Cuba ed. by Ted A. Henken, Miriam Celaya, and Dimas Castellanos (review)

Nearly eight years ago, Fidel Castro temporarily relinquished his position at the helm of the Cuban state, and power was thereafter assumed by his younger brother, Raúl. Fidel’s withdrawal from government was formalized in 2008, and the following six years have witnessed a period of halting but unmistakable change, perhaps unparalleled in the decades following the 1959 Cuban Revolution. Cuba, the second entry in ABC-CLIO’s Latin America in Focus series, aims to explain this monumental shift in light of Cuba’s past and present and, according to its editors, to take advantage of it, “challenging traditional limits on critical expression and creating more space for independent analysis” (xv).

The volume represents a collective reimagining of Ted Henken’s 2008 Cuba: A Global Studies Handbook, also published by ABC-CLIO. The Global Studies Handbook and its successor series Latin America in Focus seek to offer a basic orientation to Latin American countries for the nonspecialist reader. Chronologically, the 2013 edition picks up where Henken’s earlier volume left off: the transfer of power from Fidel to Raúl and the era of change thereby inaugurated. Here, he is also joined by coeditors Miriam Celaya and Dimas Castellanos, as well as more than fifteen contributors, most of them based in Cuba. The list of authors includes many individuals affiliated with the Cuban blogosphere that has sprung up in recent years and to which Henken has dedicated several academic studies elsewhere. He argues that the chosen contributors are uniquely positioned to reveal the “hidden face of Cuba,” obscured by the “official story” on one hand and the “often ill-informed one coming from abroad” on the other (xv).

Like the first volume in the Latin America in Focus series, which takes up the Venezuelan case in light of the chavismo phenomenon, this book aims to put Cuba’s contemporary reality in dialogue with its historical context, especially the period following the 1959 revolution. It is organized around seven chapters: “Geography,” “History,” “Politics and Government,” “Economy,” “Society,” “Culture,” and “Contemporary Issues.” The latter three chapters contain subsections tackling religion and thought; education; migration and diaspora; language and literature; popular culture, customs, and traditions; and more. Other subsections, present in the original 2008 edition, are missed here, including a sustained analysis of health care or the military. The book also contains seventy-six “vignettes” on topics such as the Platt Amendment, “El Temba,” and Hialeah, as well as a glossary, a compendium of facts and figures, a list of country-related organizations, and an annotated bibliography.

Many of the chapters take the reader up to and periodically revisit the context of present-day Cuba. An early chapter on the economy does this in a way that will be particularly comprehensible to those without significant background in the study of Cuba. Nevertheless, the volume’s approach, while appropriate for a nonspecialist audience, creates some narrative imbalances. On a most basic level, it lends itself to a degree of repetitiveness, and one wonders whether the material might not have been better served by a more integrated historical treatment (to give one example, the ten-million-ton sugar harvest of 1970 is referenced at least three times before it is fully explained on page 152). Meanwhile, Marino Murillo, the influential economics czar (minister of planning and economy from 2009 to 2011, vice president of the Council of Ministers and, as of September 2014, once again minister of the economy), receives only a mention, despite the many pages devoted to changes initiated under Raúl Castro.

On a deeper level, however, this narrative orientation to the present also produces some curious oversights. Indeed, one often wishes that the analytical space afforded to the raulista moment had been extended to the post-1959 period in a more uniform way. For example, Carlos Franqui, a key participant in the struggle to topple Fulgencio Batista and a founding father of the revolutionary press, appears nowhere in...