During the first half of the twentieth century, Samuel Flagg Bemis of Yale University dominated the writing of the history of US foreign relations, especially the history of US relations with Latin America. Professor Bemis' contributions to scholarship were both laudable and lamentable. Bemis conducted multi-archival research and meticulously documented his work. His injunction was that a scholar would cross an ocean to check a footnote. Indeed, Bemis and his note cards were dumped into the cold water of the English Channel after a German U-boat torpedoed the steamer Sussex in March 1916. Bemis took a haughty, nationalistic approach to history. He was known as Samuel ‘Wave the Flag’ Bemis, faithfully defending US actions around the world. In his Latin American Policy of the United States (1943), he endorsed the repeated US interventions in the Caribbean and Central America, labelling them ‘short-lived benevolent imperialism’ or ‘imperialism against imperialism’ that ‘was not really bad’. He denounced the Cuban Revolution as ‘colonialism’ and a violation of the Monroe Doctrine. He wrote to John F. Kennedy and recommended a US invasion of Fidel Castro's Cuba. In his 1961 chest-thumping presidential address to the American Historical Association, Bemis celebrated the ‘blessings of liberty’ and suggested that the United States might need to wage nuclear war against the Soviet Union.

Stephen Irving Max Schwab takes us back more than half a century to old-fashioned, Bemis-style diplomatic history with his study of the US military base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba – or in his words, ‘Guantánamo, USA’. Schwab, who was a former analyst for the South American Division of the CIA, is now an adjunct assistant professor at the University of Alabama. Schwab adopts the best of Bemis, taking his sources from presidential libraries and manuscript collections throughout the United States. He also travelled to Cuba, although his access to archival sources there was limited. To his credit, he cites Cuban historians who write in Spanish.

Like Bemis, Schwab focuses on narration rather than analysis, with, for example, a dramatic account of military heroism in the US taking of Guantánamo in 1898. Over the past three decades, there has been a significant shift in the way historians approach international relations. Scholars of international history use perspectives on class, ethnicity, gender and race, and concepts such as ‘ideology’, to explore bilateral and multilateral relations. These approaches are evident in Jana K. Lipman's excellent Guantánamo: A Working Class History between Empire and Revolution (2009). Schwab claims his is an ‘untold’ story, but Lipman's work came first, and her book is analytic and innovative. Perhaps aware that his study is methodologically dated, Schwab notes that ‘it is appropriate to view Guantánamo's past within the conceptual framework of Atlantic history, especially the interactive aspects of distinct cultures within the Atlantic region’ (p. 13). He waits until the last five pages of his book (pp. 233–7) to explore cultural interactions, however, and his definition of cultural interaction is ‘fenceline talks’ between US and Cuban officials on issues such as minefields near the Guantánamo base.

Schwab claims there is ‘no dispassionate published history’ of Guantánamo (p. 7). He considers other scholars like Lipman and Louis A. Pérez Jr to be unduly critical of the US presence in Cuba. But Schwab is a Bemis-like patriot, who believes that Guantánamo is ‘our’ base (p. 2). He has the same feelings about the Cuban Revolution as Bemis, and he constantly refers to Castro as ‘Fidel’, as if the Cuban leader was a boy. Schwab argues that Cubans suffer from the ‘Latin temperament’ (p. 82), and that the US presence in Cuba is on sound legal grounds because Cubans ratified the Platt Amendment and reaffirmed US control of Guantánamo in 1934. Cubans had little choice but to confirm the overwhelming power and presence of the United States in the Caribbean, however. Schwab constantly complains that Cubans are engaged in unwarranted ‘provocations’ against ‘Guantánamo, USA’. He downplays the impact on Cuban thinking and foreign policy of the Bay of Pigs invasion, the massive US campaign of terrorism and sabotage in Cuba (Operation Mongoose), the repeated efforts to assassinate Fidel Castro and the ongoing trade embargo. These were US provocations against Cuba.

The editors at the University Press of Kansas might arguably be asked why they did not address the arrogant, ethnocentric approach inherent in this study, but surely they had an obligation to edit the prose; one paragraph goes on for 86 lines, or about 900 words (pp. 7–9). Fortunately, students of Cuban history and the United States' control of Guantánamo have a choice of books to consult: the aforementioned study by Lipman and anything by Louis Pérez, including his new title, Cuba in the American Imagination (2008), are sure to enlighten, while Lars Schoultz, in That Infernal Little Cuban Republic (2009), provides a comprehensive history of US policy toward Cuba. If one wants to see how history was written 75 years ago, however, then Guantánamo, USA is the place to look.