Civil Sphere Meanings in the Cuban Sierra Maestra

A comprehensive assessment of the strategy and consequence of the Cuban Revolution is, perhaps unsurprisingly, out of the scope of this assignment and blog post. Instead, through the lens of the picture to the left, I will provide a neo-Durkheimian reading of the early days of the Cuban Revolution—Fidel Castro with his 11 men atop the Sierra Maestra, and the peasant campesinos who would aid and abet the revolution in those harrowing early days. While those peasants were not the only class who supported the July 26th Movement, the compañeros would not have made it out of the mountains without their support (Colhoun 2013:32; Huberman and Sweezy 1961:57). The revolutionaries gained that support because their behavior appeared closer to the values and codes of the civil sphere; the actions of the Batista regime, suffused with the values and codes of the market sphere, were easily painted and already seen as repressive.

In the adjacent photograph, Fidel Castro (to the left, with a characteristic cigar) trains a new guerilla recruit. Take note of the people surrounding the pair—clustered on the right are some of the original revolutionaries, visible as such from their fatigues, cargo pants, and hats. Scattered throughout are campesinos, peasant farmers in the mountainous region, in working hats and light clothes. They lean casually against their hay-roofed homes, taking stock of the barbudos. The new guerilla is a peasant, too, a fact belied by his clothes, his need for training (though some original revolutionaries were similarly unskilled), and his freshly-applied revolutionary’s armband, reading “JULIO.” That man at the center of the photograph is, as far as I know, unnamed. In microcosm, we see here the willingness of the July 26th Movement to cooperate with and treat justly the guajiros of the Sierra, which built a reciprocal and ultimately revolutionary relationship. It is the people in this photo who composed a class within civil society, and it is through that civil society that they made their case to the Cuban people.

Jeffrey Alexander sees the discourse of civil society as occurring through absolutely opposed categories, which frame the constituent’s understanding of motive, relationship, and institution. Accession to one code means association with other codes of the civil or uncivil type, and from that symbolic structure is generated deservingness—one is sacred, civil, and thus worthy of inclusion; or one is profane, uncivil, and thus to be excluded (Alexander 2006:55). This process of definition occurs both from the subject themselves and from the outside (56; 62). Civil codes include “active,” “open,” “honorable,” “friendly,” “rule regulated,” and “inclusive.” Other, uncivil codes include “irrational,” “greedy,” “conspiratorial,” “power,” and “hierarchy” (57-58). Alexander goes on to explain how the civil sphere is situated within and among the other uncivil spheres of society, which in turn each have their own codes and ideals downstream of “function-specific inequalities” (204). No sphere is independent, and as such Alexander recognizes the moments of input or intrusion of the values of other spheres into the civil sphere. In the case of economic-civil overlap, those underprivileged in the former sphere are often subject to the negatively-associated codes of the latter sphere. However, the civil sphere also gives such actors a location in which “to make claims for respect and power on the basis of their partially realized membership in the civil realm” (207-208)—in other words, the civil sphere and its civil ideals can be used to countervail the encroachment of the market sphere and its market ideals.

As mentioned above: without the support of the campesinos, the Cuban Revolutionaries would not have made it out of the Sierra Maestra, out of the Oriente, would not have been able to make their way to Havana. And it is clear that support was neither wholly present at first, nor ever total. Initial support came mostly in the form of hiding revolutionaries in homes, which contrasts significantly with the active revolutionary participation of peasants as the years advanced. What active participation that already existed—volunteers like Guillermo García, who would work his way to high-up leadership—was matched by guajiros who sold out information about the revolutionaries to the Batistianos (Guevara 2006:28). The support of the peasants, then, grew out of the kind of behavior seen in the photo—a friendly willingness to cooperate, an honor and respect for the people of the Sierra, and an equitable and just hand. July 26th soldiers would pay instead of pillaging, would set up hospitals and schools, promised a policy of agrarian reform, and indeed simply spent time with the peasants, engaging them as intellectuals and as people (Guevara 2006:57; Huberman and Sweezy 1961:57). This fact is drawn in sharp contrast to the Batista regime’s institutional character—the Havana government at the time was in intimate collaboration with all manner of gangsters, whose extortionist approach contorted the capital into a pit of “pure gangsterismo,” of “corruption and sadism” (Colhoun 2013:27; 30). The Batistianos in the city displayed Americanist- and market-positive characteristics: a “safe environment for ‘private capital,’” a means to “curtail international communist activities,” a source of “stability” (20-21). These values and codes could very well have totally enmeshed themselves in the Cuban civil sphere, and indeed they did in part—Batista, though unpopular, found a base both in ardent supporters and in individuals who did not resist the imposition of market values onto civil values. But Batista, the mob, and the Americans found the Oriente less fertile than Havana for expanding their market ideals (Harnecker 1987:31). The values of the civil sphere persisted, most clearly here in the individual psychologies of the peasantry. To them, the gangsters read as “greedy,” “conspiratorial,” and “exclusive”—uncivil, in contrast to the associative codes of the July 26th soldiers. It is civil values to which the revolutionaries hewed to most closely for the campesinos. It is civil values which the gangsters in Havana, for all their “stability,” violated repeatedly and flagrantly in government and warfare. And it is the clear comparison between the values of the compañeros and the values of the Batistianos which led peasants to support the revolution. The civil sphere, through its emanation high in the Sierra Maestra, gave the base for the revolutionaries’ discourse of liberty.

Works Cited

Alexander, Jeffrey C. 2006. The Civil Sphere. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

"Castro Giving Training To His Troops." 1956. From El País. Retrieved March 27, 2025 (https://elpais.com/elpais/2016/11/26/album/1480157108_152081.html). 

Colhoun, Jack. 2013. Gangsterismo: The United States, Cuba, and the Mafia: 1933 to 1966. New York, London: OR Books.

Guevara, Che. 2006. Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War. 1st ed., authorized. edited by A. Guevara. Melbourne, Vic.: Ocean Press [u.a.].

Harnecker, Marta. 1987. Fidel Castro’s Political Strategy: From Moncada to Victory. 1st ed. London, Sydney, New York: Pathfinder Pr.

 Huberman, Leo, and Paul M. Sweezy. 1961. Cuba: Anatomy of a Revolution. 2nd ed. New York: Monthly Review Press.