Cuba, the United States, and the Cultures of the Transnational Left, 1930–1975 by John A. Gronbeck-Tedesco (review)

As John Gronbeck-Tedesco argues in his new book, revolutionary ambitions in Cuba caught the imagination of North American radicals from the 1930s through the 1960s, bridging the Popular Front of the Old Left to the New Left’s quest for radical authenticity. Yet transnational engagement and genuine solidarity across the Caribbean proved elusive, as imperial assumptions and practices often remained well entrenched, and nascent coalitions fractured along lines of race, gender, and class. The result is a fascinating and well-written book in which “disillusionment makes up a central motif ” (p. 275). The hopeful revolutionaries, both in Cuba and the United States, wind up sadder and wiser. The political and cultural historians who reflect on this insightful analysis, however, will find themselves engaged and enlightened.

Gronbeck-Tedesco’s exploration of the period spanning the Cuban political upheaval of the early 1930s through the revolutionary transformation of the 1960s is one of the book’s greatest strengths. In contrast to many interpretations of Cold War history that begin with the emergence of U.S.-Soviet conflict after 1945, this wider lens produces two distinct benefits. First, it places the broader history of U.S.-Cuban cultural and political engagement in an explicitly imperial context, allowing for a much more effective discussion of the anticolonial history of the Cuban left and the way that North Americans engaged with it. Second, the book’s reach from the era of New Deal liberalism and Old Left critiques through the period of Cold War visions of modernization and New Left dissent allows the author to draw striking parallels and comparisons.

Gronbeck-Tedesco interprets a compelling range of sources to make his case. Although he discusses the diplomacy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy and the U.S. intervention that ultimately helped shore up the dictatorship led by Carlos Mendieta and Fulgencio Batista, the book devotes the greatest attention to the way North American writers and activists of the 1930s sought to document labor exploitation, racism, and political oppression under the harsh Cuban regime. For writers like Clifford Odets, Carleton Beals, and John Dos Passos, along with the photographer Walker Evans, exposing the brutality of a Cuban government backed by U.S. military and financial interests was part of a global, popular front struggle. In an intriguing discussion of the poet Langston Hughes and his experience in Cuba, Gronbeck-Tedesco also reveals the extent to which North American radicals envisioned the struggle there as part of a broader anti-fascist movement with parallels to the Spanish Civil War, Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia, and Japanese aggression in Manchuria. Yet they also viewed Cuba through a paternalistic lens, dwelled on the exotic, and betrayed imperial assumptions of their own. As Gronbeck-Tedesco writes, they frequently portrayed a “primitive population in need of liberation not only from US domination but also from its own backwardness” (p. 77).

A rupture of another kind then unfolded in the 1960s. Radical intellectuals from C. Wright Mills to Paul Baran, Leo Huberman, and Paul Sweezy were enthralled with Fidel Castro’s revolution, anticipating that new labor policies, healthcare advances, and popular education would eradicate inequality and provide a compelling socialist model. Searching for revolutionary authenticity and an alternative to a sterile, confining U.S. society, Beat poets, musicians, and painters flocked to the island along with the 1,500-plus members of the Venceremos Brigades, aligned with the far-left Students for a Democratic Society. African American activists, including Amiri Baraka, Stokely Carmichael, and Angela Davis, also imagined that Cuba’s revolution presented a powerful anti-racist, anti-capitalist vision. Yet once again genuine solidarity proved elusive. Even though Cuba’s government insisted that racism had been abolished, Afro-Cuban contributions to the revolution were eclipsed by the veneration of leaders such as Castro and Che Guevara. As university attendance, professional jobs, and tourist spaces remained largely...