Revolutionary Ideology and the Special Period in Cuban History Mauricio Castro (bio) Devyn Spence Benson. Antiracism in Cuba: The Unfinished Revolution. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016. xviii + 311 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $29.95. Elizabeth Campisi. Escape to Miami: An Oral History of the Cuban Rafter Crisis. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. xii + 214 pp. Illustrations, appendix, notes, bibliography, and index. $29.95. The collapse of the Soviet Union robbed Cuba of its primary trading partner and international benefactor and brought about a time known as the "special period," when economic hardship and uncertainty threatened the stability of the revolution in the 1990s. In 1990, with Soviet power and influence waning, the Cuban government triggered a series of austerity and rationing schemes originally intended for wartime. These conditions were compounded by the U.S. Congress's tightening of the embargo against Cuba through the passage of the Cuban Democracy Act in 1992 and the Helms Burton Act in 1996. The U.S. government sought to capitalize on a moment of weakness to destabilize the Cuban government and to possibly unseat Fidel Castro. Cuban policymakers reacted by adopting certain market-based measures to try to salvage the nation's economy. For ordinary Cubans, the lived experience of these policies was one of shortages in food, labor, and services. Economic instability was central to the experience of the special period. This instability also led Cubans to question their beliefs and circumstances. Louis Pérez, Jr., prominent scholar of Cuban history, notes that not since the early 1960s "were existing value systems subject to as much pressure as they were during the 1990s."1 Two new books on Cuba and the Cuban diaspora document how the economic hardships of the special period put significant pressure on revolutionary principles. Devyn Spence Benson's Antiracism in Cuba and Elizabeth Campisi's Escape to Miami are two very different projects that are centered on the ideological challenges of the special period. Benson's work seeks to understand the apparent revival of racist attitudes against Cubans of African descent, a group acutely affected by the nation's economic woes during the special period [End Page 156] and in its aftermath. She builds on existing scholarship by challenging notions of a "return of racism" to Cuba, arguing instead that the revolution's vaunted antiracist legacy of the late 1950s and early 1960s was incomplete. Campisi's oral history of the rafter crisis of the mid-1990s builds on existing social science literature on the nature of disaffection with the Cuban revolution. Campisi documents the life experiences of several rafters now living in the United States and offers fascinating insights into the events and thought processes that drove Cubans to turn their back on the revolution and risk a perilous sea crossing to escape the deprivations of the special period. Taken in concert, these works show both the shortcomings and resiliency of Cuban revolutionary culture in the face of the pressures Pérez describes. The crisis of the special period demonstrated how Cuba's antiracism campaign was woefully incomplete and accelerated the process of disaffection for many Cubans, but it demonstrated the continuity of revolutionary cultural structures both on the island and as a part of the balsero phase of the diaspora. In Antiracism in Cuba, Devyn Spence Benson examines the persistence of racism in Cuba, most clearly seen during the special period and after, by focusing on the accomplishments, inherent contradictions, and unfinished nature of the revolutionary government's 1959 campaign against discrimination. She finds that this program enacted real social change while also fueling the creation of the revolutionary government's myth of being able to root out racism in a three-year period. Benson places the history of the antiracist campaign in the context of earlier revolutionary discourses, particularly José Martí's rhetoric of "racelessness" in the 1895 war for independence. Benson finds that this ideological challenge to racial privilege, while useful in unifying Cubans against the Spanish and later repurposed by both republican and revolutionary leaders, remained incomplete as they "failed to transform the island's negative relationship to blackness or positive link to whiteness and ultimately silenced...
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Sep 3, 2024
Bettina Bacher 
Open Access