As Fidel Castro’s body is laid to rest, articles, videos and posts sprout at a dizzying pace, forming an assemblage of refractions of his life and legacy in the public record. Some eulogize the passing of a charismatic anticolonial leader, vowing to proudly follow in his looming shadow and never forget his brave example. Others exalt the much-awaited fall of a totalitarian dictator who can no longer inflict psychic harm on his enemies, alive and dead. Still others profess ambivalence, reflecting on a complex relationship with a mythologized icon who held such a prominent role in stories of political becoming, the world over. The expressed responses of apathy, or even dark humor by Cubans living abroad constitute bold political statements, vexed intimacies with a man-as-synecdoche for a revolutionary national project they have been both shaped by and against.
In this historical moment when personal political longings gain heightened public display, the readers of Devyn Benson’s historical monograph, Antiracism in Cuba: The Unfinished Revolution (2016), may rightfully latch on to the reoccurring theme of how the dead are fixed into icons to populate idealized national narratives. As a cultural historian, Benson analyzes visual materials found in the Cuban press, a technique similar to that found in Louis A. Pérez Jr’s Cuba in the American Imagination: Metaphor and the Imperial Ethos (2008). Her inclusion of political cartoons, visual slogans, and their vivid description are a key strength of the text, which she supplements with oral histories (particularly of Afro-Cuban women). Benson highlights the making of lasting archetypes, like the loyal black revolutionary martyr and Fidel as paternalistic savior, promulgated during the legendary literacy campaign in 1961 and the antidiscrimination campaign of 1959. The black martyr lingers as metaphor for the (im)possibilities of autonomous black political mobilization within the revolution. The historical record of racialized iconography during the early years of the Revolution brings striking perspective to today’s moment of spectacular refraction and repetition after life lost.
The book’s subtitle echoes that of the New York Times op-ed by Afro-Cuban cultural critic, Roberto Zurbano. Although originally entitled “Para los negros cubanos la Revolución aún no ha terminado” [For Black Cubans the Revolution has not finished], the piece was later renamed by the editorial staff before publication in English and appeared as “For Blacks in Cuba the Revolution Hasn’t Begun” (2013). The scandal that ensued as a result of the op-ed spurred Zurbano’s professional demotion, dozens of response pieces, and finally a journal special issue (Afro-Hispanic Review: Vol.33, No.1, 2014). Again, we see how refractions of meaning reveal particular political investments in a nationalized history of the struggle for racial equality on the island. Antiracism in Cuba: The Unfinished Revolution rightfully gestures toward that event, underscoring the high stakes involved in representing the history of antiracism in Cuba, its achievements, failures, and the constrained terms of debate within which to articulate such evaluations.
The high level of present-day political investment in the racial characterization of post-1959 Cuban history makes Benson’s work a daring feat, an analytical path charted by Alejandro de la Fuente’s A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba (2001) among others. She delivers meticulously researched, elegantly written, and accessible prose that covers the history of racial rhetoric in Cuba, the symbolic crafting of gendered and racialized political subjectivities, the transnational field in which this revolutionary national becoming continues to take place, and the ways that Afro-Cubans navigate and challenge the political landscape to advocate for full realization of the Revolution’s most cherished ideals. Followers of the “Zurbano case” and racial politics in Cuba, more generally, will be grateful for Benson’s careful interpretation of the events surrounding Fidel Castro’s notorious stay at the Hotel Teresa in Harlem, NYC in 1960. The events, Benson argues, reveal the basis for the coexistence of both antiracism and anti-blackness. Certain tropes were solidified over time, constituting a lasting national “common sense” around racial discourse and antiracist activism in Cuba that both opened and foreclosed important possibilities for Cuban blacks and mulatos.
The feminist undercurrent of the book’s gender analysis throughout is most prominently felt in Chapter Five and the Epilogue, putting this work in direct dialogue with the audacious direction of new historical scholarship on blackness in the Americas. Benson features the individual and collective voices of Afro-Cuban women whose contribution to the history of antiracism in Cuba escapes the official archive. This methodological move signals an investment in reading “against the grain” that other black feminist historians, like Marisa J. Fuentes in Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (2016), have asserted as an effective method to write black women back into a history that is often told without them.
In addition to reading against their archival absence and supplementing with oral history, film, blogs, and music when possible, the book documents how the 21st century group, Afrocubanas, created an archive of their own through a co-edited publication, Afrocubanas: Historia, Pensamiento, y Practicas Culturales (2011). Benson provides a window into their compilation of history, political thought, and cultural practice otherwise inaccessible to mono-lingual English readers. As Aisha Finch demonstrates in her recent book Rethinking Slave Rebellion (2015), shifting away from the identification of singular charismatic leaders allows historians to capture alternate sites of political struggle and subjectivity that are key for decentering patriarchal definitions of social value and re-imagining radical insurgency. Benson strongly suggests that a deeper exploration of the history of Afro-feminist political thought and activism in Cuba is still necessary to flesh out how a group like Afrocubanas came to be over time, despite the prevalent homosocial hypermasculinist revolutionary models of idealized interracial brotherhood.
The book will be immediately useful for scholars of Africana Studies and Latin American/Caribbean Studies in the humanities and social sciences who engage contemporary race politics in Cuba. Yet ultimately, Antiracism in Cuba is essential reading for anyone who is invested in the revolutionary promise of racial justice, both within and beyond the academy. As we enter what some are already calling a “post-Fidel era,” people perform their political longings by engaging in a dialectics of signification with an anthropomorphized social memory, actively situating themselves within its living legacy and radical imaginary. This memory fiercely haunts the current political climate in both Cuba and the U.S., marked by shared states of pronounced temporal vertigo.
On both sides of the Florida Strait, we look forward only to see the bold presence of the past; we gaze outward toward the promise of a better future ironically tinged with nostalgia. In this time of profound loss(es), we witness the resurrection of differing representations of “the national story” to publicly re-member the present. Antiracism in Cuba reminds us that this revolution does not end; it regenerates.
Author(s): Devyn Spence Benson
Title of book: Antiracism in Cuba: The Unfinished Revolution
Year of publication: April 2016
Place of publication: Chapel Hill
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Number of pages: 334 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 24 halftones,
ISBN: 978-1-4696-2672-7