Cuba y La Guerra Civil Española: Mitos y realidades de la derecha hispano-cubana (1936–1942) by Katia Figueredo Cabrera (review)

Katia Figueredo Cabrera's Cuba y La Guerra Civil Española: Mitos y realidades de la derecha hispano-cubana (1936–1942) broadens our understanding of the sizable Spanish community living on the island during the Spanish Civil War and at the onset of World War II. The monograph is divided into six chapters that analyze the diplomatic relationship between Havana and Madrid from 1936 to 1942, Spanish pro-right-wing organizations in Cuba, and economic factors that motivated Cuba's responses. Figueredo's work underscores the Cuban state's contradictory reactions to Francisco Franco's rebellion: initially, state diplomacy and rhetoric externally supported the Republic while remaining internally tolerant of right-wing pro-Franco forces. Figueredo fills a void in the study of the right-wing pro-Franco movement in Cuba by challenging previously held assumptions that gave right-wing forces a more prominent role in the spread of fascism in the Caribbean. Instead, Figueredo emphasizes economic factors as essential motives for the diplomatic rapprochement between the island and the peninsula. Moreover, Figueredo accurately surmises that Cuban scholarship has overtly emphasized the impact of Spanish Republican exiles without a careful corresponding analysis of the pro-Franco right. The paucity of scholarly monographs on the right-wing Spanish community in Cuba is a testament to the scarce attention it has received from the Cuban academy and Anglophone scholarship.

Figueredo is conversant with existing scholarship dealing with both pro-Republican and pro-Falangist forces in Cuba. To that end, she compares Cuban state responses to pro-Republican and pro-Falangist organizations, concluding that the Cuban government—in contrast to the majority of the Cubans on the island—allowed the pro-Falangist forces greater flexibility in skirting Cuban laws that limited advocacy for Cuba's involvement in foreign ideological struggles. However, the author challenges the notion put forth in Allan Chase's Falange: The Axis Secret Army in the Americas (1943), Consuelo Naranjo Orovio's Cuba: Otro escenario de lucha (1988), and Juan Chongo Leiva's El fracaso de Hitler in Cuba (1989) that "seconded and defended … an exaggerated image of the real reach and continental activism of the Spanish Falange in the Cuba" (39). Figueredo asserts that these monographs, though commendable works of scholarship, encourage a myth of peninsular power on the island. This myth distorts our understanding of the anti-Republican forces in Cuba on its own terms.

Figueredo employs right-wing publications like La Discusión and El Diario de la Marina instead of relying heavily on Noticias de Hoy, the official organ of the communist party, as prior scholarship has done. By analyzing pro-right-wing discourse and underscoring the role of pro-Franco Spaniards and Cubans on the island, like the role played by Jose Ignacio Rivero (100–101), she solidifies her claim that to understand the pro-right community one must look to the pro-right publications that she masterfully employs. Moreover, she challenges assumptions that right-wing groups in Cuba were exclusively of the elite classes, utilizing records from the Tribunal de Urgencia that demonstrate that pro-right forces had some working-class support (99). As Figueredo admits, the dearth of sources have made the scholarly investigation of the Spanish right difficult. To this end, Figueredo conducted an exhaustive analysis of the documents in the Cuban National Archive's Fondo Registro de Asociaciones and Cuba's Ministry of Foreign Relation's Fondo de España, as well as, press sources. Figueredo's plethora of sources are evident in her annex where she publishes more than twenty-five visual, statistical, and documentary sources. Figueredo utilizes archival and press sources from the three main Spanish pro-right organizations in Cuba: Falange Española Tradicionalista, the Juntas de Ofensivas Nacional Sindicalista, and the Comité Nacionalista Español, as well as other less prominent organizations, to understand the responses...