In Cuba y Estados Unidos, 1933–1959: Del Compromiso Nacionalista al Conflicto, Vanni Pettinà gives us a highly interesting and provocative book that seeks to reframe our understanding of a familiar episode in US diplomatic history – the American response to the Cuban Revolution. To do so, Pettinà traces the course of Cuban political development between the early 1930s and the late 1950s, in parallel with an examination of US–Cuban relations from Franklin Roosevelt to Dwight Eisenhower and an examination of the changing nature of Cold War competition during the period following Joseph Stalin's death in 1953. In weaving these three stories together, Pettinà argues that the hostility that emerged between Fidel Castro's Revolution and the Eisenhower administration was not purely a function of local factors (such as the threat that Castro posed to US investments on the island), nor did it result from a Manichean Cold War worldview that left American officials unable to distinguish between communism and nationalism in the Third World. Nor, for that matter, was it part of an ingrained hostility to Latin American nationalism on the part of a hegemonic United States.

Rather, the root of the antagonism lay in the way that the Cuban Revolution intersected with US perceptions of two convergent global trends in the 1950s: Third World decolonization, and the simultaneous Soviet effort to woo nationalist regimes in the developing regions. These trends, Pettinà asserts, made official Washington intensely wary of national liberation movements in the Third World, not because American policymakers could not tell a communist from a nationalist, but because it appeared that the Soviets might be able to coopt the latter no less than the former. This scenario seemed particularly relevant in Latin America, where the Kremlin had offered significant economic aid to governments in the region and begun pushing for a “united front” approach to revolution in the mid-1950s. According to Pettinà, these background influences strongly colored the US interpretation of events in Cuba, especially after the Cuban communists endorsed Castro in 1958. The ultimate result was the breakdown of the Good Neighbor-era détente between the United States and Latin American nationalism, and the rise of a US–Cuban conflict that has lasted for decades.

Pettinà's book is part of a new wave of scholarship on US–Latin American relations during the Cold War, and it has a number of features to commend it. The author makes a diligent effort to weave Latin America's story into the larger global history of the superpower conflict, and to explore systematically the links between inter-American relations and broader processes of Third World nationalism and liberation. Pettinà also does solid work in exploring the ideological and geopolitical implications of Moscow's political–economic offensive into Latin America in the mid-1950s, a subject that is only now beginning to assume its proper significance in the historiography. Not least of all, Pettinà's work reminds us that there has historically been an ebb and flow to the relationship between US power and Latin American nationalism – that this relationship is not something fixed and immutable, but rather something that has significantly varied over the course of the twentieth century. This is not the first time we have heard this story, of course, but it is nonetheless useful to recall that the dynamics of inter-American relations have often been just that –dynamic.

All this said, the book also has weaknesses. Most of the US sources are CIA and State Department records, making it difficult to tell whether the administration's top policymakers really viewed the Revolution from the particular perspective that Pettinà emphasizes. And while the book is strong when it comes to tracing the global dimensions of US–Cuban relations, the author goes too far in arguing that these factors represented the main – at times, it seems, the sole – driver of the conflict. There were clearly multiple “frames” through which US policymakers saw the Cuban Revolution; Pettinà's book tends to slight the local in stressing the global. Finally, the book would have benefited from some attention to the period after Castro's triumph, when many of the ideological and strategic issues that Pettinà discusses became even more prominent in shaping US–Cuban relations and influencing the broader international significance of the Revolution. One hopes that this book will soon be made available in an English-language edition, both so that the author might address these issues and so that his work will find a broader audience.