Hugh Thomas - Cuba: A History

I began to write this book on an evening in Havana in July 1961. I stood in the Plaza de la Revolucin listening to a speech by Fidel Castro. The immense crowd were treating the occasion as a picnic, despite the sombre tones of the impassioned orator. Small boys sold drinks and hats from stalls and brilliantly dressed girls shook with pleasure as the maximum leader of the revolution lashed himself into a fury against the government of President Kennedy. At about a quarter past eight in the evening, when the sun was beginning to die behind the statue to the Cuban liberator, Jos Mart, Castros voice began to give out and it was clear that, though he had not finished his speech (it had by then lasted only four hours), he needed a rest. Doubtless by prearrangement with cheerleaders, the orator allowed one of his remarks to be drowned by shouts and the singing first of the Cuban national anthem, then of the International.

In the section of the crowd where I stood, a group of Cubans, some white, some mulatto, some Negro, a few women, began to sing and dance the International to a cha-cha-cha rhythm, the song itself being sung by a huge Negress in the centre, the choruses by a laughing circle round her. The words came over with bizarre syncopation, arriba hijos, de la tierra . As Andr Breton years before said to the Cuban painter Wilfredo Lam, Ce pays est vraiment trop surralists pour y habiter.

The consequence was that I, who had gone to Cuba that summer with the intention of writing a short book about the current scene, embarked on a longer project, in order to explore the springs of this curious event in which I had participated. In the course of the work, I extended the starting point further and further backwards; originally I had thought that the book should begin with Batistas coup dtat in 1952. But this seemed to miss too much and so I looked backwards further to that morning in January 1899 when the last Spanish Captain-General of Cuba sadly handed over power to an Anglo-Saxon, North American general. But that also omitted the absorbing question of slavery and how that decisively affected the character of Cuba, not to speak of the golden age of Cuban sugar in the nineteenth century; and so, after wondering whether there could be such a thing at all as a starting point to the book I had in mind (other than Columbuss journey to Cuba in 1492), I finally selected 1762, the year of the first Anglo-Saxon capture of Havana a year of great importance in the history of Cuba and of the Spanish empire, though just how important is controversial. Afterwards, it seemed to me in Cuba that this decision was wise since so much that seems obscure in the present Cuban scene becomes more comprehensible if set against the experiences of the previous four or five generations.

The outcome is a long book. Half of it, plainly, is history; but, in the second half, I enter upon contemporary politics, and by the time the revolution of 1959 is reached I am in a no-mans-land between history, politics, sociology and journalism. This raises special questions: some will say that it is premature to write this part of the story, at least as history, since the necessary historical perspective does not exist. Of course it is harder to write of the recent past with an historians eye than of a more distant time. But all happenings, from the moment they cease to be future possibilities, are historical events. Often, indeed, they are allowed to suffer from neglect for some decades before being subjected to historical attention. An event is often a wound which, temporarily bound up by the journalist as if he were a field doctor, is then allowed to wait, even to fester, till it is treated by the surgeon at the hospital, the professor of history. As a result, a paradox arises: journalists and newspaper proprietors concern themselves with the immediate present and the future; historians prefer the safe frontiers of remoteness, where nearly all the facts seem at hand or are irretrievably lost and when those who played a part in the events described are dead and unable to answer. The recent past is thus often less studied than almost any other age.