NWIG (Jul 2002)
Cuba on our minds
Abstract
[First paragraph] Conversatons with Cuba. C. PETER RIPLEY. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999. xxvi + 243 pp. (Cloth US$ 24.95) Real Life in Castro's Cuba. CATHERINE MOSES. Wilmington DE: Scholarly Resources, 2000. xi + 184 pp. (Paper US$ 18.95) The Cuban Way: Capitalism, Communism, and Confrontation. ANA JULIA JATAR-HAUSMANN. West Hartford CT: Kumarian Press, 1999. xvii + 161 pp. (Paper US$21.95) Castro and the Cuban Revolution. THOMAS M. LEONARD. Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1999. xxv + 188 pp. (Cloth US$ 45.00) Cuba has attracted a great deal of attention from both scholarly and popular authors since 1959. The literature that they have produced has generated much heat, but has shed a considerably smaller amount of light. Most accounts have been situated at the polar extremes of ideology, either condemning or celebrating the island's revolutionary experiment and its maximum leader (for the former is often virtually totally collapsed into the personage of Fidel Castro) with the same degrees of vociferous, simplistic certitude. However, neither the fulminating diatribes of the anti-Castro Right nor the fulsome paeans of the Euro-American Left have done much justice to making sense of the complex, confounding, and contradictory realities of Cuban society before, during, and after the Revolution. Indeed, contemporary developments have only magnified the distortions rendered by the astigmatic lenses of cold war intellectualism.
