Book review

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/intejcubastud.7.2.0277
• Pages: 277336-278
• Published date: 01 December 2015
• Date: 01 December 2015
• Author: Benjamin Willis

BOOK REVIEWs 277

IJCS Produced and distributed by Pluto Journals www.plutojournals.com/ijcs/

Ilan Ehrlich, Eduardo Chibás: The Incorrigible Man of Cuban Politics

(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015) hb 336pp. IsBN:

9781442241176

Reviewed by Benjamin Willis

Eduardo René Chibás played a singular role in the history of Cuban politics. He

was active as a leader of the student revolutionary movement that ousted the

ruthless dictator Gerardo Machado in 1933, had a hand in drafting the 1940

Cuban constitution which was one of the most progressive documents of its time

when ratified, was a representative and senator in Cuba’s Congress, was a strong

candidate for president of the Republic of Cuba in 1948 and the favourite to win

that office in 1952. He influenced millions of his countrymen as host of the most

popular radio programme on the island and was the founder and leader of the

Ortodoxo political party. To try and fit all of his accomplishments into a defini-

tive tome would be a formidable task, as it would take several volumes to pro-

vide a comprehensive biography of one of Cuba’s most charismatic politicians.

With that no doubt in mind, author Ilan Ehrlich focuses on the period of time

when Chibás founded the Ortodoxo party in March 1947 until his surreal sui-

cide in August 1951 in his detailed study Eduardo Chibás: The Incorrigible Man

of Cuban Politics. While a period of a little over four years might seem to be an

insufficient cross section of a political career, Ehrlich’s extensive recounting of

this dynamic era provides a lucid argument for affirming Chibás’ importance in

the Cuban pantheon.

While an infinite amount of verbiage has been posited about democracy in

Cuba, the truth is that the island has only experimented with this concept for an

eight-year period out of its over-five-hundred-year history, specifically from

1944 until Fulgencio Batista’s military coup in 1952. During that time, the island

suffered from rapacious graft and corruption, bloody violence from triggermen

bankrolled by criminal politicians and the many Mafia members and other gang-

sters that were entrenched in all forms of the island’s economy, repressive police

and armed forces that silenced many forms of protest, and a political class that

was more interested in enriching themselves and making agreements with other

political parties in order to maintain power.

Aghast at these conditions and other machinations that Chibás deemed as a

betrayal of the revolutionary roots of the Auténtico party and his erstwhile com-

rade President Ramón Grau San Martín, he and a group of pro-Chibás Auténticos

launched the Ortodoxo party claiming that he was more interested in ‘ideology

without pacts than pacts without ideology’. He coined the slogan ‘Vergüenza

contra el Dinero’ (Shame versus Money) and remained steadfast to the promise