In the fall of 1996, as President Bill Clinton began his second term in the White House, a wildly popular joke circulated through Havana. It focused on a man who takes out his trash late one night and discovers a new can of black spray paint by the curb. Spotting a recently whitewashed wall near his home, the man then writes the word “Abajo[down with]” in large block letters while continually glancing over his shoulder to make sure no one from his local cdr, or Committee for the Defense of the Revolution, is looking. With no members in sight,...

If there is one image most associated with the first years of the Cuban Revolution, it is that of a larger-than-life, impassioned Fidel Castro leaning forward to address a pulsing sea of a million or more exuberant Cubans. A quintessential hallmark of the Revolution since 1959, mass rallies of immense proportions quickly became historical “facts,” that is, visual testaments of Cubans’ near-unanimous consent to Fidel’s vision and style of rule rather than fastidiously constructed “truths” that Fidel and his closest allies initially worked hard to achieve. The impact of rallies and their evolving character during the first six months of...

In the days following the resounding success of the Concentración Campesina, Cuba’s press corps confirmed the legitimacy of the mass rally as a quintessential marker of the Revolution’s popular character. Summarizing this view,Combate, the official organ of the dr, the 26th of July Movement’s one-time rival, declared, “The mass rally is now all a symbol ofcubaníaand full identification [with Fidel].”¹Cartelescharacterized state-organized demonstrations as a “permanent” feature of life and participation in them as the hallmark of a “good Cuban.”² Only “the bad Cubans, the foreigners” had felt anything negative “before the gigantic mobilization of the...

Beginning on the day before Christmas in December 1959 and culminating in mid-February 1960, a rash of unprecedented attacks on national newspapers swept the island, alarming journalists, editors, and subscribers alike. In Camagüey, women wearing the badge of La Unión Revolucionaria Femenina, a women’s group organized by Raúl Castro’s wife, Vilma Espín, held a public burning ofDiario de la Marina,Prensa Libre,Avance, andLifemagazine in the city’s main plaza. In San Antonio de los Baños, PSP leader Roberto de la Osa performed a public “burial” and mass burning of the same national dailies.¹

Four days after the...

From the summer of 1960 through the fall of 1961, the revolutionary government nationalized not only all remaining foreign-owned properties in Cuba but also most locally owned industries, stores, schools, hospitals, clinics, social clubs, and ethnic societies. Only a few private businesses and small farms, some created by the agrarian reform, remained. Ironically, while broad nationalization led to a total rupture in relations with the United States in December 1960, it did not entail an official endorsement of Marxism or a Soviet alliance until the U.S. invasion at Playa Girón, the Cuban name for the Bay of Pigs, in April...

At a mass rally on 26 July 1962, Fidel Castro offered a political catechism for explaining why otherwise fervently revolutionary sectors were now reluctant to accept Communist policies. “Do you believe that illiteracy should end?—Yes [said the peasant]. That there should be an army of the people, an armed people?—And he said yes. To everything he said yes. Do you agree with socialism?—Ah, no! Then, he was scared of the word, he was scared of theword.… They said no, because they were scared of the word.”¹ Fear, not rationality or experience, in other words, drove resistance,...

In March 1962, a formerly middle-class lawyer in Havana sat down to type a letter to his exiled girlfriend in Miami, signing it with his initial, “V.” While V expressed mundane concerns in his letter in the macho street slang of the times (“Today is as hot as three pairs of balls”), he mostly lamented the fact that almost everyone he knew was leaving (“Here, even the cat is leaving”). He also vented his growing frustration with the chasm separating revolutionary leaders’ triumphalist rhetoric from the everyday realities created by their policies. Like othergusanos(self-identiied opponents of Fidel’s Communist...

From the mid- to late 1960s, the Cuban government shocked the international Left by implementing a violent program that interred tens of thousands of homosexuals for up to three years without charge in a network of forced labor camps, euphemistically labeled Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Producción (Military Units of Assistance to Production, or umap).¹ Detained alongside them were Jehovah’s Witnesses, Seventh-Day Adventists, Catholic priests, and mainstream Protestant preachers accused of religious proselytizing and promoting “antipatiotic, antiscientific” beliefs.² Other prisoners included young peasants who resisted collectivization as well as artists and intellectuals, many of whom were accused of being...

The contradictions that shaped the evolution of Cuba’s grassroots dictatorship in the second half of the 1960s clearly illustrate the extremes to which state officials would go to contain and redirect the power that their own promises had unleashed. Revolutionary society had produced an overly enthusiastic vanguard of educated and dedicated young people whose attempts to improve the functioning of socialism made both them and their ideas threats to national security. This chapter continues to explore the limits that the Revolution’s grand narrative and increasingly authoritarian political practices imposed on social change and the activists who sought to rupture those...

In March 1968, Fidel announced a sweeping set of economic reforms called “La Ofensiva Revolucionaria.” Aimed at rectifying the ideological backsliding among loyal citizens that Fidel blamed for Cuba’s long-standing economic stagnation, the Ofensiva Revolucionaria would create a true command economy: it criminalized all remaining private commercial exchanges and declared small-time entrepreneurs traitors to socialism.¹ Literally overnight, tens of thousands of cottage industries were closed or nationalized islandwide. Despite the inability of the state to replace most of the goods and services that these small businesses provided, such as handcrated furniture, homemade shoes, and haircuts, government planners justified the hardships...

By the end of the 1960s, the role of images had never mattered more to the long-term survival of the Revolution. As in the early years of the Revolution, leaders hoped that images of a united people would inspire genuine social unity; the impossible would become possible by sheer force of will. In this case, however, the goal of overcoming “underdevelopment” required not only collective will but also leaps of the national imagination. Through consisent public performances of belief in the Revolution’s story of national redemption, the country’s most militant revolutionaries sought to inspire others to make those leaps, conceiving...

In March 1971, the arrest and detention of poet Heberto Padilla by Cuban intelligence forces shook the foundations of the Revolution’s positive image among leftist circles around the world. Voices of protest reached a crescendo when G2 agents forced Padilla to recite a lengthy self-criticism in order to secure his release and “rehabilitation” on a state farm. Before an extraordinary meeting of UNEAC, the state union of artists and writers, Padilla had graciously thanked the G2 agents who imprisoned him for being “more intelligent” than he and helping him realize how deeply he had damaged the Revolution with his selfish...