La Revolución Cubana del 30: Ensayos (review)

La Revolución Cubana del 30: Ensayos by Fernando Martínez Heredia is a work in the finest tradition of Cuban Revolutionary scholarship. This is its greatest strength and greatest weakness.

The assumption of the essays is that Cuba in the 1930s is a revolutionary society in search of a genuine path to social justice and equality. The journey is fueled by the two wars of independence in the nineteenth century and then propelled further by some visionaries in the first third of the twentieth century. As the author notes most eloquently, since the triumph of the Revolution of 1959, the struggles of the 1930s have been largely forgotten and overshadowed, except by a small cadre of scholars inside and outside of Cuba.

Few have done more to explain the importance of the revolutionary struggles of the 1930s and their implications for the Cuba of today than Martínez Heredia. He has spent the better part of 40 years lecturing and writing about the period and his expertise is evident throughout the book. This compilation of essays is his latest effort to illuminate the period, but, as with much of the scholarship produced in Cuba, it shines light only along the historical paths clearly traveled by the revolutionary government. Those paths outside the version of history acceptable to the revolution still remain in the world of shadow as far as these essays are concerned.

The historical narrative of the book is a familiar one. There are good guys in the revolutionary struggle for Cuba’s soul—those with the foresight to see that revolution, and specifically a Communist revolution, are what is needed to lift Cuba out of the imperialist clutches of the United States. There are the confused and muddled reformers, who sometimes act out of good faith, but fail to see that drastic measures must be taken. And, there are, of course, the villains, who the author periodically refers to as esbirros (henchmen or lackeys of the Cuban neo-colonial government or the United States depending on the context).

Towards that end, the author has selected five revolutionaries from the period, a task which Martínez Heredia concedes is problematic (pp. 5–6). The five—Antonio Guiteras Holmes, Julio Antonio Mella, Rubén Martínez Villena, Pablo de la Torriente Brau and Raúl Roa García— were ultimately chosen for inclusion because they were exemplary and “radical” revolutionaries. The Cuban obsession with political martyrdom is evident in the selection process, since three of them (Guiteras, Mella, and Torriente Brau) were either killed in combat or murdered. Martínez Villena died at age 35 of tuberculosis. Only Roa García lived long enough to see the triumph of the Revolution of 1959, serve in the revolutionary government, and die of ailments associated with old age.

To his credit, Martínez Heredia notes that others with revolutionary, but less radical, credentials could have been chosen such as Ramón Grau San Martín, president from September 1933 to January 1934 and then again from 1944 to 1948, Eduardo Chibás, a student revolutionary of the period and later a candidate for the presidency, and Carlos Prío Socarrás, another student leader and future president (1948–1952). The author writes that a study could also be done selecting individuals “opposed” to the revolution or those who “betrayed” it. This is an important point and indicates that Cuban scholars, like Martínez Heredia, are seeking to incorporate alternative views of history, however, they must tread carefully when the revolution’s official interpretation is the subject of debate.

Occasionally, the author tries to stretch the official version of permissible history or reveal internal struggles within the Cuban academy. These insights constitute some of the finest contributions of the book. One can find such an instance in the essay on Guiteras (pp. 76–77) when he tries to put the career of Grau San Martín in context...