Local or regional histories of, or from Cuba, are few and far between, marginalised by the hegemony of historiographical interest in the national narrative; hence, any new local history is welcome. And Matanzas is certainly one of the most obvious places to start, given its centrality to Cuba's coffee cultivation and then, much more significantly, the post-1760s sugar boom, the latter being of course intimately linked to slave labour. The latter development created the slave society which flourished around the city from the early 1800s, enabling Matanzas to challenge Havana in its wealth, its richness of architecture and its nationally-famous cultural expression. Indeed, not only was Matanzas known as the ‘Athens of Cuba’ but it was also the site of Cuba's first recorded baseball match, in 1874, as well as seeing some of Cuba's first railways (sugar-linked of course), Cuba's first steamship run, and being Cuba's first city to boast trams; more notoriously, the Matanzas region became the locale for the infamous La Escalera ‘conspiracy’ (or rather massacre) of 1844, during which, we are told, the United States offered to help Spain supress the perceived slave rebellion.

Clearly, then, Matanzas, founded relatively late, in 1693 (although its natural harbour had long been used by privateers and the Spanish and its name dates back to the Spanish conquest, to a massacre of 30 Spaniards by the island's natives) and only really developing after the 1760s ‘opening’ to external trade, was central to so much about modern Cuba, for around a century. Hence, this history comes not a moment too soon, not least because the city's decline from the end of the nineteenth century also tells a wider story, of the shifting cultivation of the increasing (but decreasingly lucrative) sugar crop and, of course, of an always costly modernisation. Meantime, the region and city saw the national narrative played out locally, witnessing the 1762 English military landings, the influx of refugees from Florida, both major rebellions against Spain, the annexationist landings and declarations of the 1840s and 1850s, the race massacres of 1912. Even the radical nationalist Antonio Guiteras was born there.

All of this is narrated in this volume. However, it is a curious tale, told by an art historian (rather than a social, economic or political historian) who, before leaving Cuba in 1961, grew up in a comfortable middle-class family in the city, both experiences (comfort and emigration) clearly shaping his account. For the narrative is all refracted through the lens of nostalgia, for a ‘lost’ Cuba (lost to him and his family but also, in his view, lost in the welter of, and destruction by, what he sees as ‘Castro's Revolution’), and therefore also of a slight bitterness at that loss. Thankfully, the nostalgia, and the clear underlying love for the city, shines through more than the bitterness, the latter being expressed more in the oddities of expression, we are told, for example, in a rather unhistorical manner, of ‘the Castro militiamen’ (p. 6), and also in the continuing need to add colophons about what happened after 1959 to destroy the beauty of the society, culture and politics which he left behind.

Perhaps because of his training and artistic preference, as well as the fact that it is evidently a labour of love, Bretos's text is actually more of a cultural history than anything else, but no less valuable for that, not least because Matanzas really was one of the centres of Cuba's romantic and poetic flowering (being one of the sites of Domingo Del Monte's seminal tertiulias), highlighting the close relationship between wealth (derived this time from sugar and of course slavery) and such cultural effervescence. Moreover, this interest perhaps lends itself more comfortably to Bretos's slightly dramatic tone, especially when dealing with the distant past, such as narrating the tale of the landing of the Dutch admiral, Piet Heyn; it also perhaps contributes to a slightly sardonic tone at times, although that is usually ameliorated by a sharp sense of humour with which some of the historical anecdotes are narrated or the passing observations made.

There is much to welcome and recommend in this account: the detail of the sugar industry, the narration of the city's evolving architectural particularities, the discussion of the secularisation of Matanzas society, and the fact that it is a detailed local history of a key city. However, it has to be said that the author's repeated tendency to lapse into often gratuitous anti-Castro (and it is always personalised as anti-Castro, rather than anti-Revolution) polemic adds nothing and distracts considerably, the last two chapters allowing that polemic to threaten to overwhelm the quality of the preceding account. This tendency is especially regrettable, as his history of Matanzas is so personally-focused that it more or less ends with the period between the rebels' 1959 victory and his own departure in 1961, being supplemented (but hardly updated) by his saddened and evidently saddening return in 2003. Equally, for all that the reliance on personal memory and anecdote adds a human touch to the ‘big picture’ painted, it is eventually no real substitute for detailed social history; even the account of the Batista period turns out to be more a reflection on the national narrative that any real study of the Matanzas to which he was to some extent a personal witness.

Nonetheless, it is difficult to get really cross with a tale which is told so well, so lovingly and so interestingly; whether it is a ‘history’ is perhaps more questionable, but at least it does address the local and thus fill something of a gap.