Haydée Santamaría, Cuban Revolutionary: She Led by Transgression

Randall (Che on My Mind) revisits the life and accomplishments of her close friend Haydée Santamaría, viewing her as a symbol of both the achievements and the limitations of Fidel Castro’s Cuban revolution. Santamaría, one of just two women who participated in the rebels’ 1953 attack on the Moncada army barracks, was in Randall’s view the epitome of the “spirit of politics as a set of human relationships” that characterized the early years of the Cuban revolution. She fought against gender and racial discrimination, aiming to carry revolutionary ideology into all aspects of Cuban life at a time when many of her fellow Communists “considered feminism a dirty word.” Her greatest accomplishment was the founding and stewardship of Havana’s Casa de las Américas, an institution that promotes Cuban art and artists. But despite Santamaría’s achievements at the Casa and her prestige as a participant in every phase of the revolution, her suicide in 1980 diminished her reputation within Cuba, as it was considered a self-centered and counterrevolutionary act. Randall is clear that this book is an “impressionist portrait,” not a biography, and readers unsympathetic to the Castro regime may see Randall as insufficiently critical of its authoritarianism, but Santamaría’s story is one which should be told, and Randall does so vividly and insightfully. [em](Aug.) [/em]