For all the scholarly attention paid to the Cuban Revolution over the past 60 years, much remains to be explored, if only because the Cubans do not declassify documents or make Fidel Castro's personal archives available. Brown makes extensive use of declassified CIA archives to shed new light on familiar episodes of both the Cuban revolution and, perhaps more importantly, the counterrevolution, directed from inside the island or from abroad.
While one would turn to Sam Farber or Marifeli Pérez-Stable for a macro-analysis of the social and political forces at play during the revolution, or to Rafael Rojas to understand the revolution's cultural and intellectual underpinnings, one should definitely read Brown's terrific and balanced new book for a kinetic, blow-by-blow account of how Fidel Castro seized power in Cuba, disposed of the moderates in his erstwhile revolutionary coalition, applied counter-insurgency tactics to fight insurgents for years in all six provinces, and, from the very first months of 1959, endeavored to export his revolution to the Caribbean and the rest of Latin America.
This study focuses on “lesser-known covert struggles in which both Havana and Washington utilized surrogates in a strategy known as ‘secret war,’ “including “paramilitary incursions, sabotage, hit-and-run attacks, and subversion.” Both the Cubans and the Americans “trained their Latin American allies in guerrilla warfare and counterinsurgency tactics. They worked through third parties, a process that eventually brought the left- and right-wing extremists of many other nations into the struggle” (14-15). For Brown, “timing and international context mattered,” and it is indeed “difficult to imagine a more propitious moment to seek Soviet assistance than 1959” (12). The young Fidel Castro capitalized on the region's thirst for change and the zeitgeist of the 1960s, especially among middle-class youth, while the US merely reacted, often ineptly, to what quickly turned out to be a challenge of hemispheric proportion for its hegemony.
Brown's book focuses on the anti-Batista insurgency plus the first years of Castro's regime, when the foundations of the new state were put in place. The first part examines how a nationalistic and mostly middle-class revolution for democracy and social reforms abruptly turned into a transition to communism led by a charismatic and shrewd leader. Thus, “Fidel proved his mastery with a multifaceted strategy of political consolidation” (45). This part primarily analyzes domestic politics, but two of its seven chapters deal with early covert operations in the Caribbean (Panama, Haiti, Nicaragua, Dominican Republic), as if those were essential to “revolutionize the revolution.”
The second part serves as a long appendix, with carefully argued case studies on Cuban “revolutionary diplomacy” in Venezuela, Brazil, Peru, Panama, Argentina, and Bolivia. Each country had a complex and unique trajectory of radical politics and armed rebellion, and Brown carefully assesses the relative impact of the Cuban revolution in each. In the early 1960s, elected civilian governments ruled most Latin American countries; many sympathized with Cuba's revolution. Brown shows how the military coups that started to unfurl in 1964 in South America were in part a reaction by the military to civilian leaders cozying up too much to Fidel Castro. Appropriately, Brown concludes with a chapter on Che in Bolivia because it serves the author's argument about the importance of timing and circumstances for the success or failure of a revolution.
The book covers a lot of territory with a luxury of details. Brown makes two important points deserving further discussion. First, his rich analysis makes clear that Castro unwittingly triggered a victorious counterrevolution in the hemisphere. “The reaction became much more powerful and more vicious than the original action” (222). In the Sierra Maestra, the guerrillas tried to lure the military to their cause. None of the public declarations or manifestos endorsed by Fidel Castro called for radical socialism or alignment with the Soviet bloc. In power, Fidel quickly turned to communism and to covert war against any regimes of the region, dictatorial or not, that failed to support Cuba in its conflict with the United States. The military class in these countries had to be destroyed and “their principal leaders executed” (205). The military establishments of the region noticed, and “Latin American armies embraced counterinsurgency doctrine with special enthusiasm” (295).
The second point concerns US foreign policy, a key part of this book. In a nutshell, Brown shows that the US often behaved badly and clumsily (in Panama in particular), but that is nothing new. What is more striking is the following lesson: if the US wants to bring about the overthrow of a hostile regime, half-baked methods do nothing but give a nationalist and anti-US regime excuses to further militarize society. In the wake of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the Cuban government arrested “one hundred thousand suspected dissidents throughout the island. One hundred thousand!” (117). Che Guevara was thankful to the US for the botched Bay of Pigs invasion: as he said, “[t]he Revolution is even more ensconced in power than ever because of the US invasion” (235).
One might well conclude that an alternative—more targeted and limited sanctions—may work better.
