With most travel restrictions lifted after two long years, several history faculty and graduate students spent the summer back at the archives. Hélio Alves, a second-year PhD student focusing on modern Cuba, spent one month working at the University of Miami’s Cuban Heritage Collection as a 2022-2023 Goizueta Pre-Prospectus Fellow. His project, titled ¿La Revolución Marcha Bien? [How Goes the Revolution?], explores important themes relating to historical narrative, memory, and truth in post-Revolutionary Cuba. More specifically, his research examines the tensions between the official, state-sponsored depictions of Cuban society during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, and those emanating from what he calls “experience narratives,” that is, the narratives about post-Revolutionary Cuba that emerge from the lived experiences of ordinary folk.
At the Cuban Heritage Collection, Hélio consulted letters, photographs, musical records, official accounts, oral histories, newspapers and other serial publications to assess how different actors portrayed, narrated, and recounted the realities of Cuban society during those decades. His preliminary findings suggest that State actors often incorporated popular complaints into the official narrative to dissuade tensions under the guise of accommodation. As his research moves forward, he will continue to unpack the tensions between official narratives, experience narratives, and counter-narratives.
Photograph by Helio Alves.