Introduction: "Origins" of Postmodern Cuba

SOMETIME IN THE EARLY 1990S, AFTER THE COLLAPSE OF THE SOVIET UNION and in the context of Cuba's "special period" (el periodo especial), Cuban intellectuals began to return to the era before the Revolution and especially to the 1944-59 years. Historians inside and outside of Cuba characterize this era in terms of General Fulgencio Batista's authoritarian rule of the Republic. Since 1959, the historiography covering these years, especially after 1952, often is a little more than a narrative of events in the prehistory of the Cuban Revolution, beginning with Fidel Castro's initial insurrection on July 26, 1953, the date of the attack on the Moncada Barracks in Santiago that gave its name to the revolutionary movement, and culminating with the Revolution's seizure of power on January 1, 1959. The success and failure of the July 26, 1953, exploit, the fateful landing of Castro's small expedition force in the Granma in 1956, the improvised guerrilla warfare in the Sierra Maestre, and finally the triumphant entry of the Revolutionary Army into Havana in 1959 are, to be sure, momentous and monumental episodes in world history, but these important incidents in the overthrow of the Batista regime and U.S. domination of Cuba also overshadow everything else in the prerevolutionary era. As Louis A. Pérez, Jr.—one of the most preeminent U.S.-based contemporary historians of Cuba (see Buscaglia-Salgado's essay on his recent book in the review section of this issue)—has pointed out, the literature on Cuba for the years from 1934 to 1958 "reveals several skewed patterns" (435). Pérez notes further that: "The period between 1940 and 1952 . . . represents a lacuna of serious proportions. Comparatively little research has been undertaken for these years. Conversely, the literature for the period of the 1950s, particularly the revolutionary struggle against the Batista government, approaches vast proportions" (435).

Historical interest in the military and ideological aspects of the revolutionary war partly results from the tendency within the discipline of history to focus on the grand events, the leaders, and the movements in national narratives. Cuban historiographical preoccupation with the period of "revolutionary struggle against the Batista government," which Pérez contrasts with the "lacuna" of the earlier period (1944-52), suggests that the revolutionary narrative of becoming was equally crucial to grounding the ascendant political regime and its personalities—most importantly Castro and Che Guevara—in a heroic past that could be made to serve the future. The case of Che Guevara is perhaps the most illustrative. Che's lasting image as the consummate revolutionary first takes shape in the stories from the Sierra to which he contributed through his war diary and Guerrilla Warfare. To this day, the image of Che continues to possess an iconic power in and beyond Cuba, a symbol that acquired meaning through the Cuban Revolution, but that has also come to evoke a broader anti-imperialism. In any event, the historiographical lopsidedness mentioned by Pérez can be attributed primarily to the force of the Revolution to inscribe itself in world history, notably as a socialist formation that successfully challenged U.S. control of the island. But the numerous, often glorifying, accounts of the revolutionary war certainly satisfied the new regime's need to produce its own historical justification.

The 1990s critical return to the prerevolutionary decade, first by Cuban intellectuals and filmmakers, and later by others, is perhaps partially motivated by apparent gaps in the historiography of the island. But the interest in late 1940s and 1950s Cuba during the last ten years is more than a neutral addendum to the singular predominant national narrative of the island in which Tyranny and Revolution confront each other in a dialectal contest for control of the State. In almost every instance that might be familiar to a U.S. public, for example, the Cuban film Strawberry and Chocolate (1993) by Tomás...