Cuba: Island of Dreams

This book is not an easy review because it is not an easy read. The reasons are evident from the start: an excessively complex conceptual scheme from which the author draws selectively to guide the historical and empirical analysis. Claiming that scholars have been reluctant to deal with the issue of Cuban ideology, and that whenever they did, they "misunderstood" it (5), Kapcia believes that his book fills that gap. To him, Cuban revolutionary ideology is cubanía rebelde, which he claims is the line that runs throughout Cuban history and which he argues should not be confused with cubanidad, or Cubanness. In order to show the difference, he establishes the conceptual parameters of the discussion of this cubanía in an introductory chapter entitled "The Concept of Cubanía and the Nature of Myth." As part of what he calls his "methodological concerns" (33), that chapter analyzes the concepts of nationalism (as "imagined communities"), political historical myth, symbols and icons, political totemization, political culture, ritual, gender, and language.

Let it be said, this is an author who knows his theory. Each of these concepts is brilliantly discussed and on those grounds alone the introductory chapter makes a contribution. The problem is that most of these conceptual concerns are subsequently hardly touched upon in a book that is fundamentally intended to elucidate what the author calls "codes" in both prerevolutionary and postrevolutionary Cuban history. His central thesis is that throughout Cuban history there has been "an emerging potential code" struggling to become reality only to be repeatedly frustrated. He calls that code cubanía rebelde. His argument that those potential codes are to be found at the "popular-empirical" and not the "intellectual-theoretical" level (17) hardly clarifies how one is to discover what is popular and "potential" in history. The author offers the following as clarification: "It can be deemed 'popular' in two senses. Firstly, it exists at the more 'unconscious' level of understanding and motivation, not so much unthinking as unthought and largely uncodified formally, except through the 'codes.' Secondly, it exists as the collective context in which the second level of ideology-the 'intellectual-theoretical'-takes root, develops and adapts" (17). Without claiming to understand such conceptual twists and turns, this reviewer does understand that the author believes that cubanía rebelde was a "code," an "ideological reservoir" (123), which, while "potential" and essentially "implicit" (97), finally became reality with the 1959 revolution. With opportunity, context, and personal direction, cubanía rebelde emerged as radical revolution, "its legitimacy unchallenged" (92).

There were three fundamental historical watersheds in the realization of true cubanía rebelde, according to the author. First, there was, of course, José Martí-hardly a controversial point. Secondly, there was the 1921-31 period, when the Communist party of Cuba was founded. Marxism (based on Leninist theories of imperialism), says the author, began to exercise a subsequent "unchallenged hegemony" within the evolving dissidence, as an explanation of Cuba's situation (76). Needless to say, there is no unanimity on this point. Nor is there agreement on the role of the third watershed, Fidel Castro's 1953 "History Will Absolve Me" speech. Kapcia calls this speech "quintessentially cubanist" and claims that it "evoked the whole cubanista tradition" so as to finally codify "the more coherent ideology of cubanía" (95). The problem is that Castro's 1953 discourse, while certainly recalling Martí, had nothing to say, directly or indirectly, about the Marxist-Leninist past or present. It was, and not surprisingly at that, very much a social democratic statement, as one would have expected from Castro, a member of the Ortodoxo party sworn to restore the Constitution of 1940, who was, in addition, an active participant in the Caribbean-wide social democratic currents then sweeping the region. And, wasn't that the line taken during the first months of the revolution? Was it not the line evident in that brilliant publication, Lunes de Revolucion, led by Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Carlos Franqui, and Heberto Padilla (among others), all to be purged once the revolution swerved toward Marxism-Leninism? Again, those seeking the author's explanation of this radical redirection of the revolution will find the going tough. By the late 1960s, says the author, "cubanía revolucionaria could be said to be explicitly Marxist in inspiration and direction, and thus capable of accepting both interpretations of the hegemonic intellectual ideology, unconsciously gravitating towards the 'inwardly oriented' perspective, but more consciously attracted by the 'outwardly oriented' discourse, which offered protection, security and stability" (140). If by protection, security, and stability the author means the military and economic patronage of the USSR, it eludes me as to how this is ideological, as he defines it, rather than simply geopolitical, as much of the literature has long maintained. If this is so, on what grounds can the author argue that while the Marxist-Leninist discourse fit "Cuban criteria and empirical models," liberal or social democratic ones represented "exogenous models" (137)?

Finally, this reviewer finds it frankly quite inexcusable that having cited Afro-Cubans, both in terms of their historical struggles and their cultural/ religious contributions to Cuban "revolutionary dreams" (64-65), he then decides that since the history of black radicalism "remains to be written," it necessarily "falls outside the remit of . . . this study" (34). Alas, what Jorge Domínguez once called "the classic non-topic" of Cuban historiography remains unaltered in this book.