This is a curious book that is not as revealing as it purports to be (nor even really about the topic suggested by the title) but is not without interest or value. Based largely on previously published letters (including those from Franco to his cousin and aide, Francisco Franco Salgado-Araujo) and Spanish diplomatic archives, and written mostly in a somewhat journalistic and occasionally anecdotal style, the book is essentially a collection of previously published magazine or journal articles (five of the six in the book). Hence, because of its genesis, the book lacks a clear sense of coherence; the ‘chapters’ are really chronologically ordered discrete articles, and some do not deal with Franco at all, instead fitting better the book's subtitle, Estudios sobre España y la Revolución. Equally, because four-fifths of the book has already been published, the material is not that new, although this volume brings it to a wider audience and, alongside the chronicler's eye for detail and relation, does occasionally bring the author's historiographical eye for wider significance.

The best part of the collection is unquestionably its only genuinely new study, the longest chapter, ‘Franco y Cuba’, which deals with the strange persistence of diplomatic relations and trade between an increasingly socialist, and Soviet-allied, Cuba and a firmly conservative and corporatist regime. Without being path-breaking (and while repeating the – largely Spanish – suggestion that Castro's motives were influenced by the two leaders' common Galician origins), the article does present a more nuanced explanation of Franco's motives. Beyond Franco's sympathy for a Hispanic country's stubborn resistance to US hostility, we see all manner of other factors: a pragmatic desire to protect, and ensure compensation for the expropriated property of, the large Spanish community in Cuba; a continuing recognition of the value of neutrality; and a general distaste for US behaviour, perhaps driven by atavistic memories of Spain's 1898 defeat, but surely exacerbated by US tolerance of Miami-based exiles' attacks on Spanish shipping.

The opening chapter covers the fascinating 1957 episode of Spanish diplomatic objections to an article in the independent progressive magazine Bohemia (already a thorn in Batista's side) which repeated allegations that the Franco regime was implicated in the unexplained death of the captain-general of Cataluña. The episode, which resulted in an unsuccessful court case brought by the embassy, is interesting as a picture less of Cuban–Spanish relations under the two right-wing dictators (Batista was keen to cooperate but was, curiously, hamstrung by legal niceties) than of the power of Cuba's Spanish community, which, resentful but aware of the strength of Cuba's historical support for the Spanish Republic, actively supported the embassy.

That community – along with its principal organ, the influential Diario de la Marina – is again the real subject of incidents covered in other parts of the book, rather than Spain, which tended to play a supporting role. This is the case with the book's discussion of the growing government controls on the Cuban press in 1959–60 (bringing us the wonderful irony of Franco's ambassador protesting at Cuba's lack of press freedom), a chapter which uses the Spanish dimension (of diplomatic correspondence) to make broader political points about Cuba's move towards communism, ignoring the most reactionary press's own political agenda and links and presenting a rather one-dimensional view of the coletillas episode (when militant trade unionists inserted protesting disclaimers inside the right-wing newspapers which they continued to print); and with the chapter on the deterioration of Church–state relations in 1959–60, which, again based on diplomatic correspondence, usefully chronicles that breakdown and also paints an interesting picture of the close links between the largely Spanish-born hierarchy of the Church and the embassy.

However, Spain was decidedly the subject of an episode covered in another chapter – or at least its interventionist ambassador, Lojendio, was. Lojendio was expelled from Cuba for bursting into a television station to interrupt, on air, a discussion involving Castro, who had accused Spain of being involved in counter-revolutionary activities in Cuba. Recounted in the book with forensic detail, and set within the context of delicate relations between the two countries, this incident is not only fascinating in its content, but also revealing of the wider attitude of Franco towards Cuba – Spain largely ignored the potential breach of relations, with Franco accusing Lojendio of acting undiplomatically. Indeed, Spanish – Cuban relations had already continued despite, and not because of, Lojendio, whose high-profile involvement on the side of the Right reflected his generally dismissive attitude towards Castro himself. This is evident in the sixth chapter, which deals with the comparison of Spain's relations with Castro's Cuba and Trujillo's Dominican Republic, and with Lojendio's dislike of the efforts of Spanish Republican exiles to persuade Castro to support the opposition in Spain. Although that particular chapter is perhaps the least pertinent to the collection's supposed theme, it does include some useful information about Cuban attitudes towards Spain before 1959, including the anti-Batista rebels' use of the Spanish embassy for asylum.

Overall the book is somewhat less than the sum of its parts, but its detail can often be both fascinating and illustrative of wider patterns and pressures, either inside Cuba or internationally. Hence, although it does not really deal directly with Franco and Castro, except in passing and in the final chapter – it really needed a conclusion to draw those discrete but related threads together and to pass analytical judgement on the overall findings and significance of the incidents covered and the Spanish role in them – it does add to our understanding of their curious relationship, which continued after 1959–61 despite an evident and growing ideological divergence between the two countries and governments, and based on more than simple pragmatism.