The fiftieth anniversary of the Cuban Revolution and the years leading up to it have produced the inevitable crop of special journal issues and edited collections, all seeking to reflect on the last five decades and offer judgements about where the Revolution stands today and what its future might be. Given the hotly contested nature of the subject and the tendency towards polemic of much of the literature on it, the results have so far been predictably variable, mixing routine condemnation and laudatory commemoration, sketchy overview and genuine reassessment. This collection is no exception, although, falling more into the categories of condemnation and overview, it disappoints somewhat. This is largely because, since it comes from a more European perspective than many offerings (which usually means a more nuanced social-democratic or liberal perspective than that of some of the more partisan writing), specifically, a group of émigré Cubans and others gathered around the diasporic journal Cuba Nuestra, it often tends to follow lines of enquiry and argument that are less rigorous than one might expect.
After a brief general introduction by the editor and a short chronology of the Revolution, Carlos Estefanía Aulet opens the substance of the volume with a curious piece entitled ‘Historia de Cuba’. It is curious because, after an initial focus on the transition to Raúl and on dissidents' reaction to it, it is mostly a routine account of the historical roots of Cuban socialism, mixing partial politics with a broad sweep of Cuban history beginning in the late nineteenth century. It is also curious because, despite the wealth of historical studies covering the period (Cuban and non-Cuban), it relies heavily on internet sources. Indeed, this latter observation largely applies to the rest of the collection, where, apart from the editor's contribution (which is the best chapter of all) and the chapter on Africa, most of the pieces tend to rely on the internet, on highly partisan (and often dated) sources, and on their own published material, largely ignoring work published inside Cuba or any more neutral studies.
Carlos L. Viamontes then gives us an overview of Cuban–Soviet relations which, despite its detail (and some useful material on the early PSP–Soviet links), disappoints since it gives us little that is new, ignores recent research (such as Bain's work) and generally interprets it all somewhat one-dimensionally through a viewpoint that seems to characterise the relationship as Castro's wilfulness and Cuban subservience. As a fiftieth anniversary retrospective, we might have hoped for something more subtle. Henrik Jesús Hernández's chapter on ‘the Cubanization of Latin America’ essentially traces Cuba's 1960s and 1970s insurrectionary foreign policy, albeit curiously set inside a historical context that takes us back to 1492. However, despite the author's personal involvement in some of the events described (which does give us some useful detail and a broad catalogue of the different manifestations of that policy), the treatment occasionally declines into unsupported speculation or rumour, even giving credence to the somewhat discredited Plan Z which was used by Pinochet to justify the 1973 coup in Chile. Once again, we needed more than that at this stage of reflection. However, Pablo Hernández González's essay on Cuba in Africa between 1963 and 1976 is much more satisfactory, being well researched and with much more useful, and referenced, detail. In essence it is one of the most academic pieces of the collection.
The other is Gay-Sylvestre's essay on Church–state relations since 1960, focusing especially on the 1990s. It is more successful than most because it addresses the complexity, contradictions and pragmatism of the relationship, and because, as well as using existing sources (although again ignoring some of the more obvious and respected commentators on the subject, not least Margaret Crahan), it is based on first-hand interviews in Cuba. The only question mark over it is why, in a book published in Spain and largely written in Spanish, the chapter is left in the original French.
Estefanía then rounds off the collection with an account of dissidence in Cuba since 1959. Despite a tendency towards a rather one-dimensional reading of the system, it does offer a usefully detailed catalogue of many of the early opposition groups and also some of the more recent ones; in between, however, it tends to focus more on intellectual dissent within the system (such as that represented by Pensamiento Crítico and the CEA before 1996) and leaves us wanting the missing detail on the active internal dissidence of the 1970s and 1980s.
One feature of the collection is the series of strangely touristic photographs of Havana (by a Cuba-based dissident associated with the Damas de Blanco) which often have little or no relation to the text, but which occasionally seem to read perhaps too much into the scene portrayed. One example is a photograph of a seemingly normal bicitaxi with the accompanying caption ‘Pedaleando el domingo en busca de pan’ (p. 486), where we are asked to take the photographer's word for it that the scene was not just a normal picture of a normal bicitaxi. This may be a small element of the book, but it does somehow seem to speak volumes for most of the rest of the text.
Overall, therefore, this is regrettably more a case of an opportunity missed than a refreshingly new assessment of the Revolution. There are elements (usually for the purposes of reference) that make it a useful addition to our shelves on Cuba, for example the details of dissidence, of the Church–state relationship or of Cuba's African activities; but mostly the collection adds disappointingly little to the recent literature on Cuba.
