Abstract
What constitutes a conspiracy, and what are the stakes of popular theories of conspiracy? This article addresses these questions through an ethno-historical examination of narratives about conspiracies endured and posited by Cuban people. Long before the Revolution in 1959, continuing through the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, numerous assassination attempts against Fidel Castro, and onward to recent claims of biological warfare orchestrated by the government of the US, conspiracy theories have circulated widely in Cuba and its diasporic enclaves. Drawing on ethnographic and historical data, the article embeds present-day narratives of conspiracy in the longer-run history of Cuban conspiracy theories such as those initially presented in the case of the USS Maine and its nineteenth-century precursors, notably including the stationing of the HMS Romney in Havana harbour, and the so-called conspiracy of La Escalera in 1844. It argues, ultimately, that these tales are always morality tales, counterposing nefarious agents of an illegitimate external power to the imagined community of those (including the narrator's self and audience) thus disenfranchised. In that sense, then, the truth value of any particular account of conspiracy is irrelevant to the larger truth of Empire.
Highlights
What constitutes a conspiracy, and what are the stakes of popular theories of conspiracy? This article addresses these questions through an ethno-historical examination of narratives about conspiracies endured and posited by Cuban people
After defining the term and focusing mainly on conspiracy theory within the Republic, I will argue that narratives of conspiración are morality tales, always presented as passionate, principled opposition to imperial machinations, from the colonial margin
The tradition of presuming, seeking and encountering conspiracy and imperial intrigue in Cuba precedes the Cold War superpowers by more than a hundred years, on at least two occasions involving the British, Spanish and American great powers of the nineteenth century – most famously over the destruction of the USS Maine, an event crucially preceded and set up by an earlier warship and conspiracy, that of the 1840s conspiracy known as La Escalera
Summary
First identified as a distinct genre by Richard Hofstadter in his seminal study, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (Hofstadter 1965), conspiratorial accounts of hidden, nefarious machinations are heard in many everyday contexts in the world today (e.g., Briggs 2004; Boyer 2006; Johnson 2013). On numerous occasions over the years, rumours regarding Fidel Castro’s death – a preferred prank in Miami and Havana both – have garnered attention in the international media. These rumours may be compelling, even political, but no conspiracy or conspirators are imagined. The tradition of presuming, seeking and encountering conspiracy and imperial intrigue in Cuba precedes the Cold War superpowers by more than a hundred years, on at least two occasions involving the British, Spanish and American great powers of the nineteenth century – most famously over the destruction of the USS Maine, an event crucially preceded and set up by an earlier warship and conspiracy, that of the 1840s conspiracy known as La Escalera
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