The book interprets the Cuban revolutionary movement from 1868 to 1959 as a continuous process that sought political independence and social and economic transformation of colonial and neocolonial structures. Cuba is a symbol of hope for the Third World. The Cuban Revolution took power from a national elite subordinate to foreign capital, and placed it in the hands of the people; and it subsequently developed alternative structures of popular democracy that have functioned to keep delegates of the people in power. While Cuba has persisted, the peoples of the Third World, knocked down by the neoliberal project, have found social movement and political life, a renewal that is especially evident in Latin America and the Non-Aligned Movement. At the same time, the capitalist world-economy increasingly reveals its unsustainability, and the global elite demonstrate its incapacity to respond to a multifaceted and sustained global crisis. These dynamics establish conditions for popular democratic socialist revolutions in the North.

January 1984 marked the 25th anniversary of Fidel Castro’s emergence to power. The Cuban Revolution: 25 Years Later is a product of the CSIS Cuba Project, a long-term effort to focus public as well as policymaker’s attention on Cuba-related affairs. The lead author, Lord Thomas of Swynnerton, is the dean of political-historical studies on Cuba, and author of the encyclopedic Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom. A great deal of myth surrounds the evolution of Cuba since Castro’s emergence to power over 25 years ago. Some of this myth is the product of official Cuban propaganda; some of it is also due to a generally misinformed American public. Sifting through available data to distinguish between fact and fiction, this book evaluates broadly the impact of Castro’s regime on Cuba itself. Based on the findings of the CSIS Cuba Project, the book draws on the assessments of 18 top Cuban specialists on the political, economic, cuiturai, and social development of Cuba since 1959. In contrast to democracies such as Costa Rica, the equalization of society that has taken place under Castro’s leadership has been accomplished by redistributing existing resources, not by creating new wealth. Moreover, the authors conclude that in politics, culture, and the economy, Cuba under Castro has become and remains rigid, stagnant, enormously militarized, and ideologically absolutist.

The book makes accessible a selection of speeches and television appearances by Fidel Castro during the first two years of the Cuban Revolution, allowing for a fresh analysis of his ideological evolution towards socialism.

This book, first published in 1965, is a scrupulously fair study of the origins and evolution of Castroism and an assessment of the impact of the Cuban revolution and of Castro’s subsequent domestic and foreign policies on the rest of Latin America. In this analysis it takes into account the great differences – social, economic and cultural – between the countries of the area and looks at the foreign policies of Latin American countries as well as the United States and the role of international Communism.

The recent retirement of Fidel Castro turned the world’s attention toward the tiny but prominent island nation of Cuba and the question of what its future holds. Amid all of the talk and hypothesizing, it is worth taking a moment to consider how Cuba reached this point, which is what Antoni Kapcia provides with his incisive history of Cuba since 1959. Cuba In Revolution takes the Cuban Revolution as its starting point, analyzing social change, its benefits and disadvantages, popular participation in the revolution, and the development of its ideology. Kapcia probes into Castro’s rapid rise to national leader, exploring his politics of defense and dissent as well as his contentious relationship with the United States from the beginning of his reign. The book also considers the evolution of the revolution’s international profile and Cuba’s foreign relations over the years, investigating issues and events such as the Bay of Pigs crisis, Cuban relations with Communist nations like Russia and China, and the flight of asylum-seeking Cubans to Florida over the decades. The collapse of the Soviet Union between 1989 and 1991 catalyzed a severe economic and political crisis in Cuba, but Cuba was surprisingly resilient in the face of the catastrophe, Kapcia notes, and he examines the strategies adopted by Cuba over the last two decades in order to survive America’s longstanding trade embargo. A fascinating and much-needed examination of a country that has served as an important political symbol and diplomatic enigma for the twentieth century, Cuba In Revolution is a critical primer for all those interested in Cuba’s past—or concerned with its future.

The Cuban Revolution offers a reflective account of what the Revolution has meant to various actors such as the dominant powers, the Third World, fellow revolutionaries, intellectuals and Cuban citizens at different periods in its history. Rather than offer a simple narrative of events, Geraldine Lievesley addresses significant themes with which the Revolution has engaged and the problems that it has encountered.

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.