Cuban Revolution Research Articles

“The Throttling of the Free Press in Cuba”: Exploring Transnational Journalism and Sigma Delta Chi’s Advocacy for Press Freedom in Cuba, 1959–1962

ABSTRACT Members of Sigma Delta Chi (SDX), the largest journalism professional organization based in the United States, engaged in advocacy for transnational freedom of information and press freedom in Cuba between 1959 and 1962, between the Cuban Revolution and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Analysis of archival sources—including SDX member records, correspondence, and declassified government reports—and content in the official SDX magazine, reveals three themes: justifying a Latin America section with a primary focus on Cuba, the throttling of the free flow of information in and from Cuba, and documenting transnational flows of propaganda from Cuba and news from United States-based Cuban exiles to Cuba. Communist threats to reporters and democratic news organizations increased, and news management from the Cuban government and US government influenced information flows during this period. These findings add to the histories on free press advocacy abroad, cross-border journalism, and international press-politics in the context of US and Cuba relations.

To Sever the Limbs of US Imperialism: North Korean Support for Latin American Guerrilla Movements in the 1960s

Abstract During the 1960s North Korea was connected to at least nine armed leftist rebel groups in seven countries in Latin America. Pyongyang primarily supported the revolutionary aims of these groups by providing them with military training inside the dprk. This agenda stemmed from the dprk leadership’s analysis of the international situation, one heavily influenced by its experience in the Korean War and Lenin’s theory of imperialism. This analysis identified the defeat of US imperialism as the primary task of the international Left, and that this could be achieved by the proliferation of armed insurgencies throughout the global South. By contrast, the Latin American militants who travelled to the dprk to undergo intensive military training were in search of personal transformation. Inspired by the Cuban Revolution and its doctrine of foquismo, these young radicals sought a transformative experience that would facilitate their evolution from “ordinary” civilians into revolutionary guerrillas.

From Cuba to the World: The Ripple Effect of US Sanctions

This paper explores the complex and enduring application of U.S. economic sanctions on Cuba, the longest-standing sanctions regime in modern history. Economic sanctions, a prominent tool of international diplomacy, are designed to influence or penalize states to achieve specific political objectives. The study offers a comprehensive historical overview of the sanctions imposed on Cuba since the Cuban Revolution of 1959. It examines the key phases of the embargo, including its escalation under various U.S. administrations and its multifaceted impacts on Cuban domestic affairs and international trade. Through a detailed analysis, this paper reveals that, while the sanctions aimed to induce regime change, their effectiveness has been ambiguous. Domestically, U.S. political dynamics, particularly the influence of Cuban-American voters and shifting political agendas, have significantly shaped the persistence and intensity of the sanctions. Furthermore, the study highlights how the sanctions have impacted global trade dynamics, illustrating that the U.S. has maintained a quasi-monopolistic advantage in the Cuban market while ostensibly addressing humanitarian concerns. The findings indicate that the sanctions on Cuba, rather than being a straightforward case of failure, have provided strategic benefits to the U.S. despite their limited success in achieving their primary political goals. This nuanced perspective sheds light on the broader implications of economic sanctions and their role in international relations.

Patriots and Traitors in Revolutionary Cuba, 1961–1981, by Lillian Guerra

Patriots and Traitors in Revolutionary Cuba, 1961–1981, by Lillian Guerra

Ernesto Che Guevara brazíliai látogatásának szerepe Jânio Quadros bukásában

Perhaps a lesser-known aspect of Brazil’s history is the one-day official visit to Brazil by Cuban revolutionary Ernesto Che Guevara in 1961. Nevertheless, it is still significant due to the high cost of the diplomatic visit. After the meeting, President Janio Quadros lost his position, and Guevara’s visit had sparked protests in the country. This paper aims to explore the meeting and its background in more depth. In doing so, it will provide Hungarian historians an insight into an event that is a significant and sensational part of Brazilian history but has not yet received enough attention in Hungarian historiography.

Intellectual lessons from Dr Aleida Guevara (Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara's daughter) and a special meeting with Aleida March (Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara's wife) – Conversations on education, revolution, and socialism of care, Havana, May 2024

On 2 May 2024, a special meeting was arranged with Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara's daughter, Dr Aleida Guevara at their home in Havana which was followed at the end with a greeting from Che's wife Aleida March. The authors (migrant-settler in Canada originally from India and Cuban friend/colleague who had arranged for the visit – both Human Geographers) along with three Brazilian friends (Doctor, Dentist, and Sociologist) were invited. For more than 3 hours, an intense dialogue ensued. We recount three intellectual lessons that emerged during our discussion. Each of the topics addressed by Aleida reflected her stance as an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist, anti-neocolonialist, and internationalist revolutionary. The discussions included the essential concepts in Che's Marxism, which were integral during the construction process of the Cuban Revolution. Three main themes that emerged included: Cuban Revolution and the socialism of care; challenges facing Cuban socialism today; and the continuing importance of international solidarity. The discussions were interspersed with personal stories, recounts of her father, and humorous anecdotes. Dr Aleida Guevara's tricontinental solidarity work that she shared with us and lessons learned across different historical and geographical contexts in the spirit of her father's intellectual insights towards struggles for freedom provide a theoretical foundation for us to consider today.

Refuge in Revolution: Chilean and Uruguayan Exiles in Cuba, 1973-1990

ABSTRACT This article examines the refuge revolutionary Cuba offered to Chilean and Uruguayan exiles. Fleeing dictatorships during Latin America’s Cold War, thousands arrived in, or passed through, Cuba. Cuba was a logical refuge, representing a revolution suffused with promises of solidarity, internationalism and socialist modernity. It was also conceived as a route of resistance and return. Centring the memories of former exiles, this article examines expectations and reality of refuge in Cuba. Revealing a diversity of exile experiences, it asks what different forms of refuge existed in Cuba, how these evolved and with what significance for understanding the Cold War.

The distribution of the cost of Cuban social reproduction in 2016: the relative contributions of domestic and diasporic households, the private sector and the state

ABSTRACT Drawing on feminist political economy and social reproduction theory, we propose an accounting framework for understanding the distributional role of household production, employment, remittances and government social transfers in the social reproduction of the Cuban people. We apply this quantitative framework to available data and produce estimates for 2016. Our findings demonstrate that households – both domestic and diasporic – were the largest contributors to social reproduction in Cuba. Our empirical exercise reveals how the actual distributional arrangements underlying Cuban social reproduction differ from the official commitments and goals of the Cuban Revolution. The relative contributions in 2016 signal several potentially unsustainable self-reinforcing dynamics that undermine efforts to achieve gender and racial equality on the Island.

“We Are Happy Here”: Creating Communist Cuba and the Mariel Crisis of 1980

Abstract At a time when Cuban immigrants are seeking political asylum at historically unprecedented rates, most press and scholarly accounts consistently mirror earlier portrayals of Cubans’ mass exodus from the island in one key aspect: they ascribe to refugees a primarily economic reason for their decision to leave and offer little discussion of political factors. To illuminate the need for such analysis, this article examines the Mariel Boatlift of 1980, when approximately 125,000 Cubans, most of them thirty years old or younger, left Cuba. No other exodus of Cubans was more demonized than the Mariel, both by Cuba’s supporters and leadership and by exile opponents of the communist state. Exploring how the intensification of ideological criteria for inclusion in the Cuban Revolution undermined the quality of Cubans’ liberation under socialism prior to Mariel, this article explores state policies and the deep politicization of everyday life and identity. Key political factors explain many young people’s alienation and the degree to which the Cuban state sanctioned and directed extreme measures of repression to discredit those who wanted to leave as lazy, sexually degenerate escoria (human trash).

Context and Liturgical Renewal: An Approach from Cuba

This article aims to share the experience of the renewal of congregational singing in Cuban churches since the 1960s as a testimony to the links that exist between liturgical renewal and theological renewal with a special focus on the dialogue between culture and social reality, particularly in light of the Cuban Revolution of 1959, as constitutive of this renewal.

Castro’s victory: An assessment of New York Times coverage of the 1959 Cuban Revolution

This research applies framing theory and basic quantitative content methods to analyze the New York Times coverage of the 1959 Cuban Revolution, in order to examine assertions that New York Times stories contributed to Fidel Castro’s victory. Specifically, the study analyzes datelines, bylines, types of sources and story framing in all the stories about Cuba published on the front page of the New York Times between January 1, 1957, and December 31, 1962. The findings of this research contest long-held claims that the New York Times stories, in particular those written by reporter Herbert L. Matthews, contributed to the success of the Cuban Revolution. Matthews’s three-part front-page scoop in 1957 introduced Castro and the bearded Cuban revolutionaries to the world, but his stories and subsequent New York Times coverage are unlikely to have been decisive in Castro’s overthrow of the Batista regime. This study argues instead that the New York Times coverage of the 1959 Cuban Revolution was written through an aspirational lens, much like the stories about other major political revolutions written by U.S. foreign correspondents, and that stories played an important inter-media agenda-setting role, as evident from the many news organizations that covered the revolution after Matthews’ scoop.

Conjectures on an absence: Latin American planning thought, seen in the mirror of Revolutionary Cuba

Conjectures on an absence: Latin American planning thought, seen in the mirror of Revolutionary Cuba

Claudia Jones and Black Power: A Close Reading of the West Indian Gazette and Afro-Asian Caribbean News

When Claudia Jones was deported to Britain in 1955, the U.S. Government likely expected that the Communist threat she presented was finally neutralized. Yet, from the shores of Britain, Jones continued her radical activism. The West Indian Gazette and Afro-Asian Caribbean News (WIG), created by Jones in 1958, became an effective bullhorn to foster unity and solidarity amongst Black migrants in Britain toward many causes – at home and abroad. She called upon her previously established transnational connections to bring news of international developments to her British audience. The WIG’s coverage of the U.S. Civil Rights and Black Power Movements throughout the 1960s was also significant. Linking the United States and the UK to global changes, Jones kept a finger on the pulse of radical movements across the world and amplified them to her audience in editorials about uprisings in the Congo in 1960, revivals of Garveyism in Jamaica, and revolution in Cuba, for example. Drawing closely from the WIG, this article will analyze some of the continuities that rippled throughout the activism of Claudia Jones into the period of the Black Power Movement, as well as the overlapping activists, their strategies, and the important discussions the WIG was able to platform during its run. It will highlight that the many crossovers observed through the pages of the WIG evidence how a generation of activists may have been influenced by the knowledge transmitted through the life and work of Claudia Jones.

Ideological Consolidation, Subject Formation, and the Discursive Creation of the “New Woman” in Revolutionary Cuba

Ideological Consolidation, Subject Formation, and the Discursive Creation of the “New Woman” in Revolutionary Cuba

The history of anti-Castro terrorist organizations and their ties to the U.S. government

The article is devoted to the history of terrorist organizations that arose as a response to the Cuban Revolution of 1959, the rise to power of Fidel Castro and the policies of his government over the following decades. An important role in the creation, financing and support of these organizations was played by people directly or indirectly connected with the American special services and the political leadership of the United States. The activities of Cuban counter-revolutionary terrorists have led to tragic consequences, including the deaths of innocent people, not only Cubans, but also representatives of other Latin American countries. The use of terrorist methods for political purposes is an extremely urgent problem in the 21st century, and therefore an appeal to the history of this phenomenon is objectively necessary to effectively combat this evil. The history of terrorist activity by opponents of the Castro regime is of interest both to historians and political scientists, whose interests include the study of the Caribbean region, the history of foreign policy and the activities of US intelligence agencies, and to specialists in international relations in general. The methodology of the research is based on the principles of historicism, scientific objectivity and consistency. This allows us to consider the problem under study as an integrated system, where the facts are analyzed in their entirety and interrelationships. General scientific (analysis and synthesis, induction and deduction, descriptive) and general historical (historical-comparative, historical-systemic) research methods are necessary for conducting research. The present study has a scientific novelty, since it is based on sources not previously used in the Russian scientific literature. A significant part of the corpus of sources used by the author of the article are classified CIA documents until recently. To a certain extent, working with such arrays of information is not only a historical, but also a political science study that allows us to better understand the realities of modern geopolitics. As for the conclusions of this study, they may be summarised respectively: 1) the United States, at least in the recent past, was a direct sponsor of international terrorism; 2) the activities of anti-Castro terrorist groups in the 20th century still hinder the process of restoring diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba; 3) a violent change of power in the state inevitably generates a cycle of violence that evades the risk of interference in the internal affairs of the country from the outside.

Jaime Sabines: The Role of the Everyday and the Mortuary in Diario semanario y poemas en prosa (1961)

The poetry of Mexican author Jaime Sabines (1926–1999) is situated within a period of change in Latin America (Cuban revolution, dictatorships, and stylistic changes in literature) that linked the author to colloquialism. According to Cesare Del Mastro, this is a form marked by the use of plain and popular language rather than academicism. Using this style as a platform, two central topics presented in the collection of poems Diario Semanario y poemas en prosa (1961) are addressed in this paper: the everyday and the mortuary. Both are shown as symptomatic expressions of an affront to modernity, with signs of oppression, and the tense relationships and poetic responses are analyzed as a response to deep historical transformations.

Hellen Yaffe's on Cuba's Revolutionary Resilience

Hellen Yaffe's on Cuba's Revolutionary Resilience

Labor Relations in Reform-Era Cuba

As part of the model-updating reform started in 2011, there has been a significant shift in Cuba's labor relations. Although the share of state jobs in the labor force — in public institutions and enterprises — is the largest, non-state jobs dominate if enterprises alone are considered. In the non-state sector, self- and family employment predominate, but new private enterprises are growing fast while cooperatives and their membership decrease. These changes in the employment structure have greatly impacted Cuban society, with growing inequalities in income, labor conditions, and rights, gender, skin color. The new preponderance of private wage relations has severe implications for Cuban socialism. To be consistent with the agreed-on documents guiding the reform and with the sacrifices made by generations of Cubans to build a post-capitalist society, the Cuban Revolution must build a new socialist hegemony inside workplaces and beyond. The non-state sector cannot be regulated and guided toward satisfying the needs and aspirations of the Cuban people only through norms, incentive policies, and administrative measures. A new hegemony of socialist relations is fundamental to secure a future for the Cuban Revolution.

On the Revolution

The Cuban Revolution is construed as a discursive formation, searching in its evolution — and in its connection with an evolving revolutionary praxis — the causes of its weakening and/or survival. A balance is drawn at three crucial moments: crisis, resistance and creation. The mechanical identification of Revolution with State has impoverished the revolutionary discourse. The deeper meaning of the Revolution, in connection with a renewed praxis, needs full restoration. To overcome the imbalance or dissociation between the various dimensions of the Revolution, the effort must concentrate on transforming the current state of affairs through the intervention of popular forces, i.e., the inaugural factors of the Cuban Revolution itself.

Elizabeth Dore. How Things Fall Apart: What Happened to the Cuban Revolution

Elizabeth Dore. How Things Fall Apart: What Happened to the Cuban Revolution