The Absolution of History: Uses of the Past in Castro's Cuba

Abstract

In his famous defence speech at the trial for his attack on the Moncada barracks in 1953, Castro declared: 'History will absolve me.'1 The attempted storming of Moncada was the first act of armed struggle in the Cuban revolutionary war, which resumed at the end of 1956 with Castro's return from exile to launch a rural guerrilla movement against the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista (1952-58). The guerrillas, supported by organized resistance in towns and cities, achieved a relatively quick victory two years later when Batista fled to the USA, enabling the revolutionaries to march triumphantly into Havana on 1 January 1959. Throughout the war, 'History will absolve me' functioned as the manifesto of the revolution, the founding text of what it promised for Cuba's future. Aside from that speech, which is mainly an indictment of the past, Castro made very few specific policy statements, preferring to mobilize as broad a constituency of support as possible by talking only of social justice and a restoration of the democratic and reformist Constitution of 1940. That Constitution, in one of many ironies of Cuban history, had been promulgated during the first presidency of Batista himself (1940-44), when he had operated in populist, rather than repressive mode. After the revolution, when the leaders opted to legitimize their government on the basis of 'direct' rather than procedural democracy, it was quietly dropped as a basis for policy. The centrality of 'History will absolve me' to the revolutionary struggle meant that history, rather than constitutionalism or ideology, was the key legitimating force behind the Cuban revolution. Like most revolutionary regimes, Castro's government immediately took several highly-visible measures to signal its rejection of the past: the US-owned Havana Hilton was nationalized and renamed the Habana Libre; the barracks of Batista's henchmen were converted into schools; the casinos and brothels that had attracted wealthy (male) US tourists were closed; and formerly private beaches and recreation areas were opened up to the general public. Revolutions have often tended towards the puritanical, but in Cuba's case the clamp-down on vice was overtly political, signalling that the nation was no longer prepared to play the prostitute to the desires of US imperialists and their local lackeys. The government also pursued policies of both retribution and restoration in the name of history. Batista's armed forces were dissolved,