PANEL ABSTRACT: In the last twenty-five years, historians have struggled to erode politically driven paradigms of analysis that hold hostage the continuities and specificities of Cuba’s mid-to-late twentieth-century development to two revolutionary moments: that of 1933, when revolutionaries overthrew the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado and sought to dissolve the role of the United States military and political interventionism through a new constitutional state; and 1959 when a revolutionary coalition of armed and unarmed forces created a similarly inclined government, mostly led by anti-corruption lawyers, activists and guerrillas of Fidel Castro’s 26^th of July Movement. However, Cuba’s pivotal and relatively quick transformations from these transitional revolutionary governments to authoritarian and ostensibly “populist” states, both in 1933 and again in 1959, have themselves influenced both the ability of historians to track contingencies as well as simply trace and render certain narratives of history in factually accurate, archivally-driven (as opposed to ideologically propelled) ways. Our panel presentations contribute further to recent scholars’ efforts to reverse generally accepted assumptions about Cuba’s multiple revolutionary transitions and their connections to the events, people, intellectual activism, economic realities and political struggles that proceeded them.

In her unique work on the Cuban Communist Party in the 1930s, Frances Peace Sullivan finds that militants’ interest in mobilizing mass support among workers extended far beyond the traditional bread-and-butter, pro-labor calculus to address cultural agendas meant to embed global dimensions of knowledge and thought into proletarian, day-to-day consciousness. For the 1940s, Richard Denis recovers the mostly forgotten and often dismissed history of how Cuba’s Black press refuted mainstream political elites’ insistence that national discourses of “racial harmony” were sufficient, even essential substitutes for the prosecution of racial discrimination and the social foundations of racial equality in a truly “raceless” and therefore truly Cuban nation-state. In examining Fulgencio Batista’s legendary kleptocratic regime of the 1950s and its roots in his earlier military dictatorship of the 1930s, Lillian Guerra excavates and follows specific case studies to reveal the reach of Batista’s “creative corruption” into daily political life as well as certain beneficiaries’ trajectories as willing collaborators whose stories, —post-Batista and post-exile—remain largely unknown. Employing methods that are historically panoramic and archivally precise, Bonnie Lucero questions the validity and historical utility of a central myth of Cuba’s socialist economic development in the early 1960s, that is, the dwindling and disappearance of the cattle industry and production of beef for national consumption under Fidel Castro and the Communist Party’s direction. Together these panel presentations will benefit from the expertise of Michelle Chase, a historian whose own scholarship has broken traditional, easily periodized and therefore, often pre-conceived boundaries, to encompass connections across Cuba’s revolutionary pasts in transition.