Inside the Cuban Revolution: Fidel Castro and the Urban Underground (Paperback)

~ Julia E. Sweig (Author)
Key Phrases: Haydée Santamaría, Raúl Chibás, Organización Auténtica, National Directorate, Sierra Maestra, Civic Institutions (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

Julia Sweig has written a carefully crafted account of the urban underground campaign against Fulgencio Batista... -- Financial Times, June 16, 2002

Sweig...provides what will almost certainly be the standard account of the Cuban insurrection for years to come. -- Louis A. Pérez, Los Angeles Times Book Review, Los Angeles Times Book Review, July 21, 2002 --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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)

Inside the Cuban Revolution confirms what many had long suspected: the 'official story' of twelve bearded, daring guerrillas bringing down a hideous dictatorship never happened. Without the urban underground there would have been no victory. In this important book, Julia Sweig sets the record straight and raises fundamental questions about revolutionary movements in Latin America since 1959.
--Jorge G. Castañeda, Secretary of Foreign Affairs, Mexico (20020721)

This book is both compelling and groundbreaking. It seamlessly combines great storytelling, investigative journalism, and first-rate analysis in a work that scholars and policymakers--indeed, anyone interested in Cuba--will find must reading. With Inside the Cuban Revolution Julia Sweig guarantees the world will never look at Cuba or Fidel Castro the same way again.
--Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Chair, Western Hemisphere Subcommittee, Committee on Foreign Relations (20021101)

With meticulous research, presented in a dramatic narrative, Julia Sweig provides the real story behind the Cuban Revolution and Castro's rise to power, showing that his ascendancy was due to far more than the popular conception of a small band of guerrilla fighters toppling a corrupt regime. It is a portrait of Castro as we've never seen him. Inside the Cuban Revolution, which sheds new light on the last time there was a transition of power in Cuba, may very well give us clues to the next one.
--Congressman Charles B. Rangel (20021213)

In this brilliantly researched tour de force, Julia Sweig adds a new dimension to our understanding of the way Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba.
--Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

Using original documentary sources from Cuban government archives, Sweig shows how the largely middle-class Cubans in the urban underground laid the groundwork for Castro's Rebel Army victory...Sweig claims that the full history of the revolution has yet to be written, but her book makes an impressive contribution to this effort by painting a new and more realistic picture of the process that produced Castro's Cuba.
--Susan Kaufman Purcell (Foreign Affairs )

The recent opening of Cuban historical archives to non-Cuban scholars has changed traditionally accepted views of the Cuban revolution of 1959. Using documents housed in the Cuban Council of State's Office of Historic Affairs, Sweig...argues that in its early days the revolution was influenced more by the Cuban middle class and less by Fidel Castor or Che Guevara than historians have suggested...By giving this period context and highlighting its importance, Sweig shows that all the elements of the revolution were in place prior to 1959...[It is] convincingly argued and now backed by documentary evidence. A valuable discussion.
--Mark L. Gover (Library Journal )

Julia Sweig has written a carefully crafted account of the urban underground campaign against Fulgencio Batista, the dictator toppled from power in 1959. The main interest of the book is that it is primarily based on original interviews and previously inaccessible records of the 26th July Movement--the revolutionary nationalist organization created by Castro. (Financial Times )

In a thoughtfully argued and carefully researched book, Sweig...provides what will almost certainly be the standard account of the Cuban insurrection for years to come. Using a wide range of archival records and manuscript sources, including important Cuban materials, Sweig successfully explores the complex and often contradictory relations between the Ilano and the sierra. She pays attention more to similarities than to differences and, by emphasizing collaboration and coordination, provides a coherent and cogent explanation of the astonishing success of Castro's movement. Keenly aware of the larger historical context which gives her tale meaning, Sweig shows how Castro held together the disparate elements of his often-fractious movement while providing considerable insight into his personality and the politics that often divided his followers.
--Louis A. Pérez (Los Angeles Times Book Review )

Julia Sweig's book, the result of eight years of research with access to newly declassified documents, exposes the myth that the Cuban revolution was imposed by a dozen middle-class, bearded rebels in the mountains and challenges three pieces of conventional wisdom...This book is vital for anyone interested in understanding the Cuban revolution, and it destroys the arguments of those British Trotskyists who deny its working class character.
--Helen Yaffe (Fight Racism and Fight Imperialism )

The sheer volume of material she was able to review is astounding.
--Mark Falcoff (Times Literary Supplement )

In this book, Julia E. Sweig attempts to debunk one of the many pillars of the mythology surrounding the Revolution, namely that Fidel Castro, his brother Raúl, Ernesto "Che" Guevara, and a few other guerilla fighters stationed in the Sierra Maestra were the primary force that brought down Batista and had a dominant influence over revolutionary activities beyond the Sierra Maestra, including the urban settings…The picture produced by this book is one in which 26th of July leaders, operating outside the Sierra Maestra, played protagonist roles within the insurrection and that much of the initiative and many of the key actions emerged from the llano (lowlands)…[S]he supports this thesis with documentary sources heretofore unavailable to scholars. The bulk of the documentary evidence sustaining the book consists of hundreds of documents housed at the Cuban Council of State's Office of Historic Affairs, which the Cuban government made available to Sweig while keeping the archive's doors closed to other researchers. This valuable and fascinating collection of documents allowed the author to paint a well-documented and nuanced perspective on llano sierra relations as well as how the leaders of the 26th of July Movement related to other anti-Batista figures…Sweig's book is an important and useful contribution for the understanding of the struggle against Batista.
--Luis Martínez-Fernández (The Historian )

This is not a military history, but it is the best book ever written about Fidel Castro's revolutionary movement...Unlike the great body of preexisting literature on the subject, Sweig's work is thoroughly professional and based primarily on archival sources in Cuba, to which she had unprecedented and almost unrestricted access...Written with style, insight, and clarity, Julia Sweig's landmark study, now available in paperback, cannot be ignored by any serious student of the Cuban Revolution.
--Neill Macaulay (Military History )

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Product Details

• Paperback: 286 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press (October 25, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674016122
• ISBN-13: 978-0674016125
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #463,800 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 17 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

5 of 5 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.

7 of 8 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

Amazon Verified Purchase

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.