Lillian Guerra

Lillian Guerra is the author of many scholarly articles, works of public history, creative writing and five books of history: Popular Expression and National Identity in Puerto Rico (University Press of Florida, 1998), The Myth of José Martí: Conflicting Nationalisms in Early Twentieth-Century Cuba (University of North Carolina Press, 2005), and Visions of Power in Cuba: Revolution, Redemption and Resistance, 1959-1971 (University of North Carolina Press, 2012), which received the 2014 Bryce Wood Book Award from the Latin American Studies Association, its most prestigious prize for a book on Latin America across all fields. Dr. Guerra’s fourth book, published by Yale University Press in 2018, is titled Heroes, Martyrs and Political Messiahs in Revolutionary Cuba, 1946-1958. In 2023, Guerra published Patriots and Traitors in Revolutionary Cuba, 1961-1981, the third of her trilogy on the Cuban Revolution, with the University of Pittsburgh Press. From 2013-2024, she served as the Book Review Editor of the journal Cuban Studies.

Patriots and Traitors in Revolutionary Cuba, 1961–1981

By Lillian Guerra

Authorities in postrevolutionary Cuba worked to establish a binary society in which citizens were either patriots or traitors. This all-or-nothing approach reflected in the familiar slogan “patria o muerte” (fatherland or death) has recently been challenged in protests that have adopted the theme song “patria y vida” (fatherland and life), a collaboration by exiles that, predictably, has been banned in Cuba itself. Lillian Guerra excavates the rise of a Soviet-advised Communist culture controlled by state institutions and the creation of a multidimensional system of state security whose functions embedded themselves into daily activities and individual consciousness and reinforced these binaries. But despite public performance of patriotism, the life experience of many Cubans was somewhere in between. Guerra explores these in-between spaces and looks at Cuban citizens’ complicity with authoritarianism, leaders’ exploitation of an earnest anti-imperialist nationalism, and the duality of an existence that contains elements of both support and betrayal of a nation and of an ideology.