Authoritarianism 101: The Cuban Revolution

Student voices
You’re listening to Authoritarianism 101, part of the #AHR Syllabus project, produced by the American Historical Review.

Daniel Story
In this episode: Why do authoritarian states seek to control cultural institutions? Historian Patrick Iber discusses the Cuban Revolution and the banning of the short film, P.M., which showed scenes from Havana’s night life.

Patrick Iber
Cuba is 90 miles south of Key West in the Caribbean. Key West is the very last island in the chain that goes off the southern tip of Florida. So we’re talking about a place that is really close to the United States geographically, but feels like in many ways, it can be a world away. Especially after the revolution, it takes a really different trajectory from the United States, and so you have a big gap in the ways that people are living, even though it’s physically quite close.

My name is Patrick Iber. I am a historian teaching at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. I generally write about the cultural politics of the Cold War, with a particular emphasis on Latin America, where I’ve spent many years of my life living in various countries.

So the history of Cuba in the 20th century is really fundamental to the whole history of the globe. It plays a really outsized role in the way that people think about what kind of changes are possible. It brought the United States closer to nuclear warfare than any other situation that occurred during the Cold War. It’s a very important place, kind of crossroads of ideas and of global politics that sort of far outstrips the size of the island. We’re not talking about what looks like a major power, but it sort of plays the role of a major power on the global stage. Let’s start with the origins of the Cuban revolution which succeeds in overthrowing the previous government of Cuba. At the very beginning of 1959, the old government is chased out by a combination of military forces that had fought a guerrilla war for several years, from the mountain ranges on the eastern part of the island to other groups that fought in cities. And they succeeded in sort of getting most of the population on their side and pushing out what had been a dictatorship.

News clip
“Havana, joyous followers of Fidel Castro sweep triumphantly through the Cuban capital hours after their rebellion had toppled the regime of Fulgencio Batista.”

Patrick Iber
That dictatorship had been in power since the early 1950s. Its leader was a man named Fulgencio Batista, and Batista had the support of the United States. The US has a long relationship with Cuba that weighed heavily on people’s minds as they were carrying out this struggle against a US-backed dictator. The US had intervened during the War of Independence that Cubans fought against Spain in 1898, in what the US calls the Spanish American War. It sent a modern naval fleet which easily sort of overcame the remnants of the Spanish fleets and contributed to the independence of Cuba. But Cubans think of that as the Spanish American Cuban War, and felt sort of sidelined by US intervention and that some of the goals that they had had were put aside, setting up a very long and complicated but very deep and often intimate relationship between Cuba and the US. By the time you get to the 50s, you’ve got a US-backed dictator who, according to the Cold War prerogatives of the United States, is pursuing communists using torture and techniques like that to root out those threats to the regime. And the US is backing that with intelligence and material support. So along come these revolutionaries that are standing up against a repressive regime. One is Fidel Castro, who is a Cuban son of a landowner who becomes the sort of leader of this movement. He had participated in an attempted raid on a barracks in Cuba in 1953 trying to spark revolution. That was a failure. He was arrested, but his speech in prison echoed throughout the country, and more broadly, a sort of nationalist call. “History will absolve me”, was the famous line. He eventually went into exile in Mexico, where he sort of gathered his forces and trained, hiking up and down the sides of the mountains. He met up with probably the other most iconic figure to come out of the Cuban Revolution, who is Che Guevara. Che Guevara is not Cuban. He’s from Argentina. He’s a medical student who has, you know, deep beliefs that in order to address the social injustices in Latin America, you need a revolution. And so he and Castro gather a group together and take a small boat, and they land on the island. Many of them are killed as they get off, but Che and Fidel survive, and they go up into the hills, and that’s where they begin fighting.

News clip
“This is the band, numbered at about 1,000, that for sixteen months has held out in the rugged Sierra Maestra Mountains near the island’s eastern tip.”

Patrick Iber
They grow their beards while they’re in the mountains, and those become a kind of symbol of what it means to have been somebody who was part of the fighting forces. In fact, once they form the new government, if you weren’t a guerrilla fighter, if you’d been a civilian during that time, a lawyer or something like that, you’re not allowed to grow a beard. The beard communicates immediately that you were part of the armed struggle for revolution.

News clip
“Castro himself has become a figure of legend in the sixteen months since he invaded Oriente Province from a small boat. The rebels actual achievements were few for most of that time, but by mere existence and survival, Castro’s force has both grown and exerted an influence out of all proportion to its size.”

Patrick Iber
So you have these really iconic figures, especially in Fidel and in Che Guevara, that are part of global culture and revolutionary figures that do inspire people around the world, inspire either an admiration or fear. So Batista is gone. He flees, goes into exile, and Fidel steps in. He appoints somebody else to be president, but he’s really the kind of power behind the throne, and he has that kind of symbolic authority from his time as a guerilla fighter. And one of the things that happens really quickly is a kind of notice that this is not just going to be a change in who’s in charge. This is going to be a profound restructuring of society. For example, they start breaking up large farms and turning them over to small farmers who previously didn’t have land. He even takes his own family farm, Fidel Castro, and breaks that up. He wants to show that he’s really committed to a change in the institutional order. He does things like slash people’s rents in half, just sort of by decree. And of course, these things are very popular among a broad set of the population who all of a sudden feel like they’re more secure that they have a government who cares about them and what their needs are. Then there’s the question of, what are we going to do with the media? What about the newspapers? What sort of sets of opinions are going to be out there? How are they going to be heard? Who’s going to have the right to talk? Cuba, at the time, had a wide range of newspapers that span the political spectrum from right to left, and you began to see certain forms of pushback in critical reporting against the regime, against the revolution. There was a paper that was the cultural supplement of the paper that represented the revolution, and this was a kind of freewheeling space for discussing problems of the revolution, and for writers to discuss what was going on. And that was the group of people that was kind of attracting attention, and that financed the making of this film.

[Sounds from film: music, chatter, laughter, etc.]

Patrick Iber
So this is a very simple movie. It is cinema vérité, which means there’s no script. It’s a sort of documentary look at what’s happening. It doesn’t have a voiceover. It just shows you things. You participate in viewing them. And it shows the nightlife of Havana. Shows people dancing, people being drunk, listening to and playing music. And that’s it, really. There’s not a plot, there’s not any overt criticism of the regime or anything like that. It just shows Havana nightlife after the revolution.

[More sounds from film]

Patrick Iber
Who it had been made by and the continuities that showed were the things that triggered this response from the government to ban this film. And that set off a broader conversation about what freedom in this new revolutionary regime would look like. You could look at a movie like this, look at the banning of the movie, and think that this is really just a minor episode. Who cares? It’s a little film. It’s not even a great film. Why does it matter that it was banned? Two things I’d like to say to that. One is that when the Cuban Revolution happened, people didn’t know what kind of revolution it would be. We know it’s a revolution that’s going to make big changes, but is it going to be a revolution that allows people a fuller range of democratic liberties than they had enjoyed under Batista when they didn’t have many of those? Or is it going to consolidate into its own form of authoritarianism? This is a big signal that it’s going to be the latter. Although, you know, this is very complicated in Cuba, and people continue to feel sometimes that Cuba extends cultural access to new groups. Certainly the children of working class people and peasants have an opportunity to go to universities in ways that they didn’t before. So it’s not a simple story that only goes in one direction, but you do see here that this is a moment where one idea of what the revolution could have been gets closed off by saying that we’re not going to allow people to produce culture that we understand as being against the revolution. That’s the thing that Castro says: Within the revolution, we’re going to let people do what they want, but against the revolution, there are no rights. And that is a moment of an announcement of an authoritarian way of thinking about how power will be organized in the country.The second thing is that it gives us some insight into why authoritarian regimes care a lot about what people see and what people understand. You might think that authoritarian governments wouldn’t care that much about popular opinion, because, after all, they’re authoritarian. They don’t have to hold elections to continue on in power. They have other sources of power. But they do care very deeply about what people think, because threats to the regime can emerge, not just from elections, but from other types of places too, whether that’s an internal coup or uprising of protests in civil society. And so the kinds of information that people get, the kinds of culture that they consume, are really important to authoritarian projects. And in Cuba, it’s even more than that, because they really thought that they were liberating people, and some people did experience the changes of the Cuban Revolution as liberatory, especially in the first years of the new government. They wanted to create new people, the new man, they called it, new women too, who would have values that were different from the values that they had had under the old capitalist regime. And I think that what bothered them, in addition to like little personal slights and concerns about the unreliability of intellectuals and writers and artists to toe the line properly, was simply that this didn’t show the new man and the new woman that the regime wanted to create. This is the old Cuba, and they wanted people focused on the changes that could come in the future. So what you’re seeing in the film and the people who produce the film are considered too frivolous and like too concerned with their own personal interests to be appropriately contributing to the revolution.

Daniel Story
This episode was produced by Daniel Story for Authoritarianism 101, part of the American Historical Review’s #AHRSyllabus project. For me info and additional resources, visit historians.org/a101.