Forgotten Voices: Cuba at War.

Growing up among Cubans of older generations, many of us could not escape the proverbial phrase más se perdió en la Guerra (far more was lost in the war). Whether responding to the accidental crash of cherished porcelain on the kitchen floor or a child's lackluster performance on an exam at school, our abuelas and tía-abuelas especially seemed to find solace in comparing relatively minor disappointments with the profound scars suffered when Cuba had been at war. No doubt four centuries of slavery, three independence struggles against Spain, US military interventions, and countless armed protests intended to topple or transform nonrepresentative governments left indelible memories of pain and a thirst for political justice, the legacies of which live on.In the wake of more than two years of pandemic-imposed isolation and an innumerable array of crises that have steadily come to engulf the island of Cuba, we share this small collection of ten previously unpublished and virtually unknown documents from two of Cuba's most important archival and manuscript collections. Read together, these forgotten, seldom-heard voices encompass the many ways war, militarism, and violence immersed Cubans' individual hopes and identities in the collective search for salvation and what one might call "the generational task of saving the world by saving the nation." Below follow startling examples of letters that anonymous citizens wrote to Cuba's legendary general Máximo Gómez as well as the writings and personal correspondence received by several great female patriots like "la Cubanita," Ritica Suárez del Villar y Suárez del Villar (1862–1961), María Cabrales Viuda de Maceo (1842–1905) and "La Delegada" Magdalena Peñarredonda (1846–1937), captain of the Liberating Army of Cuba whom José Martí appointed to represent the Partido Revolucionario Cubano in the pivotal province of Pinar del Río as well as the strategic operative and personal friend of General Antonio Maceo. Together these documents reveal not only an all-encompassing politicization that some may find surprising but an explicit sense of pride and gender equality already achieved in the camaraderie of crisis, activism, and war.Although predominantly drawn from the cycle of struggle and trauma produced during Cuba's last War for Independence in 1895 and the subsequent US military occupation (1898–1902), we have also included three striking documents from the personal collection of Ofelia Domínguez Navarro, a Communist Party militant and lawyer from Cienfuegos known for her work on behalf of women's rights and her election to Cuba's 1940 Constitutional Convention. Although made famous by her early activism and persecution in the fight to oust Cuba's president-turned-dictator Gerardo Machado, Domínguez Navarro's three-year-stint as Fulgencio Batista's minister of propaganda during Batista's only elected presidency (1940–1944) is almost entirely erased from history. From 1941, when Cuba joined the Allied powers to fight the Nazis and Japanese, no soldiers ever served in any front. However, Domínguez Navarro not only oversaw the organization and training of a Civil Defense corps; she also broadcast weekly radio shows detailing the nature of the Third Reich's genocidal policies and the radical threat that fascism represented in this hemisphere. One of the highlights of this selection of documents is a poster designed under Domínguez Navarro's watch that ascribes direct historical links between the anti-racist, anti-imperialist, and democratic vision of nation Cubans espoused during their nineteenth-century independence wars and the kind of unconditional support for the Allied cause needed to defeat modern-day totalitarianism.Today, few historians of Cuba would dispute the pronounced shifts in once-accepted narratives that have marked the past few decades in our field. Astonishing discoveries of new knowledge and bold interpretations of hidden archives have cracked open and sometimes demolished long-standing taboos. Perhaps no greater strides have been made in the historiography of Cuba than those related to the centrality, agency, leadership, intellectual contributions, resistance, and repression of Black Cubans, the enslaved and others of African descent. Remarkably, female Cubans' experience, whatever their class, racial identity, or heritage, remains less examined, subsumed—some might argue—into the often gargantuan task of simply gaining access in Cuba to any archives or library's primary source collections. This is especially true when it comes to certain periods of history, such as the 1930s to the 1950s, let alone key topics, such as Cuba's postcommunist history of agrarian reform, industrial relations, punitive use of labor camps, property confiscations, and the like.For this reason, it is often as challenging as it is tantalizing to encounter unexpected voices from the past that speak in ways that are familiar while also exotic and unknown. We hope that this dossier of Forgotten Voices inspires readers to examine further the unceasing faith in Cuba's ability to correct the failings of the past and abiding— even relentless—optimism in the future that their words evoke. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]