Transnational histories of insurgency are growing. The increased emphasis on transnational aspects of political violence have challenged traditional understandings of insurgency as a form of militarism internal to the state. Few studies, however, draw attention to how insurgency is shaped by aesthetics and embodiment. The aesthetic turn in international relations has generated new research on material and visual cultures of militarisation, but there is less understanding of how this impacts patterns of resistance in revolutionary contexts, that is, how social actors resist, rebel and revolt against political authority. In this chapter, I examine how ideas of ‘revolution’ can be read through images and self-presentation techniques. Here, the visuality of the Cuban Revolution is brought into focus, first through its strategies of urban guerrilla warfare and then through its nation-building programmes. How did rebel leaders embody the revolutionary spirit, and did the circulation of images of insurgency enlist people to a participatory revolution? Further, did the revolution consolidate and circulate specific kinds of images and embodiments of military masculinities?

Since the nineteenth century, Cuba has had many periods of economic, political and social change, and these ‘crises have been characterized by strong ideas about renewal, progress, development, social justice, national vindication, and independence’. In 1511 the Spanish established themselves on the island and for the next two centuries it acted as a gateway to the region, making Havana a significant commercial location. Since the island's indigenous population was small, the Spanish colonisers met their demand for labour by importing enslaved Africans. Slavery would only be abolished in 1886, and Afro-Cubans continued to experience discrimination and segregation after that. A short period of British occupation in the late 1700s gave Cubans a taste of freedom from Spanish taxation policies, while strengthening trade relationships, an episode that prompted interest in wider political change. When Spain's empire fell in the early 1800s, it was the USA that sought to develop commercial interests on the island, not least because slavery was still widely practiced there. By the mid-1800s, the drive for abolition and independence led to various attempted rebellions, culminating in the Cuban War of Independence in 1895–8. Afro-Cubans played an influential role in this war, but the Negro Rebellion in 1912 saw their own demands for equality with Cuba's white population denied.