In recent years, and particularly following the Coronavirus pandemic, Cuba has descended into an economic crisis that has produced new levels of dissent on the island. In this context, it is timely to ask questions about the future of Cuba and how socialism and authoritarianism connect in the past, present, and future. In Democracy and Time in Cuban Thought: The Elusive Present, Maria de Los Angeles Torres explores the relationship between temporality and political outcomes. Through an analysis of Cuba and its diaspora, she highlights the close relationship between leaders crafting narratives about a certain past or a utopian future and authoritarian rule. The book astutely asks us to think about political framing in the context of time. Leaders can distort narratives of the past and offer promises of a wonderful future to justify the use of nondemocratic means. Democracy, Torres highlights, entails a more inclusive decision-making process that offers more truthful versions of the past and the present, and it encourages more realistic ideas about the future. This review reflects on this challenge of political inclusion, how political leaders – but also scholars – may rewrite the past and the present, and who in the populace connects to these narratives.
Torres uses political theory from prominent scholars such as Hannah Arendt, writings by Fidel Castro and Cuban nationalist José Martí, and visual works to investigate the role of historical framing in nondemocratic governance. Her argument that the use or misuse of history is central to the beginnings of authoritarianism and, as Arendt suggests, is a legitimizing force in authoritarian rule, is an important contribution. Torres contemplates what would help produce a more democratic outcome. In Cuba and elsewhere, she suggests, we could create more inclusive, and thus, democratic societies, if people were more acceptant of each other’s differences.
While Torres raises important ideas on acceptance, her analysis is based largely on white voices or what Charles Mills terms “the world of mainstream (i.e., white) ethics and political philosophy, preoccupied with discussions of justice and rights in the abstract” (Charles Mills, The Racial Contract, 1997). To be fair, Torres has moments in the book where she discusses the role of slavery, racism and racial inequality, but mostly to further her argument about the failures of the Cuban Revolution, rather than to recognize racial marginalization as central to Cuban history from independence to the present. If we keep Mills’ critique in mind, it is pertinent to ask which differences a society and the political leadership need to accept to generate a more democratic and inclusive political process.
Cuban political studies comprise a wealth of scholarship, written both within and outside of the island, and that include Black perspectives, authors, writers, and histories (Tomás Fernández Robaina, El Negro En Cuba 1902–1958, 1994; Mark Q. Sawyer, Racial Politics in Post-Revolutionary Cuba, 2005; Lisa Brock and Digna Castañeda Fuertes, Between Race and Empire: African-Americans and Cubans before the Cuban Revolution, 1998; Roberto Zurbano, “Soy Un Negro Más,” 2014; Melina Pappademos, Black Political Activism and the Cuban Republic, 2011; Devyn Spence Benson, Antiracism in Cuba: The Unfinished Revolution, 2016; Monika Gosin, The Racial Politics of Division: Interethnic Struggles for Legitimacy in Multicultural Miami, 2019). This literature would have deeply enriched the book and shifted the lens away from the white elite to the workings of white wealth and privilege, as well as Black opportunity and marginalization, themes that are in fact vital to Torres’ discussion of inclusion, democracy and Cuba’s racial past.
In fact, José Martí’s seminal but limited view on Black Cubans’ place in the nation-building process takes center stage in the book, at the expense of Black actors who had voice and agency throughout the history of Cuba and were often killed or silenced for it. If the focus of the book is the Cuban Revolution, and why it failed to bring about inclusion and democratic ideals, these voices are essential. The success of Fidel Castro at the start and well into the subsequent decades of the Revolution was, indeed, in part due to Black and poor families being left behind.
Torres uses several examples to illustrate how history has been rewritten or silenced to support certain political narratives and goals. In the case of the Cuban Revolution, histories of colonialism, racism, sexism, global capitalism, and U.S. imperialism form the backbone of its rhetoric and historical teachings. The projected need for the Revolution, in turn, entailed the need for the continuous leadership of Fidel Castro who, as Torres aptly points out, reached almost godly status so that he and other revolutionary leaders did not have to address the issue of accountability. Thus, the Revolution created a narrative to justify continuous (authoritarian) rule, and it has favored oppression over democratic evolution. Torres discusses in depth, with an eye to historical detail, how the regime has managed to stay in power. The curation of a historical narrative that highlights neocolonialism and economic and racial equality is one with which many people strongly identified. Torres’ analysis of how history informs the national project includes a discussion of why so many Cubans supported the Revolution and how Cubans connect to these curated historical narratives.
In her discussion of temporality, Torres brings together Cuba and the Cuban diaspora and, in doing so, connects Cuban and Cuban-American rhetoric, which has often been missing in the literature. As a child of the Pedro Pan program, which brought fourteen thousand unaccompanied children from Cuba to the United States to escape communism from 1960-62, she focuses on this particular initiative in her discussion of collective memory and historical nostalgia. While Cuba’s official political narrative entails stories about an unequal past, Cuban American narratives involve nostalgia about Cuba before the revolution and the experience of fleeing communism to live in the United States. Indeed, while Cuban leaders of the revolution seek to bury the past, Cuban exiles seek to exalt the past. Both narratives are limited and purposefully seek to erase the legitimacy of the other. The book would benefit from a deeper discussion of these parallels. Nonetheless, bringing Cuba and its diaspora into conversation is an important contribution to the literature.
Torres ends the book arguing that in a more inclusive present, a more inclusive future can be imagined. Amid the current crisis in Cuba, what would this inclusive present and future look like? Moreover, when people begin narrating stories that have been silenced, does this bring acceptance or does the increased awareness about the past and its ugly (racial) realities inspire something quite different? Supporters of the Cuban Revolution believe that the erasure of these past narratives are necessary to create national unity. Thus, Torres leaves us to ponder if understanding and claiming historical narratives would lead to a more inclusive society or politics and, if so, how?
