The Maine, the Romney and the Threads of Conspiracy in Cuba

Abstract

'Americans', Joan Didion writes, reporting on an incredulous, baffled critique of US society by the Cuban exile enclave in Miami, are 'a people who could live and die without ever understanding those nuances of conspiracy and allegiance on which, in the Cuban view, the world turn[s]' (Didion 1987: 78). Similarly within the Republic of Cuba itself; hardly a day seems to pass in Havana without some story of intrigue and machination, whether over the death of Che, the delayed arrival of the monthly egg ration or as a quite possibly related explanation of the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy by mobsters and CIA stooges. Indeed, so many putative conspiracies surround Cuba, on either side of the Straits of Florida, that these theories must not be considered simply in terms of their internal logic or stated objectives. Nor are they a simple, unmediated consequence of a certain state socialist political system: the Cuban conspiracy genre demands attention precisely for its un-remarked ubiquity on and off the island. After defining the term and focusing mainly on conspiracy theory within the Republic, I will argue that narratives of conspiracion are morality tales, always presented as passionate, principled opposition to imperial machinations, from the colonial margin. Unlike scholars who focus on conspiracy theory as a late modern Cold War phenomena (Marcus 1999), I also argue that, in the Cuban context at least, these are part of a much longer historically and culturally grounded pattern.Distinguishing conspiraciesWhat is a 'conspiracy theory', and how is it distinct from a rumour, or indeed, from other explanatory frameworks such as witchcraft? First identified as a distinct genre by Richard Hofstadter in his seminal study, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (Hofstadter 1965), conspiratorial accounts of hidden, nefarious machinations are heard in many everyday contexts in the world today (e.g., Briggs 2004; Boyer 2006; Johnson 2013). Unlike witchcraft beliefs, however, narrative accounts which assert some sort of conspiracy characteristically deploy technical facts and scientific principles to buttress their veracity. In that sense, one might well consider conspiracy theory a highly modernist genre. Note that in trying to make sense of a paranoid style, it is all too easy to look for function, or truth value. Academic studies of rumour encounter this difficulty and furthermore tend to reify their analytical unit - in these cases, the 'rumour' (Lienhardt 1975; Turner 1993; Stewart and Strathern 2004), at times even subsuming conspiracy theory as a subset of rumour. While any term must be treated heuristically, I argue that these two terms only partially overlap: some years ago, Havana went into mourning, falsely believing that Pedrito Calvo, a superstar of Cuban salsa, had died in a fire. And on numerous occasions over the years, rumours regarding Fidel Castro's death - a preferred prank in Miami and Havana both - have garnered attention in the international media. These rumours may be compelling, even political, but no conspiracy or conspirators are imagined. Conversely, some of what Kapferer (1990) calls 'rumor' I would call conspiracy theory (the stories surrounding Kennedy's assassination, for example).1 Unlike rumours, conspiracy theories always imply actors and agents, and not simply events, and those agents' motives are always illegitimate and disenfranchising, from the perspective of the person proposing their theorised conspiracy.For the eminent anthropologist George Marcus, the superpower-driven Cold War - itself 'defined throughout by a massive project of paranoid social thought and action that reached into every dimension of mainstream culture, politics, and policy' - was the key context which enabled conspiracy theories to flourish (Marcus 1999: 2). However, I argue that to properly frame conspiratorial narratives, one must examine the deeper historical record. In fact, the tradition of presuming, seeking and encountering conspiracy and imperial intrigue in Cuba precedes the Cold War superpowers by more than a hundred years, on at least two occasions involving the British, Spanish and American great powers of the nineteenth century - most famously over the destruction of the USS Maine, an event crucially preceded and set up by an earlier warship and conspiracy, that of the 1840s conspiracy known as La Escalera. …