The paradoxical entanglement between the natural and the political in Cuba’s discursive road to ‘revolutionary’ modernity: A historical analysis of the biopolitical propaganda strategies of the Asociación Libertaria de Cuba and the 26th of July Movement during the early stages of the Cuban Revolution, ca. 1956- ca. 1962

Abstract

This thesis analyzes how the M26 and ALC wove their discourses of ‘revolutionary’ modernity in Cuba round a central historical narrative that explained Cuban ‘nature’ as inevitably politicized. By contextualizing this analysis in both the national and international context of the 1950s, it argues that Cuba’s layered discourse of Revolution was not ‘exceptional’ nor unfolded in a historical vacuum or in one-sided interaction with either one of the Cold War’s superpowers. Instead, it should be seen as one of the many (bio)political ideologies of modernity that arose globally out of the ashes of Europe’s nationalist regulation of the modern world. Accordingly, it testified to the crucial transition period to sincere modernity and, with that, a politicized sphere of nature and life that characterized the Cold War in at least Latin America.1 With this discursive biopolitical approach of the early phases of the Cuban Revolution, this thesis aims to open up a new, less isolated and more historically engaged perspective on one of the most discussed topics of Cold War historiography.