Patriots and Traitors in Revolutionary Cuba, 1961–1981

Lillian Guerra

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Year: 2023
• eBook ISBN: 9780822989783
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

Authorities in postrevolutionary Cuba worked to establish a binary society in which citizens were either patriots or traitors. This all-or-nothing approach reflected in the familiar slogan "patria o muerte" (fatherland or death) has recently been challenged in protests that have adopted the theme song "patria y vida" (fatherland and life), a collaboration by exiles that, predictably, has been banned in Cuba itself. Lillian Guerra excavates the rise of a Soviet-advised Communist culture controlled by state institutions and the creation of a multidimensional system of state security whose functions embedded themselves into daily activities and individual consciousness and reinforced these binaries. But despite public performance of patriotism, the life experience of many Cubans was somewhere in between. Guerra explores these in-between spaces and looks at Cuban citizens' complicity with authoritarianism, leaders' exploitation of an earnest anti-imperialist nationalism, and the duality of an existence that contains elements of both support and betrayal of a nation and of an ideology.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: From “¡Patria o Muerte!” to “¡Patria y Vida!”: Excavating the Nation from the State, Explaining Cuba’s Internal Cold War
• Chapter 1: Lessons in Loving the Revolution: Political Education, Violence, and the 1961 Literacy Campaign
• Chapter 2: Securing the State, 1961–1966: Fear, Surveillance, and National Liberation
• Chapter 3: The Generous Revolution: Rehabilitation, Political Prisoners, and Coercive Inclusion in the 1960s
• Chapter 4: The “Anti-Revolution” of the Late 1960s: Reeducation, Integration, and Everyday Authoritarianism
• Chapter 5: Young Communists, Former Slum Dwellers, and the Lewis Project in Cuba, 1968–1972
• Chapter 6: Labor, the Pedagogy of Love, and Cuba’s Child Revolutionaries, 1968–1972
• Chapter 7: Los Años Rojos (The Red Years): Cuba in the 1970s
• Chapter 8: The Road to El Mariel: Perfectionism, Alienation, Exhaustion, and the New Man
• Chapter 9: “We Are Happy Here”: Amplifying the Revolutionary Script and the Crisis of El Mariel
• Epilogue: The Paradigm of Patriots and Traitors Revisited: Exodus as Opposition and the Uncertain Future of Democracy Lost
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index