This ambitious and engaging book sets out to address some of the more persistent gaps in Cuban studies. Most pressing, as the authors all discuss in some way or other, is the need for histories of the Cuban Revolution that come from those who were and are embedded within it. In embracing approaches that identify and interrogate the multiple and heterogenous processes that occurred within the Revolution, the authors do not look to other models for an explanation of the events and patterns. Rather the book approaches the idea of the Revolution(s) and subsequent events within its course from multiple perspectives, thereby creating a more holistic and inclusive history.
The different mobilisations of history provide a linking thread throughout the book and their disparate, shifting uses and meanings are explored in depth in the opening two chapters by Michael J. Bustamante and Jennifer L. Lambe, and by Rafael Rojas. Bustamante and Lambe focus on what the Revolution, or Revolutions, mean(s) and encompass(es), while Rojas explores what a new history of the Revolution in all its facets might look like and include. The third chapter, Jorge Macle Cruz's on Cuban archives, throws the first two chapters into clear focus. He not only looks at the significant and ongoing challenges to Cuban archivists faced with organisational and climatic challenges, but also highlights the multiple ways in which support networks in and outside of Cuba have evolved to facilitate serious research, before considering what more systemic changes could benefit the field.
The subsequent eight chapters follow a chronological pattern and explore a diverse range of topics looking at different elements of life within the Revolution and its processes. Chapter 4 begins by examining the rebellion movement and the immediate changes the Revolution wrought. Lillian Guerra looks at the tactical use of foreign media by rebels in the Sierra Maestra to create their enduring image. She focuses on how the work of foreign journalist Andrew St George documenting and reporting on the rebels in the Sierra Maestra had a serious and lasting impact, helping to create widespread faith in the movement and in Fidel Castro. Meanwhile, María del Pilar Díaz Castañón examines 1959 and the announcement of a fundraising campaign for agrarian reform carried by Cuba's popular weekly magazine Bohemia. Her chapter explores the significant shift in the first year of the Revolution, when it moved from being a movement that demanded to a system that provided, the empowering of individual participation that accompanied that move, and how different sectors negotiated it.
Reinaldo Funes Monzote discusses the role of geography prior to and during the Revolution. He explores the idea of ‘geo-transformation’ and the desire to change Cuba's natural landscape to facilitate development within ideas about progress and civilisation. Elizabeth Schwall looks at the way that Cuban ballet and cabaret adapted and evolved within the Revolution. She demonstrates how they clearly linked their expression and efforts to the goals, and demands, of the Revolution while continuing to find and protect space for their own respective paths. Closing the focus on the 1960s, Christabelle Peters takes an innovative approach to historical research and analyses Cuban policy on Africa, via an imagined conversation between Che Guevara and Julius Nyerere that highlights the links and flows between Pan-Africanism and Cuba's idea of Latin-Africanism.
María A. Cabrera Arús looks at everyday consumption in the Cuba of the 1970s. She focuses on fashion and domestic material culture and the way that encouraging mass consumption in a socialist setting brought together seemingly contradictory currents that often comfortably coexisted. Bustamante examines the shifting uses, and indeed ideas, of revolutionary history in the 1970s as 1959 and the immediate aftermath moved from being a visceral lived experience for most to an increasingly theoretical concept and the beginning of a more distanced remembering in Cuban society. The last case study is Abel Sierra Madero's chapter, which focuses on the violent acts of repudiation that surrounded the 1980 Mariel boatlift. In the chapter he identifies common tropes in the public depiction of the Cubans who left as part of that mass exodus, and the power structures that these acts of collective violence sought to strengthen.
Three final chapters incorporate an outward gaze into their focus, examining the Cuban Revolution's place(s) in the world. Ada Ferrer explores links between the Cuban and Haitian Revolutions by highlighting the similarities in the radical changes the two developments sought. She also discusses the differences between a Revolution abroad and a Revolution at home and therefore the need for multiple histories, such as those presented elsewhere in this book. Alejandro de la Fuente looks at the idea of temporal immediacy and multiple timelines within the Revolution and its projects. He suggests that the waning past and the imminent future, and the vocabulary associated with them, have become key ideas of the Revolution and reflections of one of its defining characteristics of change, whilst highlighting the many instances of long-term continuity that are interwoven with said changes. Lambe closes the collection, focusing on the Cuban–US relationship with an emphasis on the Cuban side of the dynamic. In exploring the role that US imperialism has played in the Revolution she reflects on the need to move beyond a US-centric approach and the practical challenges faced by scholars in the Global South, particularly Cuban scholars, in doing so.
This book is a welcome and meaningful addition to contemporary Cuban studies. It presents a deeply considered, serious and varied series of histories of the Cuban Revolution which place Cuba centre stage, and which consider events within the Revolution from numerous perspectives, thereby contributing to a more ‘plural field of transnational Cuban history’ (p. 313). It will be of significant interest not only to students and scholars of Cuba, 1959, and its subsequent processes but also more generally to those interested in global history and social transformations. The subjects covered are original and approached in methodologically interesting and innovative ways, and the diversity and nuance of historical thought in this book allow the reader to find their own path into Cuban history and Revolution(s).
