My mother, Liz Dore, who has died aged 75, was an intellectual activist and Latin American historian. As an active communist in the late 1960s and 70s, she was even approached in the early 70s to spy for Cuba – an offer she declined. She spent the later decades of her life documenting the impact of the Cuban revolution on the lives of ordinary Cubans, leading the first oral history project undertaken in Cuba for 40 years.
Liz was born in Brooklyn, New York. Her father, Robert Dore, was a lawyer who later ran an advertising agency and her mother, Anita (nee Wilkes), was an English teacher. Both sets of grandparents had emigrated to the US from eastern Europe in the late 19th century – one from Ukraine and the other from Poland.
After attending Berkeley Academy (now called the Berkeley Carroll school), she gained a degree at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York state, then settled in New York City, where she found ideology (in Marxist study groups) and revolution (in the Revolutionary Communist party). In 1970 she began a PhD at Columbia University in Latin American history and during that time met John Weeks, whom she married in 1975.
Her professional life sought to fuse academia and activism. After doing research for her PhD in Peru, from 1981 she served as an adviser to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Returning to the US in 1983, she gained a full-time position lecturing at Middlebury College in Vermont. Searching for a more friendly environment for socialists, the family then moved to the UK in 1989.
There Liz taught Latin American history, first at Portsmouth Polytechnic (now university) throughout the 1990s and later at Southampton University until she retired in 2012. Although age and children tempered her activism, she still sought extra-academic opportunities – hosting lectures during the 2011-12 London Occupy movement and supporting socialist policies in the Labour party. She was proudly Jewish, and campaigned for the end of the Israeli occupation of Palestine.
Liz published widely on Latin American history. But her pride was her last book, an oral history of Cuba, finished just before she died. She saw this as a contribution to our collective thinking on how to create more equal and just societies, by triggering debate on transitions from egalitarianism to market-based economies in socialist countries. It is due to be published by Apollo Press as How Things Fall Apart: What Happened to the Cuban Revolution.
John died in 2020. Liz is survived by her children, Matthew and me, and two grandchildren, Lukas and Hana, and her sister Marge.
