Race, Coercive Complicity, and Political Nobodies in the Cuban Revolution, 1971–81

In recent years, scholars have contributed entirely new knowledge and generated new interpretations of the central paradox that defines the Cuban Revolution: that is, the state’s reliance on totalizing, authoritarian policies and laws to control and reshape citizens’ personal and political identities in line with Communism. This process emerged openly in the mid-1960s and peaked in the 1970s through the early 1980s when, among other factors, U.S. social movements surpassed the goals and discourse of liberation for women and blacks articulated by the revolutionary state. Efforts to discredit these movements as misguided ran parallel to a much more insidious and overt yet little studied process of “rehabilitating” ideologically dissident intellectuals, writers, and average Cubans. Their refusal to conform to increasingly rigid government mandates on behavior and thought earned them the label of “anti-Cubans” and enemies of the people.

This paper examines the wrenching case of lifelong Communist, black activist, and filmmaker Nicolás Guillén Landrián during and after his forcible incarceration at Mazorra, Cuba’s national insane asylum, as well as during his exile to Miami in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I seek to illuminate Guillén Landrián’s story and his efforts to express his experience through art, a form that he turned to shortly after his exile to the U.S. when the Cuban state’s decade-long use of electro-shock “treatment” left him unable to communicate effectively in other ways. I explore Guillén Landrián’s militant blackness and commitment to self-expression as a critique against the state programs of “rehabilitation.” These programs relied mostly on the coerced complicity of youth and the obliteration of alternative ways of being and thought, particularly any with links to non-Communist, Leftist forms of radicalism originating in the U.S.