Abstract A scandal struck Cuba in the summer of 1989: a decorated military general, who had recently been assigned to the second-highest rank in the Cuban military, was arrested and charged with corruption and drug running. Within two months of his arrest, Arnaldo Ochoa and others from the military and Ministry of the Interior had been executed by firing squad. Cuban coverage of these scandalous arrests and accusations was at once unprecedented and inscrutable. The trials were televized and transcripts of speeches and testimony were reprinted in the state newspaper Granma each subsequent day. But Fidel Castro himself acknowledged that some footage was not aired, and some things were not said, to protect the innocence of the Cuban people and their families. Employing strategies most often used by historians of the colonial Spanish Americas and Africa, this essay exposes the fears and desires embedded in the Ochoa military tribunal transcripts, which do their best to obscure both. The scholars referenced use secrecy, rumors, and gossip as categories of analysis in their exploration of colonial trials. While Cuba was far from a colony in the 1980s, the author argues that the government had similar motivations as colonial governments did when they put seditious, rebellious, or conspiratorial enslaved people on trial: the government wanted to suppress the realities that Ochoa's scandal reflected—namely, the disaffection of thousands of veterans of Cuba's African wars. Thus, the author employs a similar strategy here, reading the tribunal transcript using theories around secrecy and gossip. Such a methodology illuminates the Cuban government's anxieties about race and Blackness embedded in Ochoa's trial. Ochoa himself was White, but he had led troops in Angola and Ethiopia, most of whom were Black and among whom he was extremely popular. Excavating the rumors and secrecy embedded in Ochoa's trial reveals a through line of racial tension in revolutionary Cuba that might have reignited in Angola. This essay proposes a new way of writing about the history of race in late twentieth-century Cuba, one that draws on the methodologies of colonial scholars.
Anasa Hicks (Sun,) studied this question.