Even as the US hegemonic presence has impacted the horizons and actions of Cubans, Cuba has loomed large in the imagination of generations of US citizens. This book offers a dense analysis of US-Cuban political and cultural exchange, particularly around the Cuban revolutions of 1933 and 1959. It draws on US and Cuban sources, documenting how in the years of the Good Neighbor policy to those of cold war containment generations of leftists lifted the banner of revolution in their campaigns for racial equality, anti-imperialism, and women's liberation. In the author's own words, the book aims “to explain why certain US Leftists and progressives wanted to believe that Cuba would be ‘perfect’ some day and why their participation in that endeavor was inseparable from the ways in which Cuba has operated in a cultural imagination fashioned out of the lineaments of empire and independence in the history of intimate ties. Disillusionment makes up a central motif in this story” (274–275).

In tracing this history of transnational connectivity, the book produces an intimate portrait of African-American revolutionaries, feminist activists, proletarian writers, transnational exiles, dissidents, and artists, all of whose accounts challenge views of nation and nationalism as separate constructs of collective identity. It shows how intimately connected were struggles in Cuba to those in the United States, and how each struggle shaped the contours of the other. In connecting to Cuban revolution, US groups found inspiration in ‘making revolution’ on their own grounds, contesting racism, sexism, and social injustice and often projecting idealized images of Cuban modernity and an uncritical assessment of the wider implications of their political allegiances. That inspiration continued, until the gap between Cuban rhetoric and practice—the gap in attaining racial and class equality and gender parity—became too wide to ignore.

The author develops this analysis through a very rich and intense portrayal of varied historiographies, cartographies, and cultural affiliations that reconstruct “the cluster of contact zones revolution has inspired.” At its center is the story of Cuban exceptionalism, unfolding in parallel and in contact with US exceptionalism and including tantalizing images of revolution that attracting caravans of New Left travelers to Cuba's state-sponsored messages and programs. The author reveals the contradictory nature of those messages as they emphasized vigorous masculinity while predicating gender equality and the elimination of racism, and claimed to spearhead anticapitalism and anti-imperialism, while carrying out a modernizing program of state controls and collectivization. The book also places the US search for the ‘Other America’ in the coalescence of broader, postcolonial consciousness and alliances in the post-Bandung era.

The book's contribution lies in showing how the histories of the US and Cuba became entangled in multiple and often contradictory images and narratives, out of which countervailing forces in each society looked at the other as a source of inspiration, defiance, and fear as they sought alternative models of modernity (and more recently even postmodern interpretations). In Chapter 6, for instance, the author describes how Havana's postcolonial politics used civil rights clashes in the USA as fodder for its own program of nation-building, while welcoming US revolutionaries Stokely Carmichael, Robert F. Williams, and Eldridge Cleaver to pronounce emphatic denials of the existence of racism in Cuba and thereby limit everyday Cubans’ questioning of the racial norms of the revolution (198–234). Similarly, Chapter 7 reveals how women used the Cuban revolution to refashion the feminist Left, with third-world feminists in the US promoting Cuban women as models worthy of emulation in the 1960s. Only later did they realize the patriarchal nature of the narratives of modernization of the 1970s—narratives that Margaret Randall, Vilma Espín, and Elizabeth Sutherland Martínez, among others, would confront to build cross-border alliances (235–273).

The study ends in the 1970s as it traces the disenchantment of those US idealists who realized that the Cuban Revolution could not deliver on many of its utopian promises. In sum, this is a book about the multiple contacts of Cubans and US citizens, whose countries became powerful symbols for each other out of an intimate history of transnational connectivity. The work is highly recommended.