CLAS Lecture: "Feeling like Fidel": Legacies, Memory & Official Amnesia in Today's Cuba

For decades, Fidel Castro demanded self-surveillance and self-censorship from citizens as conduits for collective empowerment and national security in revolutionary Cuba. More than a slogan, the goal of "feeling like Fidel" for generations of Cubans became both a mandate of state pedagogy and a substitute for citizen control over government. Yet, when the Cuban state adopted capitalism in 1993, memories of fidelista  Communism's reliance on willful forms of self-repression became as taboo as citizens' efforts to resist them. Today, the greatest legacies of Fidel Castro may be found in the state’s losing battle against the unofficial, historically informed memory of citizens.​

Lillian Guerra is the author of four scholarly books of Caribbean history, three of them on Cuba: The Myth of José Martí: Conflicting Nationalisms in Early Twentieth-Century Cuba" (2005), Visions of Power in Cuba: Revolution, Redemption and Resistance, 1959-1971 (2013) and Heroes, Martyrs and Political Messiahs in Revolutionary Cuba, 1946-1958, in press for release by Yale University Press this January 2018. Currently, she is finishing another book called "Patriots and Traitors in Cuba, 1961-1981" for Duke University Press. A recent recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim and American Council of Learned Societies Fellowships, Guerra's Visions of Power in Cuba won 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. She teaches modern Latin American history at the University of Florida.

Dr. Guerra's talk is part of a half-day event entitled "Cuba After Fidel: Reflections on his Legacy Past, Present, and Future", which includes a roundtable discussion and screening of rare documentary footage of Cuban youth in the 1960s. Visit our website for more info.