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foreword Cuban Voices The Cuban Revolution inspired fervent, often acrimonious arguments about its achievements and failures. For some, it was the last bastion of the communist dream; for others, a repressive, authoritarian regime.1 Largely missing from those debates were the voices of ordinary Cubans living on the island. As the Revolution approached its fiftieth anniversary, I put together a research project to find out what people across the island, from different walks of life and generations, had to say about the achievements and failures of socialism in Cuba.2 It was the first large oral history project permitted by the Cuban government in more than thirty years. In 1968, a decade after the revolutionary triumph, Fidel Castro invited Oscar Lewis, the renowned U.S. anthropologist, to interview Cubans about their experiences living the Revolution.“It would be an important contribution to Cuban history to have an objective record of what people feel and think. . . . This is a socialist country. We have nothing to hide; there are no complaints or grievances I haven’t already heard,” Castro told Lewis.3 Despite this inspirational beginning, top officials acting for Fidel summarily closed the project eighteen months later. In 1975, another oral history endeavor of sorts came to an untimely end. Gabriel García Márquez, close friend and confidant of Castro, set out to write a book about daily life in the Revolution. After a year conducting interviews across the island, the Nobel laureate abandoned his plans. What people said didn’t fit the book he wanted to write, he told friends.4 Following these fiascos, doing oral history research in Cuba was taboo. Hopeful that by the twenty-first century the ghosts of oral history had been laid to rest, I brought together a team of some twelve Cuban and British scholars to develop a project we called“Cuban Voices.”When we sought permission from an array of top officials,all were enthusiastic about the importance of recording ordinary Cubans’ life stories, but none agreed to support our research. However, instead of saying no, each one sent us to a colleague higher up the viii foreword chain of command, who might, they suggested, conjure a way of getting our project approved. After months of frustrating shuttle diplomacy among bureaucrats who couldn’t say yes, and didn’t say no, my Cuban colleagues on the team suggested that we take our case to Mariela Castro Espín. She was the director of the Centro Nacional de Educación Sexual (CENESEX), the National Center for Sex Education,the leader of a controversial campaign for gay rights, and a charismatic member of the ruling clan. For all of these attributes, they held out hope that she would take our project under her wing.5 Mariela Castro understood at once the importance of recording the life histories of ordinary Cubans.Notwithstanding the risks,she immediately agreed to take the project on at CENESEX, and her staff set about obtaining permission . Yet despite her intimate access to the cupola of power—she is daughter of Raúl Castro, then minister of defense and brother of Fidel Castro, and of Vilma Espín, then president of the Cuban Women’s Federation (FMC)—authorization was long in coming. Just when our the team was on the verge of calling it quits, we received word that the minister of defense and the president of the FMC had signed statements allowing the project to go forward. “Cuban Voices” was officially launched in 2005 with considerable fanfare by Mariela Castro and Paul Thompson—sometimes dubbed the father of oral history—in the Great Hall of the University of Havana. Highlights of the ceremony were broadcast for several days on Cuban TV.6 After this glamorous beginning, the project proceeded unevenly, surviving one bureaucratic entanglement after another. Our great success was that over the course of six years, from 2004 to 2010, we recorded life history interviews with more than one hundred Cubans across the island: in Havana, Santiago, Holguín, Bayamo, Matanzas, and Sanctí Spiritus, on both functioning and decommissioned sugar estates, and in rural towns.7 One of our greatest challenges was how to select interviewees. The team came under tremendous pressure to locate people via official channels: through Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (Cuba’s “neighborhood watch”),local branches of the Ministry of Culture,or recommendations by militants of the Communist Party. Members of the team resisted those conditions, to varying...

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