In April 1970, the Hispanic Foundation of the Library of Congress and Yale University, in conjunction with the Ford Foundation, sponsored in Washington an international symposium on Cuban research materials. The Cuban Revolution had attracted the attention of an international scholarly community and, quite suddenly, a new and vast corpus of literature had come into existence. By 1970 this prodigious enterprise showed no sign of coming to an end; on the contrary, it gave every indication of expanding. In 1970 the Center for International Studies at the University of Pittsburgh launched Cuban Studies Newsletter, a publication that the editors described as “designed to provide comprehensive and timely communication among those interested in Cuban studies.” The development of Cuban study centers in Europe and the United States further served to stimulate interest in Cuba. The moment was propitious, then, for an international symposium to review the state of research collections and library holdings on Cuba. Some fifteen participants, mainly scholars with research interests in Cuba and librarians and bibliographers with specializations in the Caribbean and Latin America, presented a variety of papers dealing with various aspects of library and archival collections possessing materials on Cuba.

For the better part of the last fifteen years, scholars in the United States researching late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Cuba have worked under severe handicaps. First and foremost, obviously the richest collections of Cuban materials—in Cuba—are beyond easy access. It is not without some irony that the very phenomenon that made Cuba the subject of intense interest also placed the vast corpus of sources vital to the study of the island beyond the reach of the researcher in the United States. The researcher has had to suffer a general paucity of sources, and has been forced to reconstruct the Cuban past from incomplete and fragmentary materials scattered in archives, libraries, and manuscript collections across the country.

They arrived first in July 1898 in scattered numbers, in the company of an army of conquest, and subsequently in successive waves during the military occupation. By the time U.S. military rule over Cuba came to an end in May 1902, no less than a score of Protestant denominations had inaugurated evangelical activities in Cuba, including Northern and Southern Baptists, Southern Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, the Disciples of Christ, Quakers, Pentecostalists, and Congregationalists. In fact, so many missionaries arrived in Cuba at one time that denominational competition quickly got out of hand. In February 1902, an interdenominational conference convened in Cienfuegos to impose order on the U.S. evangelical enterprise. The resulting comity plan established spheres of influence for the principal Protestant denominations in Cuba: Northern and Southern Baptists divided the island between them, with Northern Baptists in the two eastern provinces and Southern Baptists assigned to the four western ones; Quakers and Methodists divided eastern Cuba between them; Presbyterians and Congregationalists located their missions in the western zones; and Episcopalians concentrated in Matanzas and Santiago de Cuba.

This essay reviews the following works:

From Lenin to Castro, 1917–1959: Early Encounters between Moscow and Havana. By Mervyn J. Bain. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013. Pp. vii + 159. $55.99 hardcover. ISBN: 9780739181102.

Cuba’s Revolutionary World. By Jonathan C. Brown. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017. Pp. vi + 586. $35.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780674971981.

Cubans in Angola: South-South Cooperation and Transfer of Knowledge, 1976–1991. By Christine Hatzky. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015. Pp. v + 386. $39.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780299301040.

Exporting Revolution: Cuba’s Global Solidarity. By Margaret Randall. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. Pp. x + 272. $25.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780822369042.

U.S.-Cuba Relations: Charting a New Path. By Jonathan D. Rosen and Hanna S. Kassab. Baltimore, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016. Pp. vii + 164. $36.99 paperback. ISBN: 9781498537759.

On 1 January, 1899, the noon ceremony in Havana was brief but solemn. The Spanish flag was lowered, the United States flag raised. Officers of both countries exchanged formal salutes and informal salutations, whereupon the official ceremony came to an end. After nearly a century of covetous preoccupation with the island, the Unites States assumed formal possession of Cuba.

Many of the essential early qualities of the Cuban Revolution emanated from the experience of armed struggle. In the Sierra Maestra microcosmic features of the socialist order acquired their earliest expression, assumed recognizable form, and established the foundations upon which the radical transformation of Cuban society would proceed. The exigencies of armed struggle created a new consciousness and at once proletarianized bourgeois revolutionaries and militarized civilian combatants. The guerrilla war conferred on the revolutionary order a powerful legacy of struggle which, in its earliest forms, expressed itself most compellingly in the Rebel Army.

The re-election of Gerardo Machado in 1928 promised to augur the continuity of the political quiescence that had characterized the President's first administration (1925-1928). By 1927, the Cuban chief executive had forged a coalition among the national political sectors, binding the Liberal, Conservative, and Popular parties to his candidacy for re-election. Through the appropriate application of patronage and coercion, the President had imposed a political consensus dissolving partisan autonomy, traditionally the source of anti-re-electionist violence. Cooperativismo, as the arrangement became known, conferred on parties outside the circumference of power the prerogatives, perquisites, and government posts inherent in the past only during national incumbency.

In August 1933 a bitter revolutionary struggle reached its climax in Havana. Pressure from the United States during mediations conducted by American Ambassador Sumner Welles, a general strike and a military coup combined to topple the government of Gerardo Machado. National tensions made acute during the machadato and contradictions generated in the anti-Machado struggle converged in the newly constituted administration of Carlos Manuel de Céspedes.