The Absolution of History: Uses of the Past in Castro's Cuba

Nicola Miller
2003 Journal of Contemporary History  
In his famous defence speech at the trial for his attack on the Moncada barracks in 1953, Castro declared: 'History will absolve me.'1 The attempted storming of Moncada was the first act of armed struggle in the Cuban revolutionary war, which resumed at the end of 1956 with Castro's return from exile to launch a rural guerrilla movement against the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista (1952-58). The guerrillas, supported by organized resistance in towns and cities, achieved a relatively quick
more » ... ry two years later when Batista fled to the USA, enabling the revolutionaries to march triumphantly into Havana on 1 January 1959. Throughout the war, 'History will absolve me' functioned as the manifesto of the revolution, the founding text of what it promised for Cuba's future. Aside from that speech, which is mainly an indictment of the past, Castro made very few specific policy statements, preferring to mobilize as broad a constituency of support as possible by talking only of social justice and a restoration of the democratic and reformist Constitution of 1940. That Constitution, in one of many ironies of Cuban history, had been promulgated during the first presidency of Batista himself (1940-44), when he had operated in populist, rather than repressive mode. After the revolution, when the leaders opted to legitimize their government on the basis of 'direct' rather than procedural democracy, it was quietly dropped as a basis for policy. The centrality of 'History will absolve me' to the revolutionary struggle meant that history, rather than constitutionalism or ideology, was the key legitimating force behind the Cuban revolution. Like most revolutionary regimes, Castro's government immediately took several highly-visible measures to signal its rejection of the past: the US-owned Havana Hilton was nationalized and renamed the Habana Libre; the barracks of Batista's henchmen were converted into schools; the casinos and brothels that had attracted wealthy (male) US tourists were closed; and formerly private beaches and recreation areas were opened up to the general public. Revolutions have often tended towards the puritanical, but in Cuba's case the clamp-down on vice was overtly political, signalling that the nation was no longer prepared to play the prostitute to the desires of US imperialists and their local lackeys. The government also pursued policies of both retribution and restoration in the name of history. Batista's armed forces were dissolved, 1 Fidel Castro, 'History Will Absolve Me' in Fidel Castro and R6gis Debray, On Trial (London 1968). Journal of Contemporary History Vol 38 No I as were all political parties implicated in the dictatorship; predictably, Batista supporters were purged from the state administration and the trade union hierarchy. Furthermore, the revolutionary leaders chose to dispense with civil liberties in their treatment of prominent members of Batista's notoriously brutal Rural Guard. These agents of Batista's repression were summoned before impromptu courts of 'revolutionary justice', indicted for their crimes against the Cuban people, and sentenced, usually to summary execution, without being permitted the formal procedures of a legal defence. For the first time, declared Castro, 'the torturers and murderers who have victimised so many good patriots throughout our history' were being 'called to account for their misdeeds'.2 These revolutionary trials caused outrage in the USA, but met with widespread popular approval within Cuba. The government also confiscated goods misappropriated by Batistianos -'This, too, for the first time in our history',3 returned them to their owners where possible, and restored jobs to workers who had been sacked by order of the dictatorship. Thus, the revolutionary government took its revenge, in the name of the people, against Batista supporters, who were depicted as the incarnation of all the oppressors in Cuban history. It further pursued the metaphor of a settling of accounts by means of necessarily limited but high-profile measures to right some of the wrongs done by the previous regime. Having thereby consigned Batista and all his works to history's voracious dustbin, the revolutionary government embarked on a large-scale propaganda effort to represent itself as the culmination of Cuban history. This idea was employed by Castroites to convey a vision of socialism in which history was no longer a question of politics, or even of ideology, but primarily of morality dedicated to the creation of a 'new person' committed to selfless solidarity and patriotic loyalty. It is this version of history (rather than Marxist-Leninist accounts) that has actually been dominant in the public arena (print, film, broadcasting, political speeches) for most of the post-revolutionary period. It depicts the wishes of the oppressed people as made historically manifest through the heroic martyrdom of a pantheon of revolutionary heroes. It is anti-capitalist in orientation and rhetoric but not Marxist in methodology. Its determinism is moral rather than economic; its emphasis on action rather than theory. As a result of this revival of a loose Hegelianism, in several senses history did indeed effectively stop in Cuba on 1 January 1959. An annual series of commemorative events, often with re-enactments of key episodes in the revolutionary struggle such as the attack on Moncada and the Granma landing, and the celebration of anniversaries of the births and deaths of selected national heroes, both served to reinforce the impression of stasis. It is a telling detail that the Ministry of Culture recommended the use of a spoken chorus of 2 Fidel Castro, 'Analisis hist6rico de la Revoluci6n' in Comit6 Central del Partido Comunista Cubano, Informe al primer congreso (Buenos Aires 1976), 6-51, 30. 3 Ibid., 31. 148 157 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 38 No I everything, against the revolution nothing.' A series of articles in the periodical La Gaceta de Cuba of June 2001 re-examined those ambivalent words and the incident that lay behind them, namely the regime's suppression in April 1961 of a film called PM that showed Cubans frivolously enjoying the night-life of Havana. The writers concerned are cultural critics rather than historians, but they mobilize history behind a cautious critique of the regime's policies of cultural repression. In standard apologistic vein, Roberto Fernandez Retamar argued for a historical perspective on the PM incident (it took place, after all, at the time of the Bay of Pigs invasion, when it was hardly surprising that the regime was jittery). But he went on, more controversially, to suggest that not everything published in two publications that had run foul of the regime, namely Revolucion, edited by the subsequent dissident Carlos Franqui, or its cultural supplement, Lunes de Revoluci6n, edited by the subsequent dissident Guillermo Cabrera Infante, was contemptible; in time, its value would be seen, he argued, heretically.38 He then went on to denounce socialist realism -'that monstrous deformation . . . which caused incalculable harm'and to adduce Soviet influence as the explanation for the Cuban government's over-reaction to PM. The criticism of the Soviet Union is implicit but strong; after acknowledging its contribution to the defeat of nazism, and expressing ritual gratitude for aid to the Cuban revolution, he adduced socialist realism, which, as he noted, was attacked by Che Guevara, as a metonym for all the Soviet regime's 'grave political errors, arbitrary measures and intellectual deformities'.39 Lisandro Otero's contribution to this discussion also made a thinly-disguised call for greater intellectual freedom, arguing that if PM had been released at any other moment it would have been forgotten the following week.40 His
doi:10.1177/0022009403038001969 fatcat:3u5pubrxxvbmrfbaoguuupbewi