Cuban Memory Wars: Retrospective Politics in Revolution and Exile

Envisioning Cuba

by Michael J. Bustamante

For many Cubans, Fidel Castro’s Revolution represented deliverance from a legacy of inequality and national disappointment. For others—especially those exiled in the United States—Cuba’s turn to socialism made the prerevolutionary period look like paradise lost. Michael J. Bustamante unsettles this familiar schism by excavating Cubans’ contested memories of the Revolution’s roots and results over its first twenty years. Cubans’ battles over the past, he argues, not only defied simple political divisions; they also helped shape the course of Cuban history itself. As the Revolution unfolded, the struggle over historical memory was triangulated among revolutionary leaders in Havana, expatriate organizations in Miami, and average Cuban citizens. All Cubans leveraged the past in individual ways, but personal memories also collided with the Cuban state’s efforts to institutionalize a singular version of the Revolution’s story.

Drawing on troves of archival materials, including visual media, Bustamante tracks the process of what he calls retrospective politics across the Florida Straits. In doing so, he drives Cuban history beyond the polarized vision seemingly set in stone today and raises the prospect of a more inclusive national narrative.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

317 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 22, 2021

Reviews

[Sasha (bahareads) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cuban Memory Wars seeks to show that the Cuban story is multi-faceted; there are more than two camps- those who stayed and those left. Bustamante reveals the Cuban retrospective conflict after 1959 was central to the course of Cuban history. Drawing upon oral sources and rare press, Bustamante seeks to go deeper than that previous historical monographs have done. Focusing on the two decades of revolution 1959-1979, Bustamante tracks the dualistic visions of Cuban history. The conclusion shows that Cubans have "never been divided into just two camps." The different chapters tackles the explanation the Revolution's historical roots and claims to power; Castro's opponents who failed to unite; Bay of Pigs as a revolutionary myth; Cuban exiles' politics in the second decade; revolutionary improvement creating a stable 1970s Cuba; and the encounters that came for exiles returning to Cuba starting in 1979.

Michael Bustamante sums it like so "ultimately, this book is not primarily a study of the commemoration of individual events, or the memory of particular subgroups of the Cuban population. Rather, it explores contests over the national epic in political and cultural motion during the Revolution's first two decades… They [actors and themes] prove that the Cuban memory wars have never been a strictly polarized affair. They have always involved a more nested, multi violent set of anxieties and debates."