5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good solid information, October 13, 2008
This review is from: The Origins of the Cuban Revolution Reconsidered (Envisioning Cuba) (Paperback)
This writer gives an objective summary of the Cuban revolution, with precipitating events going back to the 1930's and further. It was very informative, with a minimum of spin and an obvious grounding in research. The author lets you make up your own mind, which I appreciated.
The thing the book doesn't do much is bring Cuban history to life. I'm sure there are many stories about Castro and others that could add color to the story. Only a few of these are included.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A good overview, but -, March 22, 2011
This review is from: The Origins of the Cuban Revolution Reconsidered (Envisioning Cuba) (Paperback)
Certain realities are glossed over or sidestepped in Samuel Farber's recapitulation of the Cuban Revolution. A note to readers: this is a theoretical and policy-oriented narrative, not a review of the people or events of the Revolution as such.
Farber is a Cuban-born democratic socialist, the son of Jewish immigrants and a participant in the 1950s revolutionary movement. As such he is well-poised to both understand his subject and communicate its nuances to outsiders. As a democratic leftist he is torn, however, between condemning Castro's personal rule, and the Soviet-imitation bureaucratic repression of Cuban daily life; and the need and desirability of a social revolution to transform the island's backwardness, and defy US hegemony. There is no reason - in theory - why one is needed with the other. Yet. . . .
Farber does a great job in exploring the US' intrinsic hostility to social democracy and social revolution on principle. Thus it becomes irrelevant if Castro was a Communist in 1959 or not; and equally beside the point that the US could have been more understanding and tolerant. Castro was a revolutionary; the Cuban elite and the US demanded business as usual; and both sides believed in their own absolute moral virtue. Thus, as Farber explains well, there was little possibility of compromise on essentials.
Farber also explores the sui generis populist radicalism of the early Revolution, how its transformation into official socialism was not planned but an outgrowth of action and reactions in a cold war context. There is a world of revolutionary thought and practice between Washington and Moscow, and the Cuban Revolution was in its first days sincere in exploring these. Farber concludes with a belief that opening Cuba will give the democratic left the space necessary to resume its aborted vision in the interests of the Cuban people. Yet. . . .
The issues Farber leaves dangling tend to undermine his own case. Just how would the Revolution meet its security and economic needs against determined US opposition? In this sense, it really doesn't matter how democratic Fidel was, as his alleged Communism was also irrelevant. It was the process of change that produced the reaction, as witness Arbenz in Guatemala or Allende in Chile. Fidel congratulated himself on his survival precisely because he didn't trifle with democratic and legal nicities. How could the Revolution have survived without cold war realignment, just 90 miles from US waters, with a government that had no more use for non-alignment in its sphere than the USSR? Hungary's revolution could not have survived in '56 as a neutral state; neither could Cuba's, ten years later.
That the democratic left will have the wherewithal to oppose either the current Party elite, as they transform themselves into "state businessmen"; or the well-funded, US-supported contras seething for vengeful return in Miami, is also doubtful. The largest mass social movement is likely, instead, to be out of Cuba toward the United States, undercutting the popular base Farber hopes to mobilize for a post-Castro social democracy.
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