Irving Louis Horowitz has inhabited Cuban studies for so long, not least with his repeated editions of Cuban Communism, that we already know where he is likely to stand on the issues broached in this chronological collection of his essays on Cuba since 1965. For those who are unsure, his dedication (to Jeanne Kirkpatrick) and his Preface make it crystal clear, with an explicit debt to Arendt (and thus to notions of totalitarianism) and with references to ‘tragedy’, ‘tyrant’ and ‘family dictatorship’.

From that point of view the collection does not disappoint, with two targets standing out above all – Fidel Castro and US ‘fellow travellers’ – and with the collection showing Horowitz's trajectory from a progressive US leftism to a liberal anti-communism so expressive of Cold War interpretations of the world. Hence what we often read here are less expositions of research-based cold analysis than acerbic position taking, informed polemic with an always rigorous logic to the argument. Indeed, Horowitz demonstrates in these essays that he is more than a stereotypical apostate; despite the spleen which he vents on the US Left and his continuing adherence to somewhat outmoded concepts, he is always a deep thinker with a sharp intellect, often able to see the subtleties and contradictions of the Cuban context he examines, but also with the forensic eye of someone ideologically dedicated to the rigour of the social sciences.

Since the collection is divided into the Cuban Revolution's decades, we can follow the evolution of both the revolution and Horowitz's thought on his changing subject. The 1960s section contains four essays: on Castro's ‘Stalinisation’, on ‘Castrology’, on Fidel and Marxist revisionism (1966) and on the Cuban Missile Crisis (1969 and 1971). These four bring out the best and worst of Horowitz. The ‘Castrology’ piece (1966) is little more than a scathing assault on Ian Lumsden for what Horowitz sees as the necessarily associated flaws of shoddy argumentation and lack of knowledge on the one hand and the ‘infantile disorder’ of leftist politics on the other; the pieces on Stalinism and Marxism, meanwhile, show the social scientist at work, engaging with what Horowitz sees as the logic of leftist theory in order to demonstrate both the Cuban deviation from orthodoxy and the apparent ‘Stalinism’ of Castro's centralisation of power (in party and leader), of his own version of ‘socialism in one country’ and of left-wing nationalism. Although that essay (rewritten three times in 1965–71) coincided with one of the revolution's most unorthodox periods, for Horowitz, Castro already fitted a pattern. The last essay is the best of the four, examining the neglected dimension of the Cuban Missile Crisis – its effects on Cuba – and arguing presciently that a crisis which ended the Monroe Doctrine also locked the United States into reliance on the Cuban exile lobby.

The 1970s were clearly a productive decade for Horowitz – nine essays make up that section, and while many show the familiar targets and tone (occasionally detracting from the essays' acuity), those years clearly included some of his sharpest work. Of these, the best (and one of the best in the whole collection) is the 1975 essay on the revolution's military nature (although the title, inaccurately, talks of its military origins). In it, Horowitz brings his forensic talents to the nature of the Cuban system, seeing the Committees for the Defence of the Revolution as a military means of marshalling revolutionary fervour, and examining the structures and politics of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias (Revolutionary Armed Forces, FAR) and Ejército Juvenil del Trabajo (Youth Army of Labour), as well as – again, presciently – the military's small but significant economic role. This essay is the best in the section because it avoids condemnation and, instead, relies on Horowitz's sharp eye for detail and analysis, despite an unusual association of the FAR with Latin American ‘bureaucratic authoritarianism’ (a theme repeated in two other essays). One other essay of the decade also criticises heavy-handed US policy in the region (but, notably, not its Cuba policy). Three essays, however, resume the castigation of the sympathetic Left, arguing that their various critiques illustrate the poverty of the social science analysis which underpins them and, citing the title of one essay, supply the ‘rope to a mortgaged revolution’ (p. 191). While this condemnation tends to be obsessive and distracting, it does often highlight the shallowness of some of the ‘solidarity’ literature – although Horowitz's own repeated perception of the revolution's ‘Soviet satellite’ status (including in Angola) itself betrayed a preordained perspective.

The four 1980s essays largely disappoint, repeating the author's earlier obsessions (militarisation, the Left, and Cuban foreign policy's Soviet dependence). In fact, it is noticeable that by the 1980s (and into the 1990s), the essays show much less evidence of academic rigour and greater evidence of polemic on the familiar themes – some of them even being speeches or lectures rather than essays. It is as if, by then, Horowitz had abandoned any claim to his earlier radicalism and was entrenched in a Cold War anti-communism. That the 1990s produced so many writings on Cuba seems almost to have demonstrated a belief that the system which he had spent three decades condemning was in its death throes; indeed, Horowitz is to be congratulated for his honesty in including a 1991 lecture where he predicted the collapse of the Cuban system in 1992. However, the essays of that decade add nothing new; the fire of the rigorous social scientist seemed to have gone out, replaced by the image on an old warrior repeating old complaints.

Where, then, does this collection take us? In his heyday of 1965–79, Horowitz was an admirable political scientist; for all his obsessions, he was always capable of reminding us to look carefully, logically and imaginatively at a system which few examined in such a way, and at aspects which more sympathetic observers preferred to ignore. The best essays belong to the canon of Cuban studies, but the post-1980s work also illustrates the growing poverty of much of the Cold War-fossilised interpretations of the Cuban reality which continued to dominate a part of the literature on Cuban politics. As a collection, therefore, The Long Night of Dark Intent ends up telling us more about ‘Cubanology’ than it does about the revolution.