The Cuba Reader: History, Culture, Politics (review)

Aviva Chomsky and her colleagues have done cubanólogos a great service in assembling this impressive volume. It contains about one hundred selections divided into eight separate sections, ranging from Indigenous Society and Conquest to the Special Period and the Future of the Revolution. The book was largely complete when Cuba entered the Special Period in the early l990s, forcing a delay in publication to encompass this important change. In terms of its historical and interdisciplinary scope, this reader follows the format of other Latin America readers put out by Duke University Press, most of which have also been edited by historians. Both Aviva Chomsky and Barry Carr are Latin American historians, while Pamela Smorkaloff is a Cuban American specializing in Cuban literature.

Some might disagree with the selection of readings, daunting in their number. Most of the contributors will be familiar to those who have worked on Cuba, including José Martí, Nicolas Guillén, Fernando Ortiz, Roberto Fernández Retamar, Miguel Barnet, Nancy Morejón, Manuel Moreno Fraginals, Alejo Carpentier and Oscar Zanetti, all internationally recognized Cuban scholars. Others might have been included, especially in the contemporary social sciences. Their absence is perhaps due to the editors' conscious effort to not focus on the Cuban Revolution, but on five hundred years of Cuban history and society. Half of the book is devoted to the prerevolutionary period. But one wonders if it may also be due to budget constraints on translation and other costs, which would be a shame, since one purpose of such readers is to make foreign language materials accessible to a wider audience. Many of the translations were done by Aviva Chomsky herself, for which she is to be congratulated.

The readings are not limited to scholarly and literary articles, but include poems, songs (by Silvio Rodriguez and others), primary-source documents, and first-hand journalistic accounts published in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Bohemia, etc. Some of the more interesting selections are political documents by U.S. officials responding to the l933 and the l959 revolutions, the missile crisis, and a CIA report on assassination plots against Fidel Castro, which vividly reflect the arrogance of U.S. policy makers toward poorer, Third World countries. I am pleased that the editors chose to include material on the Cuban exile community, such as the hilarious piece by Achy Obejas exploring the Cuban-American generational differences, which will be familiar to many immigrants.

The editors raise the issue of "balance" in their introduction, since so much analysis of Cuba is biased in favor of or against the revolution. The editors joint commitment to social justice makes them partial to the struggles of the Cuban people for a more egalitarian society, free of poverty and neo-colonialism, while reserving criticism for some of the Castro government's top-down and sometimes repressive measures. This is not a book that will please older, more conservative Cuban exiles in Miami and elsewhere. The voices of critics such as Carlos Moore, John Clytus, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Heberto Padilla, Reinaldo Arenas, and the contemporary dissident Elizardo Sánchez Santacruz are included. But the overwhelming majority of articles are favorable to the Cuban revolution and to the Cuban people for what they have achieved and endured. This is also not a reader which would have been published in Cuba, and I doubt it will be translated for wider circulation among the Cuban public.

Clearly the book is designed to be read primarily by a nonacademic audience. It would also be a good text to use in undergraduate courses on Cuba or the Caribbean. Here the photos taken by Tania Jovanovic, an Australian photographer, of ordinary Cubans at work and at play, give the reader a feel for contemporary Cuban life. In addition, the well written, concise introductions to each section and selection help to lend continuity to the book and provide necessary contextual information. The suggestions for further reading tied to each section also further this...