Politics and Romance in the Scholarship on Cuban Politics

The Cuban Democratic Experience: The Auténtico Years, 1944-1952. By Charles D. Ameringer. (Gainesville, FL: The University Press of Florida, 2000. Pp. 229. $49.95 cloth.)

Cuba Today and Tomorrow: Reinventing Socialism. By Max Azicri. (Gainesville, FL: The University Press of Florida, 2000. Pp. 396. $59.95 cloth, $24.95 paper.)

Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959-1976. By Piero de Gleijeses. (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Pp. 552. $34.95 cloth, $24.95 paper.)

Castro and the Cuban Revolution. By Thomas M. Leonard. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999. Pp. 188. $39.95 cloth.)

Cuba: The Contours of Change. Edited by Susan Kaufman Purcell and David Rothkopf. (Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner Publishers, 2000. Pp. 157. $13.95 paper.)

State and Revolution in Cuba: Mass Mobilization and Political Change, 1920-1940. By Robert Whitney. (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Pp. 255. $49.95 cloth, $18.95 paper.)

The time is here to rethink the study of Cuban politics, and perhaps social sciences in general. Not only because the "re " preposition is much en vogue in the academy but because the world has changed as have many of us as well. Tracing the intellectual history of Cuban political studies since 1959 reveals a set of models that have framed our work and, in so doing, defined the scope, approaches, presumptions, assumptions and, in no small measure, determined our conclusions. Such research also reveals a scholarship in a tight embrace with politics, romance, and disaffection. Paradigms and romance have been put to the test by developments in and outside of the field.

Although the body of literature on Cuban politics and political history is impressive in sheer volume and indeed in its robustness, much could use reexamination. The need stems from the changes in world time, the relative openness of archives, the possibility of accessing living sources, the rise of a second generation of scholars in Cuban studies, and last but far from least, the important alterations in Cuban and Cuban-American politics per se. Moreover, we are not immune to intellectual climatic changes. Postructuralism and postmodernity have launched serious charges against the standard modernist approaches (either in liberal or Marxist variants) and areas studies are once again at the heart of one of the most lively scholarly debates, pitting generalists and country/areas specialists.

Changes in ideational landscapes underscore the wisdom of rethinking political analyses of Cuba. Ideas are products, historical, relational. Marx agreed that they were transitory, in and out of fashion, like polyester and disco music; post-structuralists argue that social reality is a construct. These perspectives indicate that Cuban studies have been constructed by us. Since ideas are products of their times as well as products of their authors, with changing times and casts of characters come redefined contours of knowledge.

Indeed the Cuban studies stage is in transition and will be for some while. The tough reality that Cuban socialism has confronted since the late 1980s, the end of the Cold War, the partial access to fieldwork on the island, and the release of classified documents in the United States are possible sources for a renaissance in the study of island politics. Transitions to democracy elsewhere have had an impact on how one looks at Cuba and have sparked a new-found interest in issues such as civil society that had been neglected in the past. A young set of Cuban scholars, many of the best and the brightest, have left the island and are now writing and publishing abroad (Rafael Rojas, Velia Cecilia Bobes, Madeline Camara, Alejandro de la Fuente, among others). A fresh crop of scholars from the United States and elsewhere, who are less anchored in the scholarly ideological battles of the past, are fertilizing the field as well. Many are turning to history (in part as default from what appears an intractable...