Tanya Harmer has written a creative and deeply researched political biography of Beatriz (“Tati”) Allende, the daughter of Salvador Allende Gossens, the first democratically elected self-proclaimed Marxist president in Latin America, who took office in 1970. Harmer provides an easy to read (but not easy to “hear”) narrative of Beatriz's political life as well as her death by suicide in 1977 when she was in exile in Cuba.Much of the biography is based on more than a decade of Harmer's research on Chile's place in the inter-American Cold War, on Cuban support for insurrection throughout the Western Hemisphere, on Cuban and Chilean Socialist Party support for the Che Guevara–led guerrilla movement in Bolivia (ELN), and on counterinsurgency operations by U.S. and allied regional governments (mostly, but not always, military dictatorships). An essential starting point is Harmer's pathbreaking book Allende's Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (2011), which was based on her 2008 doctoral dissertation, “The Rules of the Game: Allende's Chile, the United States and Cuba, 1970–1973.” Harmer's latest book also draws on her “‘Serémos como el Che’: Chilean elenos, Bolivia and the cause of Latinoamericanismo, 1967–1970,” Contemporánea, Vol. 7, No. 7 (2016), pp. 45–66; her “The View from Havana: Chilean Exiles in Cuba and Early Resistance to Chile's Dictatorship, 1973–1977,” Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 96, No. 1 (2016), pp. 109–146; and “Two, Three, Many Revolutions? Cuba and the Prospects for Revolutionary Change in Latin America, 1967–1975,” Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol. 45, No. 1 (February 2013), pp. 61–89. Combining this earlier work with new research, Harmer takes the inter-American Cold War that she knows so well to the “micro” level: the life of Beatriz Allende.Harmer tells the story of Beatriz Allende's life as part of the “long 1960s,” the “internationalization of national political life,” and also of the idiosyncrasies of Chilean politics and political culture from the late 1930s to 1973. Part of this political culture was traditional gender roles and expectations, even within the Socialist and Communist parties, the Marxist-controlled labor unions, and other leftist political entities. Beatriz fought against these traditional gender roles, including limits on female leadership and “outside the family” activities, and also against Chile's capitalist institutions until her death. But she could not overcome Chilean (and Cuban) political and cultural limitations on female revolutionaries or even on everyday female spouses, companions, friends, union leaders, or lovers. Nor could she overcome her own personal demons.In an interview in Jacobin in 2020 (https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/09/revolution-chile-beatriz-allende-salvador-allende), Harmer explained her motivation for writing this biography: “I wanted to know what it had meant to be a female revolutionary in the age of Che Guevara, including the constraints and opportunities women like Beatriz had faced.” Of course, as Harmer recognizes in that same interview, there were no other women like Beatriz Allende: “In Beatriz's case, it is impossible not to understand her political trajectory as the result of who her father was.” Because of her intense loyalty and unique familial and political relationship to Salvador Allende, Beatriz could never be representative of even the most privileged leftist female university students and intellectuals on the left. Harmer's biography makes clear that Beatriz's life could not fully reflect “what it meant [for others] to be a female revolutionary in the age of Che Guevara.” Her story was one of exceptional opportunities and forbearance (“la regalona de Allende” / “her daddy's favorite” or “the son he never had”) and, from 1970 to 1973, participation in policymaking as a confidante, adviser, back-up personal secretary, and liaison between Allende and her friends, relatives, and political associates in the Left Revolutionary Movement (MIR) and militarized factions of the Socialist Party as well as a direct conduit to Cuban intelligence operatives in Chile.Even as a leader and figurehead of the exile-solidarity movement in Cuba after her father's ouster and death, Beatriz's life differed greatly from that of other Chilean exiles in Cuba and elsewhere: “As well as an apartment, the Cubans gave Beatriz a car, a cook, and a cleaner, … [and] Beatriz welcomed them. For someone who had never done domestic chores or fried an egg, they were indispensable” (pp. 232–233). The memoir published in 2020 by Patricia Espejo Brain, Salvador Allende's private secretary, Allende inédito: Memorias desde la secretaría privada de La Moneda, reports that “Tati had no idea how to run a house, she didn't know how to cook or anything like that” (Tati no tenía idea de llevar una casa, no sabía cocinar ni nada parecida). Beatriz's story was exceptional, even if the quip about never doing domestic chores and not knowing how to cook (even fry an egg) is apocryphal.Beatriz Allende's exceptionality does not detract from Harmer's keen analysis and original insights into Chilean political history, nor does it detract from the light this book sheds on the largely invisible (in most historical accounts) female protagonists in the Unidad Popular and MIR efforts to transform Chile. The book is aptly subtitled “A Revolutionary Life in Cold War Latin America,” and Harmer's analysis reminds us that the intersection of global, transnational, regional, and national politics has many everyday consequences for both ordinary and extraordinary people of whatever gender.Harmer also offers glimpses nowhere else available into the lives of other female revolutionaries working every day with Salvador Allende at La Moneda, Chile's presidential palace, including Miria Contreras (la Payita), Allende's mistress and confidante; Patricia Espejo Brain, who had been a militant of the Juventudes Comunistas (Communist Youth) and later became a leading figure in the MIR in exile and a collaborator with Beatriz in the Comité de Resistencia in Cuba; Isabel Jaramillo Edwards (a key link to the Uruguayan Tupamaro revolutionaries living in exile in Santiago and, later, a widely published professor and international relations specialist at the Centro de Estudios sobre América and the Instituto de Relaciones Internacionales in Havana); Frida Modak, a journalist, Salvador Allende's presidential press secretary (the first woman to occupy that role in Chile), and later the editor of the 2008 volume Salvador Allende: Pensamiento y acción; and Gloria Gaitán, the daughter of the assassinated Colombian Liberal Party caudillo Jorge Gaitán, with whom Allende apparently hoped to have a son who would be “a grandson of Gaitán and son of Allende” (p. 205; see also Harmer, interview with Gloria Gaitán, Semana, 2007).The idea that Allende, born in 1908, was, at age 65, imagining a literal, biological revolutionary legacy and that Gloria Gaitán was on board is perhaps remarkable—though it was detailed by Gaitán repeatedly and confirmed in Eduardo Labarca's sometimes unflattering biography of Allende: Salvador Allende: Biografía sentimental (revised edition, 2014). Even more remarkable is that Allende spent time with Gaitán and her children on 9 September 1973—when the only real question was when the military coup would occur, according to Cuban and Soviet sources (p. 205).Although Harmer emphasizes the gendered constraints on Beatriz's political life, this is not a book about gender, gender theories, or the challenges of writing historical biographies and oral history methodology. Harmer makes little effort to address the bourgeoning literature on women in Chilean politics or the specialized work on gendered ideology and roles within the leading Marxist parties from the 1930s into the 1970–1973 Unidad Popular period. Those topics will be left for a different book, but the omission of them here will no doubt be regretted by some academic critics. The book ends by noting that Beatriz's story “reminds us to count women as historical actors and protagonists—as revolutionaries and activists who fought for change and helped shape the way the past unfolded as it did” (p. 274).Despite this ending line, “women as historical actors” are not the main focus of the book. Via the lens of the family life, friendships, education, student activism, political attachments, and revolutionary activities of Beatriz Allende, Harmer seeks to reveal how everyday lives were affected by global and regional conflicts and how these everyday protagonists affected the way in which the Cold War played out. The book relies on Harmer's thorough mastery of the secondary literature on Cold War Chile and Latin America; extensive archival research in the United States, Latin America, and Europe; effective use of declassified documents; privileged access to Cuban sources; interviews (more than 50 listed interviews, over more than a decade) with Beatriz's former friends and lovers, as well as with former Cuban intelligence officers and Chilean diplomats and political figures; and private correspondence provided by Beatriz's ex-husband, Luis Fernández Oña, (not his birth name; he made it his legal name late in life).Harmer acknowledges a special reliance on Fernández Oña, a Cuban intelligence officer directly involved in Cuban-Chilean operations from the 1960s until 1973, who “inspired me to write about Beatriz, opened doors to her friends and family, and shared his private document collection with me. He felt an enormous debt to Beatriz and was unwavering in helping me understand her life in what turned out to be the final years of his own. I am only sorry he—and many others who shared their stories—did not live to see the final book” (p. 275). So, this book, in part, is also Fernández Oña's story of his life with Beatriz, his life as a Cuban intelligence agent in Chile, and his desires about what should be remembered—and, unspoken, what should not be remembered. It also makes clear that U.S. policy toward Allende's Chile was not entirely paranoid.Beatriz's experiences with student politics in the 1960s highlight the overlapping and confusing personal, familial, ideological, and party divisions of the Chilean left that came to plague the Allende presidency. She joined the most militant wing of Chile's Socialist Party (PS), advocating for armed struggle against existing Latin American governments and U.S. imperialism. A faction of the Chilean PS, with Beatriz's active participation, supported the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN) guerrillas in Bolivia led by Che Guevara. Her father, then president of the Chilean senate, facilitated the escapees’ refuge and safe expulsion from Chile and their removal to Cuba, via Tahiti and New Zealand. Beatriz became a medical doctor and worked in public health clinics (as had her father early in his career), but spent much of her time in political activities, her father's election campaigns, and clandestine networks of the PS, with personal and family contacts with the MIR.Harmer makes clear that Beatriz “belonged to a specifically pro-Cuban revolutionary left group in Chile that came of age in the 1960s. And this book tells the history of her life within this world” (p. 8). As Harmer first wrote in her 2016 article in Contemporánea, the ELN insurgency in Bolivia that Beatriz actively supported was “una locura” (“madness”/“folly,” citing an ex ELN interviewee), but the notion of extending Cuba's revolutionary upheaval to the rest of Latin America seemed very real at the time—part of the “espíritu de la época” (spirit of the times). Beatriz's life in the 1960s reflected the “celebrated narrative of a few armed guerrillas sparking a successful revolution” (p. 150).U.S. Cold War policy in the Western Hemisphere after 1959, an essential piece of this espíritu de la época, was largely dedicated to “no more Cubas,” a policy that meant sponsoring counterinsurgency operations throughout the hemisphere and defeat of the insurgents or, at least, their containment—until the victory of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in 1979, when the counterinsurgency efforts intensified and became even more brutal in Central America.Salvador Allende was viewed as a threat to U.S. interests long before the Cuban revolution—even before the hemispheric Cold War. As a founding member of the Chilean PS (1933) and a long-time “anti-imperialist,” Allende was the target of U.S. efforts to prevent his election as Chilean president through covert operations in 1958, 1964, and 1970, when Allende won the presidency. In 1962, Allende declared that the enemy of the Chilean people was the same enemy Cuba faced: “Yankee imperialism.” Viewing the Allende presidency as a threat to U.S. policy in the hemisphere—and even a dangerous example for some West European countries with strong Socialist and Communist parties, President Richard Nixon and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger mounted fierce covert and overt attacks on the Allende government that contributed significantly to the September 1973 military coup and the brutal seventeen-year dictatorship that followed.As president (1970–1973), with Beatriz's active encouragement and coordination, Allende welcomed Latin American revolutionary exiles from Brazil, Uruguay, and elsewhere (pp. 173–174). Beatriz, working in the presidential office, enabled Cuban diplomats, military personnel, and intelligence officers to maintain privileged access to Allende and his policy team, as the Cubans stockpiled weapons in their embassy for the eventual defense of the government against an anticipated coup—but also to arm Allende's personal security force, militants of the PS (some trained militarily in Cuba), and the MIR.In Cuba, after Salvador Allende's suicide at La Moneda Palace (covered up by the Cuban media and by Fidel Castro, who falsely claimed that Allende had been murdered by army personnel during the attack on La Moneda), Beatriz publicly supported the Cuban version of her father's demise, unlike the rest of his family, including Beatriz's mother (Hortensia Bussi Soto) and sister, Isabel Allende Bussi. Allende Bussi, Allende's second daughter, went into exile in Mexico with her mother, returned to Chile in 1990, and became a prominent Socialist politician, serving (11 March 2014–11 March 2015) as the first female president of the Chilean Senate. In 2011, Allende Bussi confirmed that the family accepted the results of an examination based on exhumation of Allende's remains: “The report conclusions are consistent with what we already believed. When faced with extreme circumstances, he made the decision of taking his own life, instead of being humiliated” (BBC, 19 July 2011).From 1974 to 1977, Beatriz Allende coordinated distribution of “solidarity funds” collected in Europe, North America, and elsewhere for transmission by the Cuba authorities via clandestine networks to Chile for resistance to the dictatorship by remnants of the UP parties and MIR (p. 221). Beatriz's growing frustration with the inability of Chilean exiles to unify against the dictatorship, her break-up with her Cuban husband, her anger at the refusal of the Cubans and the Chilean PS leadership-in-exile to permit her return to Chile to combat the military regime, and her dislike of the oppressive surveillance and gender-based restrictions on her life in Cuba apparently contributed to her depression and to the decision to take her own life.In a suicide note to Castro, Beatriz requested that her children be raised by Mitzi Contreras, the sister of Allende's mistress—not by her mother, Bussi Soto, who had never been revolutionary enough for Beatriz, despite engaging in active campaigns against the Pinochet dictatorship for many years well after Beatriz's death (Bussi Soto died in 2009 at age 94). Beatriz's daughter, Maya Fernández, grew up in Cuba but returned to Chile at the end of the military dictatorship. A biologist and veterinarian, she was president of the Chilean Chamber of Deputies (11 March 2018–19 March 2019), and since 2021 has served as a prominent PS congresswoman. Thus, both Salvador Allende's daughter Isabel (in the senate) and his granddaughter (Beatriz's daughter), Maya Fernández, represent the PS in the Chilean congress almost half a century after the military coup of 1973.Because Beatriz Allende was a generally private person, somewhat trained in intelligence work, and because there was no prior serious biography of her (Marco Álvarez Vergara's 2017 Tati Allende: Una revolucionaria olvidada, is a useful but romanticized political panegyric), and because the Cuban government still has not released some relevant documents, the recollections of acquaintances, intimate friends, and political comrades sometimes leave important gaps in Beatriz's story, duly noted by Harmer. No one but Harmer could have written this book, given her intimate sources, her access to Cuban intelligence officials, including Beatriz's ex-husband, and her personal ties with Cuban and Chilean leftist networks. The book not only tells Beatriz Allende's personal story but also provides insights nowhere else available into Cold War Chile, the intricate and complex informal networks operating around Salvador Allende, the Chilean tragedy of 1973, and especially the inter-American dimensions of the Cold War.