Why am I passionate about this?
As the eldest daughter raised in an Evangelical home in rural Pennsylvania, I was immersed in normative, Anglo notions of gender and the family. I built on this embodied experience to cultivate expertise in discourse about the family and labor in early revolutionary Cuba. Perhaps surprisingly, the celebration of patriarchy, monogamy, and heterosexuality that bracketed my youth was also an important element of Cuban revolutionary discourse of the 1960s—albeit within a very different context. I received my PhD in Latin American and Caribbean History from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Dartmouth College. I am now an independent scholar.
Rachel's book list on defying the narrative of early revolutionary Cuba
Why did Rachel love this book?
This transformative book explores the early years of the Cuban Revolution from the ground up, arguing that revolutionary leadership constructed hegemony gradually—gaining popular support by creating a “grand narrative” that envisioned the Revolution as an opportunity for spiritual and political redemption. Guerra shows that leaders also censured alternative narratives and voices that challenged their monopoly over power. And because government organizations deputized citizens to defend the state, they inadvertently created “unintended dissidents,” as well as vast numbers of supporters. These arguments and more make this exceptional book a controversial one as well.
1 author picked Visions of Power in Cuba as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
In the tumultuous first decade of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro and other leaders saturated the media with altruistic images of themselves in a campaign to win the hearts of Cuba's six million citizens. In Visions of Power in Cuba, Lillian Guerra argues that these visual representations explained rapidly occurring events and encouraged radical change and mutual self-sacrifice.
Mass rallies and labor mobilizations of unprecedented scale produced tangible evidence of what Fidel Castro called ""unanimous support"" for a revolution whose ""moral power"" defied U.S. control. Yet participation in state-orchestrated spectacles quickly became a requirement for political inclusion in a new…