Political Rehabilitation and Ideological Diversionists in the Cuban Revolution, 1959–69

Since the early 1960s, contemporary observers and scholars of Cuba have focused on Fidel Castro and other 26th of July Movement leaders' unexpected reversal on their longstanding rejection of Communism as the guiding ideology of the revolutionary process.  Equally embedded in memories, memoirs and scholarly tracts is the supposed persecution of Cuba's Communists by the Batista dictatorship in the 1950s and their apparent marginality from Fidel’s efforts to topple him until the very last weeks of the war.  However, research into the personal archives of some of the most central figures in the Cuban Communist Party as well as the Orthodox Party (the cradle of most 26th of July activists) reveals a surprising story of personal activism connecting the two as well as division among the Communists on the question of loyalty, either to the nation or to party directives from Moscow. Indeed, while the personal papers of Communist militant Antonio Nuñez Jiménez expose little known aspects of the Cuban party’s internal culture, the papers of Eddy Chibas, founder of the Orthodox Party and mentor to Fidel, utterly undercut Chibás’ own self-image as a diehard “red-hater”. Yet after 1952, when the United States demanded that Batista fully implement a zero-tolerance policy against Communism, both Batista and his opponents publicly accused each other of being secretly affiliated with the Communists. Although this strategy strove to garner the support of the US public and, in the case of Batista, the US government, this paper argues that it was just as much an effort to conceal the degree to which the dictator and his armed rivals worked to gain Communist support to defeat one another in the urban guerrilla war and to project a global image of authentic anti-imperialism.