The Structure of Cuban History: Meanings and Purpose of the Past

Introduction

| 1 INTRODUCTION T his book is less a history of Cuba than about the history of Cuba, its course and its contours—and its consequences: about the capacity of the past to shape the character of a people, about the very logic with which historical knowledge insinuated itself into the popular imagination and thereupon acted to induce collective conduct and influence individual behavior. It seeks to understand the relationship between the useof historyas a means of national formation, on one hand, and national formation as an outcome of history, on the other.The book examines the ways that knowledge of the past—as a matter of memory and oral tradition, in the form of lived experience and written record—acted to confirm the propriety of purpose with which successive generations of Cubans engaged the circumstances of the times in which they lived. To contemplate structure in the history of Cuba is to understand the intended purpose to which knowledge of the past was put—that is, the past as a presence in the life of a people, possessed of discernible patterns, as legacy to uphold and patrimony to pass on. It is to take note of the meaning ascribed to the past, as a moral imperative to live by and didactic narrative to live up to, and specifically to appreciate the ways in which the experience of the past contributed to shaping the normative determinants of nationality. The influence of the present as a factor in the production of historical knowledge is a commonly understood phenomenon. There is indeed much truth to Benedetto Croce’s dictum that all history is contemporary history, that the experience of the present acts—often decisively—to inform the purpose and shape the perspective with which historians interrogate the past. Not as often appreciated, however, is the degree towhich knowledge of the past acts as a determinant of the present, particularly the ways a people use knowledgeof their history to address the needs of their times.That knowledge of the past is itself selective and subjective, susceptible to the bias of memory and belief in myth, serves to underscore the instrumental purport to which meanings of the past readily lend themselves. This implies the need to approach the historical narrative as a record of the past, to be sure. But it is also necessary to contemplate the record of the past as an artifact of its time, to understand how the past conceived of the past: knowledgeof the past as prod- 2 | INTRODUCTION uct of context and circumstance, in part cultural production, in part ideological construct, always historically conditioned, and which when turned in on itself can be made toyield insight into the assumptions that informed the purpose to which the past was put.The historical narrative was shaped by the history from which it emerged, and inevitably the text reveals its relationship to the history it purports to chronicle.To understand the reach of the Cuban past implies the need to understand how Cubans have understood their history; forembedded in the structureof historical knowledge—prepared as text, preserved as memory, and passed on as received wisdom—resides the national narrative upon which the plausibility of historical outcomes was validated. ... Cubans considered the possibility of a history of their own at about the time they contemplated the plausibility of a nation of their own.The relationship of the past to the future was recognized early, for the premise of nation could not be sustained without the presumption of a past. The conceptual affinities of each were entwined together at the time of the inception of both. That the proposition of nation was itself a work in progress, divided from within and contested from without, suggested the need to deploy history as a means of national formation: a past summoned by the very circumstances it produced. Cubans derived a sense of bearing from their history, from which they assembled much of what came to constitute the meaning of nationality, specifically, what it meant to be Cuban—those ideals and values that have made Cubans the people they have become. Norms of nationality were forged under actual historical circumstances as lived, thereupon transmuted into legacy to which Cubans were inextricably bound as means of collective fulfillment—simply put, cognizance of the past as source of consciousness of Cuban. There was a dialectics at work here, of course, knowledge of the past acting on perception of the present, loaded with normative precepts and prescriptive purpose through which to...