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

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

International Journal of Historical Archaeology

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.