Trade Unionists Against Terror:
Guatemala City 1954-1985 by Deborah Levenson-Estrada, The University of North Carolina Press, 1994, 288 pp., $45 (cloth), $15.95 (paper).
Over the past 35 years, Guatemala’s
tiny labor movement has waged an
incessant struggle to survive in the
face of a terrorist state bent upon its
destruction. Given such a vicious
political climate, the labor move-
ment’s very existence-and persis-
tence-is surprising.
Using documentary sources and
first-person testimony, Levenson-
Estrada begins her study of the
labor movement after the 1954
coup, when Communists and labor
unionists affiliated with the AFL-
CIO began to reorganize in a
patently hostile environment. Mod-
est industrial growth and the
appearance of a political opening in
the 1970s led to an upsurge in
unionism. This upsurge crystallized
in the 1976 sit-in at the Coca-Cola
bottling company and the 1977
Glorious March of the Miners.
After the October, 1980 urban
insurrection, the state launched a
brutal counterattack which left the
movement once again reeling. Lev-
enson-Estrada concludes with a
detailed look at the remarkable
376-day occupation of the Coca-
Cola bottling plant by the company
union in 1984 while the country
was under a state of siege.
Guatemalan unionists were not,
on the whole, revolutionary, nor
were they simply motivated by
economic need. Rather, the author
argues, they were inspired by
Christian notions of human dignity
and the right to a decent life. Con-
fronted by a state and employers
that treated them little better than
animals, workers used trade union-
ism as a vehicle to assert their
humanity and their sense of them-
selves as historical protagonists.
Levenson-Estrada argues that to
view workers simply as class actors
is to underestimate the complex
nexus of their material, intellectual
NACILA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS
and emotional lives. Faithful to this
premise, Trade Unionists Against
Terror is much more than a narrow
labor history; it is a lucid study of
work, gender relations, religion,
and urban popular culture in post-
1954 Guatemala.
Cuba Va! a video by Vicente Franco and Gail Dolgin (distributed by CUBA VA video Project, 12 Liberty Street, San Francisco, CA 94110), 1993, 59 mins., $95 (sale).
Cuba’s youth debate the revolu-
tion-past, present and future-in
this fast-paced but somewhat dis-
jointed documentary. Scenes of
Cuban life and historical footage
are interspersed with commentary
from a passionate and opinionated
assortment of young Cubans who
represents a broad range of charac-
ters, issues and viewpoints. Even
with their faces hidden, it is note-
worthy that the dissidents in the
film don’t support a U.S.-imposed
solution to the Cuban crisis. One
young revolutionary openly specu-
lates about the possibility of inde-
pendent capitalism. The film pre-
sents an image of Cuban society
undergoing the rapid social change
of recent years with extraordinary
openness and flexibility.
The film gives the impression-
and provides substantial evi-
dence-that Cuban youth have
considerable freedom of expres-
sion, particularly in the cultural
realm where long-haired “rockers”
and black “rappers” face off for the
vanguard role. The overwhelming
majority, however-especially of
university students-seem to be
loyal mainstream Cuban national-
ists and self-identified socialists.
But while supportive of Fidel and a
revolution they’ve grown up with,
they evince a definite critical spirit,
and a strong desire to determine
their own futures. They seem to
concur with the lyrics of the upbeat
song “Cuba Va!” but have to won-
der-along with the dissidents-
“Para donde?”
