Shaping Subjectivities and Articulating Solidarity in Revolutionary Cuba

Abstract

This dissertation examines the culture-politics nexus through the lens of social revolution as a form of major transition. In addition to firmly establishing rule by solidifying their political, economic, and military bases of social power, the leaders of social revolutionary governments also ostensibly aim to capture the hearts and minds of people, thereby consolidating their ideological power. Furthermore, they often pursue these intertwined goals under unfavorable circumstances marked by episodes that threaten their claims to power, like counterrevolution or famine. When confronting situations such as these, leaders historically have tended to deploy coercion, violence, and even terror to preserve their governments. Examining instances in which leaders instead leveraged aspects of their ongoing ideological projects to help navigate could-be crises contributes to a sociological understanding of early revolutionary regime consolidation. I investigate revolutionary consolidation through the case of the government that came to power in Cuba in 1959. In transforming from guerrilla fighters to heads of state, leaders sought to transform social structures, values, and practices. To do so, they promoted national solidarity and the formation of new revolutionary subjects, ideological projects that they pursued in the face of repeated could-be crises. At no point, however, did they turn to massive state-sponsored violence or terrors. How then, this dissertation asks, do leaders of the revolutionary government shape identities and create social cohesion, and how do potentially conjunctural episodes facilitate, constrain, or alter these ideological political projects? I argue three points. First, the revolutionary government pursued consolidating their ideological power through the twin objectives of ideological transformation and subject formation. Second, in so doing, they relied on political articulation—that is, the process by which political elites link together diverse, cross-cleavage constituencies into integrated political blocs as they attempt to organize political life to their benefit. Third, while articulating individual-level revolutionary subjects and population-wide solidaristic cohesion, they faced a series of could-be crises. These crises offered leaders an opportunity to formulate a template for political articulation that they could repurpose and adapt while navigating later episodes. Through rigorous interpretive qualitative analysis of roughly 30,000 pages derived from political speeches, newspapers, and magazines that I collected over several months in Havana, I trace articulatory processes over time (1959-1970), focusing on four crises. First, the 1959 Agrarian Reform alienated the upper classes but incorporated peasants into political life in unprecedented ways. Second, the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion threatened to topple Castro’s government but also enabled leaders to define Cuban society by its opposition to American capitalism and imperialism. Third, in the 1968 Revolutionary Offensive, leaders leveraged policy to reinforce a communist collective identity in response to internal political factionalism. Finally, although leaders presented their articulatory project as a fait accompli by 1970, the failure of that year’s Ten Million Ton sugar harvest campaign signaled the incompleteness of their project to forge new men and contributed to a subsequent shift toward routinization, bureaucratization, and Sovietization. These findings suggest that could-be crises do not automatically force leaders down paths of violence or terror. Rather, they highlight the importance of articulatory projects for navigating crises and mediate how leaders manage the cultural dynamics that intersect with their projects to make new people, solidarities, and societies.