No Barrier Can Contain It

During the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), roughly 35,000 men and women from more than 60 countries volunteered to form part of the International Brigades, which came to the aid of the Second Spanish Republic, as the nation's democratically elected government attempted to put down a military uprising led by right-wing military forces.Why did those men and women volunteer to fight fascism in Spain?If we could visit a perfect archive, with magical access into the documentation and even the thought processes of each one of the volunteers, we could come up with 35,000 different answers to this single question.(Or perhaps even more, as many of the volunteers often gave different-and at times conflicting-answers to this question, depending on the identity of their interlocutor, and the date of the response.)Another approach-though one not without its own limitations and pitfalls-would be to assemble an archive that revealed the motivations of the volunteers from each of the nations whence the volunteers hailed.In this beautifully researched, tightly structured, and elegantly written book, Ariel Mae Lambe provides a rich and multilayered set of responses to this question, in the specific context of the more than 1,000 Cuban-born volunteers who took up arms against the right-wing insurgents in Spain.With rigor and creativity, she nimbly shuttles between the biographical and the national contexts of Cuban antifascism, noting on almost every page how the individual lives of so many Cubans, as well as the history and the projects of the Caribbean nation writ large, were already (and still are) immersed in transnational processes.She demonstrates how traveling across an ocean to fight in what was supposedly a "foreign" war could be thought of, by the protagonists themselves, not only as a form of international solidarity, not only a means toward self-fulfillment and self-loyalty, but also as a more or less direct intervention in the construction of a New Cuba.Chapter 1 explores the complex intersections of Cuban national politics in the 1920s and 1930s with the rise of fascism (and, ergo, antifascism).Chapter 2 explores Cuban responses to Mussolini's 1935 invasion of Ethiopia, paying special attention to the reactions and actions of Communists and Afrodescendants.Chapters 3 and 4 focus on the extraordinary married couple Pablo de la Torriente Brau and Tete Casuso.De la Torriente fought and died in Spain, becoming an early martyr to Cuban-and international-antifascism, as well an important recruitment icon for Cuban volunteers in both Havana and New

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Linguistics · Political science · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Classics · Cuban History and Society · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Philosophy