Forging Diaspora ranks as an accomplished and timely addition to the research field opened up by Between Race and Empire: African-Americans and Cubans before the Cuban Revolution, the influential collection of essays edited by Lisa Brock and Digna Casteñada Fuertes over a decade ago. Guridy's examination of relations between the African-descended peoples of Cuba and the United States in the era bracketed by the US intervention in the 1898 Cuban War of Independence and the start of the rebel campaign against Fulgencio Batista in the 1950s is an interesting and informative study modelled extensively on Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic. Taking a similar approach to Gilroy, the author focusses his attention on a select group of historical encounters between members of the Cuban and American black elites to highlight the “routes” over the “roots” connecting the two communities.

Although these encounters were largely framed within a discourse of racial uplift (whether Afro-Cuban students “learning by doing” at Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute or African American intellectuals participating in oratory at Havana's Club Atenas), as Guridy deftly illustrates, the contours and parameters of improvement ideology were modified and negotiated across national as well as generational boundaries. For instance, whereas at the turn of the twentieth century, members of the pan-American black elite sought to distance themselves from forms of musical and linguistic expression linked to the lower classes (as in the example of Cuba where the danzón was elevated over the rumba as the social dance of refinement), by the early 1930s a new politicized racial consciousness had taken hold across class lines, galvanized by a number of important episodes, including the Scottsboro Case in 1931. In the book, this shift in consciousness is channelled through, among other devices, episodes in the cross-cultural friendship between Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén and Langston Hughes.

One of the study's finest achievements is to join the lesser-known story of relations between Cubans and Americans of African descent to the grand narrative of US economic and political expansionism in Latin America and the Caribbean. In this way, each chapter develops a fresh perspective on “backyard” or “borderlands” history. Chapter 1, for example, shows how Booker T. Washington took advantage of the US military occupation of the island to gain a distribution outlet for a Spanish translation of his book Up from Slavery; and chapter 4 recounts the development of black pan-American cultural initiatives tied to Franklin Roosevelt's “Good Neighbour” policy. Indeed, had Guridy opted to present his case studies as accounts of a transnational social history rather than claim them as representations of diasporization, his analysis would have been more successfully compelling. Whilst the Introduction makes clear that the focus will be on relations born of a sense of identification rather than a collective memory or myth about an ancestral homeland, this slim definition of diaspora coupled to the professedly limited focus on elites impedes the author's attempt to write a more theoretically informed history. In the first instance, a perceived vigilance against Afrocentrism leads to the appearance of such awkward designations as “Afro-descended elites” and a tendency to obfuscate Cuban africanía as a type of primitivism; in the second instance, the diaspora-making argument can appear overstated, especially since the imbalance between the two populations arising from sharp differences at the national level remains underexplored. So that, towards the end of the book, when Guridy laments the destruction of the “structural foundations that had animated Afro-Cuban and African American cultural interaction during the previous five decades” (193) with the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, his position downplays the debased conditions under which the majority of Afro-Cubans lived before the Revolution (including widespread illiteracy), and pertinently avoids closer examination of the imbalance prevalent in many of these cross-national encounters, including the Hughes–Guillén relationship. Hughes's visits to Cuba are well known, but which domestic factors mitigated against Guillén paying a return visit to Harlem? Even though a comprehensive analysis naturally falls outside the scope of Guridy's study, a theoretical approach to transnational history compels a more substantial degree of comparative sociocultural contextualization.

Such concerns aside, historians in the United States and Cuba will profit immensely from the book's revalorization of black cultural networks and institutions. It is also a great resource for teachers in US foreign relations, the African diaspora and Latin America more generally, who will find much engaging material to advance transnational and cross-cultural lines of enquiry.