By studying emotions in political and intellectual speeches in Cuba I seek to shed light on aspects of Cuban culture not previously explored. My interest lies in the emotional cultures informing the way autonomy and agency are imagined. Culture as an object of emotional study is more accessible than experience. As Carol and Peter N. Stearns note, “culture is important in its own right, because it affects public policies and behaviors, including the law; it normally affects actual emotional evaluations including self-evaluations"[1].

The starting point for this inquiry is an analysis of 1,139 Fidel Castro speeches available at the website www.cuba.cu. I discarded files that were not personal speeches such as the “Agreement for the Application of the Bolivarian Alternative for the peoples our America and the people’s Trade Agreements” signed by Hugo Chávez, Evo Morales and Fidel Castro. Whenever I needed to provide an English translation of a passage I used the LANIC Castro Speech Data Base. Most literary works were obtained in digital form, but in some cases I scanned and applied Optical Character Recognition tools (ABBYY FineReader). This analysis is aided with the tools of NVivo and LIWC software. To design graphs representing counts I employed text search queries in NVivo. For the graphs depicting coverage I utilized LIWC. All graphs were plotted in python using matplolib and occasionally mpld3.

The digital component of this project acts as the point of entry to my inquiry, not as the result. The digital methods and graphs are not intended to provide “evidence.” This website was thought as a platform for the historical exploration of emotional lexicons. The varied emotional lexicons are part of a heuristic tool to organize historical knowledge in a particular manner. I do not claim emotional lexicons “refer to” particular emotional realities, but rather, I seek to explore which realities are linked to its rhetorical deployment. To put a familiar example, when G.W. Bush talked about “freedom” there was often a link to “invasion.” One thing is the meaning of freedom, and the other, its rhetorical uses. In very simple terms, the question is: what is talked about when talking about “happiness,” “fear,” “guilt,” etc.?

My effort aims towards providing a user-friendly website where both historians and “regular” people can explore how emotional concepts are used, and which topics surround those concepts. This is a work in progress, I will be adding new graphs in the following months. Feel free to let me know what you think, what you want to see, what you like...

[1] Anger: The Struggle for Emotional Control in America's History. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 262.