The History of Cuba

Abstract

This book is part of a series that sets out to present concise and analytical surveys of the “most important” countries of the early twenty-first-century world. The other Latin American countries included so far have been Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico. The volume on Cuba, by political scientist Clifford L. Staten, achieves the core goal of the series editors. At 151 pages, this succinct narrative begins before European colonization and ends in mid–2002, with the visit by former U.S. president Jimmy Carter and the dissident Varela project to petition the socialist state for a referendum on economic and political reforms. Roughly two-thirds of the book is devoted to the twentieth century, again in keeping with the series’ emphasis on the modern and contemporary periods.Written in textbook style, the book does, however, present an overarching argument to undergird the fast-moving five-hundred-year narrative. At the outset, and then strategically throughout the text, Staten emphasizes the theme of the persistence of dependency. He argues that this dependency is twofold. On the one hand, Cuba suffered political subordination to a world power (Spain, followed more radically by the United States). On the other, Cuba has been mired in economic dependence on, or vulnerability to, world economic forces. “These,” he writes, “are the constants in Cuban history and it is the interplay of these constants that have determined the past—and will determine the future—of the island” (p. 10).In arguing for the persistence of dependency, however, Staten comes close to casting disparate forms of power as interchangeable. Likewise, the distinctions between different efforts to attenuate or subvert that power are minimized. Thus, Staten contends that “for Castro one could substitute Fulgencio Batista, Gerardo Machado, or other leaders who have controlled the country at one time or another” (p. 10). There is limited value in transposing historical protagonists whose responses to the United States were so disparate. In fact, there would be room, even in a historical synthesis of this kind, to explore the ways each of these leader’s relationship with the United States contained uncomfortable contradictions and transformations. But for Staten, exploring such differences is not a task worth undertaking, at least not in this brief text. Here, no matter what course Cubans follow, Spanish colonialism gives way to U.S. hegemony, which gives way to Soviet influence. While most scholars would accept the general contention that Cuba has had to face the political and economic power of external forces, historians are likely to chafe at the overpowering sense of inevitability that accompanies the arguments presented here. The author could have paid significantly more attention to the specific ways in which those relations of power are continually reproduced, reconfigured, and challenged.While part of the problem here might be inherent in the task of writing a very brief and general overview of a vast national history, much of it might be attributed to the fact that Staten’s synthesis is derived largely from other syntheses. Staten draws on a few very worthy monographs for the chapters on the revolutionary period, including books by Marifeli Pérez-Stable, Susan Eckstein, and Louis A. Pérez. But his sources for most of the book are, in fact, textbooks (including those by Hugh Thomas and Jaime Suchlicki). Because he relies primarily on other textbook syntheses, there is little effort to incorporate the perspectives and findings of a slew of recent and innovative works on a range of topics in the history of colonial and modern Cuba. So, although Staten has produced a short and analytical introduction to the history of an important modern nation (to borrow the words of the publishers), he has succeeded neither in offering novel interpretations nor in learning from or integrating the contributions of recent scholarship. In this, he has done his readers a great disservice. A final disservice comes in the form of poor editing and fact checking, as the text is riddled with misspellings and other errors of fact.