Guerrillas, Peasants, and Communists: Agrarian Reform in Cuba's 1958 Liberated Territories

Abstract

AbstractIn October of 1958, amidst the guerrilla war to topple Fulgencio Batista, Fidel Castro's Rebel Army passed an Agrarian Reform Law that would serve as an embryo for the Cuban Revolution's 1959 land reform. Relying on rare documents from the insurgency, this paper reanimates the debate over the role of peasants during the war, arguing that peasants not only helped shape the movement to topple Batista, but that their mobilization led to the articulation of important guerrilla agrarian policies—including land reform. As the liberated territories became a laboratory in which rebels experimented with how to run a state, peasants took part in civil projects, simultaneously bestowing legitimacy on the movement and harnessing its organizational apparatus for the achievement of the peasants’ own goals. In highlighting the political subjectivity of Cuban peasants, this paper also gives new insight into everyday life during the rebel insurgency.