In 1891, Cuban independence leader José Martí gave a speech including a line that described his understanding of a republic: “With all and for the good of all.” For author Julio César Guanche, this simple phrase is “the most radical statement in Cuban history.” With a titular nod to Marti’s inclusive vision, ¿Quienes Somos Todos? offers a reinterpretation of Cuba’s enduring democratic-republican tradition, which has been silenced and stigmatized, by unearthing its popular and egalitarian historical roots. In three chapters, each dedicated to the cardinal values of the French Revolution—that is, liberty, equality, and fraternity—Guanche explores the past and present of the Cuban Republic as an intellectual and political project. In the process, he offers remarkable insights into critical events and debates that dominated the Cuban public sphere over the last five to ten years.
In the book’s first chapter, dedicated to fraternity, Guanche reflects on “the republican notion of the homeland.” Guanche argues that the homeland is where one is not only born but also where one lives fraternally, in freedom and reciprocal equality. Several essays investigate the historical origin of “democratic patriotism” in Cuba and the political project of the “fraternal republic.” Guanche maps these concepts back to the popular culture and political practice of the leaders of the nineteenth century anti-colonial revolution, including Antonio Maceo, José Martí, and Carlos Manuel de Céspedes.
Yet Guanche also shows, through meticulous historiographical work, that Cuban women and Cuban immigrants in the United States who were active in the independence struggles also drove a conception of fraternity as “collective patriotism.” This fraternal political program of common coexistence and respect for the people’s plurality rejects a nation understood as an oligarchic, patriarchal, and white supremacist project. Likewise, the author suggests that it also challenges the top-down understanding of socialism that reduces social complexity to the dichotomies of revolutionaries versus counterrevolutionaries or patriots versus mercenaries. Recent popular demonstrations in which the author himself took part, such as the spontaneous sit-in in front of the Ministry of Culture on November 27, 2020, are examples of the revolutionary power of fraternity.
The second chapter uses republican thought to critically analyze political practices and legal-institutional barriers that limit or cancel the full realization of freedom in today’s Cuba. Drawing on the democratic-republican conception of freedom as an “absence of domination,” Guanche and his co-authors in this chapter expose legalized arbitrary interferences in freedoms of artistic creation, press and expression, and the right of association, protest, and assembly. Such intrusions were justified during the 2018 popular consultation process, in the new 2019 Constitution, and the widely denounced decrees 349 and 370 through indeterminate concepts of morality, ideological loyalty, and the defense of national security or the public/socialist order.
This chapter provides a compelling analysis of the context, causes, and immediate outcomes of the massive protests of July 11, 2021— the largest demonstrations in Cuba since 1959. Among the causes, demands against political and ideological exclusion stand out significantly. The book points out growing areas of socioeconomic exclusion and inequality, especially to the detriment of women and Afro-Cubans. Even though these inequalities emerged during the economic crisis of the 1990s, the author rightfully acknowledges that the 2010 economic reforms and the economic adjudgment implemented in the context of COVID-19 exacerbated them.
The democratic-republican critique of this complex context also proposes alternatives to the repressive state response, carried through legal and extralegal means, to the July 11 protests and other forms of civic resistance such as the artivism of Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara. Moreover, for the realization of freedom, Guanche argues, the end of the U.S. blockade and intrusion in Cuban affairs is as indispensable as the cessation of state authoritarianism. Contrary to neoliberal ideology, the author does not propose eliminating the state’s role as regulator and guarantor of human rights and national sovereignty but to remake the relationship between the state and citizenry. The state is the “mandate” of the people, he argues. The people—including its dissident, marginalized, and impoverished sectors—are “the sovereign,” not “the enemy.”
The last chapter, dedicated to equality, recognizes the expansion of this principle in the new Cuban Constitution of 2019 by explicitly prohibiting discrimination based on “gender identity, sexual orientation, age, ethnic origin, skin color, religious belief, and disability.” At the same time, it investigates the limitations of the full inclusion of “all” that Martí dreamed of, focusing on the longevity and reproduction of interpersonal and structural racism in Cuba. In this regard, Guanche tells us that anti-Black racism is not a “vestige” of the past but a central component of Cuban national formation. The author also underscores Cuba’s anti-racist tradition, recognizing both its political plurality and its unrelenting defense of the legitimacy of resistance against racial oppression. In this vein, Guanche offers a revisionist analysis of the Partido de los Independientes de Color, an anti-racist party that launched a series of protests in 1912 to demand the inclusion of Afro-Cubans. Defying the commonplace interpretation of these actors as “annexationists” and reclaiming them as part of Cuba’s democratic-republican tradition is an act of historical justice with profound contemporary ramifications. It suggests that Black liberation, along with other emancipatory struggles, are constituent parts of Cuban democracy and equality, not a blow against Cuban “unity” and sovereignty.
The order of the chapters inverts the original sequence provided by the French Revolution to its cardinal values. Putting fraternity first may be read as part of Guanche’s contribution to the Cuban democratic-republican project. Following one of his mentors, the Catalan republican philosopher Toni Domenech, Guanche also attempts to correct the overlooking and incomprehension of fraternity in modern political thought and practice, including the socialist tradition. Two additional tasks might contribute to this effort.
First, the author leaves unnoticed the significant contributions of feminist activist-scholars whose works expand the political possibilities of fraternal democracy. On the one hand, the long tradition of Black feminism's “love politics” in the United States. On the other, the Latin American feminist project of a “republic of care.” Both frameworks relocate affections outside the realm of the merely domestic, personal, or private to re-imagine the construction of political communities. At the same time, a politics of love and care recognizes the conflictual nature of democracy and the legitimacy of political rage in the face of injustice and oppression, especially if sustained and masked by law. Identifying synergies between republicanism and feminism might also be a way to facilitate the articulation among civil society actors who engage with these ideas as part of their social justice activism in Cuba. As the author suggests, the dialogue among existing political imaginaries and cultures in Cuba is a premise for the reinvention of Cuban socialism.
Second, studying the historical origins of Cuba’s democratic-republican tradition may benefit from paying greater attention to experiences of anti-slavery plebeian republicanism before and during the independence movement of the nineteenth century. Likewise, the critical analysis of the potential realization of a democratic socialist republic in Cuba demands a more comprehensive investigation of the apparently inescapable opposition between socialism and republicanism that began, according to the author, not long after the 1959 revolutionary triumph. It is essential to understand the role played in this development by the process of state institutionalization in the 1970s and 1980s. Equally relevant is to map how official political discourses and practices construct an image of discontinuity between republic and revolution. Such genealogical work should also document the censoring, silencing, and stigmatization suffered by socialist intellectuals who dedicated a big part of their lives to contesting this forced divorce. I am thinking here of the late Julio Fernández Bulté and Juan Valdés Paz, or, more recently, the author himself and other socialist republicanists of his generation, such as Julio Antonio Fernández Estrada and René Fidel González García.
These minor criticisms aside, the book stands as a testament to the unwavering commitment of a public intellectual and a jurist to the cause of social justice. The author’s work tackling intricate legal matters and empowering people to comprehend, utilize, and shape the laws that impact them is a significant stride towards justice. The texts are accessibly written, and many have already been shared with a broad audience through digital newspapers, social networks, public talks, and the author’s blog. The essays also reflect Guanche’s movement, both physically among different geographical locations, and among scholarly disciplines such as history, legal studies, and sociology. This too is visible in the book: Whether from Havana, Quito, Chicago, or Frankfurt, Guanche relates Cuba to a broader global context, including the “new Latin American constitutionalism,” the 2019-2020 anti-neoliberal protests, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the debates around the toppling of public statues and monuments. Putting Cuba in dialogue with these other processes questions “Cuban exceptionalism.” It might also be inspiring for younger generations of Cubans, increasingly in the diaspora, who advocate for a free and just Cuba for all.
Amalia Pérez Martín is a Cuban jurist and sociologist. She is currently Assistant Professor of Sociology at California State University in Sacramento.
