The 1970s have largely been overlooked in scholarly studies of the Cuban Revolution, or, at the very least, dismissed simply as a period of “Sovietization” characterized by widespread bureaucratization, institutionalization, and adherence to Soviet orthodoxy. Consequently, scant research exists that examines the major changes that took place across the decade and their role in determining the course of the Revolution. This book provides, for the first time, a comprehensive assessment of the 1970s which challenges prevailing interpretations. Drawing from multidisciplinary perspectives and exploring a range of areas—including politics, international relations, culture, education, and healthcare—its contributing authors demonstrate that the decade was a time of intense transformation which proved pivotal to the development of the Revolution. Indeed, many of the ideas, approaches, policies, and legislation developed and tested during the 1970s maintain a very visible legacy in contemporary Cuba. In highlighting the complexity of the 1970s, this volume ultimately aims to contribute to a greater understanding of the Cuban Revolution and how it chooses to face the challenges of the twenty-first century.
For many Cubans, Fidel Castro's Revolution represented deliverance from a legacy of inequality and national disappointment. For others—especially those exiled in the United States—Cuba's turn to socialism made the prerevolutionary period look like paradise lost. Michael J. Bustamante unsettles this familiar schism by excavating Cubans' contested memories of the Revolution's roots and results over its first twenty years. Cubans' battles over the past, he argues, not only defied simple political divisions; they also helped shape the course of Cuban history itself. As the Revolution unfolded, the struggle over historical memory was triangulated among revolutionary leaders in Havana, expatriate organizations in Miami, and average Cuban citizens. All Cubans leveraged the past in individual ways, but personal memories also collided with the Cuban state's efforts to institutionalize a singular version of the Revolution's story. Drawing on troves of archival materials, including visual media, Bustamante tracks the process of what he calls retrospective politics across the Florida Straits. In doing so, he drives Cuban history beyond the polarized vision seemingly set in stone today and raises the prospect of a more inclusive national narrative.
Gangsterismo is an extraordinary accomplishment, the most comprehensive history yet of the clash of epic forces over several decades in Cuba. It is a chronicle that touches upon deep and ongoing themes in the history of the Americas, and more specifically of the United States government, Cuba before and after the revolution, and the criminal networks known as the Mafia. The result of 18 years’ research at national archives and presidential libraries in Kansas, Maryland, Texas, and Massachusetts, here is the story of the making and unmaking of a gangster state in Cuba. In the early 1930s, mobster Meyer Lansky sowed the seeds of gangsterismo when he won Cuban strongman Fulgencio Batista’s support for a mutually beneficial arrangement: the North American Mafia were to share the profits from a future colony of casinos, hotels, and nightclubs with Batista, his inner circle, and senior Cuban Army and police officers. In return, Cuban authorities allowed the Mafia to operate its establishments without interference. Over the next twenty-five years, a gangster state took root in Cuba as Batista, other corrupt Cuban politicians, and senior Cuban army and police officers got rich. All was going swimmingly until a handful of revolutionaries upended the neat arrangement: and the CIA, Cuban counterrevolutionaries, and the Mafia joined forces to attempt the overthrow of Castro. Gangsterismo is unique in the literature on Cuba, and establishes for the first time the integral, extensive role of mobsters in the Cuban exile movement. The narrative unfolds against a broader historical backdrop of which it was a part: the confrontation between the United States and the Cuban revolution, which turned Cuba into one of the most perilous battlegrounds of the Cold War. ……………………………… “The anti-communist hysteria generated by the Cold War frequently unhinged the policy judgments of US government officials in many areas, but nowhere so completely as in our relations with Cuba. This conclusion is inescapable as Gangsterismo brilliantly unravels the bizarre tale of the Mafia army the Kennedy brothers recruited in their manic determination to rid Cuba of Castro, that vexing, seemingly indomitable Communist.” —Martin J. Sherwin, co-winner of the Pulitzer Prize (together with Kai Bird) for American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer “What is shocking is not what is new, but how much that is old – already on the record in presidential and other archives, CIA and FBI files, memoirs and histories – in Jack Colhoun’s Gangsterismo. Drawing on the National Security Archives, papers and books, public and private, he damningly documents the pathetic, incompetent and sometimes comic, but always inappropriate and anti-democratic, attempts by the CIA and/or its confederates, working in tandem with members of the mob, to assassinate Castro and overthrow the Cuban revolution.” —Victor S. Navasky, publisher emeritus, The Nation; professor, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism “Gangsterismo is an invaluable addition to our background knowledge about that small island nation that has incurred so much devotion and ire from U.S. Americans. Books about Cuba abound, but this one lays bare an often forgotten pre-revolutionary history of U.S.-based organized crime, and subsequent hidden U.S. government covert action. Colhoun has done his homework. This is a must-read.” —Margaret Randall, author of To Change the World: My Years in Cuba “Few aspects of Cuba-U.S. relations have so doggedly resisted serious inquiry as the subject of organized crime in Cuba. Much of what we know has reached us by way of popular culture, principally through film and fiction, to which the subject of the underworld in the tropics so aptly lends itself. Colhoun represents a breakthrough: serious scholarship on a serious subject. He casts light upon one of the darkest recesses of a dark history, calling attention to the convergence of interests between the underworld of criminal activity and nether world of covert operations – and reveals in the process that film and fiction have actually only scratched the surface of a sordid story.” —Louis A. Pérez, Jr.editor, Cuba Journal; professor of history, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
In October 1962 school children huddled under their desks and diplomats feverishly negotiated as the world sat on the brink of nuclear war. The Cuban Missile Crisis was the most dangerous moment in modern history and resulted in a changed worldview for the United States, the Soviet Union, and Cuba. In tracing the developments of the missile crisis and beyond, Sad and Luminous Days presents and interprets a heretofore unavailable (and largely unknown) secret speech that Castro delivered to the Cuban leadership in 1968. In it, Castro reflects on the crisis and reveals the distrust and bitterness that characterized Cuban-Soviet relations in 1968. Blight and Brenner frame the annotated speech with an examination of the missile crisis itself, and an analysis of Cuban-Soviet relations between 1962–1968, ending with an epilogue that highlights the lessons the missile crisis offers us in the current search for security and a stable world order. Sad and Luminous Days sheds new light on Cuban-Soviet relations and should be required reading not only for Cold-War scholars and historians, but also for anyone intrigued by the drama of the thirteen momentous days in October 1962.
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE IN HISTORY WINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE IN HISTORY “Full of…lively insights and lucid prose” (The Wall Street Journal) an epic, sweeping history of Cuba and its complex ties to the United States—from before the arrival of Columbus to the present day—written by one of the world’s leading historians of Cuba. In 1961, at the height of the Cold War, the United States severed diplomatic relations with Cuba, where a momentous revolution had taken power three years earlier. For more than half a century, the stand-off continued—through the tenure of ten American presidents and the fifty-year rule of Fidel Castro. His death in 2016, and the retirement of his brother and successor Raúl Castro in 2021, have spurred questions about the country’s future. Meanwhile, politics in Washington—Barack Obama’s opening to the island, Donald Trump’s reversal of that policy, and the election of Joe Biden—have made the relationship between the two nations a subject of debate once more. Now, award-winning historian Ada Ferrer delivers an “important” (The Guardian) and moving chronicle that demands a new reckoning with both the island’s past and its relationship with the United States. Spanning more than five centuries, Cuba: An American History provides us with a front-row seat as we witness the evolution of the modern nation, with its dramatic record of conquest and colonization, of slavery and freedom, of independence and revolutions made and unmade. Along the way, Ferrer explores the sometimes surprising, often troubled intimacy between the two countries, documenting not only the influence of the United States on Cuba but also the many ways the island has been a recurring presence in US affairs. This is a story that will give Americans unexpected insights into the history of their own nation and, in so doing, help them imagine a new relationship with Cuba; “readers will close [this] fascinating book with a sense of hope” (The Economist). Filled with rousing stories and characters, and drawing on more than thirty years of research in Cuba, Spain, and the United States—as well as the author’s own extensive travel to the island over the same period—this is a stunning and monumental account like no other.
In the tumultuous first decade of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro and other leaders saturated the media with altruistic images of themselves in a campaign to win the hearts of Cuba's six million citizens. In Visions of Power in Cuba, Lillian Gue
The Book of Lost Saints is an evocative multigenerational Cuban-American family story of revolution, loss, and family bonds from New York Times-bestselling author Daniel José Older. Marisol vanished during the Cuban Revolution, disappearing with hardly a trace. Now, shaped by atrocities long-forgotten, her tenacious spirit visits her nephew, Ramón, in modern-day New Jersey. Her hope: that her presence will prompt him to unearth their painful family history. Ramón launches a haphazard investigation into the story of his ancestor, unaware of the forces driving him on his search. Along the way, he falls in love, faces a run-in with a murderous gangster, and uncovers the lives of the lost saints who helped Marisol during her imprisonment. Uplifting and evocative, The Book of Lost Saints is a haunting meditation on family, forgiveness, and the violent struggle to be free. An Imprint Book
In Cuban Revelations, Marc Frank offers a first-hand account of daily life in Cuba at the turn of the twenty-first century, the start of a new and dramatic epoch for islanders and the Cuban diaspora. A U.S.-born journalist who has called Havana home for almost a quarter century, Frank observed in person the best days of the revolution, the fall of the Soviet Bloc, the great depression of the 1990s, the stepping aside of Fidel Castro, and the reforms now being devised by his brother. Examining the effects of U.S. policy toward Cuba, Frank analyzes why Cuba has entered an extraordinary, irreversible period of change and considers what the island's future holds. The enormous social engineering project taking place today under Raúl's leadership is fraught with many dangers, and Cuban Revelations follows the new leader's efforts to overcome bureaucratic resistance and the fears of a populace that stand in his way. In addition, Frank offers a colorful chronicle of his travels across the island's many and varied provinces, sharing candid interviews with people from all walks of life. He takes the reader outside the capital to reveal how ordinary Cubans live and what they are thinking and feeling as fifty-year-old social and economic taboos are broken. He shares his honest and unbiased observations on extraordinary positive developments in social matters, like healthcare and education, as well as on the inefficiencies in the Cuban economy.
Cuban-born historian and radio broadcaster shatters they myth that most Cubans support Fidel Castro. A clear, concise and compelling history of the internal resistance Cubans have waged for 44 years against Castro's tyranny, Encinosa chronicles the heroism displayed by many and the suffering endured by most. Unvanquished will mark a breakthrough in America's understanding of Castro and Cuba.
