Structure of Cuban History by Pérez Louis A.;

Author:Pérez, Louis A.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2013-04-12T04:00:00+00:00

Efforts at national sovereignty and self-determination had failed again. Some things did change, to be sure. The Platt Amendment was abrogated in 1934, although the United States kept control of Cuban territory on which it had established the Guantánamo naval base. The subsequent promulgation of the 1940 constitution was received with enthusiasm and expectation that perhaps the new constitutional order would provide a way to fulfill Cuban aspirations. The election of Ramón Grau San Martín as president in 1944 raised hopes of better things to come. These hopes did not last long.

The events of the 1930s passed into the collective memory as la revolución frustrada. The men and women of the 1920s and 1930s had committed themselves to the fulfillment of the nineteenth-century ideal of nation. The past had informed the purpose to which their politics was put and shaped the program to which their efforts were directed, but to no avail. The mobilizations of the 1920s and early 1930s ended in frustration, and another generation was thwarted. “I confronted the tyranny in my nation in 1933,” reflects Ricardo in the José Antonio Ramos play FU-3001 (1944). “And from the failure of the revolution to this very day, I have lived without a sense of purpose.”180

The reform project of the 1930s had failed, but the purpose of the past persisted: a people awaiting fulfillment. “It is worth remembering,” Pablo de la Torriente wrote from New York in 1936, “now more than ever, that the revolution for which we struggle is exactly the one that fell mortally wounded with the fatal bullet of Dos Ríos” (that is, the death of José Martí).181 The struggle of the 1930s—“to be who we wish to be”—Raúl Roa reflected years later, “had its roots in the process of the previous century.” Roa added: “Our perspective and our attitude were sustained . . . in the enduring example and the unfulfilled ideal of 1868 and 1895, that continues to act as the driving force in shaping our destiny. Each generation has its proper task. The task of our generation was—and continues to be—to transform into a historical reality the revolutionary principles that the generations heir to the liberation legacy [el legado mambí] repudiated and trampled upon.” Cubans were obligated, Roa insisted, to pursue the nineteenth-century project of nation as a matter of “historic duty,” and “the fate of that revolution [of independence] is our fate,” bearing as much relevance to Cubans in the 1930s as it had to Cubans in the 1890s. “It is in being a revolution of this type,” Roa insisted, “that it derives its nationalist tenor and anti-imperialist character. . . . From this condition, to revive the pursuit of the thwarted objectives of the revolution of 1895 and [from which] it obtains its battle cry: ‘Cuba for Cubans’ . . . it seeks respect for our sovereignty and the independent development of Cuban life.”182

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