Youth and the Cuban Revolution: Youth and Politics in 1960s Cuba by Anne Luke (review)

Youth and the Cuban Revolution explores the mutually dependent relationship between Cuba’s youth and the country’s leadership and revolutionary youth culture in the 1960s. Luke argues that the cultural specificity of Cuba at that moment created an exceptionalism from which identity politics emerged; Cuba was distinct from the global sixties. Internally, the ideological revolution and its corresponding policy on the island created profound changes with tremendous emphasis placed on the formation of the Revolution and the charge to create ideologically appropriate children. Reactionary behavior, including policy implementation, often resulted as a form of “moral panic” in an attempt to control the youth population (see the Stanley Cohen’s Folk Devils and Moral Panics [Blackwell, 1987]). In this vein, Fidel Castro bemoaned the deviance of youth not subscribing to the “new moral universe”: “The tree that grew twisted could not be straightened” (cited in Revolución, March 14, 1963, 3).

Divided into seven chapters, Luke’s historiography provides a comprehensive analysis of the youth socializing mechanisms that formed revolutionary conciencia (consciousness). Incorporating leadership speeches, magazines, song lyrics, and cartoons, Luke’s study uses “youth,” “sixties” and “Cuba” as units of analysis. Interviews corroborate her interpretations and fill in research gaps. Youth studies, as a tool of analysis, highlights the uniqueness of the revolutionary generation in post-1959 Cuba. Using Stanley Cohen’s concept of “moral panic,” she adeptly identifies the resultant tensions, policies and subsequent reactions, which become the “signpost for other age-related schisms” (6), including countercultures and subcultures.

The exceptionalism of the Cuban case (chapter 1), Luke explains, is that the new generation, the generation of the Revolution, was part of the evolving national revolutionary ideology, creating a political and cultural vision of Cuban young people. At the same time, incorporating broadly inclusive rhetoric (chapter 2), the Revolution sought to engage all social groups in ideological formation, ironically, as Luke shows, sometimes preventing youth from the actual experience of being young in the sixties. Taking advantage of the energy and radicalism demonstrated in the 1950s, moralism and hard work were to be channeled into the construction of a new nation, forming a young revolutionary vanguard.

Luke deftly deconstructs the extensive youth policies encompassed in the pedagogy of work (chapter 3). She reveals the ways by which notions of youth were connected with the construction of education and education with the construction of the ideology of productive work to create the necessary revolutionary conciencia and ideological development. The nonconforming young people were seen as “folk devils,” not fulfilling the idyllic expectations of heroism and purity.

In chapter 4, Luke takes a fascinating look at the external influence of the global sixties. The antiestablishment global movements contrasted with Cuba’s effort for positive internal change, in some cases preventing potential solidarity. Luke provides intriguing examples of how the reception of these outside cultural trends was either one of assimilation, hybridization, Cubanization or cultural flow. Moral panic, in this case, caused misunderstanding, if not vilification of the West.

In chapter 5, Luke provides a thorough account of the evolution of youth organizations as they played an active role in forming the new Cuba and the youth movement’s identity. Uncertainty was reflected in the organizations’ purposes (cultural, political, military), fluctuating from being mass to selective organizations, and some being absorbed by others. In 1962, the Leninist technique of autocrítica was adopted, a type of self and group criticism. Depuración occurred, purging youth of what could be destructive to the Revolution. What was considered revolutionary became so narrow and monitored that it made it difficult to attract and maintain membership.

Childhood studies tell us that family, school, and work are the primary socializing agents of children, but Luke shows the remarkable socialization of Cuban youth through mass participation initiatives and volunteerism in revolutionary life (chapter 6): first, in education, as literacy workers (100,000 children, ages ten to nineteen) in...