December 16, 2021 65Whose Art Thrives in Cuba?
Coco Fusco
Cuban Memory Wars : Retrospective
Politics in Revolution and Exile
by Michael J. Bustamante.
University of North Carolina Press,
304 pp., $95.00; $29.95 (paper)Dancing with the Revolution:
Power, Politics, and Privilege in Cuba
by Elizabeth B. Schwall.
University of North Carolina Press,
298 pp., $95.00; $34.95 (paper)The annual congress of the Latin
American Studies Association (LASA)
is usually a staid affair, but this year’s
was rocked by controversy. In early
May, two weeks beforehand, Guiller-
mina De Ferrari, a professor of Ca-
ribbean studies at the University of
Wisconsin–Madison, posted a petition
online calling on LASA’s leadership to
publicly condemn human rights viola-
tions in Cuba, specifically the escalat-
ing repression of dissident artists and
intellectuals. LASA, the most import-
ant organization of Latin American
studies in the hemisphere, does occa-
sionally comment on political affairs in
the region: as I write this its website in-
cludes a statement criticizing violence
against protesters in Colombia. But
instead of siding with the petitioners,
LASA’s subcommittee on human rights
and academic freedom issued a state-
ment denouncing US sanctions against
Cuba, characterizing them as under-
mining a sovereign nation—a position
in lockstep with that of the Cuban
government.
LASA’s refusal to condemn Cuba’s
human rights violations provoked out-
rage. Several petitioners declared that
they would resign from the organiza-
tion, which is crucial for securing aca-
demic positions, publishing contracts,
and professional advancement for ju-
nior scholars. Three research centers
at Harvard that lead a consortium of
universities engaging in academic ex-
changes with Cuba published a joint
statement against the Cuban govern-
ment’s repression of artists and activ-
ists. The confrontation was just the
latest indication of the extent to which
long- standing US–Cuba tensions affect
the study of the country’s history.
Scholars from the US who want to do
research on the island about the revo-
lution often find themselves in a bind:
gaining access to archives is subject
to approval by Cuban state security,
and one’s work is constantly subject to
scrutiny by authorities who wield the
power to prevent anyone from seeing
records and people. Scholars and jour-
nalists who cross the line by meeting
with dissidents or criticizing state pol-
icies face expulsion. This often leads to
self- censoring caution and euphemistic
language, rather than candor about the
Cuban state’s authoritarian practices.
The Mexico- based Cuban political
scientist Armando Chaguaceda notes
that the Cuban government uses the
same “sharp power” tactics as Rus-
sia and China, exploiting institutions
and the press in democratic nations to
soften its image abroad. This enables
Cuba to benefit from the sympathy of
foreign correspondents and academics;
their research in turn bestows political
legitimacy on a government whose re-cord on human rights and press free-
doms ranks very low globally. Cuban
studies scholars also face pressures in
the US, in that LASA’s stated goals—
which include “strengthening scholarly
relations between the US and Cuba”
and “facilitating the integration of
Cuban scholars... in LASA Congress
programming”—make critical analysis
of Cuba’s governance unwelcome.It is in these charged circumstances
that two new books about the Cuban
revolution’s early years have appeared:
Michael J. Bustamante’s Cuban Mem-
ory Wars and Elizabeth B. Schwall’s
Dancing with the Revolution. Both
propose to tell stories about the rev-
olution “from within,” which is to say
about how Cuban citizens enacted the
social, political, and economic trans-
formation of their country. Both strive
to present the actions—especially the
creative work—of Cubans as evidence
of their unhindered choices. This ap-
proach is meant to offset histories that
focus on statesmen, and to counter
anti- Communist views of Cuba as a
place where ordinary people have no
political voice.
Bustamante, a professor of Cuban
and Cuban- American studies at the
University of Miami, focuses his re-
search on disputes over the history and
legitimacy of the Cuban revolution.
In Cuban Memory Wars, he examines
news stories, political speeches, car-
toons, films, and television shows span-
ning three decades to demonstrate that
the lines dividing revolutionaries from
their adversaries have not been as fixed
as one might assume from a cursory re-
view of official histories of the revolu-
tion. Making good use of old clippings
in the Cuban Heritage Collection at the
University of Miami, he highlights how
political loyalties shifted constantly inthe first years after the triumph of the
1959 revolution.
Bustamante also draws on island-
based collections relating to political
trials in the 1960s and TV shows from
the 1970s designed to heroize the coun-
try’s counterintelligence operations
and persuade Cubans that they lived
under constant threat of an American
invasion. Yet despite the great range of
materials he draws on, he leaves out the
full diversity of Cubans: Bustamante
admits that his study does not take into
account the concerns of Cuban women,
gays and lesbians, or people of color,
though they make up half the popula-
tion. So we are essentially drawn into
a debate among educated white men
about how Cuba should be run, who
should do it, and why.
The opening chapter of Cuban
Memory Wars focuses on the scram-
ble among various political factions to
define the meaning of the new revolu-
tion in the three years before Castro
declared it socialist in 1962. In 1952
the former president, Fulgencio Ba-
tista, had staged a coup, ushering in a
military dictatorship and escalating
violence against opponents. Castro
led an unsuccessful attack against Ba-
tista in 1953 and spent a year in prison,
after which he went to Mexico to form
a rebel group and returned in 1956.
His guerrilla army, based in the Sierra
Maestra mountains of southeastern
Cuba, together with urban movements
of various political persuasions, fought
to topple Batista, who fled at the end of
1958 after the United States withdrew
military support. Bustamante provides
ample evidence that—contrary to the
prevailing assumption that Castro and
his bearded rebels single- handedly
transformed Cuba—the ousting of
Batista was a group effort involving
anti- Communist nationalists, student
organizations, and vast swaths of theisland population incensed by the vio-
lence of Batista’s police forces.
Avowed Communists, with ties both
to organized labor and to Batista,
joined the revolutionary effort quite
late, in 1958. By 1962, however, Fidel
had secured military aid from the So-
viet Union and shut down all the pub-
lications that had once aired a range of
critical views. Many Cubans who had
imagined themselves to be part of a
new order left the country as the Com-
munists assumed central positions in
government. In Miami, the exile com-
munity became increasingly fractured
as anti- Communist nationalists, devout
Catholics, and disenchanted former
rebels were forced to mingle with the
Batista supporters who had been their
enemies.Bustamante’s account of the 1961
Bay of Pigs invasion (referred to in
Cuba as Girón) focuses on how it en-
abled Castro to consolidate power as
the country rallied to defend itself, to
justify the militarization of daily life on
the island as well as the new alliance
with the Soviet Union, and to solidify
the view that the Cuban revolution was
the culmination of an anti- imperialist
struggle against the malevolent giant
to the north. Interested in how the
state presented the invasion to Cubans,
Bustamante looks closely at transcripts
of the televised trials of the captured
invaders, the 1,400 CIA- backed Cuban
exiles who were eventually traded for
the equivalent of $53 million in med-
icine and canned food. Several of the
captured insurgents who testified had
participated in the fight against Ba-
tista alongside those who jailed them in- The trial, televised over five days
in late April, just after the attempted
invasion, gave them the opportunity to
share versions of history that diverged
The dancer Alicia Alonso, founder of Cuba’s first ballet company, performing in Azari Plisetzki’s La avanzada, Guantánamo, Cuba, 1964Museo Nacional de la Danza, HavanaFusco 65 67 .indd 65 11 / 18 / 21 2 : 37 PM