Fidel Castro and the Quest for a Revolutionary Culture in Cuba [Paperback]

Julie Marie Bunck (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1, 1994

Beginning with an overview of the Castro regime's program to transform Cuban culture as guided by the tenets of Marxist-Leninist ideology, Julie Bunck first outlines in a broad way the four phases through which the regime's strategy evolved, from 1959 to the present, with a variety of methods tried--noncoercive, indirectly coercive, and directly coercive. The four main chapters then each focus on one of the principal targets at which the regime aimed in trying to change popular attitudes: youth, women, labor, and sports. The last chapter offers an overall assessment and explanation of the regime's few successes and many failures, suggesting lessons from Cuban's experience that help account for the collapse of communist regimes elsewhere in the world that foundered on the resistance of traditional culture to revolutionary change.

Editorial Reviews

Review

In Fidel Castro and the Quest for a Revolutionary Culture in Cuba, Julie Marie Bunck takes seriously one of the principal endeavors of Cuban leaders: the creation of a new consciousness in Cubans that would recast traditional culture into a socialist mold. Bunck surveys the record of government policies and citizen behavior in four areas: youth, women, manual labor, and sports. Her book complements Richard Fagen s classic The Transformation of Political Culture in Cuba (Stanford, 1969). She draws largely indisputable conclusions, whereas he could only partially suggest possibilities and pitfalls; both are essential reading for students of the outcomes of revolution. --Marifeli Perez-Stable, Contemporary Sociology

Julie Marie Bunck provides us with an overdue, critical accounting of more than three decades of failed, costly social experimentation by the Castro regime. She shows why the regime failed in the pursuit of its elusive goals of achieving radical cultural change because of the resiliency of traditional Cuban culture and mores. She documents how the regime was obliged to alter its policies by moving from moral to material incentives, and by increasing its totalitarian controls over society. --Edward Gonzalez, University of California, Los Angeles

Bunck's work is the best attempt to understand not just Fidel Castro's hopes for the transformation of Cuba's culture but also the extent to which those hopes ever became reality. --Jorge Domínguez, Harvard University

About the Author

Julie Marie Bunck teaches Latin American politics and international relations at the University of Pennsylvania and George Washington University.

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press; Not Indicated edition (February 1, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0271010878
• ISBN-13: 978-0271010878
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #994,532 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Critical Take on the Revolution, July 15, 2009

By 

R. L. Huff "An old reader" (Louisiana) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Fidel Castro and the Quest for a Revolutionary Culture in Cuba (Paperback)

Ms. Bunck's book is well-researched, touching on subjects left lingering under the political radar of most analysis. But she does share the mainstream preoccupation with "Marxism-Leninism," as if this served as a master blueprint for all that followed after 1959. Her emphasis is understandable considering the time of writing, the early 1990s with its post-cold war triumphalism and gleeful dismemberment of Marx's remains. This and a mainline, though subtle, anti-Castroism also diffuses the work, leading her to focus on the negatives of punishment and control in mobilizing the Cuban masses for their "revolutionary tasks."

Her choice of topics reflects her own interests and concerns, such as youth and gender - naturally, considering her own status as a female academic. Noticeably absent is any reference to race as a revolutionary mobilizer: a vital social concern in Cuba beyond her experience and interest, as it is with virtually all the Miami-based academics cited. For this reason I'll base my review on one facet of the book that I, too, can write upon with some authority - her chapter on labor.

Here Ms. Bunck meticulously cites the coercive and punitive aspects of trying to get those "lazy loafing Cubans" to get off their hedonistic backsides and go do a hard honest day's socialist construction. Appropriate texts from Marx and Lenin are employed as keys to "the regime's" reasoning. However, one sees that much, indeed most, of the "regime's" problems here are the same as any managerial system seeking to motivate its workforce. Alienated employees who work for the weekend, ambitious middle management eager to please their bosses, patroning CEOs (like Fidel) who spout platitudes - we easily recognize them. Where Cuba is different is in the state's ability to take proactive measures to "combat" these "performance gaps." Even with the militarized management and "conciencia" style the "regime" never succeeded. And although its labor policies could be nasty, at no time did they ever become gratuitously sadistic, as prevails through so much of Latin America.

But there were other positive aspects of Cuban labor that explain why the "regime" has retained the loyalty of its "masses", even when they shirk at work. First, organized Cuban labor before the Revolution involved only a minority of Cuban workers, in key industries like sugar refining, tobacco making, and stevedoring. The great "unredeemed" majority were ignored by the labor bosses as they were by the politicians. It was this unorganized mass that most readily followed Fidel into socialism - many of them black, which is why race is so important in the Cuban context. Fidel and socialism "gave" many their first good jobs, with promotions and benefits, and upward mobility into the system's higher reaches. This was (and remains) a powerful counterpoint to the "regime's" repressive aspects, one normally neglected by Cuban-cum-American analyzers.

Another way in which race may factor here is that Cuba's "socialist shirking laws" are very parallel to similar laws in the late 19th-early 20th century US South, and perhaps for the same reason: the presence of a large black population with a "plantation" work heritage and all that it implies. The resistance Ms. Bunck details may in good part be a continuing tradition of passive non-cooperation with whatever "The Man" is dictating from on high - an analogy Fidel would find deeply offensive but seems to contain merit, however little explored.

But even with my reservations her book is informative, if selective and rather blinkered, and I recommend it as a good social history of the "Cuban Revolutionary Process" in its "human form."

1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent source of Cuban/cultural information, January 30, 2002

By 

Christopher (Melbourne, VIC Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Fidel Castro and the Quest for a Revolutionary Culture in Cuba (Hardcover)

Julie Marie Bunck has done a splendid job in revealing to the reader the sometimes harsh policies that Fidel Castro has taken to enhance the development of a socialist/communist conscience in revolutionary Cuba. With meticulous research, she reveals the failures and successors of the Maximum Leader in attempting to construct socialism in all human forms.