THE CUBANOLOGY BI-WEEKLY and SPECIAL ARTICLES BLOG

Interview with Manuel Márquez-Sterling on “Speak Your Mind”

By Jose Reyes

I am very proud to announce and welcome special guest Manuel Márquez-Sterling to BlogTalkRadio for a discussion of his new book, Cuba 1952-1959: The True Story of Castro’s Rise to Power. The interview will take place live this Thursday, November 19th at 9:00 P.M. Eastern Time. I will be hosting the show with Rembert Aranda, who has an outstanding blog in conjunction with Manuel. Rembert also prepared an outline below, so you can get more familiarized with the book and the topics which we will be covering.

This Interactive Timeline created by Rembert can help you understand further.

The link for this online interview is here and the call in number is (646) 915-9812. Call in with your questions or just listen in.

Book Announcement:

The book was announced on November 3 in a presentation by Prof. Márquez-Sterling at Plymouth State University, where he is teaching a course on that period of Cuban History this semester, which uses the book as a primary text. The author will present a talk at the New York launch event for his new book, on Friday November 20.  That event, sponsored by the Cuban Cultural Center of New York, will be held at Columbia University’s Casa Hispánica.

About the Author:

Manuel Márquez-Sterling, born in Havana, has lived in the US since 1960. He is Professor Emeritus of History at Plymouth State University. His publications include “Historia de la Isla de Cuba” (co-authored with his father, Carlos Márquez-Sterling), and “Carlos Márquez-Sterling: Memorias de un Estadista”.

He is also known for his acclaimed historical novels La Cúpula and Hondo Corre el Cauto. The latter topped the Miami Nuevo Heraldo best seller list. An accomplished playwright, his works in that genre include La Salsa del Diablo (The Devil’s Sauce), which won the Madrid-Miami Letras de Oro Award in 1993, and Corneille’s Dream, winner of the 1996 Southern New Hampshire University Spectrum Award for One Act Play. Following the example of his grandfather (Manuel Márquez-Sterling [1872-1934]), the author also writes a long running op-ed column for the (Spanish language) Diario Las Americas.

Before becoming a historian he studied law at the University of Havana in the 50s, where at graduation he received the Ricardo Dolz Arango National Law Award, the top University of Havana law student prize. His law practice in Cuba included serving as Public Defender and arguing a constitutional law case before Cuba’s Supreme Court. As a lawyer in 50s Cuba and the son of the architect of Cuba’s 1940 Constitution, the author addresses the legal and constitutional aspects of the revolutionary period from an expert perspective.

About the Book:
This book unearths a lost world to reveal the undiscovered Cuba during the critical seven years of the Cuban revolution. It brings to light long-buried fragments of history and masterfully pieces them together to lay bare how Castro really came to power. It is a book that could be written only by someone who was there, by an eyewitness with an insider’s view of behind the scenes happenings and intrigues, by someone who knew the now historical figures who fought the battles that ended in the establishment of the Castros’ totalitarian regime.

The book gives the reader a revealing look at the Cuba of the 50s, that shatters many widely-held misconceptions, including myths about Castro and his revolution assiduously crafted by Castro and his sympathizers over the last fifty years. Among those myths is that the Cuban Revolution was a military struggle between the forces of Batista and Castro. Another is that Cuba was a backward nation plagued by socio-economic problems which Castro’s revolution overcame to achieve  great gains in quality of life.

The history in this book is a cautionary tale about the fragility of democracy when subjected to the kinds of stresses that plagued Cuba in the 50s: political corruption, media bias and propaganda, radical students and political thuggery. Those lessons have been made particularly relevant as a new wave of totalitarians inspired by Castro have adopted and extended his methods to create a particularly grave threat to democracies. Their gambit is to take Castro’s model one step further, seeking electoral victories which they subversively use to implement “constitutional reforms” that transmute constitutional democracies into totalitarian regimes. These “reforms” are achieved and consolidated through political gangsterism and electoral fraud. The success of such neototalitarian electoral coups is evident in several Latin American countries.

As this book reveals, the problems that plagued Cuba over 1952-1958 were political, not socio-economic. These problems were solvable by political means, and would have been but for Castro. It is commonly but mistakenly believed that in 1950s Cuba there were only two political forces: Batista and Castro. But as this book details, in reality there were three: Batista and his supporters, a revolutionary opposition advocating violently overthrowing Batista (of which Castro’s movement was a part), and an Electoralist/Constitutionalist opposition advocating  solutions using ballots rather than bullets. The Electoralists represented the vast majority of Cubans who wanted to resolve the political crisis in a way that preserved Cuba’s 1940 Constitution and its democratic freedoms.

The author’s father, Carlos Márquez-Sterling, a prominent leader of the Electoralist/Constitutionalist opposition was a presidential candidate in 1958. he also played varied roles of substance in Cuban history, including leadership roles in the Ortodoxo party, Speaker of the House, Secretary of Education and Labor, and architect of the 1940 Constitution as President of the Cuban Constitutional Convention.

The struggle leading to the Old Republic’s collapse and Castro’s rise was mirrored in the struggle between Carlos Márquez-Sterling and Fidel Castro in establishing a government to replace Batista’s. Márquez-Sterling fighting for elections, Castro opposing them. The 1958 Cuban presidential elections drew an astonishingly large turnout—despite extreme violence including Castro’s threat to gun down anyone who went to the polls to vote. Márquez-Sterling received a decisive majority of votes cast, but to the surprise of leading political analysts of the day, the Batista government abetted electoral fraud and declared his chosen candidate the winner and new President. Márquez -Sterling’s margin of victory was large enough that the electoral fraud was obvious to everyone. This became the precipitating event to Batista’s departure. The US informed Batista that it would not accept the fraudulent electoral result and pressured him to leave Cuba- ushering in Castro’s regime.

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