Oral History and Activism
In honour of Liz Dore
I’m perched on a rocky chair on a porch in a suburb of Havana. Everything is sticky. The porch belongs to a house that was, many lifetimes ago, home to a moneyed family long since departed for Florida shores. After 1959, the three-story building became home to multi-generational families from different parts of Cuba, rehoused from dilapidated rural abodes or shanty towns demolished in the wake of the Revolution. By the early twenty-first century, the street beyond the shaky gate is shaded by trees heavy with overgrown branches.
I sip water that Liz has poured from a plastic bottle, sweating with beads that gather in a pool on the short wooden table. Liz leans in and turns on a small digital recorder; we both check to make sure the red light is steady while the numbers flash into action. She nods to me. I open my mouth and open the interview: “It’s September 2005 and we’re sitting here in Havana with ‘Pablo’. Can you start by telling us a bit about yourself?” The young man across stretches back and gets comfortable. Maybe he repeats his name. Perhaps he tells us when and where he was born. Or how he’s arrived on that porch that day, seated across from these two strangers with the expensive audio equipment. How long his bus journey took, or why he chose to walk or hop a people’s cab instead. That he was coming from work, or home, or from meeting some friends or a lover in the park. Any one of these details will lead to a story. And that’s what we’re all here for.
Havana 2005. Photo by Author. Graffiti reads “Viva el 26 de Julio” (“Long Live 26 July”)
I started this newsletter in order to write about writing and activism. Then life and death took over, and recently I’ve written as much about sounds. This week I continue along those lines with some thoughts on the spoken word, in honour of my dear friend, the oral historian Elizabeth Dore, who died earlier this month.
Liz was a historian of work, class and gender in Latin America. Shortly after our paths crossed in the early months of the millennium, she set up a major oral history of the Cuban Revolution and invited me to participate. Thus began a long project that would shape our work and frame our developing friendship over the next two decades.
Oral history has long been associated with radical politics. In the 1960s, with the explosion of popular movements against racist, sexist and class oppression throughout much of the world, oral history became a favoured methodology among scholars in burgeoning fields like women’s history, Black history and labour history. By no means associated exclusively with academia, oral history draws on thriving oral traditions in many cultures. The idea that oral history offers a more democratic approach to writing history than one based only on written documents derives from the fact a majority of people in the past were either unable to write, were not fluent in dominant or colonial languages or did not have access to official publications or archives. Oral history has thus often been perceived as “giving voice” to the marginalised or “breaking the silence” imposed on the majority by hierarchical social structures.
In practice, the ideal of oral history as providing a counter-narrative to official histories is complicated by the reality that memory – individual as well as collective, popular as well as official – is selective and mutable. As Liz wrote in her 2006 study of peonage and patriarchy in Nicaragua:
[A]ll historical sources are subjective, and all in different ways … Oral sources are partial and highly subjective interpretations of the past filtered through the present and mediated by the interlocutor … [they provide] an understanding of the dynamics of social structures and relations… as well as of people’s perceptions of the past.
Shortly after the Nicaraguan Revolution of 1979, Liz went to work for the Sandinista government. Her experiences there were formative:
Traveling throughout Nicaragua to interview producers of corn, beans, and rice, I was met with hostility, but not because I was a gringa.
Rather, the peasants distrusted her because she was working for a government whose agrarian reform policy did not involve redistributing land directly to rural workers themselves. The Sandinista policy of creating state farms and cooperatives was grounded in a particular interpretation of the country’s history of capitalist government, and Liz’s work, “drew [her] into one of the major debates of the Sandinista government concerning the class nature of Nicaraguan society.” This was fundamentally a debate about history, and conducting oral history interviews meant not only listening to the oft-unheard voices of peasants but also challenging the received wisdom of the revolutionary government in Managua.
Twenty years after working for the Sandinistas, Liz achieved something no one had managed to do since the 1960s: she convinced the Cuban government to allow a group of Cuban and overseas researchers to interview a range of Cubans about their experiences of the revolution, now in its fifth decade and suffering from a dramatic ongoing economic crisis following the collapse of Soviet socialism in 1990 alongside the US embargo. As Liz explained in her foreword to my own book based on the project, from the team’s first meeting in Cuba in 2004, the project unfolded under often difficult conditions – including the strains of negotiating with different levels of Cuban government. Over the next ten years we nevertheless managed to conduct over a hundred interviews throughout much of the island with people of different ages, racial and gender identities, sexual orientations and ideological positions.
Havana 2005. Photo by Author. Graffiti reads ”Peace in the World”
Conducting oral history in Cuba is can also be tricky because of fears of censure and censorship. But Liz disagreed with those who claimed that oral history is impossible in communist countries. She argued that Cuban interviewees often recounted their life stories enthusiastically and with remarkable frankness, highlighting the pleasures as well as the pains of living under socialism. As a team, we discovered that the most valuable interviews were those that involved several conversations, allowing interviewees to develop a degree of trust and to tell a range of stories about their experiences of political, social and economic change. Liz developed close contact with a number of interviewees, especially younger people who had come of age in the Special Period (the years after 1990, when the Cuban economy went into freefall following the collapse of trade with the USSR and Eastern Europe) and returned to the island many times to interview and re-interview them. She eventually chose five interviews to form the basis of the book she finished in the final year of her life, a period that coincided with an unprecedented wave of protests on the island in the face of ongoing economic problems, heightened by the Coronavirus pandemic.
Liz never underestimated the significant achievements of the Cuban Revolution, especially in the areas of universal education and healthcare. Born and raised in the US, she was fully aware of the power of US imperialism and spent much of her life fighting against it. Listening carefully to the stories of younger Cubans raised during and after the Special Period convinced her, however, that “the demise of the Cuban revolution” was not only the fault of aggressive US policy. It was also the result an inflexible political system and a political elite – largely white, male and older – totally out of touch with the harsh realities faced by ordinary citizens. As Liz wrote in one of her last dispatches from Havana, in early 2018, for younger Cubans – especially those who are Black, work in the shrinking poorly paid state sector, do not receive remittances from relatives abroad and/or did not have the resources and connections to benefit substantially from the increased privatization introduced after Fidel Castro’s death in 2016 – heroic narratives of the triumph of the revolution sixty years ago rang hollow. She strove to convey the stories of such people even if they were difficult for many of us – including Liz herself – to hear, because, in her words, as an oral historian:
Liz was not only a great historian and researcher. She was also an outstanding teacher. One of the many lessons I learned from her over the years was that if we are to be honest and effective in our political commitments, we need to be willing first and foremost to critique ourselves and those whose views are closest to our own. In an interview she gave a few years before her death with our mutual friend, the Cuban oral historian Ana Vera, Liz summed up how her commitment to listening to the voices of ordinary Cubans shaped her own commitment to revolutionary change:
Although I realize that it is a very idealistic hope, I think that as socialists we have to be optimistic and learn from good experiences of Cuban men and women and also from the not so good experiences that should not be repeated.
In memory of Elizabeth Dore, 1946-2022
Inspiring article
such a compelling and wonderful article! Liz would have loved it.