Silencing the Republican Past: The “Erasure” of the Republic (1902–59) in Cuban Archives

Paper Title: 

“Silencing the republican past. The “erasure” of the Republic (1902-1959) in Cuban archives”

Abstract:

In 1961, a 106-year old woman, born slave in 1855, learned to read and write during the Cuban literacy campaign. María Senmanat had been a witness of the wars of independence during the last third of the 19^th century, the abolition of slavery in 1886, the US intervention in 1898, and the birth of the Cuban republic in 1902. Almost six decades later, she would witness another crucial moment in Cuban history: the victory of the 1959 revolution. Curiously, when she was interviewed by the press, her testimony moved away from an evocation of her slave past to a praise of the (emancipatory) present time of the revolution, with a notorious silence on the more than 50 years of the Republican period. But the peculiar “amnesia” of the old woman was socially conditioned. The spontaneous feeling of a radical rupture with the immediate past that accompanied the birth of the revolution quickly became an institutional silence that has already lasted half a century. By “erasing” republican history through the distortion of the mechanisms that linked the personal experience of the people with that of past generations and by symbolically reproducing its persistence, the revolution ended up transformed into a sort of eternal and irrevocable present. This paper will address the production of that silence in Cuban archives. The combination of a political intention of erasing the past, the lack of institutional interest, and the scarcity of material resources to create new documentary collections or preserve those already existing, has forced historians for decades to work on colonial history, thus producing a gap in contemporary historical narratives that persists until today.