Pilgrims of the Revolution. Stories of Argentine Catholics in the Cuba of the sixties

Abstract

The Cuban Revolution changed the physiognomy of the left in Latin America. As Carlos Altamirano has pointed out, the Caribbean experience gave a revolutionary horizon to groups that, until then, had a markedly reformist character. Like a magnetic pole, the island attracted intellectuals, writers, and politicians of different orientations. Cuba became for Latin American revolutionaries - those who perceived themselves in that category, as well as those who wished to be - a lighthouse to which they not only made many references, but also sought to meet in person. Travelers and their stories became a genre unto themselves. Among Catholics, the reception was mixed. For the traditionalist sectors, it raised alarms about the advance of communism in Latin America. But for Christian progressivism, which had been formed in the 1950s, it had an ambivalent character. It would be difficult to imagine the dialogue between Catholics and Marxists without considering the impact of the Revolution, forcing an encounter that oscillated between necessity and distrust. It was not a simple Catholic "bad conscience" regarding a new set of truths that were now integrated into an old canon, but a complex confrontation from which both borrowings and rejections emerged. It triggered both a set of encounters that took place in a particular period in Argentina (from 1962 to 1965) and a longer process, in which Catholics incorporated, through translation and reworking, categories proper to the Marxist tradition. Many of them - such as the priests Héctor Ferreirós, Aldo Büntig and Carlos Mugica - traveled to the island, leaving rich testimonies of their passage through the capital of the Latin American revolution. The purpose of this article is to analyze how the Cuban Revolution was read among Argentine Catholics and what was the role of these representations in the elaboration of a Christian leftist project and its relationship with the experiences of "real socialism".