Book review

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/intejcubastud.12.1.0155
• Published date: 01 July 2020
• Date: 01 July 2020
• Pages: 155-157
• Author: Toloo Riazi

booK REVIEWS 155

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

Anna Clayfield, The Guerrilla Legacy of the Cuban Revolution (Gainesville,

FL: University of Florida Press, 2019), pb 204pp. ISBN: 9781683400899

Reviewed by Toloo Riazi1

The focus of The Guerrilla Legacy of the Cuban Revolution by Anna Clayfield,

published in 2019, is the guerrilla origin of the Cuban Revolution that helped

not only the creation, circulation, repetition and perpetuation of certain state-

ments, but also the legitimacy of certain beliefs and values in Cuba’s public

imagination (p. 11). Clayfield basically investigates the ways in which the guer-

rilla legacy of the Cuban Revolution is employed to shape the Cuban people’s

perception of the revolution in its aftermath. As indicated by Fidel Castro, the

Cuban Revolution is ‘olive green . . . the color of the uniform of the Rebel Army’

(quoted on p. 165). In her book, the author argues that the replication of the

past and of revolutionary heroes has been present for six decades after the tri-

umph of the revolution. Evidence is displayed throughout the book. Analysis of

slogans and images, verbal and visual languages, political culture, and venera-

tion and emulation of revolutionary heroes are some of the tropes at the disposal

of the author to develop her thesis. Clayfield adopts a chronological structure to

analyse the revolution and its aftermath. She puts an extensive range of newspa-

pers, Fidel Castro’s speeches, history books, Che Guevara’s writings, and army

manuals under scrutiny to prove her argument.

Clayfield’s first chapter provides a brief yet important history of guerrilla

warfare and the triumph of the Cuban Revolution. She assigns primary impor-

tance to romanticised images of rebels and shows how Fidel Castro and his

comrades constantly bound themselves and their cause to the martyrs of the

Cuban War of Independence and Che Guevara, as the ultimate embodiment of

sacrifice, in order to create a line of continuity that would reinvent those glori-

ous days and grant them historical legitimacy. Clayfield explores, in particular,

the figure of Che Guevara in this chapter and works on Che’s doctrine on sacri-

fice, foco theory, subjective conditions, conversion, and redemption, inter alia.

She discusses that the guerrilla legacy has as much to do with the utopian future

as with the past. The official discourse, as Clayfield discusses, found Guevara to

be useful in keeping the revolutionary mandate alive.

The second chapter offers a convincing argument about the role of language

promoting guerrillerismo and in constituting the Cuban people’s conception of

the revolution, which is also a matter of ‘words and wordings’ (quoted on p. 8).

Clayfield draws on Michel Foucault and his regime of truth and explores some

1 Toloo Riazi is a lecturer at University of California, Santa Barbara.