Protecting the Ideologically Vulnerable: Paternalist Policy and Discourse in Early Revolutionary-Era Cuba

Jen Triplett, University of Colorado, Boulder

When a social revolutionary movement successfully seizes the state, its leaders are faced with a paradoxical task that entails dynamics of both dominance and liberation. Emancipating subordinated and oppressed groups is a revolution’s purported raison d'être, but leaders must consolidate military, economic, political, and ideological power to govern. Historically, leaders of revolutionary regimes have combined coercive and consensual approaches to achieving these seemingly opposed goals. Paternalism—a form of domination that limits personal freedoms for the benefit of the governed—blurs the boundaries between coercion and consent. This article contributes to existing scholarship on paternalism in state socialist contexts by asking how leaders of the Cuban revolutionary regime characterized different social subgroups as ideologically vulnerable and how they managed those perceived vulnerabilities via paternalism in both policy and discourse. Against the backdrop of the regime’s first decade in power, I examine leaders’ treatment of both peasants and women. Using a variety of primary sources, including key pieces of agrarian and gender-based legislation as well as political speeches and print media, I trace how leaders discursively constructed the ideological vulnerability of peasants and women, which they then used as the justificatory foundation for paternalist policies targeting these two groups. Because these policies often also had clear economic motives and impacts, I argue that the lens of paternalism highlights the tensions between emancipatory projects and the exigencies of governance. Paternalism as a form of domination, therefore, constrains leaders’ abilities to equitably incorporate marginalized groups into the body politic, even when they supposedly wish to do so.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 134. Critical Approaches to Revolutions