Memory, Destruction, and Traumatic Pasts in Cuba: The Escuadrón 41 During Batista’s Dictatorship

Jun 22, 2022

Memory, Destruction, and Traumatic Pasts in Cuba: The Escuadrón 41 During Batista’s Dictatorship, 1958

Odlanyer Hernández de Lara (Ph.D. student in anthropology)

International Journal of Historical Archaeology, June 2022

Odlanyer Hernández de Lara

Anthropology Department

Human Rights

Latin America & the Caribbean

Student Experience

International Journal of Historical Archaeology

Odlanyer Hernández de Lara

After a military coup in 1952, Cuba entered in a dictatorship with extreme state repression. By 1958 a colonial fortress in the city of Matanzas became a torture and detention center known as Escuadrón 41. Illustrating a case of forgetting, its destruction presents an atypical case study that defying official master narratives. Here, I analyze how is a traumatic past remembered through the lens of conflictive ideologies by intertwining the concepts of place of memory, destruction, and cultural trauma, which provides an account of a peripheral place and its local significance in the process of defining Cuba.