calculating, are all undoubtedly true, but he was effective principally because he was of the history that he propounded. He fashioned a larger vision of political purpose in the form of a claim in discharge of historical legacy. “He was determined to insert himself in history in whatever way possible,” as Heberto Padilla remembered the young Fidel Castro.102 Fidel Castro espoused the past explicitly as the rationale of political purpose, discerning within the normative determinants of nationality a relentless moral logic of revolution. He was properly reverential of the mambises as symbol and source of validation. As early as November 1947, on the occasion of the anniversary of the 1871 execution of University of Havana medical students, Castro—then a student at the University of Havana—organized a campus demonstration to protest government corruption, for which he invited the participation of surviving mambises. He addressed the purpose of their presence:
It is necessary to set in relief the miracle of this moment. The liberators who fought for our independence from Spain still, after fifty years, retain the same rebellious spirit that propelled them into the battlefield of redemption [la manigua de la redención]. It is a momentous occasion when the veterans of our independence struggle ally themselves with the students in pursuit of the liberating aims of our past. The liberators of yesterday trust the young students of today so that we can continue their goal of achieving independence and justice.103
The MR 26-7 leadership understood the power of the past to inform political purpose. This was to use history to make history: to exhort Cubans to live up to legacy as an obligation implied in the meaning of Cuban. The “Manifiesto de los revolucionarios del Moncada a la nación,” distributed on the eve of the assault on the Moncada barracks in July 1953, affirmed the determination to fulfill “the revolution of [Carlos Manuel de] Céspedes, [Ignacio] Agramonte, [Antonio] Maceo, [Julio Antonio] Mella, [Antonio] Guiteras, [Rafael] Trejo, and [Eduardo] Chibás, the true revolution that has not yet been completed.” The Manifiesto proclaimed the year 1953—the centennial of the birth of José Martí—as “the culmination of a historical cycle marked by progress and setbacks in the political and moral realms of the Republic: the bloody and vigorous struggle for liberty and independence; the civic contest among Cubans to attain political and economic stability; the shameful practice of foreign intervention; the dictatorships; the unrelenting struggle of heroes and martyrs to make a better Cuba.” The assault on Moncada was planned in the “name of the determined struggles that have characterized the summit of glory in Cuban history,” and further: “The Revolution identifies with the roots of Cuba’s national sentiment [and] recognizes and bases itself on the ideals of José Martí contained in his speeches, the program of the Partido Revolucionario Cubano, and the Manifesto of Montecristi.”104 Asked at the trial what the purpose of the Moncada attack was, Raúl Castro responded: “To make the revolution that Martí and Maceo wanted, to make the revolution of our mambises.”105
It was to history that Fidel Castro appealed for absolution during the Moncada trial, and it was history from which he claimed the mandate to discharge the duty of Cuban. Castro’s trial speech, subsequently expanded and distributed as the foundational text of the MR 26-7, “History Will Absolve Me,” invoked the legacy of the past to validate the moral propriety of revolution. Moncada responded to historically conditioned attributes of nationality, Castro explained, acted out as behavior modeled on the example of heroic comportment associated with the mambises. “All doors for peaceful struggle being closed to the people,” he insisted, “there is no solution other than that of [the revolutions] of 1868 and 1895.” Castro invoked the duty to “exercise the right” of the Cuban people to revolt against oppression as a matter of “historic continuation of the struggle of 1868, 1895, and 1933.” Castro appealed explicitly to obligations deemed intrinsic to the character of Cuban. “We are Cubans,” he exhorted,
and to be Cuban implies a duty: not to fulfill this duty is a crime, it is treason. We live proud of the history of our patria; we learned it in school and we have grown up hearing of freedom, of justice, and of rights. We were taught early to venerate the glorious examples of our heroes and our martyrs. Céspedes, Agramonte, Maceo, Gómez, and Martí were the first names inscribed in our minds. We were taught that the Titan [Maceo] had said that liberty is not begged for, but rather conquered through the edge of the machete. . . . We were taught that October 10 [1868] and February 24 [1895] are glorious anniversaries . . . on which Cubans rebelled against the yoke of infamous tyranny. We were taught to . . . sing an anthem every afternoon, the verses of which say that “To live in chains is to live in shame and dishonor” and that “To die for the patria is to live.”106
The men and women of the MR 26-7 immersed themselves in the history of Cuba as a matter of political education in preparation for armed struggle. Years later, Mario Llerena recalled a conversation with Castro in Mexico in 1956: “Castro told me over and over that, in addition to military and guerrilla training, the soldiers of the revolution were required to read and discuss a variety of books of historical and political significance, especially, he emphasized, the works of the Cuban liberator José Martí.”107 This is also what Teresa Casuso remembered, explaining that she was persuaded by Fidel Castro to join the MR 26-7 with the argument that “in dealing with Batista and his army there was no other way but to wage ‘the necessary war,’ as Martí had called the one waged for our independence. Fidel showed that he had read a great deal of José Martí, who seemed, indeed, to be the guiding spirit of his life.”108 Haydée Santamaría often recounted that the preparations for Moncada involved “giving ourselves to reading Martí in depth,” with particular attention “to the Manifesto of Montecristi and the statutes of the Partido Revolucionario Cubano.”109
Between 1953 and 1955, the years of imprisonment, Castro conducted daily classes in Cuban history. “The desire to know more about our past, our people, our great men of the past,” he wrote from prison in 1954, “has been preying on my mind for some time. The enthusiasm, love, and interest I put into all my reading on this subject is a source of comfort for me.”110 Patriotic holidays in particular offered occasions for history lessons. “On every patriotic date of Cuban history,” Castro wrote, “we have gathered together to commemorate the occasion and hold discussions on the subject.”111
Vast numbers of men and women sustained devotion to nation as a matter of belief in their past. They bore their history with a sense of purpose, conscious too of the duty that their history imposed upon them. This was a history dense with narratives of martyrdom and heroic deaths, honored as deeds noble and noteworthy, to be sure, but also as conduct represented as model and measure of Cuban: this is what Cubans did by virtue of being Cuban. “If what is needed at this time,” Castro proclaimed in 1955, “are Cubans willing to sacrifice themselves to redeem the civic sensibility of our people from shame, we offer ourselves with pleasure.”112 The duty “of sacrifice [and] of honor is honest, useful, worthy, heroic, and is part of our glorious tradition.” This was validated by invoking a passage from Marti: “Great moments require great sacrifices.”113 To do less implied dereliction of duty and dishonor to the ideal of Cuban. Those who perished at Moncada, Fidel Castro affirmed, “learned to die when the patria is in need of heroic immolation to lift the faith of the people . . . [as] the inevitable realization of their historic destiny.”114 The narrator in Luis Ricardo Alonso’s novel El palacio y la furia (1976), based on the abortive 1957 assault on the Presidential Palace to assassinate Batista, comments: “Many were ashamed that they had escaped with their lives. Perhaps it was the influence of religion, of so many years hearing talk of the glory of martyrdom. And for those who did not believe in God, twelve years in school hearing talk of the martyrs of the patria: Martí, Maceo, hundreds of others. Since everyone was going to die anyway, we used to say in school, better to die like the great heroes. There wasn’t a single boy who wanted to die in bed.”115
The MR 26-7 claimed history as source of redemptive purport, having as much to do with overturning the conditions that had produced Batista as overthrowing Batista. To invoke the nineteenth-century independentista project as the discursive framework of revolution implied the use of the past as a way to contemplate solution to the historic sources of Cuban discontent. The MR 26-7 insisted outright that “the dictatorship can only be toppled by those who seek something more than its simple removal. . . . Those who pretend simply to ‘topple the dictator’ will not even achieve that, since they lack both serious motives and support from the social forces necessary to oppose regime embodying the most negative aspects of Cuban society. . . . The current government is not the cause but the result of the republic’s fundamental crisis.”116
The politics was embedded in the history, which meant too that the men and women of the resistance acted consciously as agents of their past. History served as a way to give context to commitment. The men and women of the MR 26-7 adopted the past as source of purpose and assumed the role of agents of history in fulfillment of the long-deferred project of nation. “Today we see [the martyrs of liberation] more alive than ever,” exhorted El Morillo in 1958, the official publication of Column 9/Third Front ‘Antonio Guiteras’ of the Rebel Army led by Hubert Matos, “a presence [sombra] that drives us forward and guides our arms tirelessly to struggle against the enemies of the patria.”117 Virtually all the principal texts prepared and disseminated by the MR26-7 during the years of the insurrectionary war characterized the process of armed struggle as a matter of historical continuity. The “Manifiesto Número 1 del 26 de Julio al pueblo de Cuba” (1955) affirmed:
The Cuban revolutionary movement is today organized and prepares for its great task of redemption and justice. . . . The streets and parks of our cities and towns bear the names and display with pride the statues of Maceo, Martí, Máximo Gómez, Calixto García, Céspedes, Agramonte, Flor Crombet, Bartolomé Masó, and other illustrious heroes who knew how to rebel. Our glorious history is taught in school, and the dates of October 10 and February 24 are venerated with devotion. These were not dates of submission or of resigned and cowardly acceptance of existing despotism. . . . In adopting again the line of sacrifice we assume before history responsibility for our acts.118
The Manifesto-Program (1956) provided the clearest exposition of historical sensibility as the logic of armed struggle. “The 26th of July Movement proposed fundamentally to reclaim the unfulfilled ideals of the Cuban nation and bring them to fruition,” the Manifesto-Program began. The MR 26-7 proclaimed itself as the “continuation of the revolutionary generations of the past” and insisted that it was “in reality the resumption of the unfinished Revolution of Cuba. It is for that purpose that we commit to the same ‘necessary war’ propounded by the Apostle [Martí], and for the same reasons.” The Manifesto-Program insisted that armed struggle was “at least as justified today as it was in 1868 and 1895, perhaps more so. In reality, we are resuming the unfinished revolution of Martí.” It continued: “Cuba fully possesses the geographical, historical, political, economic, and sociological justifications to constitute itself as a sovereign and independent nation. This is the first and basic affirmation of our struggle. Without it, the historical progress of the Cuban people in the last one hundred years would be totally devoid of any sense.” Indeed, the document proclaimed,
the Revolution is the struggle of the Cuban nation to fulfill its historical objectives. . . . The Revolution is not exactly a war or an isolated episode. Rather it is a continuing historical process represented by distinct moments and phases. The landings of Narciso López in the mid-nineteenth century, the wars of 1868 and 1895, the movement of the 1930s, and the struggle against the outlawry of the Batista regime are all part of the same and only national Revolution. . . . The principal objective of the Revolution is to affirm the full sovereignty of Cuba.119
The MR 26-7 reaffirmed this theme one year later: “The Revolution is based on the historical ideal of the Cuban nation. . . . This is the basic and foremost affirmation of our struggle. Without it, the historic process of the last one hundred years would be devoid of meaning,” adding:
That the struggle has not yet been brought to a successful conclusion means that the nation has not been fully consummated. . . . The Revolution is the struggle of the Cuban nation to achieve its historical objectives and realize its full integration. The Revolution seeks full national sovereignty and economic independence. The Revolution is not exactly a war or an isolated episode. It is a continual historical process that develops in different moments and through different stages. The conspiracies of the last century, the wars of 1868 and 1895, the movement of the 1930s, the struggle against the terror of Batista are all parts of the same and only Revolution.120
Not for the first time was the past deployed as a politics. But never before had the discursive framework of opposition been so fully transacted as discharge of historical purpose. The MR 26-7 inscribed itself into the past as a matter of context and continuity, to claim the fulfillment of the ideal of the sovereign nation as reason for revolution: the past as a shared reference point of memory and remembrance, of aspirations that were themselves at the very source of nationality. “Having won the war of independence, after the defeat of the colonial regime,” the MR 26-7 explained only weeks before the triumph of the revolution, “our people had earned the right to their independence. But almost immediately the sovereignty for which we so yearned was abrogated by the opprobrious Platt Amendment. . . . That was how the Republic was born.” The MR 26-7 pledged its determination “to conquer for our patria its legitimate right to be present in history as a nation free and democratic . . . [a commitment] that derives its inspiration from the thought of the Apostle [Martí].”121
From the outset, the MR 26-7 inscribed the meaning of armed resistance within allusions and analogies to the past: a continuation of the cause for which generations of mambises in the nineteenth century had sacrificed. Insurrection in Oriente province was itself possessed of intrinsic historical significance, an opportunity for Cubans to incorporate themselves into the historic geography of the nation, the very region associated with the origins of the wars for Cuba Libre. “[Oriente] is the land of the invincible heroes,” proclaimed the MR 26-7, “for it represents the spirit of sacrifice and love of the Patria of the Liberators of 1868 and 1895, of the struggles against Spain and Machado . . . and always to emerge triumphant.”122 All through 1957 and 1958, the insurgency in the Sierra Maestra was likened to the wars for independence. The clandestine newspaper Sierra Maestra proclaimed that “today in the mountain ranges of Oriente, a war for the freedom of Cuba is being waged in precisely the same way that the mambises fought in the war of 1868 and the war of 1895.”123 Enzo Infante Uribazo joined the insurgency, he remembered, inspired by the knowledge of “the prestigious combatants in Oriente who filled the pages of our history with acts of heroism,” noting: “All these things conferred on Oriente a great tradition of epic struggles and events.”124 “Young Cubans today,” wrote Armando Villa in 1957, “fight like the mambises of 1868 and 1895,” and further:
The way that sunlight originates from Oriente, once again light will arrive in Cuba from the indomitable region of its Liberty. First it was Maceo, who in his triumphal march brought the Light of Justice and Democracy, with all the mambises, from Maisí to San Antonio [that is, from one end of the island to the other]. Now it is Fidel Castro, the leader of the present generations, who has taken control of our highest mountain, to start a fire that will serve as the beacon of redemption of our martyred Patria. . . . The flame of liberty has been set ablaze again in Oriente and it will reach across the entire island.125
But it is also true that the armed opposition to the Batista government extended far beyond the confines of the Sierra Maestra. Across the island, in small towns and large cities, a vast underground network expanded to mount clandestine operations against the Batista government.126 The resistance involved vast numbers of Cubans, mostly ordinary men and women, of all social classes, who made a choice to act on what they believed to be the moral of their history. “We workers,” proclaimed Candela, the clandestine newspaper published by laundry and dry cleaning laborers, “faithful to the ideals of 1868 and 1895, appeal for the support of the mambises of today, to the revolutionaries who are truly committed to the construction of the Republic that Martí had dreamed about.”127
A new generation had taken up the cause of fulfillment of nation as a function of historic purpose. It identified itself as the “Generation of the Centennial” and would thereafter claim direct ideological lineage from José Martí, who was thereafter identified as the “intellectual author” of Moncada.128 The assault on Moncada, proclaimed the “Manifiesto de los revolucionarios del Moncada a la nación,” was planned with the “desire to honor with sacrifice and victory the unrealized dream of Martí.”129 Fidel Castro invoked the centennial of the birth of Martí as the occasion to redeem the ideal of nation: “[Martí’s] dream lives on. It has not died. His people are rebellious. His people are worthy. His people are faithful to his memory.”130
Many of the facets of the insurrection were modeled on the war of independence. “The similarity of the situation,” Castro wrote from prison in August 1954, “reminds me of the efforts made by Martí to unite all honorable Cubans [todos los cubanos dignos] in the struggle for independence. Each [person] had his history, his glories, his achievements; each believed to possess more rights than the others, or at least as many rights. . . . I am certain that without [Martí’s] magnificent effort, Cuba would still be a Spanish colony or a yanqui dependency. Perhaps that is the reason that I so admire the pages of Cuban history. They are not so much about feats on the field of battle as about that vast, heroic, and quiet effort to unify Cubans for the struggle.”131 Like the Partido Revolucionario Cubano in the 1890s, the MR 26-7 organized revolutionary clubs abroad in the 1950s. Like José Martí, Fidel Castro traveled to the United States to enlist support among Cuban communities in New York, Tampa, and Key West. Speaking to a Cuban audience in New York in 1955, Castro drew the obvious parallel: “We are realizing anew with the émigrés those things that our Apostle Martí taught us in a similar situation.”132 To have landed on Playa Las Coloradas in 1956 aboard the yacht Granma was to reenact the arrival of Antonio Maceo at Duaba and José Martí and Máximo Gómez at Playitas de Cajobabo in 1895. Castro’s invitation to correspondents Herbert Matthews, Robert Taber, and Andrew St. George to the Sierra Maestra reenacted the Cuban invitation to U.S. correspondents to insurgent camps in the nineteenth century. The establishment of the newspaper El Cubano Libre in 1957 in the Sierra Maestra replicated the establishment of the newspaper of the same name by Antonio Maceo in 1895. “El Cubano Libre was the official newspaper of the mambises,” proclaimed MR 26-7. “Today El Cubano Libre, in the mountain ranges of the Sierra Maestra, is the voice of those of us . . . who struggle to reclaim the liberty that forms the legacy that the mambises bequeathed to us.”133
Many of the guerrilla operations were influenced by the war for independence. The battle of Guisa in November 1958 was inaugurated on the same date that General Calixto García had laid siege to Guisa in November 1897. The dispatch of guerrilla columns to Havana in late 1958 under the command of Ernesto Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos was designated as “the Invasion,” the same name given to Antonio Maceo’s march westward in 1895–96. Camilo Cienfuegos designated his command as Column 2 ‘Antonio Maceo.’ Recalled Dariel Alarcón Ramírez, a member of Column 2: “Camilo always had an extraordinary love for General Antonio Maceo. . . . He lived in passionate admiration of the principal actions and battles directed by Maceo. . . . Ever since the nineteenth century, he has been one of our most admired warriors as a result of his courage and dignity. That was the reason Camilo gave Column 2 the name ‘Antonio Maceo.’” These were historic associations that informed the sense of moral purpose with which Cubans joined the insurrection. Recalled Alarcón Ramírez: “When we received orders to undertake the march westward . . . and reached the historic site Peralejo, Camilo explained to us the significance of [Maceo’s victory at the battle of] Peralejo. For an hour he spoke, with a fervor so pure and so revolutionary that I came to feel myself like one more Maceo in the invasion of the West. I believe that it helped me enormously, for I always remembered the beautiful words spoken by Camilo. This strengthened my resolve.”134
In 1957, the MR 26-7 declared war on the economy in imitation of the tactics adopted by the mambises in the nineteenth century, that is, sabotage as enactment of historical mandate: “Work is a crime against the revolution,” General Máximo Gómez had proclaimed in 1896.135 “The economic war against the Dictatorship has commenced,” proclaimed the Rebel Army command in 1958. “The 26th of July Movement has decided to use against the Tyranny the same method that Máximo Gómez used with success against the Captain Generals of the colonial regime.”136 The purpose was clear. “We will burn the sugarcane fields,” vowed the MR 26-7. “We will not hesitate a single moment to destroy the cane, the way the mambises did not hesitate to burn the cane during our wars of independence. There will be no harvest with Batista in power.”137 To burn sugar was raised to the level of historic duty. “The burning of the sugarcane fields,” proclaimed the MR 26-7, “signified today what it meant in 1868 and 1895: the revolutionary obligation of the Cuban people.”138
The concept of armed struggle gradually transformed from a rebellion against the Batista government (la lucha contra la tiranía) and the overthrow of the dictatorship (derrocar a la tiranía) to a war of national liberation, a momentous if perhaps not readily discernible change in an environment dense with the rhetoric of revolution—but one with far-reaching implications. By late 1957, Fidel Castro was characterizing the guerrilla columns as the “Liberation Army of the 26th of July Movement” (el Ejército Libertador del Movimiento 26 de Julio). Radio Rebelde inaugurated transmissions from La Plata, the Rebel Army headquarters in the Sierra Maestra in 1958—on February 24, the anniversary date of Grito de Baire: “Aqui Radio Rebelde transmitiendo desde la Sierra Maestro en Territorio Libre de Cuba!”—liberated territory: exactly the terms that the mambiseshad used to refer to territory under their control during the war for independence.139 All through 1958, the broadcast transmissions of Radio Rebelde repeatedly invoked the proposition of national liberation as the purpose of the armed struggle.140
The triumph of the revolution on January 1, 1959, was the triumph of history. Certainly that was the claim advanced by the victors. It seemed plausible—and persuasive. For a people who believed in the prophetic power of their past, the triumph of the revolution was received as vindication of their faith in their history—“la llegada,” many Cubans believed—a revolution that “had come out of the past,” Herbert Matthews wrote at the time.141 This was a history that had insinuated itself deeply into multiple domains of the popular imagination, what Cubans had been reading in fiction, viewing in film, singing in song, reciting in verse, all bearing the moral of a nation awaiting fulfillment. Historical knowledge had reached deep into the national imagination, a process that must be understood as one of the principal means by which the claim of the revolution as redemption of the nation obtained popular currency and political credibility.
Memory lingered in places of unsuspected profundity. In this moment of unmediated triumph, on January 1, Cubans found themselves immersed in their history, self-consciously reclaiming their presence in their past as protagonists, fully imbued with a sense of agency and expectation of fulfillment. A joyful María de los Reyes Castillo was reunited with her two sons in early January 1959, both combatants in the Sierra Maestra, and greeted them through the eyes of a woman of her history: “How beautiful they were! With their olive green uniforms, and long hair and beards; one, an officer. They were dignified successors to the mambí tradition of my ancestors and my father.”142
Sixty years after the defeat of Spain, as the victorious Rebel Army prepared to descend from the Sierra Maestra into the city of Santiago de Cuba, as the government of Fulgencio Batista crumbled, the parallels were far too compelling to allow them to pass without comment. Something significant was happening, Cubans sensed, although certainly the dimension and depth of what was happening could hardly have been suspected on January 1, 1959. But the presentiment of momentous was everywhere. It was palpable. “Something big is happening here,” comments the protagonist in January 1959 in José Soler Puig’s novel En el año de enero (1963).143 Reflects Adriana in Freddy Artiles’s play Adriana en dos tiempos (1972): “I realized that something fundamental had changed. I didn’t quite fully comprehend what it was, but I felt that it was something new, and above all something different. Even the people seemed different. Public life entered into the home, even entered into one’s self.”144
Momentous times indeed, for which the larger narrative rendering of the armed struggle as liberation—certainly in its discursive structure—had more than adequately prepared national sensibilities. This is not to suggest that the revolution was a matter of inevitable outcome, of course. But to acknowledge that the Cuban revolution was not inevitable should not be understood to mean that it lacked an internal logic, one derived from the very history from which it emerged. The MR 26-7 had fashioned a politics of the unfinished project of nation into a revolutionary metaphysics of powerful appeal. To address Cuban discontent as a historical condition, possessed of solution in the fulfillment of the promise of the past, was to confer on the proposition of revolution the achievement of redemption. “Fidel Castro with the support of the revolutionaries who followed him,” novelist Lisandro Otero reflected years later, “assumed the task of realizing the project of nation that had been conceived at the very origins of Cuban identity,” and added: “They were prophets of the new era, preachers in a new-found Arcadia. They discharged the mission that had been conferred upon them by history: the hour of our genesis was at hand.”145
The triumph of the revolution was a defining moment, not only—and perhaps not even principally—because it was a historical event in its own right, but also because it lay claim to the purpose of all the history that had preceded it. For many of the men and women “inside” the revolution, that is, those who had contributed to the triumph, the revolution did not come from history—it was history. This was an exquisite existential moment, when the past and present collapsed in on one another and in that instant revealed the power of the past to give meaning to the present. Filmmaker Julio García Espinosa recalled January 1, 1959, vividly: “We felt finally that our interior lives could now be reconciled with our public life. Time had become one and indivisible. The present had become the past and the past, the present and future. The image we now saw in the mirror was not that of a stranger, but of ourselves.”146
But the triumphant revolution came bearing another message, one of portentous purport, precisely because it had so fully inscribed itself into the historic project of nation. The men and women of the revolution discerned in the past a politics of radical reach, as a program and a purpose, conveyed principally in the proposition of national sovereignty as means of self-determination. The revolution summoned Cuban indignation against the prevailing order of things, to be sure, but with the understanding that the sources of Cuban discontent were the product of historical circumstances that could be remedied only by the realization of the purpose that had given meaning to the idea of nation in the first place. “There is a common view in Cuba,” Fidel Castro warned pointedly in January 1959, “that in destroying the tyrant we destroy tyranny. But tyranny is not a man; tyranny is a system.”147 The overthrow of the Batista government implied more than a restoration of pre-1952 constitutionality; it signified rejection of the post-1902 republic.
In the exaltation of triumph on January 1, fresh and flushed with victory, Fidel Castro chose that moment to recall the past. This was the past as a means with which to arrange the present into coherent narrative order, of acts and actors of almost impenetrable complexity rendered as history in actual time, but mostly a way to confer continuity on discontinuity and introduce memory to anticipate the future. At dawn, Castro addressed the nation by way of Radio Rebelde: “Cuba is not free yet. . . . The war has not ended because the murderers remain armed. The military men . . . insist that the rebels cannot enter Santiago de Cuba; we have been prohibited from entering a city that we could take with the valor and courage that our fighters have taken other cities. They wish to deny entrance to Santiago de Cuba to those who have liberated the patria. The history of 1895 will not be repeated!”148
The comparison was plausible; the meaning was purposeful. The celebration of liberation obtained in 1959 called attention to liberation obstructed in 1898. The long-deferred liberation was at hand, an unmediated victory achieved through war, with the victors entering the cities to receive the adulation of a grateful people: at once an act of catharsis and consecration, a process by which a people affirmed reintegration into their history. Not like 1898, when the Cubans, disarmed and displaced, marched into the cities behind the Americans and saw foreigners receive credit for the victory that properly should have been—minimally—shared with the Cubans. Not in 1959. José María Cuesta Braniella remembered well the symbolism of Fidel Castro entering victoriously into Santiago de Cuba. “It was to vindicate the Liberation Army [el Ejército Mambí],” he wrote years later, “that was not permitted to enter Santiago de Cuba after the victory of the War for Independence in 1898.”149
These were men and women acting consciously as agents of history, determined to make good on their past and driven single-mindedly to bring an unfinished history to a conclusion. “This time the mambises will enter Santiago de Cuba! This time the revolution will not be thwarted,” Fidel Castro thundered on January 1, 1959, effacing all distinction between the mambises of 1898 and the barbudos of 1959. “This time, fortunately for Cuba, the revolution will be consummated. It will not be like the war of 1895, when the Americans arrived and made themselves masters of the country; they intervened at the last minute and later did not even allow Calixto García, who had been fighting for thirty years, to enter Santiago de Cuba.”150 Later that day, Castro spoke at Céspedes Park in Santiago de Cuba. “The republic was not freed in 1895 and the dream of the mambises was frustrated in the final hours,” Castro recalled. “We can say with joy that in the four centuries since our country was founded, we are for the first time entirely free and that the work of the mambises will be fulfilled.” The Cubans who had struggled for thirty years only to see their dreams denied, Castro was certain, would have rejoiced at the realization that the “revolution that they had dreamed of and the patria that they had imagined had finally come to pass.”151 Castro reflected upon a private pilgrimage he had made to Baraguá a day earlier:
A profound sense of devotion compelled us to stop at the monument commemorating the Protest [of Baraguá]. At that late hour, with only our presence there, thoughts of the daring achievements of our wars of independence, the idea that those men would have fought for thirty years and in the end did not see their dreams fulfilled because the republic was thwarted, and our anticipation that very soon, the revolution that they dreamed of, the patria they yearned for, would be transformed into a reality, made us experience one of the most powerful emotions that one could ever imagine. I saw those men relive their sacrifices, sacrifices which we experienced so recently. I could conjure up their dreams and their aspirations, which were the same as our dreams and our aspirations, and I reflected that this generation of Cubans must render and has rendered the most fervent recognition of loyalty to the heroes of our independence. The men who perished in our three wars of independence now join their efforts to those of the men who perished in this war, and to all those who perished in the struggles for liberty. We can tell them now that their dreams are about to be fulfilled.152
Thoughtful observers sensed that Fidel Castro was saying something else, something more—that the moral of the idea was greater than the meaning of the words. These were, after all, acts and allusions with far-reaching implications, by design and with a purpose, something that Cubans understood intuitively: the visual and the verbal registered as a sensory moment whose advent had been anticipated long before its achievement. Signs of what was to follow were, in fact, all there, and everywhere portentous. The past was indeed prophetic. To evoke memories of aspirations thwarted sixty years earlier implied a larger purpose, of course. It was left to the literary imagination of novelist César Leante to grasp the mood of the moment in his short story “El día inicial,” as the narrator listens to Fidel Castro’s radio broadcast from Santiago de Cuba and ponders the meaning of those allusions to the past:
Finally, at dawn, . . . the voice of Fidel Castro. It is not a deep voice, not as full as many have expected, but thin, tense, a little forced, that does not construct brilliant paragraphs, that speaks in everyday language, that gets entangled in clauses that remain incomplete, and that, most of all, already, from this early moment, sounds troubling. . . . “This time the revolution will not be thwarted”—predicts the distant orator. “This time, fortunately, for Cuba, the revolution will be consummated.” And in continuation, a warning, the sounding of an alarm that should have made the contented well-to-do slightly uneasy—only slightly, for the time being. “It will not be like the war of 1895, when the Americans arrived and made themselves masters of the country; they intervened at the last minute and later did not even allow Calixto García, who had been fighting for thirty years, to enter Santiago de Cuba.” That allusion to the United States . . . that allusion . . .153
In the days that followed January 1, Fidel Castro and an entourage of hundreds of victorious barbudos—the caravana de la libertad, as it became known—made their way slowly westward to Havana. All along the way Castro stopped to speak, and again and again he alluded to the past as something of an uncontested—and incontestable—moral warrant of the revolution, always to the roaring approval of many thousands of Cubans. He rendered the meaning of patria in deeply sentimental terms, unabashedly nostalgic, recalling the nineteenth-century promise of nation as remedy to the historic sources of Cuban discontent, and especially patria as meeting Cuban needs—the very proposition that had given meaning to nation in the first place. “The tragedy of our people has been the lack of patria,” he affirmed on January 4 from Camagüey: “How can we say, ‘This is our patria,’ if from the patria we have nothing. ‘My patria’—but my patria gives me nothing, my patria does not sustain me, in my patria I die of hunger. That is not patria!. . . Patria is a place in which one can live, patria is a place in which one can work and maintain an honorable livelihood and earn just wages for one’s labor.”154 Two days later, in Santa Clara, he proclaimed that “our Revolution has triumphed for something. It has triumphed because the people have understood from the outset that this is not a mere change of men but a change of purpose,” adding: “Our people long ago lost faith in our patria.” But things had changed: “For the first time in our history the nation is truly free.” History was very much on Castro’s mind: “The glory of the revolutionaries, of all who have fought, belongs to the people and to history! The dead who have fallen, whatever their affiliation, belong to the patria and to history! The sacrifices that have been made belong to the patria and to history.”155 Later that day, in Sancti-Spíritus, Castro affirmed purpose in fulfillment of the past: “The struggle was not only to overthrow the dictatorship,” he proclaimed. “The struggle was for something more: to build on the ruins of the toppled dictatorship a new patria, that must be different from the patria which has existed up to this day.” He continued:
Fidel Castro in Santa Clara, January 1959. From Luis Báez and Pedro de la Hoz, Caravana de la libertad (Havana, 2009).
The triumph of this Revolution is contained within a moral renovation, not only for those who have fallen in this struggle. It is with enormous satisfaction to think that this Revolution will be the realization of the dreams not only of the men of this generation, but also the realization of the dreams of the generation that struggled against the dictatorship of Machado and the realization of the dreams of our liberators which still have not been realized. . . . We pay homage and will continue to honor the fallen of today, and the fallen of yesterday, and the fallen of our wars of independence. . . . They are men who have perished struggling for a dream, a dream that has not been realized, but a dream that we will fulfill.156
The next day, in Matanzas, Castro elaborated further: “A people determined to defend their rights are invincible, no matter how small they are. For that reason, I believe that our people, this time, the first occasion when a revolution has fully triumphed—the revolution that did not triumph in 1895 because it ended in an intervention, and the revolution of that did not triumph in 1933 because it was thwarted by a military coup—this time there is and cannot be an intervention or a military coup. . . . This time the people will achieve the goals that have so often been denied to them.”157 All along the way to Havana, Castro repeatedly invoked the idea of liberation, of the triumph—he insisted—of a revolution that represented the completion of a struggle for national liberation begun more than one hundred years earlier. In Santa Clara, he praised the new “veterans of the war of liberation [veteranos de la guerra de liberación].” In Matanzas, he expressed appreciation to the Cuban people for their support of the “ejército libertador” (liberation army).158
Headline of the Havana Post announcing the arrival of Fidel Castro in Havana on January 8, 1959. From Havana Post, January 9, 1959.
Across the island, the scenes of popular euphoria that anticipated the arrival of the triumphant Fidel Castro and the officers and soldiers of the Rebel Army were those of a people receiving their liberators in a collective mood of deliverance. Guillermo Vincente Vidal recalled the arrival of the caravana in Camagüey: “A celebratory procession that would have rivaled any Caesar’s triumphal entry into Rome. For days, offices and shops everywhere were shut down. Throngs of people spilled out into the streets, and virtually every Cuban tried to find a way to see and cheer our revolutionary hero. . . . People threw flowers, confetti, freed doves into the festive air. . . . It was a wonderful time to be alive.”159 Marcia del Mar vividly remembered the arrival of the caravana in Havana: “There was drinking and singing in the streets. The green-clad soldiers entered the city accompanied by cheering mobs. Women threw multi-colored flowers into the happy crowd from wrought-iron balconies. Everyone felt miraculously saved from tyranny. . . . The crowds went wild with joy. . . . The savior and his disciples had emerged victorious. . . . Our neighbors held ‘liberation parties,’ flying torn, mildewy flags insolently out their windows. Fireworks went off for weeks.”160 Hiram González, a young officer in the Rebel Army in the caravana, remembered entering the capital: “As we moved toward Havana, our guerrilla columns were mobbed everywhere we went. Old women hugged us, young girls kissed us and gave us flowers to adorn our jeeps and hats. When we stopped, townspeople brought us containers of hot food, gifts. Little children asked us for autographs. It was a time of joy, of incredible happiness. I was twenty years old, a lieutenant in the army of liberation. I felt on top of the world.”161 Observed the British ambassador in Havana on January 10: “[Castro’s] triumphant progress throughout the length of the island during the past week, culminat[ed] in what the press with some justification termed the apotheosis of his entry into Havana. . . . Romantically bearded, with his cohorts of battle-scarred veterans recalling the liberation fighters of sixty years ago, it is neither blasphemous nor exaggerated to assert that for the great majority of Cubans, intoxicated by recent events, Castro represents a mixture of José Martí, Robin Hood, Garibaldi, and Jesus Christ.”162
“Never in the history of Cuba,” New York Times correspondent Ruby Hart Philips confided to her journal, “has anyone received such a welcome. The ovation was of such magnitude that it was a little frightening. The majority of Havana’s one million inhabitants must have turned out.”163 Chicago Tribune correspondent John H. Thompson, wrote Jules Dubois, “who was in Paris when it was liberated in World War II, compared the welcome accorded to Castro with that historic event.”164
Contained within the proposition of the revolution as liberation was a claim as irresistible as it was irreversible: the presumption of continuity with the nineteenth-century wars for independence, and more: the triumph of the revolution as consummation of nation. The revolution claimed the mandate of change as a legacy, the promise of the past fulfilled. A people seemed to have been revived to reclaim control over their history. The idea of rebirth took hold. Manuel Urrutia recalled Castro’s entrance into Havana as the moment “the country was being reborn.”165 Rufo López Fresquet looked upon the revolution as signaling “the rebirth of the nation.”166 Jorge Mañach discerned Cubans as a changed people. “We are living in Cuba a brilliant moment of profound renovation,” Mañach wrote in 1959. “Renovation . . . of the spirit of our people, of hopes and of will; most of all, of faith in ourselves. . . . What has been reborn in Cuba is not as much faith as the confidence of Cubans in themselves.”167
How difficult indeed it would prove to be to challenge the moral propriety and political legitimacy of the men and women who declared themselves to have realized the nineteenth-century project of liberation and who, in the process, proclaimed the revolution as fulfillment of historical destiny. The victorious Cubans, Tony Santiago García of the Directorio Revolucionario proclaimed in January 1959, had “consummated the Third War of Independence of our misfortunate patria.”168 By early 1959, the idea of national liberation had expanded fully into the master narrative of the revolution and had obtained discursive ascendancy across the island: the new mambises had realized the long-deferred liberation of Cuba. In the euphoria of victory in the early weeks and months of 1959, in the exaltation of triumph, Cubans across the island celebrated the triumphant revolution as liberation and the resumption of the history interrupted in 1898. Journalist Waldo Medina celebrated “the liberators of the 26th of July who, in the voice of its outstanding leader . . . Fidel Castro—Martí reborn—has set Cuba on a new course.”169 Roberto Fernández Retamar insisted that “it was with perfect clarity that the objectives of Fidel Castro represented continuity with the republic propounded by José Martí.”170 In 1959, the Cuban people surrendered themselves joyfully to their history. “January 1959,” Cintio Vitier remembered years later, “was an ecstasy of history.” He continued:
An ecstasy in the sense of a suspension of time: it appeared as if a vision had revealed itself, not an image or metaphor, but a vision of something that had been realized but seemed impossible. . . . And everyone who experienced this moment—something very difficult to convey to young people—will never forget it. A moment that not Martí, that no one lived to witness: not Céspedes, not Agramonte, not Maceo, not Gomez, not [Julio Antonio] Mella, not Rubén [Martínez Villena]—not anyone. We were witness to that vision in which history was aligned on the side of the good in absolute terms. That cannot be forgotten.171
The triumph of the revolution was received as the fulfillment of national liberation. The weekly Bohemia celebrated the MR 26-7 as “the soul of this project of national liberation.”172 In announcements and advertisements published in newspapers and magazines, merchants, manufacturers, and financiers were exuberant in their congratulations to the victors and further ratified the proposition of the triumphant revolution as redemption of nation. “Our eternal gratitude to the heroes who liberated us,” proclaimed Fin de Siglo department store. La Filosofía department store paid its respects to “the new liberators . . . who have gloriously emulated the immortal deed of the War of Independence: the liberation invasion [la invasión Libertadora].”173 Beer manufacturer Tropical congratulated the “glorious army of liberation,” and the Association of Merchants and Industrialists proclaimed its support of the “army of liberation and its maximum leader Fidel Castro.”174 “We wish to congratulate the people of Cuba for its liberation,” affirmed the Shell Oil Company, “and we welcome with open arms the liberation army with its maximum leader Dr. Fidel Castro Ruz.”175 The Rice Growers’ Association of Sancti-Spíritus pledged its support of the “revolution of liberation,” and the American Sugar Company expressed its gratitude to the “young generation at this time of liberation.”176 Affirmed the Social Security Bank of Cuba: “We can now sing victory for now that the chains that impeded our complete political, social, and economic liberation have been broken, Cuba can now determine its own destiny! Now we can legitimately proclaim: ‘Viva Cuba Libre.’”177 January 1 was proclaimed the “Day of National Liberation.” The year 1959 was proclaimed the “Year of Liberation.” The insurrection was henceforth designated as the war of national liberation.178
Advertisement welcoming the arrival of the liberators in Havana, January 7, 1959. From El Mundo, January 7, 1959.
The proposition of the triumphant revolution as culmination of the nineteenth-century process of liberation drew unabashedly upon the value system from which nationality had formed and indeed developed early into the master narrative with which the victors claimed power. It served to transport a people into realms never before visited with a confidence that only a faith in their history could sustain. “The present revolutionary process,” affirmed Camilo Cienfuegos in early 1959, “to which our generation has fully given its soul, its heart, and its valor to the cause of liberty, is nothing more than the continuation of the liberation process initiated in 1868, resumed in 1895, and frustrated during the Republic. The ideals of liberation, of social, political, and economic justice for which our Apostle [Martí] gave his life, are the reasons for our struggle.”179 “The mambises,” proclaimed Fidel Castro in February 1959, “initiated the war for independence that we have completed on January 1, 1959.”180 He did not hesitate to draw the obvious moral: “Finally, the dreams of the men who for more than one hundred years struggled to have their own patria have been fulfilled. They struggled so that our people would be masters of their destiny, to have a place of dignity among the countries of the world, and to have also a space in the history of the world.”181 Raúl Castro made the same point: “Now, with this Revolution . . . we have done nothing less than finish the War of Independence that was begun nearly one hundred years ago by our mambises. On January 1 of this year we completed our War of Independence. We inaugurated the Republic on that date.”182
The imagery of the victorious barbudos as mambises seized hold of the popular imagination. “Our dark past has remained behind,” reflected historian Leví Marrero days after the triumph of the revolution, “spurned by the rifle fire of the new mambises. . . . The admirable troops of the liberation army replicated the heroic feats of the mambises.”183 Columnist Carlos Todd celebrated the men and women of MR 26-7 as “living embodiments of the famed ‘mambises’ of the revolutionary past of Cuban’s beginnings as a free nation. . . . They appeared before the cameras, a reincarnation of the men led by Maceo, Máximo Gómez, and Calixto García, bearded, long-haired, bristling with bandoliers and rifles and carbines.”184
Fidel Castro was not the first Cuban to aspire to the role of redeemer of the nation. But he was different in that he appealed to the logic of a history that was as self-implicating as it was self-confirming. The power of the appeal to the past lay where it had always been: in the promise of nation as the premise of nationality, central to which was the demand for national sovereignty and self-determination as the minimum condition for fulfillment of Cuban. Few political leaders in the twentieth century were—as a matter of intellectual formation and political persuasion—as fully conversant with the Cuban past as Fidel Castro. He understood intuitively that to inscribe a politics of change into well-formed and widely shared historical sensibilities was to appeal directly to the very aspiration by which Cubans had arrived at an understanding of the people they wished to be. “Castro has become the most genuine representative of the Cuban youth,” Jorge Mañach had concluded only months before the triumph of the revolution, “and indeed of many older citizens who share the views of youth—which has inherited all the accumulated sense of betrayal of several republican generations.”185 Precisely because Cubans were conversant with the moral of their history as a matter of received wisdom, the use of allegories, analogies, and allusions to the past as the logic of change could be easily encoded into a metaphor of revolution. That it would threaten the status quo and especially challenge the premise and the propriety of privileged power contenders, including and especially the Americans, was not immediately apparent. A careful reading of the meaning of the sovereign nation in its nineteenth-century formulation would surely have laid bare the implications of the Cuban purpose in the mid-twentieth century—although, no less surely, even after such a careful reading, few would have thought Cubans capable of sustaining a project of such radical reach in defiance of North American power. That too was the conventional wisdom. “No sane man undertaking to govern and reform Cuba,” the Central Intelligence Agency had reasoned, “would have chosen to pick a fight with the U.S.”186
That the summons to revolution was inscribed within the narrative of a familiar history served to conceal the radical portent of the nineteenth-century ideal of nation: powerful in the late nineteenth century, and more so in the mid-twentieth. The proposition of national sovereignty was as much a threat to the premise of the republic in the 1950s as it had been a challenge to the rationale of the colony in the 1890s. Purpose was contained in the convergence of past and present, with a politics in the form of sentiments, which, if discerned at all, were mostly in the realm of feelings and passions, where cognitive certainties yielded to intuitive impulses. Hugh Thomas was correct to observe that had the ideals of Martí been implemented in 1959, “the changes in Cuba’s condition would be radical” and might have resulted “in perhaps not a Communist revolution, but one certainly more ‘revolutionary’ than in Mexico under [Lázaro] Cárdenas.”187
Whether by political opportunism or heartfelt persuasion or some combination of both—perhaps never to be known—Fidel Castro understood well the power of the past to drive the purpose of politics. The past was legacy to make good on, to be sure. But it existed also in the form of accumulated grievances as a wrong to right. “The grievances we carry within us are old,” reflected Fidel Castro in early January 1959.188 The sentiment had fixed itself within national sensibilities as a disposition of unsuspected depth: in part angst, in part umbrage, a condition that contained within its very properties the vision of its own transformation. It had given form to a national constituency disposed to act in realization of the promise of the past. Fidel Castro could deploy the narratives of the past as effective discourse for revolution precisely because the claim to nation evoked ideals to which Cubans were eminently susceptible: as source of program, as standard of conduct, and as scope of purpose. It was from history that Castro propounded the mandate for revolution, a self-conscious representation of the revolution as fulfillment of unmet aspirations of the past. Not since José Martí had anyone so explicitly appealed to the normative determinants of nationality as the basis of a mandate for change.
Cubans experienced the triumph of the revolution with soaring self-confidence, rising expectations, and a heightened anticipation of national fulfillment, but most of all with a powerful sense of empowerment, of a people imbued with the prerogative of Cuban in Cuba: characterized at the time—and thereafter—as a release of nationalist exaltation. But a closer examination suggests a far more complex process. This was about a people reintegrating themselves into their history, celebrating their achievement in the 1950s as fulfillment of the achievements of the 1890s, something of an act of completion and thereupon affirming the decorum of protagonists in history, what playwright Senel Paz characterized as a “people wishing to celebrate their entering into History [un pueblo que quiere festejar su entrada en la Historia].”189
The revolution drew vast numbers of men and women into the logic of the very history from which it claimed its origins. Cubans in 1959 were a people fully persuaded that they had recovered their history and reclaimed historical agency. “History is now,” proclaimed the daily Revolución.190 The triumph of the revolution provided Cubans with the opportunity to enter their history, to act out history, to feel their history, to become one with their history. For the men and women formed within the normative systems from which the meaning of Cuban had developed, the triumph of the revolution seemed to have signified mastery over the forces that governed their lives. Cubans believed themselves to have seized their history, on their terms, as agents and actors, fully imbued with the moral authority of their past. This had to do with the idea that in overthrowing the Batista dictatorship, unaided and unassisted, Cubans had cleared the way back to their past, back to the point from which they had been dislodged from their history, and from that point to begin anew.
The triumphant revolution produced almost immediately a new history as source of legend and lore, new founding myths in the making, a celebration of heroes and commemoration of heroic deeds, of the combats and battles large and small, all elevated to the level of decisive military victories: La Plata, El Uvero, Jigüe, El Hombrito, Palma Mocha, Arroyo del Infierno, Bueycito, Guisa, and Santa Clara, among others. And a pantheon of new martyrs of liberation. The barbudos became legends in their own time. “Legends surrounding the revolucionarios spread quickly across the island,” Guillermo Vincente Vidal recalled in the early months of 1959; “they became folk heroes and celebrities, and in the popular imagination, Fidel grew larger than life.”191
Cubans drew the inference of their accomplishments without hesitation. “The victorious revolution won on January 1, 1959,” Raúl Roa affirmed, “put an end to an ominous state of affairs, and today for the first time in our history, Cuba is truly free, independent, and sovereign.”192 Journalist Andrés Valdespino celebrated the triumph of the revolution as a victory of all Cubans, and with thinly veiled allusions to the past:
A people has given to the world a glorious example of an indomitable will. . . . A pueblo, above all, that has arisen . . . with faith in its own destiny. This has been, perhaps, among the greatest of all the achievements of the Revolution: of having restored faith to Cubans. . . . For the first time a Revolution has triumphed without compromise and mediation, . . . a revolution that overthrew a regime supported by great capitalist interests and the American embassy. A revolution that achieves power without foreign intervention that divests it of its nationalist sentiments and without a military coup that threatens its democratic inclination.193
The revolution had “radically changed the character of our circumstances,” Luis Aguilar León observed: “National dignity firm and filled with pride, fully secure in our destiny, free at last of the humiliating inferiority under the northern shadow, Cubans today can return without embarrassment to the objective pursuit of all the threads that make up the fabric of our history.”194 The narrator in Daura Olema’s novel Maestra voluntaria (1962) contemplates the panorama of the Cuban countryside from a moving train soon after the triumph of the revolution, reflecting: “It is the same Cuba of always, but in truth for the first time in history it belongs to us.”195
The occasion of the triumphant revolution in 1959 was a time to look back, purposely, for redress and remedy, a way to connect one historic moment with another as a matter of consummation as an act of continuity. Writer Armando J. Flórez Ibarra drew the connections succinctly: “Analyzing the historical reach of the triumphant revolutionary movement, it appears to us as if the revolutionary armies of 1895 . . . have reached power, finally, free of all mediating influences. We are witness to the vindication of the triumph that the United States, through its armed intervention in 1898, cheated us of. . . . We have finally liberated ourselves from the complex of a protectorate.”196 The newspaper Revolución alluded often to 1898. “Independence,” Revolución affirmed on January 15, “was frustrated by the foreign intervention.” One day later, Revolución provided its readers a history lesson: “We are going to talk about a little history. Once upon a time, some of our grandfathers, after nearly a century of conspiracy and war, at the point of obtaining their victory as a result of the exhaustion of Spain, and its impending financial collapse, due to the futility of its arms and the fever of its sons, suddenly received the intervention of their neighbors, who until then had remained indifferent to their years of suffering. The war ended but . . . the liberators all but starved to death.”197
Cubans received the triumph of the revolution in 1959 with a newfound sense of collective self-esteem and self-confidence, what novelist Miguel Cossío Woodward described as an “incomprehensible notion derived from a profound sense of history.”198 The debilitating sense of inferiority that had sapped Cuban morale through much of the early republic seemed to have dissipated. “It is now a pleasure to be Cuban; before it was embarrassing,” proclaims the protagonist in José Soler Puig’s novel En el año de enero (1963).199 “Of all the ‘incredible’ things that your tenacity and energy have achieved,” novelist José Lezama Lima wrote to Fidel Castro in early 1959, “none is perhaps greater than that of having ‘resuscitated’ the Cuban spirit of confidence, a spirit that appeared understandably dead and without any possible means of revival after the governments between 1944 and the present, whose fraudulence in so many ways destroyed even the possibility of optimism among the Cuban people.”200 Writer Luis Amado Blanco dedicated his novel Ciudad rebelde (1967) to Fidel Castro, “who one day resurrected us with the Spring of an old hope.”201 Poet Roberto Fernández Retamar published a collection of poems under the title Vuelta de la antigua esperanza (The Return of Old Hope).202 Wrote Jorge Martí in early 1959: “With the triumph of the revolution, the Cuban people feel, for the first time, as fully developed protagonists in their history, as masters of their destiny. They realized their hopes without foreign assistance, without foreign limitations. There was an euphoric outburst of sentiments of independence . . . and as a consequence there developed among the Cuban people a fervent desire to suppress the old vices possessed of colonial origins and practice the ideals of the mambises. Such is the moment in which we live.”203 Novelist Juan Arcocha was succinct: “We can finally believe in Cuba.”204
National fulfillment had become personal fulfillment. Vast numbers of men and women became one with their past, learning anew the meaning of Cuban. “[The revolution] makes us know who we are,” Esteban Montejo explained to Andrew Salkey. “To ourselves, I mean. That’s good. We didn’t know that for a long time in Cuba. We are beginning to know what Cuba is, and who all the people are, living in Cuba and calling themselves Cubans.”205 Pablo Armando Fernández explained this phenomenon in slightly different terms: “The Revolution gave us a face and a voice, two things that Cuba had lacked.”206
History seemed to advance inexorably: a people overtaken by a history set in motion almost one hundred years earlier, displacing almost everything that lay beyond the logic of the purpose from which the idea of the past had developed. There was no escape. Years later, Andrei Codrescu learned that during the 1960s the Hotel Capri in Havana had been “a favorite meeting place for dissidents,” noting: “They came here to drink coffee and plot some improbable exit from Cuban history. . . . The best some of them did was to plot an exit from the island, but history was harder to shake; it followed them like a rabid dog.”207
The past had become ends and means: the past to reclaim and redeem, to make good on, of course, but also the past as a usable framework in which to summon a people already disposed—indeed, determined—to reclaim the purpose for which the nation had been conceived in the first place. Cubans carried knowledge of the past in the form of a persuasion, the way a people know something with such certainty and with such conviction that they lose awareness that it is external to them; it assumed fully the form of faith, which in part explains the power of the past to convey moral purpose as a politics. This was historical knowledge as a compelling frame of reference to make sense of in 1959. To inscribe the triumph of the revolution within the logic of the past was to advance the claim to power as a matter of prophetic purport, of a future foretold and informed with purpose derived from the very value system from which the meaning of Cuban originated.
The promise of national sovereignty offered Cubans the possibility of agency as protagonists in historical narratives of their own making and a destiny of their own choosing. Aspirations to the sovereign nation were sentiments to which almost all Cubans—usually in principle and certainly in public—could subscribe; and as an ideal advanced by the revolutionary government these must be seen as a factor in how Cubans were early drawn into the logic of revolution. These were not sentiments invented by the leadership. They were intrinsic to the very moral order to which Cuban leaders were themselves heir and by which they had been formed. They understood intuitively the power of the ideal of national sovereignty as means of political mobilization and source of national consensus, that the claim to defend the normative systems in which Cubans were formed provided an all-encompassing discursive strategy of national purpose.
Men and women across the island gave themselves unreservedly to their history, fully persuaded that a historically foretold destiny had been realized. The triumph of the revolution implied more than a victory over the present: it was vindication of the past. Belief in a common destiny had early inscribed itself into the historical narrative of the nation: thwarted, of course, but sustained by way of a faith in the past as purpose. “Cuba has recovered confidence in its destiny,” proclaimed historian Emilio Roig de Leuchsenring, “and Cubans have regained confidence in themselves.”208 This was not a matter of chance, Cubans were certain. They had determined their own destiny and in so doing had seized control of history on their terms. “What have we done?” Fidel Castro asked rhetorically, answering: “Continued the effort. What have we done? Continued the struggle, fulfilled the program of the patria, realized the destiny of the nation.”209
The triumph of the revolution was a drama dense with history. The Rebel Army acting in behalf of the mambises marching into Santiago de Cuba, or perhaps it was the other way around, that the mambises had returned in 1959. In fact, it really did not matter. The ambiguity was useful, for either way the larger meaning was the same and could be inferred intuitively. “Today,” Revolución blurred past and present in early 1959, “when we saw the troops of Calixto García led by Fidel Castro enter Santiago on January 1, we have to think that we live in different times. And if Santiago de Cuba of yesterday was the tomb of the Spanish empire in the New World, Cuba of today . . . could well be the . . . site where the now obsolete imperialism is shattered.”210 It is entirely possible to contemplate, of course, that there were many Cubans who did not fully appreciate the implications of what the premise of liberation—carried to its logical conclusion—portended.
There was perhaps no more powerful corroboration to the claim of continuity than the presence of the surviving mambises at public events organized by the new government and who by their attendance lent moral credibility to the claim of authority. Mambises were a ubiquitous presence in the early years of the revolution, celebrated in their own right, of course, but also called upon to bear witness and validate the process made in their name with the claims of having fulfilled their aspirations. When Fidel Castro addressed the nation from Camp Columbia upon arriving in Havana on January 8, seated behind the speakers’ platform, sharing the stage with the victorious barbudos, were surviving mambises of 1895.211 At a mass rally later that January, seated on the speakers’ platform, reported Revolución, “was a very large group of mambises, who drew powerful applause, and whose presence was palpable testimony of the support of those who gave us our first liberty for the brave young men who re-conquered it.”212 From time to time, interviews with aging mambises were published, almost all of whom ratified the claim of the revolution as the realization of the independentista project. “Naturally I like Fidel,” proclaimed one-hundred-year-old veteran José Chamizo, “for he has the same ideals of General Antonio Maceo.”213 Eighty-seven-year-old Antonio Díaz affirmed outright: “The Revolution is doing today what the mambises initiated in the field of combat [en la manigua].”214 “It is now,” eighty-eight-year-old José Virgilio Carabaloso exulted in 1968, “one hundred years after October 10 [that is, the Ten Years War], that we can say that we are truly free.” Dulce María Aguilera—105 years old—affirmed: “Fidel is doing everything that those who died in the war for independence wanted done.”215
One-year anniversary commemorative issue of the newspaper Hoy, emphasizing the revolution as historical continuity. The January 1, 1960, issue—“One year of mambises’ dreams realized”—juxtaposes, right to left, Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, Antonio Maceo, José Martí, and Fidel Castro. The picture on the bottom superimposes a representation of a barbudo of 1959 on an image of a mambí of 1895. From Hoy, January 1, 1960.
The moral was never difficult to divine. The remembered past mattered as a politics, to be sure, but also as a means of reckoning, which implied a politics of another kind. The meaning of the past insinuated itself into those popular domains where politics and passions converged in realms as a shared moral order, as indeed inevitably it had to, for these were issues that reached deep into national sensibilities and implicated the very value system from which nationality originated. The men and women who presumed to act on behalf of the revolution did so as self-conscious protagonists in the very history from which they emerged, as self-assured proponents of the historical purpose by which they were formed. There is no evidence of self-doubt.
The proposition of the revolution as continuity and consummation of the nineteenth-century independentista project—that is, the revolution as fulfillment of legacy and realization of nation—expanded into the master narrative of the new order of things. The claim was entirely plausible, of course. But plausibility was only part of its appeal. This was the history for which successive generations of Cubans had lived in anticipation. Its power was registered in those realms of memory, of a people who knew what their history was to be and sensed too that the realization of their history was at hand. The most powerful memories were not always remembered as deeds and dates, but as hopes and expectations, as sentiments borne over time, to take hold in the interior narratives of a people as an article of faith. “Our Revolution,” proclaimed Blas Roca, “as continuation of the history of our nation, is the legitimate offspring of all the revolutionary traditions of the past; it is the extension of a noble past given to the holy cause of liberation for which countless numbers of Cubans struggled and died in fulfillment of the task and duty that history constantly has imposed upon us.”216 Novelist José Rodríguez Feo was certain that Cubans had at last “completed the revolution initiated by our mambises in 1868 and Martí in 1895, truncated by the yanqui intervention in our republican era,” adding: “We need not get into the historical details, but no Cuban doubts the fact that the struggle that resumed when the Cuban people realized that the revolution of Martí had been frustrated with establishment of the Republic under the auspices of imperialism culminated with the overthrow of the Batista tyranny in 1959.”217 On the commemoration of the date of February 24, in 1963, Revolución was categorical: “The struggle of the mambises culminates in the process of our revolution with the conquest of our national independence. The nation of Martí and Maceo can now celebrate the historic date of February 24.”218
Representation of continuity of the Cuban revolution with the mambises of the nineteenth century. From Verde Olivo 9 (October 1968).
Few disputed the premise. Men and women who subsequently broke with the Castro government, principally over the issue of communism during the early years, remained persuaded that the triumph of the revolution represented consummation of nation. Few indeed were the numbers who repudiated the history that had made their initial support of the revolution so compelling. “To me, the Castro movement was essentially a reinvigorated manifestation of the old longing for independence, democracy, and progress which somehow had time and again been frustrated,” Mario Llerena recalled years later: “I used to dwell on the idea that the antecedents of this movement could be traced back to similar ones in the recent past and even to the founders and heroes of the country from the early stages of its historical and political formation.”219 Journalist Raúl Lorenzo, who emigrated from Cuba in 1960, continued to believe that the revolution signified fulfillment of the past. “Fidel embodies the ideological inheritance of the Veterans and Patriots Movement, the Grupo Minorista, [Antonio] Guiteras, and above all the founders of the patria, starting with José Martí,” Lorenzo affirmed. “He represents the recovery of the national spirit and the necessity of reforms in all aspects of Cuban life.”220 Fifteen years after the triumph of the revolution, Ramón Bonachea and Marta San Martín would write in exile that “the Sierra Maestra leader represented a continuation of the mambises of the wars of independence.”221 Former comandante Huber Matos, more than two decades after having completed a twenty-year prison term on charges of counterrevolutionary activity, reflected on the history that culminated on January 1, 1959:
The historical circumstances were propitious. Ever since the War for Independence, frustrated by the intervention of the United States, the Cubans have struggled in anticipation of redemption. In that war, outstanding leaders—Martí and Maceo among them—perished. Generation after generation, the people have attempted to fill that vacuum, witnessing time and again their aspirations frustrated. . . . The Cuban people aspired to the Cuba envisioned by José Martí, a nation genuinely independent, “for all and the good of all.” Fidel Castro, wrapped in the mystique of the guerrilla struggle, was the beneficiary of more than sixty years of thwarted aspirations.222
These were heady times, a people exhilarated by new possibilities and new promises, but most of all by the promise of a better future within their reach. Impatience overtook prudence. Cubans acted with the conviction that they had lost fifty years of their history between 1898 and 1958: so much to be done, so much to make up for. Anticipation filled the air, as if it were necessary to recover lost time, to get on with the task at hand and to return to the point of displacement to begin anew. “We have lost more than fifty years,” Fidel Castro insisted, “but we are going to recover them rapidly. We are going to recover them. They made us lose fifty years since the beginning of the Republic. We will recover them.”223 Signs in government offices captured the tenor of the times: “Hemos perdido 50 años—hay que recobrarlos—sea breve.”
Events moved quickly: affairs of state were in continuous flux as developments with portentous implications seemed to gather momentum from one day to the next in vertiginous succession. History had speeded up. “The Revolution forces one to reorient oneself at every moment,” reflects the narrator in the Hilda Perera novel El sitio de nadie (1972). “The process advances with such velocity that a position adopted yesterday is tomorrow untenable.”224 Change seems to beget more change as the normal course of events.
The triumph of the revolution implied the realization of a Cuba for Cubans: Cuban well-being as the principal purpose of public policy. Early reforms more than adequately fulfilled popular expectations. Electricity rates were drastically reduced. So were telephone rates. The Urban Reform Law in March 1959 reduced rents by as much as 50 percent. Labor contracts were renegotiated and wages raised. New minimum wages were established in virtually every sector. Health and educational reforms were enacted in rapid succession. The revolutionary government addressed long-standing practices of racism and racial discrimination, opening hotels, resorts, beaches, and nightclubs to all Cubans.225 In May 1959, the Agrarian Reform Law nationalized landholdings in excess of 3,333 acres and redistributed land to small farmers in allotments of sixty-seven acres and into state cooperatives. More than 1,500 laws, decrees, and edicts were enacted in the first nine months of 1959. All in all, promising auguries—certainly for vast numbers of Cubans. Living standards improved. Wages and salaries increased. The cost of living decreased.
The revolution did indeed appear to have fulfilled historic expectations of what could be accomplished through the exercise of national sovereignty and the enactment of self-determination: a Cuba for Cubans—“with all, and for the good of all.” The Cuban purpose was explicit. “It is necessary,” Fidel Castro proclaimed on the occasion of the Agrarian Reform Act in May 1959, “to write once and for all on our pure solitary star the formula of the Apostle [Martí] that the patria belongs to all and for the good of all.” And two years later: “What patria did they refer to before?” Castro asked rhetorically, and continued:
The patria where a few possessed all the opportunities and lived off the work of everyone else? The patria of men who did not even have work? The patria of the family that lived in conditions of indigence? The patria of hungry and barefoot children asking for alms on the streets? To what patria and to what concept of patria were they referring? The patria that belonged to a minority to the exclusion of opportunity and benefit of the majority? Or to the patria of today, where we have won the right to direct our own destiny, where we have won the right to construct the future that will necessarily be better than the present? . . . The patria will be from this time forward and forever what Martí wanted when he said: “For all, and the good of all.” Not the patria for a few and the good of a few.226
The fulfillment of Cuban aspirations was not without a cost. Few indeed were the reforms that did not adversely affect the property and privilege of Cubans and foreigners alike, and especially the Americans. The commitment to the remedy of the historic sources of discontent, with its attending emphasis on the exercise of self-determination as a means of Cuban well-being, portended a far-reaching realignment of power relationships and redistribution of wealth. Cubans could not resolve the structural anomalies of the national system without challenging the very premise upon which the republic was founded.
The demand for the primacy of Cuban interests as the principal purpose of power implied more than a simple adjustment of policy priorities. That Cubans would assert claim to their destiny in function of their own interests, that they would affirm their interests as distinct and different from the United States and presume the priority of Cuban interests as proper to pursue, was to challenge a status quo with antecedents in the nineteenth century. So profoundly institutional, so intrinsically structural, were the sources of North American power that the determination to advance Cuban interests over foreign ones could not fail to produce a confrontation with the United States. Cuban pretensions to national sovereignty and self-determination directly challenged the presumption of North American privilege in Cuba, which was, after all, the premise upon which the republic was founded. What had mattered most to Cubans—national sovereignty and self-determination—had been precisely what one hundred years of U.S. policy had been given to preventing.
It is not difficult to understand how utterly implausible if not incomprehensible the claim of Cuba for the Cubans—and not for the United States—would have appeared to the Americans. The propriety of North American privilege in Cuba had assumed such utter commonplace normality as to acquire the appearance of the natural order of things, hardly noticed at all except as confirmation that all was right in the world. That Cubans called attention to this condition as an anomaly in their lives, as wrong and improper, drew responses of blank incredulity from the Americans: how to comprehend Cuban dissatisfaction with a relationship that most Americans—if they thought about it at all—were certain had been entirely ideal and had presumed always to be in the best interest of Cubans. The very proposition of Cuba for Cubans, that is, Cubans no longer disposed to accommodate the primacy of North American interests, was preposterous. The sheer effrontery of the Cuban challenge was breathtaking—the impertinence of it all. How utterly implausible.
Tensions between Cuba and the United States increased all through 1959 and 1960. It was not simply that Washington and Havana appeared to be talking past each other. They were in fact not even using the same vocabulary. “I think we fail to realize that Castro does not speak our language and does not want to listen to it,” concluded Henry Ramsey of the State Department Policy Planning Staff in early 1960. “They do not speak our language and do not aspire to speak it. As a result, we are not likely to influence them by continuing to insist on addressing them in the language of private enterprise, the sanctity of private property, the equities of just compensation, etc.”227 Without historical depth perception, the Americans were unable to comprehend that the Cubans were in actuality addressing the past. In fact, in the early weeks and months, it was all about history. Policy disputes came later. The Americans pretended the past did not exist, or worse: they were unaware of its existence. Without knowledge of that history, the Americans mistook their ignorance for innocence: surely they had done nothing to provoke Cuban ire, they persuaded themselves. “US policy toward Cuba,” the Central Intelligence Agency insisted in 1961, “had been marked by caution and restraint,” further claiming that the turn of events on the island had not been “a function of US policy and action.”228 In fact, to a certain degree, this was not incorrect. But the politics was in the history. All at once the past and present conflated, and without knowledge of the former an understanding of the latter was impossible.
The defense of national sovereignty, all through the early years, in the face of unrelenting American determination to force Cubans to yield to the will of the United States, provided the government of the revolution with an enormous fund of political support and enduring moral sustenance. That the Americans opposed the revolution was received in Cuba as continuing U.S. opposition to Cuban aspirations of national sovereignty. The Cuban leadership could have no more compelling proof of the virtue of its purpose than to confront the United States in defense of national sovereignty. In a lengthy diplomatic note by Foreign Minister Raúl Roa in November 1959, published in English as “In Defense of National Sovereignty,” the Cuban government reiterated a familiar theme:
The Cuban people conquered the right to govern themselves at the cost of enormous sacrifice and innumerable courageous deeds. It is to this stubborn determination and fighting spirit that, despite the well-known constraints and subordination to which we have been subject, we owe the level of political, economic, social, and cultural developments which we have managed to achieve in our 56 years of the pseudo-republic. The triumphant Revolution of January 1, 1959, put an end to this ominous state of things, and today Cuba is, for the first time in our history, truly free, independent, and sovereign.229
The past was put to a purpose. This was about forging a consensus on the matter of Cuba being wronged as the basis from which the leadership claimed moral mandate to make things right. Another form of the past as a politics, of course, except in this instance it served to summon Cubans to act in defense of their history as a matter of legacy. These were extraordinary times: a triumphant revolution, a people imbued with a newfound sense of agency and achievement but also smarting, bearing grievances decades in the making, and all at once given the opportunity to act out and act on the fulfillment of their history.
These were sentiments of unsuspected depths. Few were the number of adult Cubans who did not—as a matter of a historical knowledge—bear varying degrees of resentment toward the United States. Virtually all Cubans who had completed elementary school education could offer a disquisition on the Platt Amendment. For much of the early twentieth century, a Cuban sense of inferiority was expressed in public and private, with a mixture of frustration and impotence in the face of powerlessness to control the terms of the meaning of Cuban. These circumstances served to infuse into norms of nationality a deepening tenor of defensiveness, the obverse side of which would find expression easily enough as defiance. This was a sentiment that when summoned and channeled into a politics could be relied upon to mobilize powerful popular support. Novelist Manuel Cofiño speaks through his protagonist, in Cuando la sangre se parece al fuego (1979): “I came to hate the North Americans who would not allow us to do what we wanted to do. They believed that because we were a small country they could bring us to our knees and do to us whatever they wanted to do.”230
Confrontation with the United States in defense of national sovereignty served to enhance the moral credibility of the new government and indeed contributed to a national unanimity of purpose previously unimaginable and perhaps unattainable by any other means. It was all about history. “[The Americans] deprived the Cuban people of the prerogative to govern themselves,” Castro recounted in early 1959; “they deprived the Cuban people of their sovereignty; they treated the Cuban people like little children to whom they said: ‘We give you permission to do just this, and if you do more we will punish you.’ The Platt Amendment was imposed [and] we either behaved ourselves—behaved ourselves in the manner convenient to the foreign country—or we would lose our sovereignty.” And to the larger point: “It was inconceivable that after so many years of struggle, in the end the mambises were denied the fruit of their labor. . . . We are doing today in our patria what Maceo, Máximo Gómez, and José Martí, and all those who struggled for our independence, would be doing.”231 Explained Fidel Castro one year later:
We have had to confront an old mentality. . . . We have had to confront the spirit of submission that was instilled in our people, for however sad and difficult it may be to acknowledge, our people thought little of themselves. Our people were never told the truth. . . . They were taught to look toward another nation, to look with an inferiority complex and with a spirit of impotence, to await for their needs from others. They were taught to depend on others from which was created a spirit of inferiority and cowardice. It was as if our people were like one of those children who could not take one step forward without asking someone for permission. That is what our people were taught. That is the spirit that we have had to confront. Not only the past but old ideas of the past, the vices of the past.232
The Americans challenged the revolution on the grounds that the leadership was best prepared to defend: a commitment to the historic ideal of patria, as a matter of national sovereignty and self-determination so central to the legacy upon which the men and women of the revolution validated their claim to power. Within the context of Cuban historic sensibilities, U.S. policy not only contributed to Cuban intransigence but, more important, it also lent credibility to that intransigence—not simply as a principle of foreign policy but as a means of internal governance. American policy served to bring out some of the most intransigent tendencies of the Cuban leadership in the defense of some of the most exalted notions of Cuban nationality. If, in the end, the invocation of national sovereignty and self-determination had been the last and only rationale through which to exhort defense of the revolution, the leadership would still have retained a powerful claim on the allegiance of vast numbers of Cubans. It was a sentiment of enormous vitality and resonance, one that could be defended without compromise or concession, no matter what its defense may have cost. This was the moral of the Cuban past.
Early political discontent with the Castro government notwithstanding, the patriotic consensus was preserved—as it would be for decades to come—around the defense of the sovereign nation. In a public opinion survey completed in Cuba in 1960—Attitudes of the Cuban People toward the Castro Regime—Lloyd Free of the Princeton Institute for International Social Research was slightly perplexed by what appeared as an anomaly in Cuban public sentiment. Free described the need to comment on “one other aspect” about growing opposition to the government: “Not only the groups less enthusiastic about the regime . . . but also the outright oppositionists, in listing the best aspects of the present situation, mentioned with above-average frequency . . . an item with distinct nationalist overtones: ‘Cuba free and independent; the struggle for or defense of national sovereignty; etc.’” Free understood the implications with prophetic accuracy: “Since in Cuban eyes national independence tends to mean independence from the U.S., the higher degree of nationalistic sentiment apparent among the very group where oppositionist and critical sentiment tend to be the most frequent suggests that criticisms from American sources of the regime’s anti-U.S. policies are apt to fall on relatively deaf ears.”233
