Revolution Archives - Not Even Past

Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution by Ada Ferrer (2014)

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Cuba was profoundly shaped by its proximity to and multi-layered relationship with Haiti, or Saint-Domingue as it was called before the 1803 Haitian Revolution. In the decades leading up to Saint-Domingue’s 1791 slave revolt, Cuban planters looked with envy on the booming sugar economy of their neighbor to the southeast and sought to emulate its success. After the revolution in Haiti, Cuba was able to take advantage of the implosion of Saint-Domingue’s sugar industry. Sugar production machinery and human expertise vanished from Saint-Domingue and reappeared in Cuba. Within twenty years of the first Haitian slave revolt, Cuba had surged ahead to become the largest sugar producer in the Caribbean. Necessary to that, of course, was human capital in the form of enslaved Africans or Afro-Caribbeans, some of whom may have been captives from Haiti. Between 1791 and 1821, slaves were imported into Cuba at a rate four times greater than in the previous thirty-year period. As a result, Cuban elites were forced to confront the growing probability, and then actual occurrence, of slave revolts.

Ferrer shapes her narrative around the “mirror,” or reversal, of historical processes: the collapse of one colony’s sugar economy and the rapid growth of another’s; the liberation gained by slaves on one island and the expansion of slavery and entrenchment of enslavement structures on the other; revolution and independence in one place and colonialist counterrevolution in the other; fears of re-enslavement on the part of former slaves and fears of revolt on the part of the elites. She argues that for Cuba, the Haitian Revolution in 1791 served as a temporal “hinge” between the “first and second slaveries.” The second slavery distinguished itself from the first in its larger scale and in its existence alongside a growing “specter” of abolitionist political movements and the reality of enslaved people successfully claiming and obtaining their own freedom.

Nineteenth-Century Photograph of Enslaved People Drying Bagasse in Cuba via University of Miami Digital Collections

The first half of Freedom’s Mirror takes the reader up to Haitian independence and victory over Napoleon’s forces in 1804. These chapters trace the evolution of Cuba’s “sugar revolution,” Cuban attempts to deter the import of negros franceses – Saint-Domingue slaves who might foment rebellion — and a short-lived alliance between the Spanish army based in the city of Santo Domingo (including soldiers from Cuba) and the Haitian rebels. The second half of the book showcases the conflicts resulting from the rise of coffee plantations in lands occupied by communities of runaway slaves, the 1808 turmoil in Cuba caused by Napoleon’s installation of his brother on the Spanish throne, featuring discussions of independence and slavery abolition, and the 1812 Aponte Rebellion.

Map of Haiti via Digital Public Library of America

Freedom’s Mirror, however, is not just a story about the causal relationship between the Haitian Revolution and Cuba’s transformation, and Ferrer does not confine her investigation to economic or political factors. What interests Ferrer are the “quotidian links – material and symbolic – between the radical antislavery movement that emerged in Saint-Domingue at the same time that slavery was expanding in colonial Cuba” (11). In particular, she tracks the circulation of knowledge, rumor, conversation, religious symbolism, anxieties and hopes that mapped onto infrastructures of commerce, slave-trading, government activity, and military action.

Toussaint L’Ouverture via New York Public Library

In 1801, for example, Toussaint Louverture’s forces occupied Santo Domingo and issued public proclamations. These were carried by ship crews and disseminated in Cuba, as were first-hand accounts of Spanish refugees from that occupation who had fled to Cuba. This, according to Ferrer, is the mechanism by which Cubans came to know of the events of the rebellion and the “spectacular ascent” of Toussaint Louverture (153). Eleven years later, images of the coronation of the Haitian King Christophe appeared in the prison holding suspects from Aponte’s revolutionary movement in Cuba. In the tradition of Lynn Hunt’s treatment of the “invention” of human rights, Ferrer uses her sources—city council minutes, port registers, trading licenses, letters, confessions of revolutionaries on the eve of their executions, and printed images of Haitian leaders—to document that this circulation of information and rumor transformed the interior experiences and decision-making of historical actors and ordinary people in both Cuba and Haiti.

Freedom’s Mirror situates Cuba in a regional history, primarily the interactions between Cuba and Haiti. Ferrer is fundamentally attuned to the circulation of knowledge, symbolism, and ideas. In bringing those into the light, she shows us that economic, political, and military realities never cease to shape, and be shaped by, subjective perceptions and individual actions.

Cuba’s Revolutionary World

By Jonathan C. Brown

On January 2, 1959, Fidel Castro, the rebel comandante who had just overthrown Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, addressed a crowd of jubilant supporters. Recalling the failed popular uprisings of past decades, Castro assured them that this time “the real Revolution” had arrived. Castro’s words proved prophetic not only for his countrymen but for Latin America and the wider world.

Fidel Castro announcing the arrival of “the real revolution,” 1959.

The political turmoil that rocked a small Caribbean nation in the 1950s became one of the twentieth century’s most transformative events. Initially, Castro’s revolution augured well for democratic reform movements then gaining traction in Latin America. But what had begun promisingly veered off course as Castro took a heavy hand in efforts to centralize Cuba’s economy and stamp out private enterprise. Embracing the Soviet Union as an ally, Castro and his lieutenants, Che Guevara and Raúl Castro, sought to export the socialist revolution abroad through armed insurrection. Chairman Khrushchev’s early support aided the Cuban revolutionaries in defeating of the CIA invasion of Cuban émigré fighters at the Bay of Pigs. However, he subsequently lost his job over the 1962 Missile Crisis that pushed the superpowers to the brink of nuclear war.

By the end of the 1960s, rural and urban uprisings linked to the Cuban Revolution had spilled over from Central America into the bigger countries of South America. Revolutionary groups whose leaders had trained in Havana were operating in Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, and Argentina. Most of the rural and urban guerrillas may not have traveled to Cuba. Yet they certainly followed Fidel’s “anti-imperialist” example. Che himself attempted to spread the revolution to Bolivia, where he died. Other rebel groups with names such as the Tupamaros and Montoneros and still others with initials like FALN, ELN, and MIR defined the 1960s as the age of student unrest.

Castro’s provocations inspired intense opposition. Cuban anti-communists who had fled to Miami found a patron in the CIA, which actively supported their efforts to topple Castro’s regime. American presidents supported anti-communist forces that often utilized disproportionate violence against pro-Cuban dissidence in their own countries. The insurrections fomented by leftist guerrillas lent support to Latin America’s military castes, who promised to restore stability. Brazil was the first to succumb to a coup in 1964. A decade later, juntas of generals governed most Spanish and Portuguese-speaking nations of the Western Hemisphere. Rightwing terror claimed increasing numbers of casualties into the 1980s. Thus did a revolution that had seemed to signal the death knell of dictatorship in Latin America produce its tragic opposite.

Latin America’s military establishments especially came to oppose revolution because they learned what had happened to the Cuban army that failed to defeat Castro’s guerrilla rebellion. Revolutionary firing squads killed hundreds of military and police officers when the Batista dictatorship fell. Consequently, Che Guevara’s travels in Latin America proved especially toxic. President Jânio Quadros of Brazil resigned one week after presenting Guevara with a medal and Argentina’s army generals deposed President Arturo Frondizi several months after he “secretly” met with El Che.

Omar Torrijos and Fidel Castro in 1976

However, it is instructive that two generals who performed coups d’état in 1968 took advantage of the nationalist feelings of peasants and workers to establish pro-Cuban juntas. Generals Juan Velasco of Peru and Omar Torrijos of Panama ousted elected governments in order to implement overdue social reforms. Many countries of Latin America followed the Brazilian example of establishing long-term counterrevolutionary military dictatorships. Brazil’s generals governed for twenty-one years.

The Cold War that Cuba introduced to Latin America affected the lives of countless ordinary citizens. Humberto Sorí Marín, the revolution’s first agriculture minister. opposed the turn toward communism, resigned, and fled to Miami, only to return with a cache of weapons for an uprising against Castro. He died before a firing squad. There was also Osvaldo Ramírez, the bandit king of the Escambray Mountains who led a widespread guerrilla rebellion against Castro’s rule until militia troops shot and killed him in battle. His anti-communist guerrilla successors endured within Cuba until 1965.

Cuban militiamen capture an anti-Castro guerilla fighter, c. 1962.

Antonio “Tony” Zamora was one Castro opponent who survived. He aspired to study law but left Cuba in 1960 to join the brigade of exiled Cuban youths who landed at the Bay of Pigs. President Kennedy ransomed Zamora and his fellow prisoners following the Cuban Missile Crisis. Tony became a lawyer in Miami and went on to advocate greater dialog with the Castro regime as the Cuban Revolution approached its fiftieth anniversary.

Cuba’s revolution attracted youthful visitors from all over Latin America who wished to learn how they too might become armed revolutionaries. Julio García left the University of Buenos Aires to learn how to fight as a guerrilla in 1962. However, he and several other Argentineans quit the camps after training became too rigorous for them. Venezuelans like Luben Petkoff did finish Cuban guerrilla training. Luben engaged in combat for nearly ten years only to give up finally with a pardon from one of the few democracies that survived the 1960s.

Venezuelan Leftist Guerillas

Women too became involved in the turmoil. The guerrilla Tania gave up her life for the revolution, this one in Bolivia. Tania’s real name was Tamara Bunke Bider, an Argentinean-born East German who first met Che Guevara as a government translator in East Berlin. She immigrated to Cuba in the early 1960s and eventually became Che’s spy in La Paz, Bolivia. Tania campaigned with Guevara’s last guerrilla group in 1967 and suffered the fate of most of his followers.

Student rioters in Córdoba, Argentina, 1969

Argentina’s Norma Arrostita visited Havana in 1967 to attend a conference of armed leftists from all over Latin America. When she returned to Buenos Aires, Norma acted as the lookout for the kidnapping and killing of a former general who once served as Argentina’s president. A founding member of the urban guerrilla group known as the Montoneros, Arrostita later “disappeared” in a military prison like thousands of other suspected radicals.

As Mao used to say, “The revolution is not a dinner party.” Fidel Castro provided the corollary. “But the counterrevolution” he said, “is always more cruel.”

Jonathan C. Brown, Cuba’s Revolutionary World (2017)

For more on twentieth-century Latin American revolutions, try these:

Jorge I. Domínguez, Cuba: Order and Revolution (1978).
The foundational text for any serious study of Cuba’s three revolutions in the modern age: the Wars of Independence, the 1933 Revolution and rise of Fulgencio Batista, and the 1959 Revolution of Fidel Castro and his many associates.

Alexandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, One Hell of a Gamble: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958-1964 (1997).
A fascinating account of Havana-Moscow relations culminating in the October Missile Crisis of 1962. The authors had access to Soviet and US document collections but only a few Cuban ones, which are generally not available to researchers. The title derives from a statement by President Kennedy during a White House discussion about Premier Khrushchev’s possible motivations for placing nuclear missiles in Cuba.

Jan Lust, Lucha revolucionaria: Perú, 1958-1967 (2013).
The most thorough study of a guerrilla movement in any country of Latin America during the 1960s. The author interviewed survivors and collected detailed information on leaders and fighters from a variety of sources.

Valeria Manzano, The Age of Youth in Argentina: Culture, Politics, and Sexuality from Perón to Videla (2014).
An important study of the student movements of one important country in South America during an age of youthful protests and cultural change wrought by national political turmoil and military interventions. The book covers the period from the 1955 overthrow of Juan Perón to the 1976 coup d’état that preceded the last military dictatorship of the country.

Watch: The Wider Arc of Revolution: The Global Impact of 1917 (Part II)

To commemorate the centenary of the Russian Revolution, the UT Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies held an international conference entitled, “The Wider Arc of Revolution: The Global Impact of 1917.”

The second keynote speech was given by Professor Lisa Kirschenbaum, Professor of History at West Chester University. Professor Kirschenbaum has published three books, including: Small Comrades: Revolutionizing Childhood in Soviet Russia, 1917-1932; The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941-1995: Myth, Memories, and Monuments; and International Communism and the Spanish Civil War: Solidarity and Suspicion.

Watch a recording of Professor Kirschenbaum’s keynote here.

Watch: The Wider Arc of Revolution: The Global Impact of 1917 (Part I)

The first keynote speech was given by Sheila Fitzpatrick, preeminent historian of Russia and the Soviet Union, Professor of History at The University of Sydney and Distinguished Service Professor Emerita at the University of Chicago. Professor Fitzpatrick taught at UT Austin from 1980-1989.

Click here to watch a recording of Professor Fitzpatrick’s keynote.

The Revolution will televise football

By R. Joseph Parrott

As football returns to living rooms across the United States, it’s worth remembering that the sport has an international appeal for many who have spent time in this country. Fifty years ago this week, one such foreign fan launched a revolution from Tanzania. Eduardo Mondlane, the first president of the Mozambique Liberation Front (Frente de Libertação de Moçambique or FRELIMO), loved American sports, especially professional football. Beginning in September 1964, he guided an armed struggle for the independence of his homeland against imperial Portugal, but he still did his best to make time on Sunday nights to settle in for a game.

Mondlane watched American football games at the Kilimanjaro Hotel in Tanzania’s capital of Dar es Salaam, near where FRELIMO operated its headquarters in exile. The modern glass-clad block is still down the road from the whitewashed façade of St. Joseph Cathedral on the city’s waterfront. In the 1960s, it was a popular gathering place for revolutionaries from across the southern third of the continent – Angola, Rhodesia (modern Zimbabwe), South Africa, and Southwest Africa (Namibia) – which was still under colonial rule. On Sundays, though, Mondlane carved out a little piece of America. Watching football in Africa can still be difficult today, if only due to the time differences. Before satellite transmission made live international broadcasts possible, it was even harder. Physical films had to be delivered by plane from the United States. Each weekend that a game was available, Mondlane would gather with his children and an African American from Chicago named Prexy Nesbitt, who was working with FRELIMO’s propaganda arm on their English-language publication, Mozambique Revolution. Nesbitt remembers that when Mondlane was away on one of his frequent diplomatic missions in the late 1960s, he would ask Nesbitt to keep the tradition going with his children. The determination partly came from Mondlane’s love for American sports– he was a fan of the Cleveland Indians baseball team as well – but there was likely a deeper personal connection. Watching the films on Sunday, even a few weeks after they occurred, connected him with the unique ceremony that is football in America. It maintained a sense of community with the country where Mondlane had been educated and where his wife and children had been born.

Map highlighting Mozambique. Image via Wikicommons.

Football was just one of Mondlane’s deep ties to the United States. He came from a noble Tsonga family in the south of Mozambique, but he spent over a decade living in Chicago, New York, and places in between. An education at a Protestant mission in Mozambique first took him to the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa until apartheid made further study impossible. His nationalist politics also made it uncomfortable to continue his schooling in metropolitan Lisbon. The United States offered a refuge. Protestant missionary connections and a scholarship from the Phelps-Stokes Fund allowed him to enroll as an undergraduate at Oberlin College. In 1953, he graduated at the advanced age of 32 with a bachelor’s degree, a love of Cleveland Indians baseball, and a passion for the pigskin. He would continue to Northwestern, where he earned a PhD in sociology under legendary Africanist Melville Herskovits. He worked with the Trusteeship Department of the United Nations that was pushing for continued decolonization in Africa, including Portuguese colonies like Mozambique. He even accepted a position as a professor at Syracuse University, resigning only after he was elected president of FRELIMO upon its formation in 1962.

Eduardo Mondlane class photo at Oberlin College, 1953. Image via wikicommons.

Throughout his time in the United States, Mondlane promoted African decolonization. Even before he graduated from Oberlin, he began making appearances alongside UN officials like Ralph Bunche and humanitarian Albert Schweitzer as an expert on Portuguese Africa. He was active in church circles, where he urged congregations and church camps to expand their interests from domestic civil rights to global political and human rights. Many listeners would take these lessons to heart, including future congressman and Ambassador to the United Nations Andrew Young. In Chicago, he taught university and informal classes, while also speaking to local organizations. Africa stood at a crossroads, Mondlane would explain to his audiences, and it was up to progressive forces in the United States to support its bid for independence against outdated colonialism. Only this international pressure could force Portugal to finally give up her colonies without the need for armed revolution. The nonviolent message would link Mondlane with the emerging Civil Rights movement. Longtime National Urban League head Whitney Young knew him well, and he attended the first American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa organized by Martin Luther King, Jr. and James Farmer. Those who met him remembered him as intelligent, personable, congenially authoritative, and utterly convincing.

Mondlane’s ties to the United States were extensive, but his strongest by far was his marriage to Janet Rae Johnson of Downers Grove, Illinois. Mondlane met his future wife at a church summer camp, and they began a lengthy correspondence. She was part of a generation of young Americans whose religious convictions pushed them to agitate for racial equality, but her interests were more global. Janet Mondlane became a partner for Eduardo in much more than a domestic sense, sharing his commitment to self-determination for Mozambique. The marriage was controversial – Janet was not only white but nearly fourteen years younger than her husband – but they were nothing if not determined. Janet and their growing family joined Eduardo in Dar Es Salaam when he moved there to direct the exile movement. The white Midwesterner became the head of the fundraising arm of FRELIMO known as the Mozambique Institute, which ran a secondary school for refugees. Her powerful position angered some within the party due both to her race and gender, but she became an important element in selling FRELIMO’s cause to the wider world.

Portugal was part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and in the midst of the Cold War it used anti-communism to justify fighting a war to retain its colonies. Western allies disagreed with Portugal’s approach to its colonies, but they were not willing to put decisive pressure on the government in Lisbon. After FRELIMO decided on the course of armed revolution, it depended on weapons from neighboring African countries, China, and communist Eastern Europe, but it did not want to choose sides. The Mondlanes knew that there were many in the United States and Europe who sympathized with their cause and they worked to cultivate these relationships. Eduardo Mondlane’s cultural fluency and vision of a free Mozambique made a good impression on Robert Kennedy in 1963, which led to the Ford Foundation donating tens of thousands of dollars to the Mozambique Institute. But such government aid to a revolutionary movement was unpopular and unusual since it targeted an ally. FRELIMO relied more on building relationships with civil society groups, which included religious organizations and young people frustrated by the Cold War. Popular movements would eventually develop throughout the Western world, holding political rallies, launching boycott campaigns, conducting clothing drives, and raising funds to support the social programs of FRELIMO and the Mozambique Institute. In Europe especially, these movements would grow in strength until they convinced governments and political parties in places like Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, and even Britain to directly aid the liberation parties. The Mondlanes and FRELIMO cultivated these unofficial friendships through a shared commitment to self-determination, but also through personal connections like those formed with Prexy Nesbitt. Effective transnational diplomacy depended as much on talking about local concerns and personal passions – like Chicago football – as talking African freedom.

Frelimo button with the face of Eduardo Mondlane, the first president of the movement. Translation: ‘Frelimo will win’. Image via African Activist Archive at MSU

Eduardo Mondlane would not live long enough to see the independence to which he had dedicated his life. He died in 1969 after opening a parcel bomb mailed to him in Tanzania. Janet Mondlane remained active in the struggle and continues to live in Mozambique today. She and FRELIMO maintained her husband’s diplomatic neutralism after his death and oversaw the expansion of Western support, even as they used African and communist supplied weapons to fight Portugal to a standstill and gain independence in 1975. Neither in Mozambique nor in those American institutions that he touched has Mondlane been forgotten. In a tribute published in Mozambique Revolution in February 1969, one party member observed that “he was able to speak for us the language of other men – the language of the diplomats, the language of the universities, the language of power.” On Sundays, he would also speak the language of American football, illustrating the transnational linkages that can create a sense of community between the United States and the world but too often pass unnoticed or unremembered.

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