Haydée Santamaría Cuban Revolutionary: She Led by Transgression by Margaret Randall (review)
“This is not a biography,” Margaret Randall writes of her book. “This is an impressionistic portrait, written by a poet rather than a historian” (13). Randall, who lived in Cuba from 1969 to 1980, considers Haydée Santamarı́a—the most central female figure of the insurrection culminating in the 1959 Cuban Revolution and founding leader of Casa de las Américas—her revolutionary mentor. Their connection shapes the form and function of the book. Both narrative history and poetic homage, the book consists of ten chapters and an elegy of ten poems and transgresses the conventions of traditional historical scholarship to examine this revolutionary figure and process the causes and consequences of her suicide in 1980. The mixing of genres allows Randall to reveal the private tensions underlying Santamarı́a’s very publicly heroic life and to argue for a more just consideration of her legacy.