The Epic of Cuba Libre

Éric Morales-Franceschini describes his own text as a “peculiar book” (p. 59). Indeed, it reads as if written by someone earnestly ambivalent about its subject matter. The Epic of Cuba Libre is about an idea born during Cuba's long independence struggle with Spain (1868–98): the idea of a free Cuba. But Morales-Franceschini does not only analyze the immediate postindependence period. Rather, he examines how this idea becomes mythologized, appropriated, repurposed, and critiqued in Cuba up through the 1990s. Within the epic of Cuba libre, the author detects a decolonial impulse, one characterized by an “obediential aesthetic”—that is, an aesthetic that emanates from the people and their liberatory imagination rather than from the state and its fetishized power (p. 14). It is this kernel of resistance embedded within the epic itself that allows Morales-Franceschini to thread the needle between the pitfalls of the traditional epic form and the potential of the decolonial epic.Each chapter represents a profound critique of an aspect of the epic of Cuba libre, while the book as a whole questions the appropriateness of the epic as a form for Cuba's present and future. Despite this tension, Morales-Franceschini resists abandoning the epic because he acknowledges its power. He suggests that new heroes and new stories are needed for our troubled global future and that those heroes might be readily found in Cuba, especially today. Morales-Franceschini argues that the decolonial epic conveys multiple emancipatory possibilities especially when read dialectically or across multiple sources and genres. It is in the tension between the dominant epic tale and its contesters that Morales-Franceschini's analysis resides. His exhaustive source list includes poetry, plays, monuments, memoirs, songs, speeches, and films, all of which form a “copious archive” that he mines for stories. The epic of Cuba libre is crafted and recrafted over multiple textual forms and genres and over multiple decades, shifting as the historical context of Cuba changes. Morales-Franceschini's critical exegesis of Cuba libre elaborated over five chapters renders a rich and detailed study of the power and limitations of the stories we use to understand our past and set course for the future.As Morales-Franceschini notes, the classical epic tale hinges on the sober and inspiring heroism of brave and able-bodied, skillful, masculine, white males. In these stories, women are confined to supporting roles, and people of color are ancillary. Such was true of the epic of Cuba libre as well. Over the course of five chapters, however, Morales-Franceschini shows how this dominant figure has been continually contested in Cuba during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Chapter 1 centers Black resistance to counter the myth of the white hero. Chapter 2 unsettles the myth of the male hero by foregrounding feminist readings. Chapter 3 takes on the sober nature of the epic form, underscoring the importance and tradition of humor and satire. Chapter 4 problematizes heroic violence by exploring the realities of the battlefield. And chapter 5 demystifies the idea of heroic death by juxtaposing the idea with the reconcentration camps that took the lives of most of those sacrificed during the wars. In each case, Morales-Franceschini shows painstakingly how the dominant myth was constructed through a concerted denial of reality and how that denial was challenged. For example, in chapter 1, the myth of the white hero prevailed even despite the fact that most independence war rebels were men of color. This representation (or repression of reality) did not go uncontested. Morales-Franceschini explains how the idea of the white hero propagated during the first republic was continually challenged by Black activists in Cuba through the 1940s. After the 1959 revolution, and especially after Cuba aligned itself with decolonial struggles in Africa, the Black heroes of the independence war were given their due. Not stopping in the 1970s, however, Morales-Franceschini pushes through the 1990s to observe yet another reversal as racial discrimination and disparity returned during the period after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which came to be known as the Special Period in Cuba. Each of the five chapters traces the tumultuous and continuously contested efforts to shape Cuba's national narrative. By the end of the book, the reader feels tempest-tossed for sure. Morales-Franceschini concludes that it is not so much the epic itself that is the problem as the kinds of heroes and tales that it enfolds. He proposes that Cubans might replace the Mambí (the Cuban independence war hero) with the agriculturalist or the green medicine healer—which, after all, the Mambís also were. But this reader couldn't help feeling rather skeptical about the value of the epic (decolonial or not) by the end and was left wondering if the epic form itself renders the kind of liberation sought after by the subalterns in this book impossible. The book will be accessible to a general readership interested in Cuban culture. It will be especially useful in undergraduate classrooms but is also appropriate for graduate classes in history as well as Latin American and Caribbean studies

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