In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Exporting Revolution: Cuba's Global Solidarity by Margaret Randall
  • Gary Prevost
Margaret Randall, Exporting Revolution: Cuba's Global Solidarity. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2017. x, 270 pp. $99.95 US (cloth), $25.95 US (paper or e-book).

In Exporting Revolution: Cuba's Global Solidarity, prolific poet and author Margaret Randall has written an important book that is a combination of political analysis, oral history, and personal memoir. Regarding the latter, we learn early on that the author was a direct beneficiary of Cuban solidarity in 1968. She was living in Mexico with her four young children and working as an activist in the Mexican student movement that was violently repressed in the fall of that year. Margaret went into hiding but was able to send her children to Cuba where they were cared for by the Cuban state until she was able to join them. Margaret lived in Cuba for the next decade raising her children there and living many experiences that provide the context of the book, which provides interesting details of the Cuban Revolution's impact on the wider world by chronicling Cuba's [End Page 345] outreach in health care, disaster relief, education, literature, art, liberation struggles, and sports. These contributions to international solidarity have been studied field by field with several important books in recent years but this volume is probably the first to provide a comprehensive overview of Cuba's efforts and in the process, makes a contribution to our understanding of this important subject. Cuba's internationalism is known well in the lesser developed world but generally not fully appreciated in the United States, primarily as a result of the Cold War lenses through which Cuba has been seen in the mainstream US media. Randall also grounds our understanding of Cuba's internationalism in the context of the Cuban revolution itself and its significant domestic achievements in all of the fields in which it has provided international assistance headed by health, education, and arts.

Properly so, Randall begins the body by focusing on the Cuban internationalism that dominated the early years of the Revolution, its support for armed liberation movements, both in Africa and Latin America. Chapter five focuses on Africa and begins with a lesser known history of Cuba's support between 1961 for the Algerian independence fighters that included a Cuban ship that brought arms to North Africa and returned with wounded fighters, their families, and children orphaned by the war. In discussing the children, the book sheds light on a form of international solidarity much focused on by Cuba including its treatment of the young victims of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the USSR. The remainder of the African chapter focuses primarily on Angola, a subject that has been researched in great detail by Piero Gleijeses and presented in two volumes, Conflicting Missions: Havana Washington and Africa, 1959–1976 (2011) and Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington, Pretoria, and the Struggle for Southern Africa, 1976–1991 (2013). Another important work in this arena is Dirk Kruijt, Cuba and Revolutionary Latin America: An Oral History (2016).

Randall's primary focus is on Cuba's crucial role in the military defeat of South Africa in Angola and the role that defeat played in the ending of apartheid, a fact often cited by anc leader, Nelson Mandela. However, in keeping with the book's use of oral history, Randall draws on the memoirs of Emilio Comas Paret who fought in Angola as the member of a people's militia to show the human costs of the war that claimed more than 2,000 Cuban lives and lasted for more than a decade.

In chapter eleven the author details Cuba's role in promoting education and literacy worldwide through its promotion of the highly successful Yo Si Puedo (Yes I Can) program. Originally developed in Spanish in Cuba during its successful 1961 Literacy Campaign, it has now been translated into many languages, including Portuguese, English, Quechua, Creole, and Swahili. The program has enabled more than six million people in twenty-nine countries to read and write. Randall augments her analysis of [End Page 346] the literary program with an oral history...

pdf

Share