Patriots and Traitors in Revolutionary Cuba, 1961–1981

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.

More Praise

Guerra’s latest book thus provides a much-needed account of revolutionary regime consolidation that equally considers both the role of political elites and the publics they govern in the process of establishing and maintaining both hegemonic and coercive structures to govern the new, “revolutionary” society.

H-Net Reviews

No other historian has even tried to reconstruct, as Guerra does, how structures of hegemony and control were so efficiently built in postrevolutionary Cuba. As Cuba’s future becomes increasingly open to diverging views and possible paths, conflicts over what ‘patria’ is and who can legitimately claim it will become more central, perhaps even more violent. Patriots and Traitors is the first historical reconstruction of that future.

Alejandro de la Fuente, Harvard University

In this book, Lillian Guerra has undertaken one of the most authoritative investigations of the national security system that Fidel Castro put in to place to control nearly all aspects of the social and political life of Cuban citizens who did not or could not leave for exile abroad. Never before has one scholar described in such great detail the institutions of repression on the island and how they functioned. Scholars and general readers alike now have a convenient reference to the kind of system that kept the revolution in power through tumultuous times.

Jonathan C. Brown, University of Texas at Austin

It convincingly shows how the Cuban state uses these foreign threats to convince everyday citizens to not just surrender their rights but aid in depriving others of theirs in order to build a hegemonic project that guarantees collective sovereignty at the cost of individual rights.

Andres Sebastian Pertierra, University of Wisconsin-Madison

This study shows a wealth of detail, an eloquent style, and a willingness to question more established orthodoxies, highlighting aspects of post-1959 Cuba that deserve historiographical interrogation and providing a rich base for further research.

Hispanic American Historical Review

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