What was the Cuban Revolution? A series of events in Cuba, plainly: the defeat of the dictator Fulgencio Batista and the triumph of the guerrilla armies at the beginning of 1959, the agrarian reforms, the literacy campaigns, the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, the missile crisis in 1962, the death of Che Guevara in Bolivia in 1967, the socialization of small business in 1968, the failed 10-million-ton sugar harvest of 1970, the Mariel boatlift, and so on. Without a doubt, the Cuban Revolution was the most important event (or perhaps process) in Cuba’s 20th-century political history.
But it was also an important event in intellectual history, and it is this aspect that Rafael Rojas’s new book asks us to consider. Artists, writers, and intellectuals in New York are Fighting over Fidel’s subjects, and they engaged with the Cuban Revolution not as a matter of lived experience but as a matter of intellectual concern. For these figures, the Cuban Revolution was, above all, an inspiration for those who were seeking some sort of left-wing “third way” between capitalism’s indignities and the drab socialism of Eastern Europe. The desire for a viable alternative was so strong that people projected their hopes onto Fidel Castro and Cuba. But by the beginning of the 1970s, no matter where they began, nearly all of them were disappointed.
Rafael Rojas is a prolific historian of Cuban literature and culture. Born in 1965, Rojas left Cuba for Mexico in 1991 to begin doctoral work at the Colegio de México. By the end of the 1990s, his criticism of the Cuban political system began to create problems with authorities there, and he was issued a special passport given to those who are considered exiles. Working from Mexico City, he is the author of many book-length essays, several of which have won important prizes; Fighting over Fidel, however, is the first to be translated into English. American readers who hear the words “Cuban exile” and fixate on the conservative community in Miami might expect Fighting over Fidel to be some sort of polemic excoriating the naïveté of sympathizers of the revolution. But it is nothing of the sort. If Rojas’s oeuvre has a subject, it is the recovery of alternative political and intellectual traditions in Cuba’s past, including small-r republican ones, social democratic ones, and even alternative left visions to the one that came to dominate both politically and intellectually in the years since the Cuban Revolution. Fighting over Fidel, then, extends Rojas’s broader project by examining alternative lefts not in Cuba itself, but in the New York left’s engagement with Cuba.