No Barrier Can Contain It: Cuban Antifascism and the Spanish Civil War by Ariel Mae Lambe (review)

No Barrier Can Contain It dismantles a pervasive myth about twentieth-century Cuban history: that the crushing of the March 1935 general strike produced a period of retreat, disillusionment, and quiescence among the island's prodemocracy activists. Focusing on the years immediately following that defeat, the book argues instead for the "political continuity of Cuban activism as antifascism" (56), documenting how intensely Cubans engaged with global antifascist struggles during the second half of the 1930s. Fascist Italy's invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 and the Nazi-backed Nationalist insurrection against the Second Spanish Republic in 1936 inspired Cubans to mobilize broadly against the twin evils of dictatorship and imperialism, both internationally and at home. Studying their mobilizing efforts, Lambe suggests, allows us to see how the "New Cuba" embodied in the progressive 1940 constitution "did not spring forth from a political desert"—because, as she writes, "the current of change had never dried up" (206).

The book situates Cuba's vibrant antifascist moment in the broader context of the island's interwar-era political ferment. Chapter 1 surveys how popular leaders like Julio Antonio Mella, and activist sectors like the students and faculty at the University of Havana, challenged the Machado dictatorship; it also introduces readers to Pablo de la Torriente Brau and Teresa "Teté" Casuso, the antifascists whose life stories Lambe deploys as the book's narrative through line. Chapter 2 examines local organizing in defense of Ethiopia and its particular symbolic resonance for Afro-Cubans, whose analyses of fascism, informed by their sense of black diasporic identity, foregrounded racism and colonialism as fascism's constitutive elements. From there, No Barrier Can Contain It turns to its primary subject: Cuban solidarity work during the Spanish Civil War. Its central chapters discuss the islanders who traveled to Spain to fight on behalf of the Republic in the International Brigades (among them de la Torriente, martyred in combat in December 1936); the more "mainstream" antifascist work, led by Casuso, of the Cuban campaign to aid Republican children, in which several hundred thousand people participated; the deepening of Cuban antifascists' "transnational identities and experiences" (131) as migrants in the United States, Pan-Africanists, or members of island-based Masonic lodges; and finally, the challenges of unity and solidarity among the various factions of the Cuban Left. In a conclusion and postscript, Lambe maps out the multiple legacies of these years of antifascism, which, she argues, included motivating Batista's populist turn, ensuring the official codification of constitutional principles in 1940, and providing a symbolic, if contested, touchstone for the Cuban Revolution's commitment to international solidarity.

No Barrier Can Contain It is clear and convincing in its primary intervention, namely its argument that "Cuban popular politics retained vitality—and even momentum—during a period that otherwise appeared to be a lengthy, defeated lull" (204). Lambe demonstrates conclusively that antifascist activity spanned diverse social, racial, and economic strata on the island, and that it was precisely the geographically distant nature of the Spanish and Ethiopian theaters which allowed local prodemocracy activists to cleverly and safely articulate searing critiques of fascism and authoritarianism which served the fight for a New Cuba. That the Spanish conflict saw Franco's Nationalists extolling the imperialist glory and values of Golden Age Spain afforded Cuban activists abundant opportunity to decry the island's own dictatorial regime, racial iniquities, and vestigial colonial social structures. Since Cuba had been independent from Spain for fewer than thirty years when the Spanish Civil War broke out and hundreds of thousands of Spaniards continued to reside on the island, the two nations and their politics remained intimately connected. In the analysis of observers like de la Torriente and Casuso, Franco was a standin for Batista (141) or Valeriano Weyler (15), Ramón Grau de San Martín's modernizing agenda resembled that of the Spanish Republic, besieged by the forces of reaction (45), and the...