Cuban Historiography in the 1960s: Revisionists, Revolutionaries and the Nationalist Past

This article examines nationalist historiography in revolutionary Cuba, focusing in particular on the relationship between pre‐revolutionary ‘revisionist’ histories and the revolutionary historiography produced after 1959. Despite agreement among the revolutionaries on the need for new histories to respond to the needs of the revolutionary age, the dominant nationalist historiography of the Revolution repeated many of the myths of the ‘bourgeois’ histories of the past. In the 1960s, however, several historians working at the margins of academia emerged to challenge the nationalist myths perpetuated by both their republican counterparts and by their Marxist adversaries in the University School of History. Yet despite many significant historical re‐interpretations undertaken during the Revolution, many of the sacred cows of Cuban nationalism remained firmly on their plinth.