State of Ambiguity: Civic Life and Culture in Cuba's First Republic, edited by Steven Palmer, José Antonio Piqueras, and Amparo Sánchez Cobos

Abstract

State of Ambiguity: Civic Life and Culture Cuba's First Republic, edited by Steven Palmer, Jose Antonio Piqueras, and Amparo Sanchez Cobos. Durham, Duke University Press, 2014. 376 pp. $94.95 US (cloth), $26.95 US (paper). The historiography on Cuba's republican period (1902-1958) has long languished alongside the growing historiography on the Wars of Independence and the revolutionary period. True, there are a few clusters of excellent studies on labour, race, and to a lesser extent, women and gender the republican period. But for the most part, the period has either been caricatured as a failed experiment democratic politics and a neocolony groaning under the weight of US exploitation, or else has been studied merely order to understand the underlying structural conditions that gave rise to the revolution of 1959. (Eminent Cuban historian Jorge Ibarra's 1995 book on the republican period, translated into English as Prologue to Revolution (Boulder, 1998), epitomizes this approach.) The new anthology State of Ambiguity: Civic Life and Culture Cuba's First Republic happily makes an important intervention into this lacuna. The volume draws on historians from an unusually wide geographic base, particularly scholars based Cuba, Canada, and Spain, and it thus benefits from engagement with a broad swath of historiography. The collection showcases the new themes and methods that characterize the emerging scholarship on the republican period, such as environmental history, urban history, the history of science, the politics of memory and memorialization, and various approaches to popular and elite culture. Collectively, the articles give us a sense of the richness of the period and the important historical work that still needs to be done. Editors Steven Palmer, Jose Antonio Piqueras, and Amparo Sanchez Cobos provide a thought-provoking introduction that asks us to take republican history on its own terms. They ask that we see the republic in terms of ambiguity rather than betrayal, failure, domination, or liminality (11). Bookended by the end of Spanish colonialism and US occupation 1902, on the one hand, and the 1959 revolution that would soon declare itself socialist, on the other, the period has defied easy categorization. Yet the editors quickly dispense with standard assumptions about Cuban exceptionality. Instead they point out the many parallels between Cuban history and that of other Latin American countries the same period. They even find fruitful comparisons with interwar Germany, suggesting we view Republican Cuba as a tropical Weimar (7)--that is, a political experiment rich with possibility yet also circumscribed by political instability, the ascendancy of foreign capital, and the threat of foreign intervention. They highlight the remarkably promising set of political, social, and economic conditions that the newly independent nation enjoyed. …