Haydée Santamaría Cuban Revolutionary: She Led by Transgression by Margaret Randall (review)

“This is not a biography,” Margaret Randall writes of her book. “This is an impressionistic portrait, written by a poet rather than a historian” (13). Randall, who lived in Cuba from 1969 to 1980, considers Haydée Santamaría—the most central female figure of the insurrection culminating in the 1959 Cuban Revolution and founding leader of Casa de las Américas—her revolutionary mentor. Their connection shapes the form and function of the book. Both narrative history and poetic homage, the book consists of ten chapters and an elegy of ten poems and transgresses the conventions of traditional historical scholarship to examine this revolutionary figure and process the causes and consequences of her suicide in 1980. The mixing of genres allows Randall to reveal the private tensions underlying Santamaría’s very publicly heroic life and to argue for a more just consideration of her legacy.

This unconventional approach manages the difficult work of presenting historical events to the non Cuba-watcher while fleshing out, for the specialist, the very intimate details behind the contradictory “facts” of Santamaría’s life. These include her provincial origins vs. her internationalist idealism; gendered expectations of womanhood vs. her leadership in the guerrilla forces; her “official” institutional role vs. her ambivalence toward party conformism; and her vehement search for justice under the cloud of her fiancée and brother’s deaths during the attacks on the Moncada barracks in 1953.

In the chapters “Moncada” and “War,” for example, Randall’s poetic impressions help her move between documenting Santamaría’s key role in the insurgency and representing how it forever marked her life and death. To capture Santamaría’s personal perspective on Moncada and the loss of her loved ones, her jail time, and her missions in the urban guerilla movement, Randall uses antithesis and metaphor, painting war as painful but natural to Santamaría and its consequences as “logical residue.” The narration of Santamaría’s participation in the Mariana Granjales brigade is infused with interviews and excerpts from correspondence to reveal the sensibility underlying her leadership role.

For example, the reader learns that Santamaría was sensitive to the addictive potential of violence and therefore assigned the task of setting explosives to individuals most averse to it. Correspondence between Santamaría and her exhusband suggests that the deaths at Moncada were intimately linked with her commitment to other revolutionary heroes like Fidel Castro and Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara; footnotes clearly describe key figures and fill narrative gaps left among the poetic images.

Similarly, Randall grounds the task of documenting Santamaría’s role in cultural history in the echoes of her testimonial sources. Her interviews with Santamaría’s nieces and filmmaker Rebecca Chávez recall her “motherly role,” rather than simply narrating Santamaría’s defense of the nueva trova musicians in the repressive early 1970s (118). How she wore a guayabera (men’s dress shirt) to a Communist Party meeting reifies her gender consciousness in her role as head of Casa de las Américas (181). Interviews with both international intellectuals and the Casa’s cleaning staff testify to Santamaría’s class-consciousness. Likewise, a complete translation of a letter Santamaría wrote to Che Guevara on the news of his death, discursively equates Santamaría’s role in the Casa de las Américas’s resistance to US cultural imperialism to Guevara’s ideological struggle.

Ultimately, the mixture of sources and methodologies allows Randall to argue for Santamaría’s rightful place in the revolutionary pantheon despite, or perhaps because of, her suicide. Curiously, there is very little “history” written here—no documentation of press reports or the event’s late July date (and its possible connection to the Moncada event). Instead, the interviews stress that the decision to hold Santamaría’s wake at a funeral home rather than Revolutionary Plaza belittled her commitment to the Revolution...