Alongside signals that Cuba and the United States are now on a path toward reconciliation grows a body of scholarship that examines the tumultuous Cold War history between the two countries and the transnational collaboration this friction produced. Rafael Rojas's Fighting over Fidel adds to the burgeoning historiography of the US left's interest in the Cuban Revolution by spotlighting the dialogue and debates revolution inspired within the intellectual sphere centered in New York City. As an important literary and ideological microcosm of 1960s America, the Big Apple, Rojas argues, gave life to the “interplay of tensions and sympathies that were generated in the relation between the New Left and the Cuban Revolution” (5).

Fighting over Fidel is a nuanced analysis of this interplay, a navigation through left ideology and polemics, the musings and vitriol of 1960s luminaries such as Waldo Frank, Carleton Beals, C. Wright Mills, Irving Howe, Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, Susan Sontag, Norman Mailer, Eldridge Cleaver, Stokely Carmichael, Elizabeth Sutherland Martínez, and their publishing outlets: Monthly Review, Kulchur, Village Voice, Pa'Lante, Dissent. Rojas inlays these figures within their movements and communities – the Black Panthers, the beat generation – while also singling out their personal and multifaceted relations to the Revolution, and, more problematically, to the new Cuban state.

How one made the “American translation of utopia” (7) depended on one's identity as African American, Chicana, feminist, or part of the Old or New Left generation. Disenchantment – or what Rojas terms “disencounter” – is a theme that flows throughout the book. These are the internal inconsistencies weighing on those in search of a new variant of humanism in Cuba. There, Susan Sontag and others could discover authentic socialist liberation, yet

Rojas concludes that most writers “were not defenders of the Cuban Revolution's shift toward communism but objectors to Washington's Cold War policies” (31). The overall fanfare surrounding the Revolution fell into hasty retreat after the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Once Cuba became firmly ensconced in Soviet-style Communism and dependent on Moscow, Rojas affirms, the left's distance from Cuba grew.

Many of the figures appearing in Fighting over Fidel have been reviewed elsewhere, but even the well-informed reader will learn new facts regarding Waldo Frank, elder statesman of the left Latin Americanists, who was commissioned $5,000 to write a book on the Revolution. Cuba: Prophetic Island (1961) sold well, though it earned a cool reception by the Cuban government due to Frank's heavy-handed anticommunist criticism. Additionally, there is a chapter that rests on Allen Ginsberg and another on Robert F. Williams. Carleton Beals and the monumental C. Wright Mills also earn lengthy commentary, as do fellow liberals, Marxists, and communists, which are political labels that Rojas painstakingly probes, giving variety to ideological trends and divisions that are often flattened in like-minded investigations. There is also an enlightening chapter on Chicana activist Elizabeth Sutherland Martínez. Her book The Youngest Revolution (1970) crops up elsewhere in similar scholarship, but the photographer Leroy McLucas, whose work appears in the book, often gets short shrift. Rojas corrects this oversight. In the end, Sutherland and McLucas, like many of the book's protagonists, walk away from revolution with the “melancholy of estrangement” (219).

In the end, this book is a valuable introduction to dissident intellectualism published between World War II and the climax of the Vietnam War. Students of cultural studies will find their methods and frameworks lacking, save some surface scrutiny of photography and poetry; nor will one find the wider historical brushstrokes of the movements mentioned: feminism, black power, anti-Vietnam War protest. But many scholars will find useful and novel the information gleaned from left and liberal journals and periodicals of the day and the archival material mined from the National Archives and the papers of C. Wright Mills, Carleton Beals, and Waldo Frank. In the end, Rojas has produced a widely accessible book, which would work well in an undergraduate or graduate classroom, as well as on the casual bedside table.