Cuba's Revolutionary World by Jonathan C. Brown (review)

Studies of United States-Cuba relations following the 1959 revolution are a dime a dozen. Alongside Churchill biographies and volumes on the American civil war, shelves the world over must surely groan under the weight of books exploring aspects of the conflict between Havana and Washington, especially the 1962 Cuban missile crisis and the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. Happily, in his over 500-page opus Cuba's Revolutionary World, Jonathan C. Brown, professor of history at the University of Texas, Austin, devotes barely a dozen pages to these two events. Rather, his engaging and well-written history focuses largely on Cuban foreign policy in its hemispheric dimensions and the connections between the consolidation of the revolution at home and Cuba's support for revolution abroad. He also emphasizes the reaction to Cuba's revolution throughout Latin America. While the United States is not absent from Brown's analysis, Cuba and Cubans are at the centre of his study, a welcome change of pace from much of the US-centric scholarship on Cold War Latin America.

In its focus on Cuban actors and actions, Cuba's Revolutionary World, stands alongside other recent works of inter-American relations that have employed sources from archives in Latin America. In what is fundamentally a transnational history, Brown certainly emphasizes Cuban actions, both domestically and throughout the hemisphere, and he stresses the degree to which a mix of power politics and messianic ideals drove Cuba's revolutionaries, not least of which was Fidel Castro. And he traces, too, the reaction to the revolution from supporters and detractors across the hemisphere. "It is no exaggeration to say," Brown observes, "that the Castro regime exported both its revolution and its counterrevolution" (11), with events in Cuba raising fears and hopes that, at a political level, affected the lives of millions across the continent.

Brown begins with an analysis of Castro's consolidation of power following the revolution's toppling of Fulgencio Batista, the US-backed strongman, in January 1959. The revolutionaries included not only Castro's small band of bearded guerrillas but a range of people from across the Cuban polity (as well as some foreigners). It was these rivals, including moderates both within and without his own organization, who Castro eventually squeezed out of power or eliminated altogether. To some degree Brown's argument here parallels the notion of a revolution betrayed, a longstanding view with regards to the leftward tilt of Castro's revolution. Brown gives this issue an even-handed, thorough, and convincing treatment, pointing out—importantly it should be stressed—that the sense of betrayal was one felt by a great many Cubans, tens of thousands of who voted with their feet and left the island. He also offers the best analysis yet of what he terms the "Caribbean War of 1959": in the flush of revolutionary success, a series of invasions were launched from Cuba of the neighbouring dictatorships of Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti. Yet Panama, a democracy, was also a target, a sign that Cuba's new leaders were focused on combatting countries aligned with the United States no matter their political makeup. The resulting efforts to export the revolution, which continued throughout the 1960s, proved tragic for many Latin Americans. As Brown points out, the tragedy was twofold: in terms of the lives lost to political violence and because Cuba's revolution came at the tail end of the "Twilight of the Dictators," a period that saw the emergence of a series of democratic governments across the hemisphere. These governments' moderation stood in contrast to the radical program offered by Castro's government. The Cuban leader's widespread popularity, for his reforms and for challenging the United States, inspired countless real and would-be revolutionaries throughout Latin America. And so just as democratic governments came to power they were increasingly challenged by radical forces from within, forces given support from Cuba.

In a series of chapters exploring Cuba's "revolutionary diplomacy" (227) and the...