Inside the Cuban Revolution: Fidel Castro and the Urban Underground [Hardcover]

Julia E. Sweig (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 27, 2002

Julia Sweig shatters the mythology surrounding the Cuban Revolution in a compelling revisionist history that reconsiders the revolutionary roles of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara and restores to a central position the leadership of the Cuban urban underground, the Llano. Granted unprecedented access to the classified records of Castro's 26th of July Movement's underground operatives--the only scholar inside or outside of Cuba allowed access to the complete collection in the Cuban Council of State's Office of Historic Affairs--she details the ideological, political, and strategic debates between Castro's mountain-based guerrilla movement and the urban revolutionaries in Havana, Santiago, and other cities.

In a close study of the fifteen months from November 1956 to July 1958, when the urban underground leadership was dominant, Sweig examines the debate between the two groups over whether to wage guerrilla warfare in the countryside or armed insurrection in the cities, and is the first to document the extent of Castro's cooperation with the Llano. She unveils the essential role of the urban underground, led by such figures as Frank País, Armando Hart, Haydée Santamaria, Enrique Oltuski, and Faustino Pérez, in controlling critical decisions on tactics, strategy, allocation of resources, and relations with opposition forces, political parties, Cuban exiles, even the United States--contradicting the standard view of Castro as the primary decision maker during the revolution.

In revealing the true relationship between Castro and the urban underground, Sweig redefines the history of the Cuban Revolution, offering guideposts for understanding Cuban politics in the 1960s and raising intriguing questions for the future transition of power in Cuba.

(20020515)

Editorial Reviews

Review

After so many books on the Cuban Revolution, it might seem impossible to shed new light on one of the key moments in the twentieth century. Yet Julia Sweig manages to do so in this remarkable tour de force. Using documents only recently made available to her by the Cuban authorities, she challenges several myths about the nature of the Cuban Revolution and in the process provides a nuanced and very readable account of the rise to power of Fidel Castro. (Victor Bulmer-Thomas, Director, Royal Institute of International Affairs 20020616)

About the Author

Julia E. Sweig is Senior Fellow and Deputy Director of the Latin America Program at the Council on Foreign Relations.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 286 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press (June 27, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674008480
• ISBN-13: 978-0674008489
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,593,488 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Witness to the events finds sloppy research and bias, January 30, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Inside the Cuban Revolution: Fidel Castro and the Urban Underground (Hardcover)

As a former representative of Castro's Movement in Washington during the insurrection against Batista, I was interested in how Ms Sweig covered a period I was very familiar with. I was surprised and disappointed. The book's many mistakes reflect sloppy research. Grau San Martín was not the Auténtico party candidate in the 1952 elections. It was Carlos Hevia. Those elections were scheduled for June 1952, not November. It was Huber Matos,not Pedro Miret, who brought the shipment of weapons contributed by President Figueres of Costa Rica. Perhaps her most careless mistake is writing that Felipe Pazos was working in the Inter-American Development Bank in the 1940s, when, in fact, the IADB was not established until 1959! The author, tries to convey an image of thorough scholarship, but, probably due to ideological bias, failed to interview anybody mentioned in the book living outside Cuba. Plus, the sources consulted overseas are heavily biased in favor of the Castro regime. In my case, she quotes me at large and attributes to me a political membership in the Ortodoxo Party that never existed. She also writes about my alleged appointment by the Castro sisters as Washington Representative, yet I never met them. If she had bothered to contact me, and she knew where to find me, she would have avoided these inaccuracies. As to her main thrust that Castro was not involved in the great failure of the April 9, 1958 general strike, nobody who worked with Fidel can believe that. Those of us who were in the Movement at the time and are now free to talk know he was deeply involved. He is too much of a micromanager to have allowed such a central event in his effort against Batista to take place without his participation. The entire book is tainted by the biased sources used by the author. -Ernesto Betancourt

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Hard to read but interesting, March 27, 2004

By 

F. Lennox Campello "f. lennox campello" (Potomac, MD United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Inside the Cuban Revolution: Fidel Castro and the Urban Underground (Hardcover)

This is not an easy book to read. It is as if the author had taken her thesis and expanded it into a book, which is exactly what she did.

The book does seem to affirm the importance of the true martyrs of the Cuban Revolution, those fighting Batista in the cities - the "llano" revolutionaries, which have been somewhat pushed aside in Cuban mythology by the exaggerated myth of the Sierra fighters developed by Che Guevara after the Revolution.

While the book does affirm and establishes the immense contributions of all the other groups and people fighting the Batista dictatorship, it seems to me that it fails to answer the same question that it raises: WHY did Castro and his band diminish their contributions?, why did they splinter their unions? It was of course the threat of potential "other than Castro and his group" heroes sharing in the victory and challenging Castro's caudillismo and eventual brutal dictatorship.

And I wondered what would have happened had Frank Pais not been murdered by Batistianos?

And the answer, of course, is that he would have suffered the same fate later on in Castro's hands as countless other Cuban martyrs, who were not Communist, did.

The book is well researched, and Sweig has obviously had a lot of access to the Cuban regime's doctored archives. It is because of this access that perhaps she is somewhat soft on her evaluation of Castro and his motives. Nonetheless, regardless of this bias and some apparent historical errors here and there, it remains an interesting, if somewhat hard to read, window on a part of the Cuban Revolution that has been diminished by the regime.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very informative - that's why they don't like it!, March 10, 2004

By A Customer

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This review is from: Inside the Cuban Revolution: Fidel Castro and the Urban Underground (Hardcover)

A very detailed search for the lost civilian underground of M-26-7, despite Mr. Betancourt's criticism. (She does not state he was a MEMBER of the Ortodoxo Party, and his dispatching to Washington by the Castro sisters is credited to Mario Llerena, who was in a position to know.)

Mario Llerena also recounted, as M-26's public relations chief in exile, how he only met Castro once and spoke with him only one more time, via shortwave radio; proving that the scattered logistics of the Revolution made it physically impossible for Castro to micromanage many important developments, much as he would have liked to.

Without doubt the assassination of Frank Pais and the crushing of the April '58 strike made it easier for the Sierra to consolidate power afterward, but to say that Fidel deliberately sabotaged the urban underground would have him shooting himself in the feet. There was no way he could know that Batista would fold in so rapidly and leave a power vacuum at the top. Castro needed his civilian supporters right up to the end.

Although this book only marginally addresses the post-'59 followup, I'll add my 2 centavos in saying that much of the Communist vs. anti-Communist struggles that year were an ill-cloaked continuation of the Sierra/Llano feud, with Fidel struggling to break free of a liberal tutelage his victorious rebel army no longer needed.

Sweig did a good job. Buy it. Read it. Learn.