Professor Elizabeth Dore
Research Leave
The voices of Cubans living on the island have been largely absent from the worldwide commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the revolution. Professor Dore’s forthcoming book Memories of the Cuban Revolution, written during her AHRC funded Research Leave, redresses that silence. Drawing on 100 in-depth life history interviews collected in Cuba from 2004 through 2007, she analyses how men and women of different generations, social positions, racial and religious identities, and political views narrated their experiences of living the revolution.
The book delves into ordinary Cubans’ views about the achievements and failures of the revolutionary process. Encouraging women and men to speak about what mattered most to them, rather than to their government, or its nemesis in Miami, prompted a torrent of memories, some expected many unexpected. People recounted the ecstasies and the agonies of the 1960s. How the withering away and later resurgence of social stratification affected their lives; and the ways gender roles and racial stereotypes changed, and how they stayed the same. Older Cubans frequently boasted of occupational accomplishments, but the young despaired that the jobs they sought had disappeared.
The pressure in Cuba to talk the talk cultivated silence in the public sphere. But surprisingly these interviews are laced with hidden histories of religiosity, migration, family separation, surveillance and control. They dramatise the ways people embraced, succumbed to, and resisted conforming to the official model of the good Cuban. Keeping in mind that life history combines past and present ‘in a single breath,’ Memories of the Cuban Revolution examines how Cubans’ recent economic difficulties influenced their recollections of the past.
Dore draws our attention to three red threads in this tapestry of memories. First, Cubans across the board complained bitterly about their material difficulties. Second, critically or approvingly, narrators described how political participation was minutely orchestrated from above. Third, many older Cubans—no younger ones-- repeated the official slogan ‘Gracias a Fidel’, and expressed gratitude to the comandante for giving them education, a pension and by-pass operation. While these themes might seem unrelated, Dore believes they are inextricably intertwined. The revolution’s record on schooling and medical care has been outstanding by any measure. And although Cubans agonized about food rations and housing, in comparison with citizens of other countries Cubans do quite well. Yet because people have been excluded from any real engagement in the body politic, indicting the government for what it did not provide became the substitute for political participation.
This project is unique, and the book will be of huge interest to many. A major deficit in the study of Cuba has been the failure to do extensive field research, something that is extremely difficult to accomplish on the island. Dr Dore led the first large oral history enterprise authorised by the Cuban government since a similar study by the renowned anthropologist Oscar Lewis was closed down in 1970. This project was a partnership between 8 Cuban and 2 British researchers. Dore negotiated one of the most complicated bureaucracies in the world and gathered 100 extensive life histories not just in Havana, where research is eminently easier, but also out in the provinces.
After power passed from Fidel Castro to his brother, transition became the number one topic of discussion among academics, policymakers, journalists and members of the general public interested in Cuba. Yet these conversations are missing an important element in the equation: what the people who matter, ordinary Cubans, think about their lives, their society and their future. This project rectifies that absence.
For more information please see Professor Dore's page at http://www.soton.ac.uk/ml/profiles/dore.html
Image © istockphoto.com/KieselUndStein