The late historian Elizabeth Dore spent the final 20 years of her life directing “Cuban Voices,” a Ford Foundation-sponsored oral history project aimed at collecting memories of the Cuban Revolution by interviewing scores of everyday Cubans over what turned out to be a period of 15 years. In 2023, Duke University Press published Dore’s provocatively titled book, How Things Fall Apart: What Happened to the Cuban Revolution, posthumously. It tells modern Cuba’s story of both resilience and survival on the one hand, and decline, disintegration, and decay on the other.
It does this by tracing the intricate contours of the lives of seven islanders from the post-Soviet generation over the past four decades, starting during the relative “golden age” of Cuban socialism in the 1980s and concluding during the unprecedented economic, social, and political crisis of the present. Indeed, Dore allows her readers to hear a wide variety of Cuban voices as the narrators explain their struggle to survive a deepening crisis where inequality is ever more rampant, desperation forces ever greater numbers of Cubans to emigrate, and the government does not hesitate (in Dore’s concluding words) “to use brutal methods to maintain control” and “instill fear” since its legitimacy has long since evaporated.
The oral history project itself – which lasted from 2004 to 2018 – involved a team of 10 Cuban interviewers, 3 Brits, Dore herself (an American expatriate who lived and worked in the United Kingdom), and 124 interviewees across eight Cuban provinces. Dore managed to secure official approval and sponsorship through the good offices of CENESEX director Mariela Castro Espín, whom Dore learned had “a reputation for fighting for lost causes” from fellow team member and historian Julio César González Pagés. The project even enjoyed a formal celebratory launch in the Aula Magna of the University of Havana in March 2005 with the participation of Castro Espín herself, Fernando Ortiz Foundation director Miguel Barnet, and Paul Thompson (known as the “father of oral history”).
Doing Research in Cuba: ¡No es fácil!
However, along the way Dore’s project faced many challenges.
First, the project was temporarily suspended in 2007 by the Cuban Government after it came to light that certain “delinquents” and “antisocial elements” had been included and allowed to tell their stories. As a result, half of the original research team dropped out – most of whom were Communist Party members (a detail of their CVs Dore only became aware of later).
Six months later the project was allowed to continue but now on a “less formal and less frequent” basis. To Dore’s credit, she took advantage of this “shuffle” (as she calls it in the book’s fascinating “Backstory” chapter), to expand the pool of interviewers to include “younger, less politically attached researchers.”
Second, after the completion of the interviews in 2018, nearly all the remaining Cuban project team members asked Dore to remove their names from the published book itself after they learned of its critical content. Imagine the irony of a book of oral histories where the interviewers are more concerned about protecting their anonymity than are the interviewees – even though it is the latter who actually share their life stories and sometimes critical opinions!
While Dore never explicitly tells us the team members’ reasons for requesting anonymity, it is likely because they disagreed with her analysis and conclusions (about the Cuban Revolution having “fallen apart”) or because they feared the repercussions of being associated with such a dire depiction of the Revolution, or both.
Finally, Dore experienced great difficulty at the end of her life in finding a publisher for her controversial findings after the left-wing Verso Press, the book’s initial editorial home, balked. No doubt Verso had expected to publish a different, more up-beat book based on Cubans’ memories of the Revolution, not the “Chronicle of a Death Foretold” that Dore handed in as a manuscript. But a lot changed in Cuba in the 15 years between 2005 and 2020, and most of that change was not for the better.
Perhaps Verso’s change of heart stemmed in part from Dore’s abandonment of her more neutral original working titles: “Cuban Lives: What Difference Did a Revolution Make?” and “Cuba Is Not Like What You Think” for the final, much more provocative and pessimistic one that includes an implicit nod to the great Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, How Things Fall Apart, followed by a statement (not a question) that promises to explain: What Happened to the Cuban Revolution.
Also, initially Dore planned to tell only the stories of five men in the book, with subsequent volumes focusing on women and other social groups. There is certainly material in the thousands of pages of interviews for multiple volumes. However, due to Dore’s worsening health, a planned series of books was folded into one. Thankfully, Dore’s book did eventually find a home in the UK and was published there in August 2022 by the Apollo imprint Head of Zeus before being republished a year later in the U.S. by Duke.
The Ghost of Oscar Lewis
“The ghost of Oscar Lewis kept me awake at night,” is the wry way Dore notes her keen awareness of the promise and peril of doing social science research on a sensitive topic in a communist country with foreign funding.[1] Her well-known lifelong progressive bona fides and the fact that she lived and worked outside the United States undoubtedly allowed her to win initial trust and good will in official circles on the island. Still, her reference to the “Lewis Affair” in the book’s opening pages (as notorious among foreign researchers as the “Padilla Affair” is for native intellectuals) indicates that she was never naive about the risks involved with the project she was undertaking. In fact, in much the same way as Lewis had done before starting his own project 35 years earlier, Dore made sure that she had explicit government approval, logistical support, and a “visto bueno” from a member of the Castro family before beginning.
After securing informed consent from research participants, I myself have always operated in Cuba under the motto: “It’s better to ask forgiveness (of officials) than permission (from them).” Both Lewis and Dore did exactly the opposite. Unfortunately, the old saying, “you’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t,” seems to have applied in the cases of their projects.
For those unaware of Dore’s reference to Oscar Lewis, he was a famous American anthropologist who – together with his wife Ruth Maslow Lewis – carried out his own Cuba project in 1969 and 1970, “Living the Revolution: An Oral History of Contemporary Cuba.” Invited to the island personally by Fidel Castro after he learned of Lewis’ desire to continue his Mexican and Puerto Rican research into the so-called “culture of poverty,” part of the anthropologist’s motivation was to “test” whether such a culture could exist in a socialist country. He assumed it could not.
“We have nothing to hide,” were Castro’s famous first (and it turns out last) words to Lewis when the two men met in 1968 and Castro gave his project the green light. “There are no complaints or grievances I haven’t already heard.” Just as would later happen to Dore’s project (but in a much harsher, threatening, and more definitive manner), Lewis’ projected 3-year study was terminated after just 18 months.
More chillingly, a significant portion of the project materials (including tapes and transcripts of supposedly anonymous interviews with complaining Cuban interviewees) were confiscated by Cuban State Security with at least one participant ending up in prison as a result. This tragedy only deepened when Lewis himself died of heart failure in December 1970, without ever being able to clear his good name or recover the confiscated material.
In fact, according to a new, minutely detailed book-length account of the Lewis project in Cuba by Susan M. Rigdon, Oscar Lewis in Cuba, La Partida Final (Berghahn, 2024), he spent the last 6 months of his life back in the U.S. “consumed by the mess left behind in Cuba” as he fruitlessly tried to set up a meeting with Castro so he could protect his informants, recover his materials, and resume his research (Rigdon 2024: 61).
This is the same Susan Rigdon who was hired by Ruth Lewis after her husband’s death to assist her in transforming the research materials they managed to spirit out of Cuba in the months prior to the project’s closure into the three books, Four Men (1977), Four Women (1977), and Neighbors (1978). Together, they make up the published legacy of the “Living the Revolution” project. Oscar Lewis, Ruth M. Lewis, and Susan M. Rigdon are credited as co-authors of each of these three books. A fourth book also based on the project research, The People of Buena Ventura: Relocation of Slum Dwellers in Postrevolutionary Cuba, was published in 1980 by Douglas Butterworth, one of Lewis’ research assistants.
Finally, Rigdon also published an original and incisive intellectual biography of Lewis and his work, The Culture Façade: Art, Science, and Politics in the Work of Oscar Lewis (University of Illinois Press, 1988).[2] While that book primarily focuses on debunking Lewis’ controversial “culture of poverty” thesis that he had famously applied to the impoverished communities he wrote about previously in Mexico (Pedro Martínez and The Children of Sánchez) and Puerto Rico and New York’s Spanish Harlem (La Vida), it also contains rich analysis and archival material about Lewis’ Cuba project, which he undertook after he had largely abandoned the “culture of poverty” thesis. Like Oscar Lewis in Cuba, Rigdon’s The Culture Façade was based on an intensive use of the Lewis archive at the University of Illinois, Urbana.
In her new book, Rigdon vividly describes the entire three-year research saga and its chaotic aftermath but places special emphasis on the frantic period between June and December 1970 when Lewis told one close friend that the Cuba affair had “destroyed” him. In a letter to his own son, he said the ordeal had been “a nightmare, worse than anything I could have imagined,” explaining that, “People who worked with me as my informants and assistants are in danger and 10,000 pages of my interviews and manuscripts are being held and may never be returned to me!”
Perhaps even worse for Lewis personally, the episode seemed to completely undermine his lifelong optimism and progressive political orientation, leading to his “general doubt and disillusionment about an ideal that has been the central stabilizing component of my life from the time I was fourteen” (Rigdon 2024: 61). Though neither Lewis nor Rigdon explicitly say so, the “ideal” Lewis refers to here is very likely socialism itself. Adding insult to injury, Raúl Castro (Mariela Castro’s father), would later allege (without evidence) in a 1971 speech that Lewis had been working for the CIA while in Cuba.
Rigdon’s account of the Lewis project is so detailed, methodical, and focused, and she makes such expert use of the extensive trove of both old and newly discovered archival materials housed in the Lewis collection at the University of Illinois, Urbana, that one is tempted to say that she has finally given us the last and definitive account of it. However, she explicitly rejects this interpretation. There is so much more we still don’t know about the project and its aftermath in Cuba unless and until we hear from the “Cuban side” —especially from the ten young Cuban researchers who were directly involved in the project (all members of the Young Communist League, UJC, and all forced at the time to provide secret daily reports to Cuban state security about their work with Lewis).[3]
The same can be said of Dore’s project and book. How did the Cubans involved, both the interviewees and especially the interviewing team (who quit and/or asked that their names be removed from the book), experience the research? Were they able to make the decision to distance themselves from the project freely or were they under pressure from State Security? Did they or the interviewees ever suffer any punishment due to their association with the project? It would be fascinating to hear about their experiences as part of the research project and their various takes on Dore’s interpretation of the research results.
Luckily for us, Dore’s book is not the only published outcome of the project. In fact, the project website at the University of Southampton, UK, where Dore was a Professor Emeritus of Latin American Studies, lists the names of many of the project’s team members —most of whom were employed at the University of Havana or CIPS (Centro de Investigaciones Psicológicas y Sociológicas) at the time – and the various other publications produced by some of them, including those published in Cuba in Spanish.
Most notable among these are Carrie Hamilton’s Sexual Revolutions in Cuba: Passion, Politics and Memory (University of North Carolina Press, 2012) and the book Aires de la Memoria (CENESEX, 2010) co-authored by the Cubans Daisy Rubiera Castillo, Antonio Moreno Stincer, Mercedes López Ventura, and Pedro Jorge Peraza Santos.
Improvisation and Catharsis
Dore’s brief take on Lewis’ infamous episode is this: “The most likely reason the [Lewis] study was closed was that Cubans acted exactly the way Fidel had predicted. They complained. They talked about their grievances. They described the government’s accomplishments and its faults.” Interestingly, 35 years later when Dore initiated her own project (also primarily sponsored by the Ford Foundation) she gained three surprising methodological insights beyond the fascinating details of the “Cuban lives” her respondents actually shared with her.
First, the formal research plans she and her team had drawn up turned out to be impractical, so they improvised “interviewing pretty much wherever and whoever we could.” This make-do strategy, which Dore initially though was a weakness, turned out to be a strength since it allowed the team to learn from their mistakes, adjust, and greatly expand their pool of interviewees to include many respondents located though informal networks complementing those found thorough official channels.
This made a real difference in Dore’s book since three of the most interesting and critical-minded interviewees included there (Alina, a censored filmmaker; Esteban, a supposed “delinquent”; and Pavel, a well-known dissident) would certainly never have been included had the team relied exclusively on official channels.
Second, while it is commonly assumed that Cuban society is highly polarized into supportive and oppositional camps vis-à-vis the regime, the actual interviews revealed that this assumption exaggerates the divide and ignores the common hardships, hopes, and grievances most islanders share.
Finally, the team was surprised to discover that many people were in fact willing to tell their stories “pretty much the way they remembered them.” Yes, they found ample evidence of the famous evil Cuban twins of self-censorship and “la doble moral,” but as the interviews proceeded and deepened, the power of catharsis tended to win out. “I never said this to anyone before, but it feels good to say it,” was a common reaction among the project’s interviewees.
Importantly, Dore was also clear with her interviewees about two additional things. She promised them that their identities would be disguised but she reminded them (as if they needed any reminding) that “in Cuba anonymity only goes so far. Neighbors might inform. State officials might discover who they are.”
Following Dore’s death in 2022, her children, Rachel and Matt Dore-Weeks, donated the project archive of more than 100 recorded interviews to Columbia University, where it is now digitally available to the public. A lifelong socialist and principled scholar, the book is evidence that Dore was dedicated to not just hearing but to actually listening to diverse, critical, and often contradictory Cuban voices and then – in the estimation of BBC Latin American correspondent Will Grant – “doing a rare thing: she let them speak for themselves.” In the book’s 26 chapters, they describe in rich, lived detail the Revolution’s many challenges, rewards, dilemmas, and failures. As such, Dore’s book captures the lives and voices of some of the people who built, supported, opposed, and even fled the Revolution.
Memory Is Malleable
Dore’s book How Things Fall Apart is really Three Books in one. In the prologue, the introductions to each of the book’s three main parts, the individual chapters on Fidel and Raúl Castro, and the conclusion, we get Book One: Dore’s take on modern Cuba. That is, in these sections, she frames the much longer and more detailed narrative sections that feature her seven interviewees with her own argument and analysis which I would summarize in this way: In order to survive, the government chose to make pro-market economic changes that successfully saved the regime but at the price of abandoning socialism and the Revolution.
Indeed, on the book’s opening page, Dore makes the following judgement of “what happened to the Cuban Revolution” after Fidel: “The changes [the introduction of tourism, the legalization of the dollar, and the allowance of micro-enterprise] temporarily propped up the economy but ruined the country.” And for her, the “ruin of the country” has mostly to do with the precipitous rise in inequality, the return of racial discrimination, and the new “Raulista” understanding of egalitarianism not as a strength or achievement of the Revolution to be celebrated and defended but as a weakness to be mocked and abandoned.
To wit, Raúl’s economic changes, Dore argues in the prologue, gave some Cubans more economic freedoms than at any time since 1959. “Other Cubans,” however, “encountered a different kind of freedom,” she notes with bitterness. “They were free to be poor and hungry.”
Although Dore lays the blame for these changes at the feet of Raúl Castro, in fact, many of them were first introduced by Fidel himself in the early 1990s at the start of the Special Period, before he scaled them back after 1996, and eventually harshly criticized them in his short-lived “Battle of Ideas” campaign. When he fell ill in 2006 and ceded formal governing power to Raúl in 2008, these pro-market changes were deepened – far too much for some but far from enough for others.
Indeed, in 2014 the Canadian economist Arch Ritter and I co-published the book Entrepreneurial Cuba, where we celebrated these changes but came firmly down on the side of those who criticized them for not going far enough. So, while I celebrate Dore’s achievement as a principled historian and ethnographer in hearing Cuban voices and letting them speak for themselves, I fundamentally disagree with her analysis about why and how things fell apart in Cuba.
Book Two is comprised of the intriguing but barely 5-page “Backstory” chapter. As described above, in this all-to-brief “making of” section of Dore’s book we learn about the origin, development, and many trials of the Cuban Voices oral history project itself that constitutes the foundation of the book. Luckily, both the project website and the many other research articles Dore published about the project, its development, and its findings between 2009 and 2018 function as a useful repository and compliment to this brief but suggestive “Backstory.”
Finally, Book Three is comprised of the self-told stories of the book’s seven protagonists, interviewees, or “narrators,” as Dore normally refers to them. They are Mario, a young, black, and iconoclastic party cadre; Alina, a censored but prize-winning filmmaker; Juan, an Afro-Cuban high school drop-out and jack of all trades who nurses lifelong wounds of racial discrimination even if he can’t always name them as such; Esteban, an “anti-social delinquent” and would-be émigré; Barbara, an impoverished black loyalist who fights Cuba’s (and her own husband’s) machismo largely alone; Pavel, an eloquent if embattled dissident and independent journalist; and Alejandro, a star student and well-off professional who can’t wait to move to Miami so he can “live better.” They are the pollo of the arroz con pollo, a Cuban might say.
While I don’t want to spoil your own reading by revealing too much about this best part of the book, I do want to make two observations that might help to guide and focus your reading.
First, the book’s three-part chronological structure allows each of the seven individual stories to gradually emerge and develop over the course of recent Cuban history, always within the particular context of the times: (1) The so-called “golden age” of the 1980s when Cubans enjoyed a relatively high degree of both prosperity and equality; (2) The “special” period from 1990 to 2006 when both the regime and the Cuban people fought (sometimes against one another) for survival; And (3) the post-Fidel period after 2006 when inequality reigned, emigration exploded, and repression intensified.
Secondly, so as not to lose sight of the personality of each narrator or the dramatic development of their individual lives, I chose to read each one as a single, stand-alone story instead of following the alternating storylines as they are presented in the book. This strategy yielded two benefits to me as a reader. First, it allowed me to develop a sustained identification with each of the narrators as their lives and the larger socio-political context around them changed. Also, this approach brought home to me the truth of the epigraph that Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez uses to kick off his memoir, Vivir para contarla (Living to Tell the Tale), and that Dore uses a slightly altered version of as the epigraph to her own book:
La vida no es la que uno vivió,
sino la que uno recuerda y
cómo la recuerda para contarla.
(Life is not what one lived,
but what one remembers
and how one remembers it
in order to recount it.)
In other words, as Dore (not Gabo) says, “memories are malleable.” That is, memories are not verbatim recordings of the past but selective “rememberings” that reflect changes in one’s life and perspective as the political and social context changes. “In all societies,” Dore argues, “memory provides a mirror on changes in politics and ideology. Oral history has shown again and again that when public politics and personal circumstances change, memories are likely to somehow reflect the changes.”
This does not mean that those who change what they remember, how they emphasize those memories, or the meanings they extract from them are lying. But it does mean that context matters. This is especially true of oral history interviews done in politically polarized or surveilled contexts where there are real consequences to what people are willing to say or not (and how they say it) – despite assurances about informed consent and anonymity.
In the case of Dore’s own oral history work in Cuba, changes in Cuban official discourse and policy – especially from Fidel to Raúl Castro – led to changes in her narrators’ stories and the meanings they took from them. She notes that many of her respondents were initially “astonished” at Raúl’s abandonment of the Revolution’s historic commitment to egalitarianism, for example. “But in a remarkably short time,” she found, “men and women I had been interviewing for years changed their stories, or they repeated old stories about growing up, but gave them new meanings.”
For example, Mario, whom I describe above as an “iconoclastic cadre,” was quite confused and didn’t know what to say about this historic shift in policy. Was it a betrayal of the Revolution’s core principles or a necessary updating of an anachronistic, impractical approach to economic policymaking? Though Dore tells us that “Mario always spoke honestly and sincerely,” during this period his responses “were full of silences” because his past stories “about the injustices of inequality [now] seemed inappropriate.” Ultimately, Mario successfully absorbed the new ideology, now telling Dore different stories about the past that fit better with his greatly changed present circumstance.
Of course, this kind of “malleable memory” change can happen over the course of time in Cuba (both among supporters and opponents of the regime) as Dore’s book shows. But it can also happen across space (for Cubans in the diaspora) as well. As many Cuba watchers can attest, the same people can say very different, even contrary things about their lives in Cuba when speaking about them outside (vs. inside) the country.
Notes:
[1] The Ford Foundation was the project’s main financial sponsor. However, as a way to get around some of the legal, bureaucratic, and logistical nightmares associated with funding a research project in Cuba in the face of the U.S. embargo, the Ford Foundation collaborated with the Swedish Agency for International Development (SIDA) to administer and distribute the funds in Cuba.
[2] I thank Rigdon for generously sending me two copies of this now out of print book together with the news that she was about to publish a book directly covering Lewis’ research project in Cuba. She also kindly fielded many of my questions about the “culture of poverty,” Lewis’ work in Cuba, the Urbana Lewis archive, and the state of research on the “Lewis Affair.”
[3] In 2011, one of those researchers did publish her own two-part recollection of her participation in the project. See Maida L. Donate, “Oscar Lewis: Proyecto Cuba,” Part 1 and Part 2. Also, historian Lillian Guerra includes a chapter focusing on the involvement of these UJC researchers (including Donate) in the Lewis project in her recent book Patriots and Traitors in Revolutionary Cuba, 1961-1981 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023).
