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Fidel Castro and the Quest for a Revolutionary Culture in Cuba

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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."

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.