Polestar

Abstract

Nowhere was student protest more successful than in Cuba, where the island’s proximity to the Colossus of the North fueled nationalistic fervor and calls for the ouster of the ruthless dictator Gerardo Machado. What was distinctive about the Cuban student movement was its determination to thoroughly transform the island’s neocolonial relationship with the United States. To students at the University of Havana, the North American intervention in 1898, successive military occupations, the Platt Amendment, and the ceding of Guantanamo to the U.S. military, represented a betrayal of the principles for which heroic mambises (guerrilla fighters) had fought and died for during the wars of independence. The firebrand of revolution was the Communist Julio Antonio Mella, whose incendiary rhetoric galvanized youthful opposition to the dictatorship before he was murdered in Mexico City in 1929 by gunmen sent by Machado.