The Cuban Revolution And Its Leadership

Most conventional readings of the Cuban Revolution have seemed mesmerised by the personality and role of Fidel Castro, often missing a deeper political understanding of the Revolution's underlying structures, bases of popular loyalty and ethos of participation. In this ground-breaking work, Antoni Kapcia focuses instead on a wider cast of characters. Along with the more obvious, albeit often misunderstood, contributions from Che Guevara and Raúl Castro, Kapcia looks at the many others who, over the decades, have been involved in decision-making and have often made a significant difference. He interprets their various roles within a wider process of nation-building, demonstrating that Cuba has undergone an unusual, if not unique, process of change. Essential reading for anyone interested in Cuba's history and its future.

'Adopted by the Australian Socialist Workers Party at its national conference in January 1983. In October 1984 the SWP's National Committee amended the resolution ... that is presented here'.

Perhaps the foremost social analyst and journalist on Cuban affairs, Carlos Alberto Montaner has written a definitive study of the Cuban regime from the vantage point of the Cuban dictator. This is not simply a history of Cuban communism but rather a personal history of its leader, Fidel Castro. Montaner's extraordinary knowledge of the country and its politics prevents the work from becoming a psychiatric examination from afar. Indeed, what personal irrationalities exist are seen as built into the fabric of the regime itself, and not simply as a personality aberration.Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution is not an apologia for past United States involvement in Cuban affairs. The author is severe in his judgments of such participation. Nor is he sparing in his sense of the betrayal of the original purposes of the Revolution of 1959 manifested in the character and policies of Fidel Castro. As the work progresses from a study of the victims to a study of the beneficiaries of the Cuban Revolution, it leaves the reader with a deep sense of the tragedy of a revolution betrayed, but not one that could have easily been avoided.Montaner is an ""exile"" like the great Alexander Herzen before him. His decision to live in Europe was made by choice, not of necessity. He sees his role as critical analyst, not as restoring the status quo ante. A most valuable aspect of this book is its intimate reevaluation of Fulgencio Batista. Whatever the reader's judgment of Montaner's work, no one can read it and be dismissive of the effort. It is a work of intimacy even through written in exile--and hence must be viewed as an important effort to understand the character of the man and regime who have changed the course of Cuban history in our times.

Analyzing the crucial period of the Cuban Revolution from 1959 to 1961, Samuel Farber challenges dominant scholarly and popular views of the revolution's sources, shape, and historical trajectory. Unlike many observers, who treat Cuba's revolutionary leaders as having merely reacted to U.S. policies or domestic socioeconomic conditions, Farber shows that revolutionary leaders, while acting under serious constraints, were nevertheless autonomous agents pursuing their own independent ideological visions, although not necessarily according to a master plan. Exploring how historical conflicts between U.S. and Cuban interests colored the reactions of both nations' leaders after the overthrow of Fulgencio Batista, Farber argues that the structure of Cuba's economy and politics in the first half of the twentieth century made the island ripe for radical social and economic change, and the ascendant Soviet Union was on hand to provide early assistance. Taking advantage of recently declassified U.S. and Soviet documents as well as biographical and narrative literature from Cuba, Farber focuses on three key years to explain how the Cuban rebellion rapidly evolved from a multiclass, antidictatorial movement into a full-fledged social revolution.

How did the Cuban revolution come about? Why does it represent, as Joseph Hansen put it, an "unbearable challenge" to U.S. imperialism? What political challenges has it confronted? Written with polemical clarity as the revolution advanced.

Youth and the Cuban Revolution: Youth Culture and Politics in 1960s Cuba is a new history of the first decade of the Cuban Revolution, exploring how youth came to play such an important role in the 1960s on this Caribbean island. Certainly, youth culture and politics worldwide were in the ascendant in that decade, but in this pioneering and thought-provoking work Anne Luke explains how the unique circumstances of the newly developing socialist revolution in Cuba created an ethos of youth which becomes one of the factors that explains how and why the Cuban Revolution survives to this day. By examining how youth was constructed and constituted within revolutionary discourse, policy, and the lived experience of young Cubans in the 1960s, Luke examines the conflicted (but ultimately successful) development of a revolutionary youth culture. She explores the fault lines along which the notion of youth was created—between the internal and the external, between discourse and the everyday, between politics and culture. Luke looks at how in the first decade of the Cuban Revolution a young leadership—Fidel, Raúl and Che—were complemented by a group of new protagonists from Cuba’s young generation. These could be literacy teachers, party members, militia members, teachers, singers, poets… all aiming to define and shape the Cuban Revolution. Together young Cubans took part in defining what it meant to be young, socialist and Cuban in this effervescent decade. The picture that emerges is one in which neither youth politics nor youth culture can alone help to explain the first decade of the Revolution; rather through the sometimes conflicted intersection of both there emerged a generation constantly to be renewed—a youth in Revolution.