A Short History of Revolutionary Cuba

Abstract

The historical literature on the Cuban Revolution is so vast that it can be difficult to know where to start. Antoni Kapcia's A Short History of Revolutionary Cuba is therefore a welcome, up-to-date primer on Cuba's history leading up to, and since, 1959. Far from a straightforward recitation of dates and events, however, the book advances several core arguments that will challenge beginning and expert readers alike.The first concerns periodization. Rather than dividing the history of the Cuban Revolution into “phases”—for instance, experimentation in the 1960s, followed by institutionalization in the 1970s—Kapcia orients his narrative around recurring “debates” and “strategies” (p. 40). By “debates” he means disputes over the direction of policy (especially, but not solely, related to the economy). “Strategies,” then, refer to periods in which the results of “debates” appeared to be settled and the focus was on implementation. At times like the early 1960s, though, government officials found themselves debating and implementing policies simultaneously. Meanwhile, arguments over issues like the place of market incentives in Cuban socialism were never resolved permanently, showing that whatever the chronological or conceptual markers, Cuban history has in part moved cyclically.Second, Kapcia challenges readers to see these tensions leading to something more than the alternation between “idealism” and practicality (or “orthodoxy”), the former generally associated with “Guevarist” or Fidelista elements of the revolutionary coalition and the latter associated with officials hailing from Cuba's historic, pro–Soviet Union communist party before 1959, the Partido Socialista Popular (PSP). For one thing, the meaning of such labels has proven fickle. What seemed “practical” in terms of economic management in the 1970s hardly seems so today. More important, Kapcia argues that the “idealism” of certain moments was also grounded in logic. Thus, the emphasis on “moral incentives” and mass mobilization in the late 1960s was also born out of a real-world response to the departure (or exile) of so much skilled manpower from the island's former middle class. Conversely, while the mid-1970s were characterized by a “Sovietization” of Cuban government structures and modes of thinking, revolutionary officials also maintained allegiance to more “radical” principles, especially in foreign policy in Africa. Kapcia's point is not to deny the differences between conventionally defined periods and their ideological/factional substrates but to blur their boundaries.These interventions then lead Kapcia to contend with the shifting definitions of “the Revolution” (or simply “revolution”?) itself (p. 196). From early associations with the anti–Fulgencio Batista movement to usages that suggested a “process” that only began with Batista's ouster, clearly the term has not had a static meaning. But given the association of the word revolution with change, it is pertinent to return to periodization and ask whether “the Revolution” ended at any point. Here, Kapcia's work can be compared with another recent primer, Rafael Rojas's Historia mínima de la Revolución Cubana (2015), which offers a tight argument that the Cuban Revolution indeed ended with the promulgation of the Cuban socialist constitution in 1976. Yet if Kapcia does not come down with a similarly neat assessment, focusing instead on an ongoing if contested “nation-building process,” he does acknowledge that even in the 1960s (and certainly by the 1970s) “the Revolution” was evolving into a “system” that its backers felt was worth defending (pp. 2, 57).Finally, and related to the evolution of this system, Kapcia's most insistent intervention is his effort to explain the nature of Cuba's state structures and “matrix of power,” building on his previous scholarship (p. 179). Rather than a strictly personalistic or hierarchical entity, Kapcia argues, the Cuban state has proved durable because it includes evolving and overlapping structures of vertical and horizontal communication and negotiation between its elements—among them, the unified Cuban Communist Party (after 1965), “People's Power” legislative structures (after 1976), government ministries, and the semicorporatist so-called “Mass Organizations” founded in the early 1960s. Here Kapcia is largely convincing, though some readers will likely feel that acknowledging this complexity is not incompatible with more forcefully recognizing the system's authoritarian, totalitarian, or simply repressive legacies. Moreover, Kapcia himself would likely agree that it is challenging to measure, let alone conduct historical research on, the actual workings of these horizontal and vertical channels of governance, given the lack of transparency of many Cuban government institutions and Cuban archival limitations. Thus, a description of Mass Organizations as “potentially” providing “sounding boards for gauging grassroots opinion” is revealing (p. 188).Overall, Antoni Kapcia offers a probing, intellectually challenging, and deeply informed synthesis of Cuba's contemporary history that provides much fodder for reflection and debate. In light of Cuba's current economic and political crisis, punctuated by unprecedented nationwide protests in July 2021, it will be fascinating to watch whether the future confirms Kapcia's arguments about the fundamental resilience of a “revolution” that long ago also morphed into a state.