Chapter 6 looks at how money acts both as an element in the moral concretion of the revolution’s moral project – one that here takes the form also of a ‘moral economy’ – but also a prime catalyst for its deterioration in the face of the pervasive condition of moral-cum-material decline Cubans call necesidad, intimating a sense of destitution that is felt to exert itself as an uncontrollable force. The relation between the revolution and what lies beyond it, then, is seen here through the prism of the duality of money as both a qualitative token of value and quantitative scale for commensuration. The former is central to the way pesos (Cuba’s national currency, issued by the revolutionary state) operate as moral concretions of the revolution, marking out the scope of its moral economy. The latter, however, comes into its own with the use of US dollars and locally issued currencies pegged to it, which have become increasingly pervasive in everyday consumption since the 1990s. In its capacity to commensurate all values quantitatively, the dollar rubs out the distinction between the state’s moral economy and the variously licit and informal realms of transaction that have grown alongside it in Cuba. Crucially, in this way, it tends to trump the revolution’s effort to position itself as transcendental condition of possibility for life, encompassing it with its own transcendental scope.

This chapter develops a model of the relationship between revolution and person with detailed reference to the life and family histories collected in Havana in the late 1960s by the American anthropologists Oscar and Ruth Lewis and the team of researchers they trained in Cuba. The focus here is on ethnographic material from the Lewis’ volumes pertaining to people’s revolutionary ‘integration’ through participation in state-coordinated mass organizations, and particularly the so-called Committees for the Defence of the Revolution (CDRs). Tracking ethnographically the ways and degrees to which the Lewis’ respondents got involved in these neighbourhood level structures, the chapter develops a model of revolutionary personhood that emphasises the duality between ‘role’ and ‘person’. Due to the totalizing way it ensconces itself in every aspect of everyday life, this duality marks out the coordinates for people’s continual acts of comparison and calibration between the two, which becomes the prime format of daily social life in revolutionary Cuba. By the same token, the duality of role and person marks out the limits of the revolution’s transcendentalizing project, whose containing force reaches only as far as its designation of roles via the state’s structures can take it, leaving the remainders of people beyond its scope.

Chapter 4 extends the argument on the ‘duplex’ form of revolutionary personhood by exploring the shapes it takes in people’s relationship with Marxist-Leninist ideology. The analysis draws its material from heated public debates that raged in the Cuban public sphere throughout the 1960s, regarding the merits and demerits of using Soviet and other textbooks (‘manuales’) as the prime tool for bringing the rudiments of communist ideology to the masses. Comparing this with classic anthropological accounts of the power of ritual in bringing transcendent orders to life, the chapter develops an alternative to meaning-based theories of ideology, which focus on questions of its truth-value and legitimating powers, by focusing instead on ideology as a relational form, configuring people in relation to ideological texts and the ideas that they contain. The contrasting positions taken in the controversies over textbooks in Cuba, then, are shown as different ways of configuring the relationship between people and ideas. Duality and how best to negotiate the ruptures it creates, including temporal rifts between the past and the present, will once again be a central theme of this morphological discussion.

Prefaced by an extended ethnographic account of Fidel Castro’s charisma as it emerged in the days of national mourning that followed his death in 2016, Chapter 9 concludes the book’s morphological argument by drawing out its implications for two forms of comparison that contribute to its development. The first concerns the analogies and contrasts between political and religious concepts and practices, which feature throughout the development of the book’s morphological analysis and are viewed here in relation to the broader discussion about ‘political theology’. The second returns to the comparative anthropological framework with which the book begins, namely the varied ways in which the distinction between nature and culture can be made, locating revolutions in this comparative frame.

This chapter furthers the book’s morphological analysis of the revolution’s relationship to people by examining it as a relationship of care. The ethnographic context here is housing, focusing on the way in which the revolutionary state’s all-embracing involvement in the infrastructure of people’s lives acts as another prime avatar of its moral concretion. The chapter recounts the story of Clarita, for whom her state-built house embodies her own sense of being a revolutionary, though, as she says, ‘in her own way’. Getting an analytical handle on Clarita’s sense of commitment to the revolution involves showing the ways in which the state’s transcendental project of care is supplemented by relationships that are intimate and personal. This happens through the myriad ways in which personal relationships – with family, neighbours and workmates – are enlisted in order to bring to fruition the state-sponsored scheme that provided her with the means to build a new house. The revolutionary state is credited with providing houses as habitable wholes, and in this way is able to incorporate under its aegis of care the myriad ways in which nonstate resources and relationships are necessary in order for this to happen. Crucially, this centripetal dynamic renders the intimate ambit of personalized sociality a constitutive (albeit unacknowledged) feature of the revolutionary state’s project of care, traversing the distance that separates its institutional structures and procedures from the day-to-day sociality of people’s lives.

Chapter 8 tells the story of Lázaro, whose home collapsed and is now stuck in a long-term struggle to get the state authorities to assist him in rebuilding it. Here the focus is on the dire failures of the revolutionary state apparatus, though the twist is that, rather than cynically lamenting them, Lázaro maintains a steadfast conviction that the state will solve his problem. The reason for this, as we shall see, upends the whole framework of the revolutionary state’s relationship with people, since the source of Lázaro’s conviction in the state’s powers is not the revolutionary state itself, but rather certain spirits with which Lázaro has developed deep and abiding relationships, and who guide him through life, including in his interactions with the state authorities a propos his collapsed home. The chapter shows that the spirits’ mediation does not merely supplement Lázaro’s relationship with the revolutionary state, but rather upends its overall coordinates, drastically changing its shape. The signature ontological constitution of spirits is that they collapse dualist separations between spirit and matter, transcendence and immanence, ought and is – precisely the distinctions that mark out the coordinates within which the revolutionary project takes its shape. In so doing, the spirits present an altogether startling political possibility: a revolution able to deploy the transcendental structures and processes of the state in a way that somehow, per impossible, relates with people immanently in the intimate key of personal care.

This chapter traces trajectories of counterrevolutions following six revolutions, which exhibit the full range of counterrevolutionary outcomes and offer useful comparisons to Egypt. First, it examines two revolutions that never experienced counterrevolutions: Tunisia’s and Libya’s 2011 revolutions. Both occurred in the same Arab Spring wave as Egypt’s revolution, but in Tunisia the new government faced a military whose interests were not deeply threatened by civilian rule and in Libya the coercive capacity of the former regime was largely destroyed in the brief civil war. Next, it examines two Latin American revolutions that demonstrate the two ways in which revolutionaries can maintain their capacity and defeat counterrevolutionary threats. Following Cuba’s 1959 revolution, Fidel Castro’s regime put down multiple counterrevolutions using its loyal revolutionary army. In Venezuela, following the 1958 democratic revolution, the government enjoyed none of these coercive resources, yet managed to thwart multiple counterrevolutionary coup attempts through a preservation of revolutionary unity and a return to mass mobilization. Finally, in two cases that are otherwise quite different to Egypt – Thailand’s 1973 democratic uprising and Hungary’s 1919 communist revolution – a very similar set of mechanisms undermined the capacity of the new governments and created opportunities for counterrevolutionaries to return to power.

Chapter 3 reads two maritime fictions against the cartographic and photographic records of US War Department’s Bureau of Insular Affairs. I argue that the camera’s unpredictable mode of development heightened colonial anxieties about the assimilation of the Philippines into the United States. For a literary counterpoint to the Bureau’s colonizing project, I read back and forth between the island-hopping narratives of Ernest Hemingway and Ramon Muzones, a Hiligaynon language novelist from the Visayas. Their shipboard fictions set adrift the repressive and racializing logics of US military technics. But the novelists move in different directions. Disillusioned, the late Hemingway gets lost at sea, uninterested in a return to national homeland. Muzones complies a pre-Hispanic nautical map, a regional Visayan space within the newly independent Philippine republic.

Chapter 4 explores how the literary collection adapted to audio recording to form a species of sonic cartography. I argue that Zora Neale Hurston’s fieldwork in Jamaica and Haiti presented US borders in stereo, both offset from Caribbean islands and overlapping with them. Hurston’s notion of a sonic boundary is distinct from that heard by Jean Toomer, for whom folksong is a spiritual rejoinder to the violence of agricultural labor. Toomer’s swansong to Georgia’s small-town sugarcane harvest is echoed and distorted by Cuban soundscapes. Poems about cane harvest by Agustin Acosta and Nicolás Guillén document of Cuba’s rather different agricultural identity and pose toward US imperium. In these cartographies, I argue, the line demarcating continental nation from island colony is not just aquatic, but also sonic: heard in stereo, and often out of phase.

Chapter 5 follows a small but diverse group of Cuban Spanish Civil War volunteers, paying particular attention to Rolando Masferrer and Eufemio Fernández. The post-Spain trajectories of these volunteers illustrate the volatile nature of politics in Cuba and the Circum-Caribbean in the 1940s and 1950s, where coalitions were consistently made and unmade in transnational efforts to topple regional dictators. Later, several Spanish Civil War volunteers came to occupy influential roles as strategists and instructors within the military structures that the Castro regime developed to support revolutionary movements in the Americas after 1959. Thus, Cuban politics offered an unusually large and varied number of opportunities for Spanish Civil War veterans to remobilise after their service in Spain and to continue to engage with armed revolutionary projects of a transnational or internationalist nature.

For more than a decade, filmmaker Michelle Memran worked creatively with Fornés on what would become the award-winning 2018 documentary The Rest I Make Up. The celebrated and widely screened film distilled some 400 hours of footage into a 79-minute exploration of a friendship and creative collaboration that began during the period when Fornés had “stopped writing” but had not yet received an Alzheimer’s diagnosis. Pearl and Memran’s co-written piece continues the collaborative process of critical reflection and creative compilation that guided the post-production phase of the film, when Katie Pearl joined the project as producer. Interweaving unused scenes from the film – transcribed from the original footage and presented here in “screenplay” form – with their own experiential observations, Pearl and Memran’s experimental memoir “documents” the complexity of María Irene Fornés’s role as “elder” during the last two decades of her life, a period beginning in 2000 and continuing through to Fornés’s death from dementia-related causes in 2018.

Alisa Solomon excavates the fragmented evidence of María Irene Fornés’s intimate relationship with noted public intellectual Susan Sontag. Arguing that the two came together at a pivotal time in their lives, Solomon demonstrates how Fornés and Sontag galvanized each other as they embarked on their disparate professional careers as writers, producing a persistent synergy in spite of their radically different backgrounds and career trajectories. Carefully charting how Fornés and Sontag cryptically acknowledged and deliberately effaced their history as romantic and creative partners, Solomon argues the relationship was foundational to both writers as not so much a matter of mutual influence as confluence rippled through both of their careers long after their romantic relationship ended.

This chapter discusses Caribbean antifascism’s roots and its connection to the Comintern’s regional radical network, tracing the evolution of the movement from its anti-imperialist origins as early as 1924. The discussion provides specific examples as to how visions of fascism and antifascism were created for and/or adapted to the local and regional realities through an anti-imperialist prism. The study also maps the transnational and transatlantic journey of an antifascist discursive formula from its origins as a Caribbean hologram equating fascism with imperialism, to its official incorporation to the Communist internationalist lexicon as Comintern policy in 1935, and finally to its application as a propaganda formula during the Spanish Civil War. In the long run, while Caribbean antifascism’s anti-imperialist sensibilities may have been lost in translation in the mayhem of theoretical battles and iron-fist, Stalinist policies, the gist of the messages survived the turmoil, and perhaps still lingers on in our culture even to this day.

In a certain sense all theatre is an act of translation. We translate written and devised texts into stage action, characters are translated into beings, images are translated into physical spaces. In this essay, Adam Versényi explains how, because she was a playwright writing primarily in her second language throughout her career, María Irene Fornés was simultaneously writing and translating, with each practice inextricably linked to the other. Drawing upon his on own professional practice as a dramaturg and translator, Versényi argues that not only does an understanding of translation provide greater access to Fornés’s creative process but also that a careful reading of Fornés’s work informs the topic of translation itself. As example, Versényi explores how Fornés’s playwrighting method and the process of theatrical translation affect two notably distinct translations of Fornes’s The Conduct of Life (1985).

This chapter explores the newspapers anarchists used to create and disseminate an anarchist Latinidad that was a radical, transnational, anti-capitalist, anticlerical, anti-imperial, and Spanish language-based identity forged initially by US-based migrant anarchists from Spain and Cuba. Using the anarchist press in Florida and New York, anarchists rejected the importance of identifying themselves as “Spanish” or “Cuban” and instead forged a cross-border working-class identity. In creating this identity, anarchists focused on their encounters with US capitalism and republican democracy from 1886 to 1898. Such encounters conditioned their perspectives on what an independent Cuba could look like and what it should avoid. Anarchists also debated whether or not to support the Cuban War for Independence. Was it just another nationalist project that would usher in a new, exploitative ruling elite, or could an independent, non-nationalist anarchist society be constructed? These latter debates began in mid-1891– three and a half years before the mambises launched their uprising against Spanish colonialism.

In the main, critics have regarded Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés (also known as Plácido) as a tragic mulatto detached from enslaved black people yet unable to join the ranks of the white literary elite. This essay takes an innovative approach to Plácido by reading his poetry as transculturated colonial literature rather than a poor imitation of European aesthetics. Plácido produced poems situated at the crossroads between classical European deities and enigmatic African spiritual practices. I argue that Plácido transculturated Mars, the Roman god of war, with the Yoruba principles of the divine masculine most often attributed to the orisha Oggún. In Oggún philosophy, the divine masculine is the capacity to exploit the powers of devastation and dissension either to ensure the survival of a given polity or to remake it entirely. Plácido appropriated Aeolus, the Greek god of the wind, Jupiter, the supreme Roman god, and most prominently Mars, the Roman god of war to reimagine Cuban resistance as a just war between good and evil. Plácido’s portrayal of ancient deities divested of sacred authority enabled him to convey an alternative God concept without contravening censorship guidelines that forbade any criticism of Catholicism, the official religion of the empire.