Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Heroes, Martyrs, and Political Messiahs in Revolutionary Cuba, 1946–1958

2019; Duke University Press; Volume: 99; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-7370555

1527-1900

Samuel Farber,

Political and Social Dynamics in Chile and Latin America

Lillian Guerra's previous work has been an illuminating attempt to provide an alternative to the Cuban government's official history of the revolution. However, this is not the case with her new book here under review.This book is based on the erroneous premise that before the overthrow of the Fulgencio Batista dictatorship on January 1, 1959, there was “an already prepared, already revolutionary citizenry” (p. 14). In fact, however, the anti-imperialist and anticapitalist sentiment engendered by the revolution of 1933 had greatly declined by the 1940s and 1950s for various reasons, including the gradual abandonment of anti-imperialism by the principal nationalist parties (the Auténticos and their Ortodoxo offspring), and by the Communist alliance with Batista (1938–44) that emphasized antifascism and played down anti-imperialist and anticapitalist politics. This decline was a major reason why the 26th of July Movement did not advocate a social revolution before it came to power.Consistent with her premise, Guerra ignores the profound mass radicalization that took place after the 1959 overthrow of Batista, a mass radicalization that went on to support, far beyond a multiclass democratic political revolution, a social revolution that radically transformed the class and economic system of the island and that went beyond a critique of the US foreign policy that supported Latin American dictatorships to a systemic opposition to imperialism. This radical popular support was used by the revolutionary leadership to build an antidemocratic, Soviet-style society, but it was real.Guerra roots the popular revolutionary impulse in the Ortodoxo movement led by Eduardo “Eddy” Chibás in the late 1940s. Chibás was an honest politician with democratic convictions whose main contribution was leading a militant reform movement that, as Guerra indicates, nourished a strong culture of protest on the island (which explains why Fidel Castro, a secondary leader of the Ortodoxo Party, drew most of his initial followers from that party's youth ranks). But a culture of protest is not the same as a political ideology and program. The politics of Chibás's movement was a far cry from the anticapitalist, anti-imperialist politics supported by the radicalized Cubans in 1959. His socialism was a minor theme of his campaign focused on battling government corruption; apart from advocating the nationalization of the US-owned electric and telephone monopolies, this platform was a Cuban version of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. And although Chibás was critical of US foreign policy, he supported the United States in the Cold War.Also, it is doubtful that Chibás's party would have been able to implement his program once in office. His Ortodoxo Party was a very wide and unwieldy political coalition: it included leaders with entirely disparate politics, from Communist allies such as Marta Frayde and Eduardo Corona to remnants of the fascist-influenced ABC Party and big latifundistas like Federico “Fico” Fernández Casas. This coalition would have most likely splintered if either Chibás or his successor, Roberto Agramonte, had won the presidential election scheduled for June 1, 1952.To minimize the role of the Communists in the 1959 revolution, Guerra implies that there was an understanding, if not outright collaboration, between the Communists and the Batista dictatorship, and she writes that only at the end of 1958 did the Communists support the armed struggle against the regime. It is true, as she notes, that Batista appointed former Communists to important positions in his government, but that is a meaningless assertion given her failure to show that these people acted as agents of the party. It is also true that the Partido Socialista Popular (PSP) opposition to Batista immediately after the 1952 coup was somewhat ambiguous, but that ambiguity disappeared a few months afterward, when Batista broke diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union and outlawed the PSP. After that, the party joined in actual practice—despite its impeccable calls for mass struggle against the dictatorship—the moderate opposition to the regime, as in its campaign for a “negative vote” for Ramón Grau San Martín against Batista in the phony elections scheduled for 1954; and by late 1957, after realizing that Castro's movement was the only show in town, the PSP declared its support for the armed rebellion. By the summer of 1958, the PSP was actively collaborating with the Sierra Maestra rebels, particularly with those under Raúl Castro's leadership in the Second Front, and formed its own guerrilla group under the command of Félix Torres in central Cuba. Guerra's distortions undermine serious attempts to establish an independent critique of the PSP record as an antidemocratic political organization subservient to Moscow and an experienced practitioner of politiquería (unprincipled political wheeling and dealing).Besides many other factual errors—like mixing up Rafael García Bárcenas's insurrectionist Movimiento Nacional Revolucionario with the later and very different moderate Movimiento de la Nación, jocularly referred to as “el meneíto”—Guerra frequently mistranslates terms, such as vergüenza, paladín, motoneta, and vivac, disregarding their cultural, political context or their particular meaning on the island (pp. 152, 154).