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Lillian Guerra, "Patriots and Traitors in Revolutionary Cuba, 1961-1981" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2023)
01:35:56
An interview with Lillian Guerra
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- [00:00]
A
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- [00:46]
B
Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello, everybody, and welcome back to New Books and Latin American Studies, a a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I'm Ethan Besser Frederick, a host of the channel. And today we'll be talking to Lillian Guerra about her new book, Patriots and Traders in Revolutionary Cuba, 1961-1981. Lillian, welcome to the show.
- [01:08]
C
Thank you so much for inviting me. I'm very excited to talk to you.
- [01:13]
B
I am really excited to get into the book. But first, Lillian, I wonder if you could begin by telling our listeners a little bit about how you came to work on this project and then about yourself academically a little bit as well. Sure.
- [01:25]
C
Many, many years ago, when I was a graduate student, it was considered impossible to write a book about the Cuban Revolution because there were really no accessible archives. And that is still as true today as it was back then. The difference was that back then I believed it. I believe that that was an impediment. And what ended up happening is that I spent a long time working on the republic, a year in Cuba to my topic in the National Archives, and I wrote a book about the republic, which was my dissertation book. And I could not, I could not free myself of the incredible amount of information that I was constantly receiving every time I went to Cuba from average Cubans and from intellectuals and from my own family members, from taxi drivers, from peasants about the revolution. So I came to decide that I was going to do something basically by following up on what people's stories were, finding out whether Fidel's references to Jesus Christ in the first year of the revolution, the second year were somehow true. And it turned out that they were true. For instance, turned out that virtually everybody's memories were extraordinarily astonishingly accurate. Some people even remember dates for very specific events that really everybody's forgotten outside of Cuba. So the point is that I'm. I decided to go ahead and work on the revolution. And so I have been doing that for a long time, since 2004, researching and writing. And this is the third book of what some people think of as a trilogy that covers the period from the 1940s through the 1980s.
- [03:19]
B
Well, I know as a person who works in Latin America, but not in Cuba, I'm always very, very happy to read a book from somebody who's done so much work with the sources and with. With people on the island. So let's start with the introduction. You summarized the book's main point as in this book, I plot the origins of that realm of citizen complicity on which Cuba's Communist Party relied to build political institutions, a massive security apparatus and a state directed popular culture and economy between 1961 and 81. Could you talk a little bit about what you mean by citizen complicity, a really interesting term and analytic you use and why you wanted to explore sort of this dimension or this angle of this period of Cuba's history?
- [04:06]
C
Yes, I decided to use the word complicity as opposed to something else because it was obvious to me from my very first visits to Cuba. And I ended up going to Cuba more than 50 times by the time I wrote this book. And most of these trips were very long, relatively speaking. They were most of the months long or six weeks long or six months long, or I guess rather five months long, more accurate. And in all of these trips, Cubans would constantly talk about how they had decided at some point to be apolitical. And apolitical somehow meant that they were involved with the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, that they carried out guard duty, that they did not object to the politicization of their education, that they sometimes turned down being a member of the Communist Youth, even though they were repeatedly nominated for that position, not on the basis of their actual objections to the state, its policies, or communism in general, but rather just simply because, you know, they, they had too much work at home, they had an elderly mother. I mean, like a bazillion different ways for explaining which was what was really passive resistance to integration to the state. And yet by law, certainly by the 70s, by law, and now more than ever under the 2019 Constitution, you cannot be separate from the state. And if you took such a position in the 1960s, you were considered to be somebody opposed to the revolution, potentially a counter revolution, revolutionary and subversive to the efforts to know, create this totally equal world, which was supposed to be better than anything Cuba or any other society had ever achieved. So it really, to me, the question of why has a one party state endured for six decades? Why for of that period, most of the time people outside of Cuba seem to want to believe these images that were staged by the state, these political, the system of political discrimination in favor of loyalists. Those questions, you know, why, why, why, why? They were really answered and only answerable by looking at people's lives. And what to what degree did the Communist Party and the armed forces and the Ministry of the Interior Fidel Castro and their control over A the economy, B the press, and C, any kind of civil society, meaning any kind of social organization, including unions, how did they manage to reproduce A, a system in which the individual saw himself or herself as constantly in relationship to the state? And so my quest in this work has been to look at people's lives and see how they came to understand on the one hand, that the state was imposing a kind of binary with us or against us, and at the same time resisting constantly the binary and trying to find a way to live outside of it, even though that was effectively going to get you in trouble if it became too overt. So complicity is really the best word to describe what I think is the foundation to the continuity of the Communist Party's rule, despite its many policy reversals. And we don't have to look to the early 1990s or the collapse of the Soviet Union and the now 30 year long adoption of capitalism to see policy reversals. They were constantly reversing policies. Anything that the state, the top officials, could do to maintain themselves and rule, they did so. Citizens were constantly subject to that whiplash. And yet in the path, this continuity of rule, and the only way in which it seems that citizens could be successful in opposing the state or resisting the state in an overt way, was to simply leave. And that, of course is ironically exactly what Fidel Castro said, that anyone who was opposed to him and the revolution as he defined it, needed to do so again. Even when you leave, somehow you're complicit with the paradigm. You know, it becomes like this, this surreal kind of a situation.
- [09:12]
B
You develop this, this theory and this approach of citizen complicity historically and chronologically. Beginning in the first chapter, Lessons in Loving the Revolution. All the titles have great names, I have to say, but Lessons in Loving the Revolution, Political Education, violence and the 1961 literacy campaign. And even for people that aren't deeply familiar with Cuban revolutionary history, the literacy campaign is probably something lots of people maybe know something about. And you trace how the early inception and trend of citizen complicity begins in that literacy campaign. You argue not only does the literacy campaign emerge as pivotal to Marxism's legitimation, it reveals the nuts and bolts of how the paradigm of patriots and traitors transcend the structures of ideology to embed itself in the hearts and minds and psyches of citizens. So could you talk a little bit more about the literacy campaign and its role in building this grassroots dictatorship?
- [10:06]
C
Yeah. So first of all, most of us think that even though the literacy campaign was literally launched a year before its completion, it was really only in about March, April of 61, which coincides with the US backed US trained invasion at the Bay of Pigs, that it takes off. And the reality as well of that moment where Cubans finally saw fulfilled what Fidel Castro had perhaps been seeking, but certainly he had been predicting for at least a year since March of 1960 when, when Cubans saw this happen. It was a moment in which Cubans really came together and, and most of them saw this as a repetition of their previous history of US interventionism, of military occupations. Many of them had not lived that history, but they had certainly grown up with the knowledge of its legacies in their homes and their families, in the economy and their schools. So effectively the literacy campaign takes off in April in terms of the numbers of volunteers and also in the pressure on those people to produce results. And I did not have really questioned too much. Certainly everybody has questioned the results of the campaign in terms of the fact that even UNESCO and the Cubans own Ministry of education recognized by 1964 that people had, had gained a very, very limited degree of literacy. I mean, they had really, you know, they hadn't really done much. What they had done, however, was stitch together, you know, a country through these young people, about 200,000 or so, who were very young, some of them as young as 11, most so then between 13 and 16 years old, who had volunteered to go out to the ends of the earth and, and meet with peasants, et cetera. And what they, what they, what they taught those people was an overtly political form of literacy. You know, where the list of vocabulary at the end of the book, the primer they were using, included all kinds of ideas and words that were clearly ideological. I mean, we don't learn the word imperialism to learn what the letter I stands for. And we don't necessarily learn F is for Fidel and R is for Raul, unless, unless we've got a point behind that education. So that all of a sudden I didn't really realize what life was like for the literacy campaigners. Until I decided, until I actually didn't decide. I came to know Ernesto Chavez, who was not a literacy campaign volunteer. He was somebody who in early 1960, had volunteered to be a voluntary teacher, Maestro Dontario. So he signed up for a four to five year gig where he was going to go into very illiterate regions of Cuba. They first assigned him to, er, Escambrai, and he was going to teach there. And so he graduated from Minas del Trio, which was a Marxist training school set up in the highest mountains of the Sierra Maestra. He went there. And incredibly, many years ago, long before I thought about writing this book, he wanted to meet with me and he wanted to give me all of this material, which included all the letters that he had received from his mom and dad, all the letters he had written to his mom and dad, all the letters he had written to a fellow literacy activist, literacy teacher, who was his girlfriend, and then all of the letters that both of them had received from another girl who was also a literacy campaign activist. So suddenly I had this archive of that stuff, and I knew Ernesto, and he still lives in Cuba. And so I. I went and interviewed him. There's much to say about Ines. So he ended up creating his own collection at the University of Florida. But the letters, the material there, that's where this idea of love comes from. Because love became a discourse that the state very actively, with the backing of the Cuban Communist Party, known as the Partido Societa Popular, developed as a sort of substitute for the more difficult, challenging ideas behind total unconditionality to the state's directives. So love meant if you loved the revolution, you loved it more than your parents. And so, for instance, Ernesto, in his letters, addressed his parents for the first time by their first names, you know, and when I asked him about it, he explains that, you know, mommy and poppy just aren't the right words you're supposed to use when you love the revolution more in your personal relationships. And the. The more I read these letters, the more I realized this is also something that you could find anywhere really, you know, at the time, and then across more than one generation. And I deepen the project of exploring what is the revolution's understanding, the state's understanding of unconditionality. And how does this discourse of love get played out in people's lives? But it really is anchored in. In the literacy campaign and that first group of young people who went out into the field. So I also interviewed a couple of folks who are Communist Party members and who are given pseudonyms in the. In that chapter, who had just spectacularly interesting experiences and had long careers, having been selected because of their work in the literacy campaign at the age of, you know, the tender age of 14, to do things like go to the Soviet Union, learn Russian, and. And so we're really products of their relationship to the state and not relationships that one would normally see in a 14 year old. So the state, the revolution, the suffering that being, you know, so far away from one's family for long stretches of time, you know, to do something like learn Russian and come back, those were direct results of the love that had been cultivated in this process of the literacy campaign. So that said, this was a real experience. And the peasants, who were often the subject of the experience of the experiment, if you will, resisted it. And that was also part of the story that needed to be recounted. Because what I discovered, especially in Ernesto's case, was that, you know, he was there up in an iskcon, but I, he and a bunch of more than a dozen, he was of literacy campaigners. He was overseeing. And there were massive peasant rebellions against the state because it was clear that they wanted to take over very small plots of land and make them into coffee cooperatives owned by the state. And these are illiterate peasant farmers who have dirt floors in their rooms. And they are the subjects of the literacy campaign. But they didn't have a problem with the kids who were the literacy campaigners, and nor did those kids have a problem with the peasants. In fact, what they. With the what. What Ernesto ended up reporting on behalf of his brigade was the abuses that these people were suffering from the army, from the Cuban army. So these kinds of stories about the violence of the situation and such, you know, the Bay of Pigs, the violence, the. The nature of the violence that, that these young people witnessed or were threatened by, the stakes fell very high for them. And the violence, nobody really talked about that before. Nobody really talked about the love part of it before. And I didn't feel that I was the one who was doing the talking. I felt like the sources were. So that's what that chapter is all about, those sources talking and speaking of these things that we do not associate with the literacy campaign violence. And then this kind of selflessness that is giving up the individual for the sake of a government and its understanding of your destiny and your own emotional life force.
- [18:54]
B
That is just an incredible archival story. And it does feel like, oh, you're compelled then to tell that story into all of these sources. Well, as you've already hinted, it's not all love and feelings of love and adoration. Chapter two, in fact, moves pretty clearly to the feeling of fear. Chapter two, titled Securing the State 1961-66 Fear, Surveillance and National Liberation. You argue that, needing a culture of conviction, the Communist state needed a penal system that did not rely on systematic forms of torture or extrajudicial killings that were typical of right wing dictatorship such as Batista's. Thus, state security counted on psychological methods of inciting fear and exterminating subversive ideas through visible tactics that muffled voices and bent the wills of those who led them. So could you talk a little bit about these tactics of visible tactics, of psychological methods of inciting fear?
- [19:48]
C
Well, one of them comes from the most sort of unique institution that communist rule Cuba would develop, which are the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution. These were originated by the Partidos Socialita Popular, the Communist Party, In September of 1960, in response to a number of bombs that had gone off across Havana that were largely set by not the moderates, not the, you know, the democratic wing of the revolution, but really Batistianos, who were seeking precisely to divide public support for the government. What is important, though, is that when they were set up, nobody knew that the Communist Party was behind them. They were supposed to be temporary. They were supposed to be these neighborhood watch groups that would make sure that people couldn't have the opportunity to gather and organize against the revolution and set off bombs or carry out acts of terrorism. But it is important that all of the major pivots in the nature of who has power, who wields it in Cuba in the first year and a half of the revolution, really after July of 59 through 61, are all happening while Fidel is denying that he is giving privilege, access and importance to Communist Party members. And they are actively ensuring that nobody knows that they're behind some of these big projects. So that said, the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution are an institution that in whose membership, or rather whose membership is not mandatory until 1968. And yet they have an enormous amount of power. They exist everywhere, in every block. People are constantly being asked to join. So you are being, and they use the word evangelized by them, by members. A lot of folks broke down and just joined so they could stop being harassed. You have to go to the meetings. You have to regularly go to meetings. And you're not supposed to contradict what your leadership is telling you at those meetings. So that in itself becomes a source of fear. But it's not until after 61 that you get the coupling of the fear that is sort of mild and intimidating with regard to your speech with executions. And the kind of normalization of executions that happens between 61 and 66 has really never been studied. It has been the object of great propaganda on the part of the far right exile community, a lot of which was backed, unfortunately, either by the CIA or by Batista's people, thereby discrediting the nature of their reports. However, when you put together what the Cuban press was saying, the fact that they had like a daily execution report on the radio, and you put together that with what the Cuban armed forces is saying that they are doing in Erez Cambrai, the region of peasant uprisings at other regions, Pinar del Rio, with things like the memoirs of Ministry of the Interior officials who over the course of 40 years, at different moments, would break with the revolution and then publish something, sometimes in obscurity, sometimes to great renown. You know, for instance, in the early 1990s in France, et cetera, you start seeing patterns. And one of the greatest patterns is that after 61, or rather in 61, the Soviet Union begins to train the Ministry of the Interior's top guys, and they go about creating a whole vast structure that is in fact the real security system. Committees for the defense of the revolution are much more of a shadow than they are real structure of surveillance. What happens there is that the real structure of surveillance is one that relies on not an enormous number of paid agents, but a relatively small number of extremely, well, you know, privileged agents who then recruit others to the task of informing. And they do so often through blackmail rather than through anything else, or they do it on the basis of volunteerism. So, you know, if somebody's a real revolutionary, that real revolutionary gets visited by the Ministry of the Interior agent who lets him know or her know that they need to do this service. And that service may come today, may come tomorrow, but it's going to come. And that's when you're going to have to talk about what your dad is really doing, what he's really saying, what he's really thinking. And your dad might be a really important writer, or he might just be some guy who does illegal stuff like traffic and cheeses or hams. Or your mom, she might have an on the side sewing gig, which is after 68, illegal, you know, and the problem with that isn't the economic problem. The problem is that the people that come to see them you know, they think and say things very openly and that's not allowed. So there is that kind of recruitment and then there is the blackmail, which is, okay, so your dad's in prison and we're going to let your mom leave the country. But unless you render the service for us right now, you're not, we're not going to let your mom leave the country or your sister, or maybe your dad's going to get out of prison, but we're not going to let him go until you do this. And so these things are really disturbing. But probably the most interesting, most surprising part of all that is that the guys who were telling the story, you know, our agents who are very proud of how successful they were and you can tell that, you know, I, I think that that's pretty impressive that they are proud of how successful they were. And some of them, you know, are not agents at all. Some of my sources are not agents at all. Nor were they people who defected. I mean, there is a very famous Spanish Republican exile who spent decades in Cuba and was a psychologist. And he ended up writing an extraordinary account, a memoir about how he created a clinic, for instance, for burnt out guys who worked for the Ministry of the Interior, overwhelmed by guilt because of all of the evil things that they've done. And what they've done is create this climate of fear. And it's kind of Mafioso style tactics when you think about it. It's, it's very, it's, it's pervasive as well. So one last thing to say. When I was in Cuba on multiple occasions in Central, I was amazed that somebody, they would discover in, you know, when drugs started getting into Cuba in a big way after 2007, 2008, you could tell, you know, the same kinds of signals that drug traffickers use in the United States and local communities is to put like hang different kinds of shoes from electrical wires or telephone wires, and the shoe indicates what's available and it's a whole code that started having a Sidrovana. And amazingly, on a couple of different occasions where the police were able to raid and get all these guys who were involved with the drug, the drug trade in San Giovanna, the one who had tipped them off was not somebody who is in the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution or the most revolutionary person on the block. It was the least revolutionary person on the block. That was the guy who was running the illegal lottery and allowed to get away with it because the government gains a great deal from these unsuspected informants who are creating, you know, I mean, in terms of the illegal lottery, one of the most illegal activities you can do, and benefiting from it sometimes for years. But the Cuban Ministry of the Interior is very patient and they will tolerate that for as long as it takes for so that they can get as much information as possible at the local level. And so their big heroes were the drunk guy on the corner that everybody assumed was drunk but was really faking it, and the other one was running the illegal lottery. So this all lined up with what I ended up finding in the sources. You know, source is completely, you know, independent of my own experience. And, you know, the things that I had just sort of blown off as, you know, not really that significant, turned out to be really, you know, what a part of a pattern that you could document. And it was already documented for me. So that chapter to me is one of the hardest ones I had to write because of its complexity and because of the nature of the sources. But there's no speculation in that. There's a lot of putting together pieces of the jigsaw puzzle.
- [29:19]
B
The next chapter continues in a very logical way that story, by moving on to what happens to those people who are informed on. The third chapter, the Generous Revolution, Rehabilitation, Political Prisoners and Coercive inclusion in the 1960s, explores the rehabilitation and RE education. Although RE Education also appears in a later chapter of the tens of thousands of political prisoners in Cuba in the 1960s. And you argue that, quote, these programs aspired to create a class of revolutionary acolytes who could ratify the state's superlative right to impose its values by consenting to its narrative. So could you talk a little bit about these prisons and these prisoners and what kinds of programs the state was putting in place and what kinds of goals the state seemed to have?
- [30:04]
C
Yeah, so between 1965 and 1971, prisons were bursting with tens of thousands, probably about 40,000. Fidel himself said to Lee Lockwood that it was 25,000, but it's probably more like 40,000 people who were mostly peasants and lower class, working class folks who had participated in, either directly or indirectly, in resisting the state or in the armed uprisings that consumed De las Cambrais, parts of Matanzas and Pinar de Rio for the previous six years. So five years. Five years, really, it's 61 to 66. So post 65, you have these prisons that are packed with these folks. Then you have folks who were imprisoned early on who were themselves revolutionaries, who had opposed Batista, who had long histories of doing so. But they were opposed to communism where they wouldn't take orders from Fidel Castro or like Jorge Vaz, you know, just member of the student directorate, brilliant guy. And they never actually charged him with anything. I mean, he was just arrested sitting on the couch of his parents in his parents living room in 1964. But they're. What the problem here is is, is that many, many, many, many of these people are one day going to be released. And they don't have any way of engaging the state's discourse because they've always rejected it. So if you give somebody who's a peasant a five or six year sentence, what are you going to do with this guy when he gets out, you know, or let alone somebody like Aureliano Sanchez Arango, Senator Aureliano Sanchez Arango's son Alfredo, when he gets out, you know, he was in prison at the age of 19. He's given, you know, a 20 year sentence or a 19 year sentence. What we do with these guys, you know, when they leave. So the state created a number of different rehabilitation programs which were a method of ideological rehabilitation where people would learn what they could say and what they couldn't say. So the purpose is not indoctrination. The purpose is not to make the person believe in the very thing that he or she is opposed. The purpose is to get them to speak correctly. So one of my favorite quotes in the. In the whole chapter has to do with this guy who you have to say, you know, I mean, the world turned upside down. Part of that story is pretty important. So he basically is in charge of a woman who, you know, comes from royalty. And she has actively and admittedly worked with the CIA. She's put in prison, but she's not really a threat to anybody. And so they're like, well, how could we get. What could we do to get her back out on the street? I mean, what are we gonna do with this lady? She's going to be done with her sentence. And she, like many others, never wanted to leave Cuba. Alfredo Sanchez, who is Sanchez Aragua son, his goal was not to leave. His goal was to live in Cuba. So in her case, her interviewer says to her that he determines after interviewing her that she is not, Which means that she is not capable of living on the street, meaning that she will never ever echo the words and terminology of the state. And so therefore she has to stay in prison and serve out her term. And Alfredo Sanchez refused participation in one of these programs. Some of them had names like Amigos And Fuegos. And so he became, you know, somebody who, you know, stood up against the whole possibility of rehabilitation and is known as one of those prisoners who did that, one of the earliest prisoners who did that. But when he is released, and he's released a little bit early in 1974, he wants to leave, and they won't let him. They want to get rid of him. They want to get him out of the country besides that, because in prison, as I learned from Alfredo once he resisted these programs, you were sort of like, free to talk and be whoever you really were. And that meant that you learned from other prisoners who had similar views or interests. And so there was a kind of freedom. There was horror and there was a lot of torturous existence, but there was some freedom, intellectual freedom, to being inside the prison and resisting the rehabilitation efforts. So this chapter attempts to cover all of the dimensions of what it was like to live as a political prisoner for women, for men. And then, importantly, as this rehabilitation program begins to take off what it meant to be a plantado, which is what Alfredo was, a plantado. And the plantado, that means that they stood their ground. And they were often made to, you know, basically live in their underwear because they refused to wear the prison uniform. And the prison uniform in the 1960s was literally the old army uniforms that the Baptist army had worn. So you were supposed to take on the. The clothing of, you know, be a traitor, right? You were supposed to take on the clothing of the dictatorship. And so those who refused that and also refused the rehabilitation were the troop on Carlos and Alfredo, one of them. And I had the great joy of interviewing him on many occasions, along with Jorge Bar for that piece and others, you know, Beltran, who is a peasant, who is mostly a literate peasant from and who served several years in as a political prisoner.
- [36:16]
B
Despite these many attempts to build love and then fear and then a certain kind of prison system, the regime still perceives a very high level of threat to its existence in the late 1960s. And you cover this in chapter four, the anti revolution of the late 1960s. Re education, integration and everyday authoritarianism. And you argue in this chapter that by the mid to late 1960s, leaders perceived an array of people as ideologically diversionary and or socially dangerous, whose bottom line commonality was a personal desire for autonomy from the state and a public willingness to conform. So could you talk a little bit about these anti revolutions and these threats to the state of nonconformity?
- [37:02]
C
Yes. So I want to point out here that my own work on this chapter now relies in a way that some of my previous work could not on just really spectacular original scholarship by Jennifer Lamb and Abel Sierra, when Rachel Henson in particular. So I want to say that the chapter, some of it deals with programs that were labeled rehabilitation programs, but. Or re education programs, but they were really ways of controlling populations of domestic servants and of prostitutes or freelance sex workers or people who worked in or perceived to work in that trade who refused to join the government's assignment of a role in society or to take a job with the government. And so domestic servants in particular were kind of my cup of tea because as it turns out, a lot of the folks who, I mean, after domestic service becomes illegal, which is, which happens in 1961, you know, a lot of these women, most of the women just didn't want to leave their employers and they didn't want to do that because their employers had such degrees of access to, you know, material goods in their own homes as well as gardens in their backyards, et cetera. And a lot of them had their businesses confiscated. But if they didn't leave Cuba, they got a stipend from the state which could be as high as 900 pesos per month. So all of that meant that if you were a domestic servant for some of these folks, you had a better life awaiting you than if you worked for the state. So, you know, that. That's pretty great. Crazy, right? And I was able to put together some really interesting, I think, nuances and story piece to the foundational work done by my former, my other colleagues like Rachel Henson, because I interviewed some of their rehabilitators and you know, and found that, that this was quite true, that one woman in particular argues, excuse me, that she had a very hard time teaching. You know, she was herself in her late teens teaching these revolutionary classes in this school for domestic servants because, you know, they would always say the wrong thing. And ultimately she ended up persuading them that if they just went along with what she was teaching them and they were, they were good students, you know, then they, she wasn't going to bug them that much, you know, and, and, and that's, that's how it ended up being possible for her to be successful in her rehabilitation work. On the other hand, there are also lots of folks and in this chapter I'm trying to, by the way, her name is, well, Aida Marta Grobe. There, there are other parts of this story which I think are also really interesting that are stories about people who lived on the margins of the revolution and they weren't pretending that it wasn't happening, but they were devoted to trying to maintain an autonomy from it. And that included, you know, the current bishop of Orgin, who went to seminary precisely at the worst time to do so technically, you know, the late 60s through the early 70s. And yet he described to me how since there were so few priests left on the island, he went to the Seminar de San Carlos, which is technically, again, it's a Jesuit seminary. And yet the examiners, the people who would go to listen to the candidates for the priesthood, do their presentations on very important fields for a Jesuit priest, which are not just theology, but social sciences, history, literature, ended up including women. So like Dulce Maria Loynas, the great recipient of the Cervantes Prize, is one of his examiners. I mean, I was like, so I call this the anti revolution because, you know, they, they weren't coucher, they weren't part of that paradigm category of people who were somehow actively seeking to usurp the revolution. They were just simply defying the state's mandate that they be part of the state in order to be part of Cuban society, which was defined as the revolution. There was not supposed to be anything separate from it. So that's really what the goal of that chapter is, is to illuminate, I know, how religious believers and homosexuals and other unconvinced subjects of this convincing revolution managed their lives and what they were up against.
- [42:27]
B
This problem of non conformity appears again and again throughout the book, or problem, I guess, for the state, maybe I should say. And it continues again in the next chapter, chapter five. Young Communists, Former Slum Dwellers and the Lewis project in Cuba 1968-1972. And I'll ask you to introduce the Lewis Project a little bit, but I'll say I'll quote you here. I argue that the Lewis team revealed the power of citizens resistance to state claims of ideological supremacy, as well as leaders methods for enforcing those claims. So could you talk a little bit about what the Lewis project and view the Lewis team were and what it shows us about this citizen resistance?
- [43:09]
C
Well, okay, so I would definitely say that chapter five. Are we in chapter five? Yes, is my, probably my favorite chapter. There is a good bridge between chapter four and chapter five that reveals just the quality of the research conducted by the Lewis team. Fidel Castro and Oscar Lewis met in 1967. Each was a fan of the other. They had a great deal in common, as I argue in this chapter, because Oscar Lewis believed in something called the culture of poverty, which is his own terminology for this sense that somehow people who were poor transferred from one generation to the other a set of values that ensured their poverty. And he wanted to test this. He had seen this in Mexico, in the slums. He had seen it in Puerto Rico under the great government sanctioned mandate of demolishing the slums that Luis Munoz Marin had carried out as the first freely elected governor and Puerto Rican governor of the island. And so he thought, well, this is a perfect test case scenario to go to Cuba and see where the government has demolished slums and according to Fidel, eliminated poverty through things like just basic food rations and the supposed universal health care and the access to schools and all this stuff. So this is the perfect place to test whether people do have values that they transfer from one generation to the next, which continues to prevent them under socialism from getting over the habits of their past lives, which might include, you know, smoking pot, right? Drinking too much, not showing up for work. So Fidel loves this supposedly because he, he ultimately too, in the late 60s, he is convinced that the reason that the economic policies in Cuba aren't working is that the citizens are preventing him from work working either because they're not working hard enough or because they have this whole system of black marketeering or because they own small businesses that are more successful than government owned businesses. So he nationalizes all the remaining small businesses, which is 52,000 in March of 1968, with a swoop of, or with a stroke of a pen. And so in 1969, the Oscar Lewis team arrives in Cuba with the backing of Fidel Castro. What I ask in the, in the chapter, which is a very important question, is why did everybody else, like Raul Castro and the rest of the Ministry of the Interior, allow them in? And the reason that that question is asked is that by 1969, by the time the Lewis team gets there, all of these other foreigners have been there already and they have all been invited and given full access to, you know, the realities of the countryside and the city. And all they can do is, and they're all leftists, and all they can do is reveal just how wonderful everything is. You know, how when I say how horrible everything is, that's the perspective that the Ministry of the Interior had of their very critical and on the ground accounts. These were critiques from the left. These were not, you know, uninformed kinds of studies. And so guerrillas in Power is one of them, but there are many. And as a result, one asks the question, so if all these leftists were already doing this and they hadn't served the revolution and the state's goals in letting them have that access, which is triumphalism, and to show how great everything could be, or was about to be, or was on the way to be. Then why let Oscar Lewis. And I think the answer lies in what Oscar Lewis discovered, because he goes there, he creates a team that includes 11 Fidel approved members of the Communist Youth who are his assistants. And he also brings a couple of folks from Harvard and his own graduate student. And then they carry out these extraordinary interviews, hundreds of them, more than 300 interviews in what is a barrio of former slum dwellers, people who had lived in Las Yaguas, the most infamous slum. And their work, which was to go and not just do a census of what people owned or interview them once. Their work was to interview them multiple times over the course of two years to get to know the families, to write essays about their own experiences doing this. That work was made all the more difficult for the members of the team because as soon as they got home, the Ministry of the Interior showed up to their homes and interviewed them again. So they would work eight to 10 hours and then they get home after typing up the transcript of an oral history or recorded interview. And then they would have to sit and inform directly the Ministry of the Interior for the next three to four hours. And that happened every day for almost two years. But what you find there are these. And these interviews are at the Oscar Lewis Archive at the University of Illinois, Champaign. What you find there are the voices of the Cubans and they are just inconquerable. They are incredible. I have my favorites, but certainly they speak to how on a very nitty gritty day to day basis, the, the way in which even something as simple as the rations work. They are not, these are not policies that serve the poor because what they do is they take away the power of the poor to serve themselves. There, the Oscar Lewis team, also at the very top, the two most communists of the team discover that the head of the local CDR in this government barrio is and has been for decades, not only just a militant of the Communist Party, but she actually is the biggest drug trafficker in the entire barrio. So you know the secret reports that Marta in this case and her and her colleague are issuing also just remarkably well documented. And so you see just the hypocrisy going on. And what I argue is that the Ministry of the Interior who approved this project did so because they actually wanted to use the Lewis team to do their research for Them, they wanted to know who in this former slum community were the problems and what were their attitudes, what were their real attitudes, what were their, quote, real values, unquote. And I have no doubt that after the Lewis team was effectively kicked out and Lewis and his wife were told in Raul Roy's office that they were no longer welcome and that they should leave. You know, the Minister of The interior confiscated 20,000 or more, maybe 30,000 pages, but Oscar had already set the equivalent, plus all the audio recordings, back to Illinois. Right. But I have no doubt that people pay the price for. For having expressed with honesty what they thought. And sometimes these folks would tell the Lewis team, their interviewers, well, we know you guys are working for the Ministry of the Interior, otherwise why would you be here? But so since you are, let me tell you what I really think I mean something to die for. But I will say there I have a hero among them who is an American named Clara Siegelbaum. And if she hears this, I hope that I can speak with her. She does these, this great research into the popular tribunals that had been set up from 64 until 72, when they're dismantled. And these are local neighborhood tribunals to try you on offenses, revolutionary ideological offenses, like letting your hair grow too long, not doing voluntary labor, listening to the Beatles, having ideologically diversionary attitudes. And she finds out, she discovers that a bunch of the judges in the Havana tribunals were actually Baptist. And she goes and interviews them with Enrique, I think is her partner, who's the local Cuban guy who works with her. And those interviews are at the end of the previous chapter, chapter four. And then they feed us into this complexity and the hypocrisy and all of this world of the former slum dwellers in chapter five. But I think that that chapter is. It speaks to just how extraordinary archives are and how you can really step back into the past and see things you never expected and in this case, listen to voices that are wonderful and humorous and also extremely ironic and very, very politically astute.
- [52:38]
B
Your next chapter transitions a little bit in subjects to children in education, and it really winds up to a really interesting and important argument you by the end of the book about people steeped in growing up in revolutionary Cuba. But chapter six, titled labor the Pedagogy of Love and Cuba's Child Revolutionaries, 1968-72, makes a number of interesting arguments and assessments about growing up in the Cuba of the 60s. And there's one particular argument that jumped out to me that labor emerged at the center of revolutionary pedagogy in these years and became a personal expression of political. Political love. So could you talk a little bit about child revolutionaries?
- [53:21]
C
Yes. So it was certainly the case that by the late 60s, the Cuban government would put into place something that Fidel had spoken of as early as the Sierra Maestra, which was to create cities of cities of children who would not only go to school, but they would be self sustaining cities that would produce their own food and part of which would be used either to feed other Cubans or for export. And this is precisely what we got in what were these There becomes mandatory if you are in a city, going to a city school, that you spend a certain number of weeks per year out in the countryside picking grapefruit for export to Russia or doing other forms of productive labor in the fields. But a huge number, tens of thousands of children will be sent to middle schools in the Campo. And there they are living pretty much permanently and seeing their parents very irregularly, or rather regularly, but very, very infrequently in the sense that parents were only allowed to have a certain degree of contact with their kids, some as little as just 18 hours, you know, every two weeks. And that was true of the most prestigious of all of these schools, which was not just Escuela El Campo. It was, you know, six year schools called the tenant school, La Reni. So the chapter covers everything from the sort of fifth graders who are growing up in Cuba, and at the time growing up in Cuba, going to regular schools, as well as those who are in higher grades and are living large part of their lives doing field labor and then going to their classroom. Because the important thing is that in Cuba it's very hot. So if you want people to do any kind of productive work in the fields, you can't send them after noon. So you have kids who are getting up really early in the morning and going out to harvest coffee or to harvest tomatoes or to harvest grapefruit, or to plant any one of those or more crops, and then they go to lunch and then they go to the classroom. So the exhaustion factor has to be enormous. But importantly, too, their nighttimes are also spent in a regimented fashion, where they have two hours where they're supposed to do study halls, et cetera. So they're living without really saying it, a kind of militarized lifestyle, highly disciplined. And then you have the Lenin School, which is even more of that, because it's the highest of all these. And I had a number of friends who went to the Lenin School, who are my generation are slightly older. And so the stories that I have kind of grown up with myself since I was in my mid-20s about the Lenin School led me to want to really analyze it. Its origins in Lasquela Vento, which is sort of an experimental school that was established in the late 60s and that would be supplanted by the Lenin. So the Lenin was funded entirely by the Soviet Union. It was supposed to. Supposed to have been personally funded by Leonid Brezhnev, who inaugurated the school. He went there in 1973. And I interviewed Sebastian Arcos, who was part of the first graduating class. The Lenin School had 3,000 to 4,000 students. United Height would have 4,000 students. And. And Sebastian gives a riveting account because, you know, he is somebody who comes from a highly revolutionary background. His uncle and his father were both heroes of the 26th of July Movement. He had another uncle who died in the assault on the Mukada barracks. His. His uncle Bernie is the man who was seen in the original images of Fidel Castro and Raul Castro and others leaving the prison on the island of Pines in 1955 after they'd served a little less than two years of long sentences. But after 1960, 61, beyond that, the image of his uncle starts to be erased, and all you end up seeing is his suitcase. Not in the hospital was a very, very prestigious guy, and he was in the diplomatic. Cory's dad was very prestigious as well. And both of them, by the time the Sebastian is in Lani, you know, are essentially political enemies of the state. You know, his uncle is on plan, which means pajama plan, sort of under house arrest. His dad has been. I mean, you know, the whole thing is a nightmare in terms of his political pedagogy, or rather pedigree. But that was the whole point, I think, that he would be brought in and somehow reshaped and remolded in the state. He wasn't rehabilitated. He was supposed to be the product of the revolutionary state at its best. And he does graduate from the Lenin School, but he's very smart. And in the end, he ends up spending a year in jail with his uncle and his father. So that's part of the story of how the chickens come home to roost. Because students who went there, especially those who had their eyes wide open, were seeing the contradictions, the ways in which their lives were mirrors of the state's will rather than their own will. And I do definitely believe that this is why many of my friends who mostly live now outside of Cuba, but had graduated from the Lenin School. Why? They are premier intellectuals, and we include many there. Alejandro de la Fuente, Mariel Iglesias, Rafael Rojas. This was an extraordinary human experiment. And so children's lives and identities were shaped by that experiment.
- [59:57]
B
The framing there of setting up these are supposed to be the children produced by the best of what the revolution had to offer. I think is such an interesting way to think about El Maria when we get there in chapter eight. So I just really enjoyed that framing. Your next chapter, chapter seven, situates us in the 70s generally, and you call it Los Anos Rojos, the Red Cuba in the 1970s. But there's actually a couple of different names and color names that appear in this first section. The Gray Years, the Red Years. So could you talk to. Could you talk a little bit to the names for this period and why the Red Years is the title you went with for this decade?
- [60:37]
C
Yes. So pretty much everyone should know who studies Cuba that in 1971, a poet who had previously occupied a pretty important position in the cultural world of Cuba, had been sent to the Soviet Union, comes back in the mid-60s, writes this spectacular book of contestatory poetry, all about how the state demands your applause, etc. That book is prized. And then he ultimately is made into a pariah, and then he is arrested in 1971. So the reason I mentioned all that is that 1971 in general is the launching point for what people who call the 1970s the gray years call Pinqueno gris the five gray years. And there they're pointing to the leadership of a particular man named Luis Pabon, who is. I don't know how to describe him, other than to say that he was a great censor and a repressor of intellectual and creative promise as well as production in Cuba. And Luis Pabon was sort of the arch enemy of Badilla in terms of everything he did to discredit and discount and ultimately contribute to not only Barilla's arrest, but the overt. I don't want to say overt, because never seem to make the press, but the open intimidation, firing, repression, disciplining of intellectuals from early 70s to 1976. And hand in hand with him was Lisandro Otero, who was the head of the Cuban. Essentially, before there was a Ministry of Culture, there was cnc, the National Council of Culture, and these two and others, hundreds of others, all work together to get writers and people of great talent silenced, unpublished or reassigned because they were gay. And as of 1971, you couldn't be gay or suspected of being gay and having contact with the youth or with culture because you would, well, you would devastate, you know, the future of Cuba according to the Cuban government. So that Quince, the five years supposedly ends with the establishment of a true Ministry of Culture under the supposedly moderate Armando Heart. So in this 1976 and in this chapter, I try to blow all that out of water by saying, give me a break. Yeah, this isn't, first of all, this kind of narrow kind of experience of government repression of cultural belief, expression, promise, et cetera, that is confined to intellectuals or artists or people with some kind of a degree. On the contrary, 1972 is the year that the Cuban government surrenders its economic sovereignty to the Soviet Union in return for Soviets by the tens of thousands swooping in to completely redo the Ministry of Education and to advise and really manage a devastated economy, an economy devastated by Fidel's policies. In return for all of that, the Cuban culture needs to shift in terms of the kind of model that the Soviet Union had established decades earlier. And that model includes state direction of culture. So state direction of culture means that, for instance, rather than punishing people for listening to the Beatles, we should create music that is echoing of all of the lines of the party and that will really reshape and recast in the minds of people who are listening to this music what the revolution means. And luckily, Cuba was stacked, for example, with extremely gifted musicians, most of whom had been subject to some form of pretty intense repression, and among them, Sibio Rodriguez and Pablo Milanese. And so my research there has to do with in particular this group of musicians that become, you know, the, this experimental. They're even given the title of experimental music group. And then what do their lyrics say, right? And what is the music is actually in their albums, not their most famous songs that were exported around Latin America, and that with reason, were very, in fact critical of repressive governments and that people who were fighting right wing dictatorships, assumed right, were not descriptive of the Cuban government, but actually they were descriptive of the Cuban government. And you have that in the music, but you have the co optation and appropriation of that as well as the artists by the state. And then you have the privileging of those artists in return for those folks writing songs that will in fact echo the interests of the state. So you have dozens, well, dozens, but at least five different versions, for instance, of a song of songs all about Playa Hiron, about the Bay of Pigs. You have by one artist, you have songs like Palo Milanes Made, where the song is supposedly about, you know, a Catholic creed and in fact, Revolution is God. That's a stunning song. You also discover in the chapter that Sibyl Rodriguez, when he had the money and independence in the early 2000s to do so, he started publishing sonaros, so his own books of lyrics. And turns out that there are like 1500. 1500 songs, close to 1500 songs that he's written, most of which we've never heard. And all we have are the lyrics and the music in these books, which are published in very few number. You have to really struggle. I had to go to the Yasayala collection in Miami to see them. So there's a whole story there about this being the red ears. These aren't the gray years. This is where red, meaning Stalin, red is the color that saturates your existence. And I say that symbolically and as well as literally.
- [67:50]
B
I really, really enjoyed that exploration of simultaneously access and repress. I think that that's such an interesting pairing in that chapter. The next chapter, chapter eight, the Road to El Mariel. Perfectionism, Alienation, Exhaustion, and the New man continues on with the lead up to the generation of young people leading in El Mariel. And you argue, one of the arguments you make in the beginning of this chapter is that as part of this revamping of education and kind of lots of what's going on in Cuba, new school curricula aimed at adolescents and young adults strove to develop a communist personality in every child in a precise and objective way, so that one's entire personality should be placed at the service of socialism and against imperialism. So can you talk about this kind of curriculum and the extent to which these, these, these projects differ to and continued what we've already talked about as part of the, the, the government's policies.
- [68:54]
C
Yes. So certainly there is an incredible and overt intensification in the ideologically driven educational system. So Fiden had called, literally that, had said in the 60s, you know, education is political and, and politics is education. By the 70s it had become education is ideology and ideology is education. And so that is most clearly stated in this, what you just cited, which is a Ministry of Education position that was sent out, you know, as a directive to all teachers with the founding in 1973 of one of two new journals that would be deeply funded by the Soviet subsidies. So we say Soviet subsidies. They weren't really subsidies, they were just direct aid. So, you know, $4 billion a year, that's, that's a hell of a lot of money, especially in the 70s. I mean, the entire time that the United States was sponsoring the atrocities committed by the Salvadoran military, from 19, approximately 1980 until 1992, we spent $4 billion. But the, the Soviets were putting 4 billion bucks into Cuba on an annual basis as of the 70s through the late 80s. And so they had just money to spare. And these journals which we have, we subscribe to here at the University of Florida in the 70s, we have all of them, right. It'd be very hard to see them in Cuba, but yeah, that. That really struck me. So this, this journal called. Which went out by 2020, 000 copies, right? To all these different teachers. It's everywhere. You have to read it and everybody's supposed to discuss it and their political circles at the schools and the training of the teachers, et cetera. This idea of a communist personality doesn't mean that you become a member of the party. It means that you aspire to be kind of a member of the party all your life. So much so that you are constantly checking your consciousness against any obstacle to you becoming the fully selfless revolutionary that the state calls you to be. And so this chapter talks or deals with one of the platforms for that project, which was a campaign for perfectionism. Perfectionism. Perfection. I mean, I had never heard that term in my entire life. I was shocked. And then. Yet when I started looking into the 1970s, I found it everywhere. I found it especially in the pedagogical journals, as well as in this huge collection of posters that I had photographed in 2004. So I'm writing this book in 2021, 2022. But I had this big collection of posters that my friend Jorge Mackley had saved from recycling at the National Archive. And he had been a teacher in the 80s and a student in the 70s. And so when he was directed by the director of the Archive to just throw everything away and put it in recycling, he said, why? Right? Why would we do that? So he called me, Eddie already called me. He emailed me and told me, why don't you come to the archive and bring your supit camera, right? And so I went there. And so this collection, when I went back to it, against the backdrop of the journals, the speeches from Fidel, the books that were published for children in the seventies by Editorial Abrin with Soviet money, I was dumbfounded. You could not escape the statement la revolution apuesto e la juvitu sumaro. Profundas. Yes, profundas. Esperanza e comfia a futuro which is what Fidel said, this idea, and I'm quoting, the cleanest, the purest, the most honest must be the students, because they are workers of tomorrow. They are called to develop to a maximum point of perfection socialist society in advance, deliberately along the paths of communism, unquote. That is a statement from a Fidel speech. And it is everywhere for more than 10 years. And it's in one poster after the other. And these posters are a series of, of posters. So, you know, you're walking into your, your school and you, you're seeing these posters. You're also seeing one of the, the lemas or slogans of schools in the 70s, which is something that I had heard about, but I didn't really know was, was, was, was part of the landscape per se. And that is Dondenacio conit. So where ominous is born, difficulties cease or difficulties die. Yeah, so that. So the point of this chapter is a lot of pressure. And by the way, I realized that my stories about the Lenin School are in this chapter. And I have, what I, what I have done is misquote myself for the earlier chapter on children in education, which is about the country schools, and it's also about daycares. So those of us who are better readers than the author here can go back and review that. But here I think what my purpose is, is to show just the intensity of the pressures on youth and how this generation, raised under the state and by the state, cannot question the state's policies. And they do nonetheless. And so one of the ways by which they do that, that is very memorable to me, is to simply, you know, consider why it is that Cuba is an island. And yet when they go to lunch at the Lenin School, they don't get real fish, they get the tails of fish. Why, why are we eating tails of fish? Well, we're an island, right? Why does 100% of Cuba's seafood go for export and we'll never eat it? No, that is a question that haunts young people, and it's one of many that begin to haunt young people. So the road to Marian is exactly a road that's paved by doubts in a system that's supposed to eliminate doubt, prevent doubt, criminalize doubt, demonize doubt. The true revolutionary does not doubt. And yet that's exactly what's happening here in the 70s and, and the 60s was a period when that was sort of possible where you could maybe, ah, you could question, you can, you know, you were supposed to eliminate doubt, though, in the process of becoming a true revolutionary. But by the 70s, the, you know, any expression of. Of these kinds of doubts was, you know, seen as detrimental to your future as an individual. Um, and it wasn't detrimental to your future as an individual because somehow you were jeopardizing all of society. So this idea, the weight born is a cross that is neither easy nor is the yoke light. Nothing, you know, forget Jesus. This is a really heavy yoke. And the burden is there and you're supposed to feel it and you're supposed to smile and be happy about it. Which would lead us to, I think, the last chapter.
- [76:35]
B
Yeah. Which is a great culmination and capstone to the groundwork you've laid in the rest of the book. Chapter nine, we are Happy Amplifying the revolutionary script and the crisis of El Mariel. So could you talk a little bit about this chapter, to me, really explored this performance of happiness, like needing to exemplify not having that doubt. So could you talk a little bit about performing that to both foreign and domestic onlookers or for Cubans in the midst of what's genuinely a crisis?
- [77:06]
C
Yes. So incredibly, you know, in the first, or rather in the last six months of 1980, 124,779 Cubans left Cuba. They were, in their vast majority, young people who had lived their entire existence under the revolution. At least their consciousness, certainly from childhood to adolescence, was shaped by the revolution. They had really not known anything more than that. They were, in their vast majority, working class, because the state directed, and it still does, to the degree that it can, directed the numbers of people who would become professionals. So you don't have also kind of entrepreneurial class or anything like that. So the vast majority of these people who are leaving are male. They are working class, they are in their 20s. And then a striking percentage of them are non white. And. And the fact that they are 70.2% male matters because previous groups who had, or previous waves of folks who had left the island had been more than 50% female. So it is important to note that from 1972 until 1980, there was no way to leave the island. And In March of 1980, before the Marian happens on March 8, Fidel gives a speech in which he. It's Women's Day. And he addresses the Federation of Cuban Women. And he actually says, you know, back in the mid-60s, we did this thing at this port of Camarilloca, where we invited exiles to come and pick up. He calls them a counter revolutionary, the Gusanos Worms, to come pick up their family members who wanted to leave. And they did. They did that for a month. And in fact, so many people wanted to leave that they ultimately established what were called in the United States freedom flights from 1965 to 1972. And the bulk of the middle class, the bulk of the professional class, the bulk of anybody who ever left Cuba after 1959 left then 65 to 72. It's close to half a million people. So he says this, and then he says, you know, maybe we should do something like that. And that's important because most of us think that somehow the Marian was some kind of improvised thing that came out of actions taken by citizens. And the, the, the origin point for the Marian is that speech. The next step is where it gets completely out of control of those who probably crafted this, which were Fidel Castro and his buddies. And they wanted to get rid of the discontented. So what is it that happens? Well, the Peruvian Embassy, a group of Cubans, small group of Cubans commandeer a government owned bus and they drive it through the gates of the Peruvian Embassy. And at that very moment, then Fidel picks a fight with the ambassador of Peru and he wants them to be returned to Cuba because he says that one of them is a lesbian, for instance, and she's taken naked pictures of herself. And these people are antisocials and et cetera, et cetera. Seems to me that there was at least one person in charge of that bus. And the rest on the bus were probably recruited precisely because they could be discredited. But the Peruvian ambassador, to his credit, refuses to release them. And then Fidel pulls the guard on the gates of the embassy and that's the Cuban guard. And as a result, we get. Suddenly the word is out that there is no guard at the Peruvian embassy. And 10,000 Cubans in a day walk to the Cuban, to the Peruvian Embassy in Havana and invade its grounds. They just take over and they're seeking asylum. Not to Peru, to the United States. So this is where Fidel's story that he has told himself and all of his other friends and leaders have told themselves about how unanimous the Cuban people are in their support for the revolution and his state and his socialism blows up in his face. And so the rest of the story is really a struggle. It's an effort to control the damage that Fidel himself has created by allowing first for this to happen. And then secondly, apparently he had in mind that he was going to open the port of Mariel and bring the exiles in to pick up their relatives. Along with those who never expected would be 10,000 people at the gates or within the gates of the Peruvian Embassy. So that does get announced. And all of this takes place within the first two weeks of April 1980. There is a Cuban exile in Miami, in Vitavoa, who was probably not, probably, definitely working with Fidel, but he was at that point, supposedly a very prestigious exile. And he's the guy who announces over Cuban. Cuban Miami radio stations that anybody who wants to go pick up their relative can. So you have an agent, really, in Miami with Fidel Castro who are subverting any kind of control that the US Government might exercise over immigration or over the situation. And in inciting, enlisting, inviting Cubans from Miami to go to Cuba with their boats to pick up their relatives. And then people on the island are getting the message that they should be. They could get out. And so those who get out of their own volition are, you know, thousands and thousands of people, and they have to buy the Cuban government's own mandates, go to local police stations and denounce themselves as degenerates and antisocials. So their complicity comes back, right? You're trying to leave the country, and you're trying to get on out through Mariel, and the government is happy to put you on anybody's boat that comes through, even though maybe you just wanted to pick up your relatives. Your. You're going to have to pick up whoever the government wants. And at the same time, you are supposed to declare yourself an enemy of the state. You know, you're supposed to go in and say, you know, I've been running. Running an illegal bar in my house. You know, my daughter's a prostitute, I'm a pimp, my wife's a lesbian. Anything you could say, right? And the government gives you at the police station this document that says that you are an antisocial, and so therefore, you are allowed to leave because the revolution doesn't want you. So this is an extraordinary situation, and it worked in the favor of the Cuban government, undoubtedly, because all of these folks, the tens of thousands who are coming on these boats over a course of five months to Key west and to South Florida, they are being interviewed by people who are mostly Cubans with absolutely no knowledge of what Cuba is like. They have rejected any knowledge of it, even if it were there. They haven't had contact with the island. And then they're getting a Cuban in front of them who has spent sometimes weeks trying to leave, who hasn't any kind of hygiene, who has endured the horror of the 90 miles and has also these papers that say, you know, I'm an antisocial. And they have to explain that. They have to. There's just no translation here. So no wonder the Marianitos, as they were called, were almost immediately, you know, suspect, rejected, treated like pariahs by their own people in Miami and back in Havana, Cuba, or rather Fidel is applauding and he's making all of these other Cubans applaud. And how is he doing that? Well, the government and the CDRs and the communist Party and their political circles that every one of schools and workplaces, et cetera, are called to carry out meetings of repudiation against those who want to leave. When a meeting of repudiation means that you who want to leave and have registered that you're going to leave in your local police station with your whole family, suddenly your apartment building, and your apartment in particular, is surrounded by a mob, mostly often of school children who've been recruited after 9pm by their teachers. People are throwing eggs at your apartment. They may or may not have cut off your electricity and your water, sometimes for days, sometimes for more than a week, two weeks. And you are subject to this kind of constant mob violence and intimidation. And even if this happens, let's say to 10% to 50%, to 70% of those who wanted to leave, everybody who's watching this is the rest of the country and they are saying, my God, I don't want this to happen to me. So you add to that that Fidel created something he had relied on since the beginning of the revolution, which were government organized rallies to show that everybody's with him, except in this case they were called Machas del cuerno combatiente, and there are three of them. And they run from April to May. And these are million people marches. People are ranting and raving and they're approved. There are more than 100 approved slogans. There are signs that you can take that they can only say certain things. And they say the most disgusting and horrible things about other human beings whose only crime is that they want to leave the island. So I would say that this is probably one of the ugliest, horrible, most shameful chapters in our history. And. And it remains so because it is taboo to discuss this, to discover it. And aside from myself, I know that there are a number of people who have contributed tremendous works on the Marian in the last year, especially because we have the last few years, because we have now hit up against the 40th anniversary in 2020. Albert Sierra is a great inspiration to some of my work because his own work on the Maria preceded mine. But there is a huge well of material that has yet to be discovered about what these people experienced, what the government did. And ultimately it is La Tapalpomo, like, as we say in Cuba, you know, it's the COVID on the top of the bottle, the cork in the bottle, that it shows just how deep that senior and indoctrination, manipulation of people's emotions, of their morality, of their own identity, of their sense of destiny, of their will, went thanks to this government and the nature of complicity on which it relied, which is very insidious and damaging. So this is a. It doesn't end, the book doesn't end, you know, on a sad note, because my whole point, point in writing it is to say that we must recover this history and that Cubans are their best historians, at least those who in earlier generations especially were willing to remember all of this and recount themselves to me so that I would get on, get on the job of doing the research and writing the history and then and putting their voices on paper. But I have to say that there is no doubt that moment was a horror, a horror in our history.
- [89:40]
B
Well, if it's both a great capstone and culmination of the ideas that you develop throughout the book, I think Tip of the Bottle is a great metaphor, quirk of the bottle of a beginning. And I'll use that as natural a transition as possible to ask about what's next or what you're working on now, because clearly this isn't, this isn't a one offside project. This is part of a larger intellectual project.
- [90:03]
C
Yes. So I have kind of three projects. The first is that for many years I have been kind of very close to the Anderson George family. And Anderson George is a great photojournalist and I have many, all of my books have in some way or another engaged his tens of thousands of photographs, his own work, his own notes, his own archive. So in the last year I've worked very closely with his oldest son, Andrew St. George, last name is Hungarian originally, and then his second son Tom, to get for the University of Florida this huge collection of material that includes about 8,000 photographs and then just extraordinary documents. So I'm working on a book that's called Witness to Cuba and the photography of Andrew St. George with Alex Harris and Margaret Sartor. They are both brilliant in terms of photography, design and not necessarily historians of Cuba. So that leaves me something to do that's one project and then the other two that I'm taking very seriously. One is a book of interviews with founders, pioneers of the field of Cuban studies. And the third is a book that combines oral histories with average Cubans and letters. Because in our work as historians, we often come across letters that are just riveting, and we can only quote, you know, a couple page or pages, couple sentences. You know, we can't put the whole letter in there. And. And yet these letters stay with you, you know. And so I hope to be able to complete these projects. Certainly the, the Anders St. George book is on its way, and the other two I work on, you know, as pretty consistently as much as I can. So I'm hoping that, that this will continue, continue to contribute to this trend in the field of Cuban history, which is recovery of our past and then a debate and discussion that is informed by the past of our present and future.
- [92:34]
B
Lillian, I'm excited to see those projects develop and come out, and I want to thank you again for your time and for sharing your book with us on the New Books Network today.
- [92:42]
C
Thank you so much, Sam.