Jennifer Lambe’s insightful new study of Cuban politics and culture in the 1960s and 1970s focuses on the production of knowledge about the revolution—that is, the subject of revolution—from the perspective of a multiplicity of actors—that is, the subjects of revolution. Lambe sees this as a dialectical process in which various subjects, from diverse political positions and social backgrounds, all contributed to the forging of a shared understanding of “the revolution” as an epistemologically coherent world-historical event. That process of knowledge construction, in turn, interpellated those actors as the subjects of revolution. The book illustrates these concepts through a wide-ranging exploration of popular culture, broadly defined, taking the reader from Cuban television studios to cane fields and incorporating actors ranging from foreign economists to local art teachers. Combining theoretical sophistication with engaging storytelling, The Subject of Revolution offers a creative new approach to the consolidation of the Cuban Revolution.

The book’s first three chapters work especially well together; they question how knowledge about the revolution was constructed by delving into the interrelated evolution of print journalism, radio, and television in 1960s Cuba. Lambe includes a range of actors in these chapters to show how revolutionary leaders, foreign journalists, the US government, and Cubans both on the island and in exile all struggled over how the media could best convey the “truth.” The result, she argues, was an enduring politicization of the concept of a “free press.” Chapters 4 and 5 ask how knowledge about the revolution was constructed through interactions with foreigners, including US solidarity activists and European economists and agronomists, while the last two chapters focus on how the revolution forged new subjectivities through popular culture, labor, and leisure.

One of the book’s great strengths is its ability to link specific episodes to the broader questions of the period. Indeed, Lambe argues, one explanation for the Cuban Revolution’s enormous global impact was the way it “channeled the era’s most pressing debates (over socialism, civil rights, mobility and immobility, intellectual freedom, and popular culture)” (2). Chapter 4, “Beyond the Sugar Curtain,” makes these connections particularly well. It pairs two contemporaneous events—a progressive US student group’s trips to Cuba in purposeful violation of the travel ban and the mass emigration from Cuba to the United States in the Camarioca boat lift—to ask how they contributed to the politicization and limitation of mobility. The Cold War, the author argues, pushed political leaders in both Cuba and the United States to weaponize travel restrictions. In response, Cuban citizens demanded the right to emigrate, while US solidarity activists demanded the right to see and know. Here and elsewhere Lambe shows convincingly how foundational the events of the 1960s were, setting up ideas and practices that persisted in Cuba and beyond for the next few decades.

Lambe tries to move beyond the revolutionary leadership to recover the interventions of popular actors. Cuba’s notoriously restrictive access to archival sources on this period forced her to be creative. Her chapters on the press do this admirably by reconceptualizing TV and radio less as unidirectional broadcast media than as complex interactive platforms. For example, Lambe uncovers the letters listeners sent to radio stations, which were sometimes read aloud or printed in newspapers. She notes the way Cuban television in the early revolutionary period could unintentionally capture unscripted conflicts between politicians, such as the 1960 on-air argument between Fidel Castro and the Spanish Ambassador. Later in the decade, Cuban television developed call-in shows, in which viewers could query revolutionary leaders in the “world’s biggest press conference” (75).

This bottom-up perspective can sometimes be hard to sustain. For example, subsequent chapters on evolving ideas of self-improvement, emerging attitudes toward labor, and debates over popular culture or music are fascinating and insightful but can lean toward a more top-down study of the Cuban state’s prescriptive understandings of labor and culture. Still, Lambe offers refreshing and original methods and sources that will help guide future scholars in their collective attempt to uncover popular voices and the alternative understandings of the revolution they conveyed.