The Cuban Revolution and the United States: A History in Documents, 1958-1960 (review)

Mark Falcoff has produced a curious book. Never does he directly indicate for whom the book is intended—although as we shall see it is not hard to guess who is most likely to comprise his audience. The majority of the book consists of reprinted and excerpted documents, most of which previously appeared in U.S. Department of State publications. The period primarily covered by these documents extends from January 1958 through December 1960; during those twenty-four months Fidel Castro rose to power in Cuba and the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower determined that it could not tolerate the presence of this particular revolutionary in the Western Hemisphere. Immodestly, Falcoff writes that his "is the real story of the Cuban Revolution and the United States, told on [sic] documents which most of us were never expected to see" (xxi).

Readers will be excused for thinking that they are about to get a rare, brief, if not unwelcome glimpse into the secretive world of policy making. In fact, nothing of the sort transpires in this putative "history in documents." When the needless, manufactured mystique is stripped away, what remains is not a history at all but rather an interesting collection of official documents, most of which are available in any good college or university library. Falcoff's primary contribution is to provide an editor's notes that purport further to explain some of the material in his hand-picked documents. To term the result "a history," however, does a disservice to professional and amateur historians alike.

Falcoff's "real story" is demonstrably incomplete on two very important counts. Where, it must be asked, are Cuban accounts—documentary at the very least in memoir form—of the Cuban Revolution and the United States? Were this book, the work of a well-known senior scholar, titled The United States and the Cuban Revolution, the absence of Cuban sources would perhaps be defensible if ultimately not understandable. Also, Falcoff either ignores or all but misrepresents the work of fellow scholars. As he well knows, historical scholarship gets its name in part from engaging the work of other writers and scholars—especially those with whom one disagrees about interpretative matters. Falcoff all but eschews that crucial convention. What he gives his readers is an inexplicable swipe at the work of historian Lester Langley for being too evenhanded in 1968—long before the documents Falcoff draws upon were available—to see perfidy in Fidel Castro's 1959 trip to the United States (vii).

If Falcoff wants to criticize his scholarly peers, why does he not engage the more recent work of Jules Benjamin, Morris Morley, or Louis A. Pérez Jr., to name but three? Nor is there to be found mention of the scholarship of Jorge I. Domínguez, or even more importantly that of Thomas G. Paterson, whose seminal work Contesting Castro: The United States and the Triumph of the Cuban Revolution appeared almost a decade ago, or of Stephen G. Rabe's two outstanding volumes on U.S.–Latin American relations from 1945 to 1963. Falcoff's "real story" has an air of scholarly unreality and tendentiousness about it that is not worthy of someone with his well-earned reputation.

It is difficult not to conclude that Falcoff and the U.S. Cuba Press published The Cuban Revolution and the United States solely for an audience of anti-Castro diehards. Who else would be interested in this book as it is conceived and produced is impossible to imagine. That is too bad, for a real story of the Cuban Revolution and the United States still needs to be told.