Cien Años de Lucha: Narratives of Cuba’s Revolutionary History

Abstract

"Revolution means. .. changing everything that must be changed," said Fidel Castro on May 1, 2000. This slogan has become the watchword for the far-reaching changes under way since 2008, when Raúl Castro succeeded Fidel as president. 1 In 2011 Cuba embarked upon a fundamental reorganization of the economy as outlined in the Guidelines of the Economic and Social Policy of the Party and the Revolution adopted at the Sixth Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC, 2011). Then on December 17, 2014, President Castro and President Barack Obama stunned the world by announcing their agreement to begin normalizing U.S.-Cuban relations, setting aside half a century of hostility. Although only one of the books reviewed here deals directly with this torrent of change, all cast light on the historical trajectory that brought Cuba to this contemporary conjuncture. Lamrani and Morais chronicle some of the final battles of the cold war in the Caribbean-Lamrani attacking what he sees as the ideological war against the revolution and Morais narrating the inside story of the Cuban Five. Pérez surveys the long arc of Cuban history to understand how the idea of Cuban nationhood set the stage for revolution, and Guerra dissects the revolution's own "grand narrative" to understand how an insurrection against a hated dictator became a socialist revolution that changed everything. Martínez-Fernández offers a more traditional take on the history of the revolution, citing Cuba's penchant for caudillos and Castro's Machiavellianism to explain its survival in the face of U.S. hostility. Ritter and Henken examine the political economy of the revolution's uneasy relationship with small business, focusing