The Development of Cuban Studies in the U.S

Eighteen years and thousands of books and articles after the access to power of the revolutionary forces in Cuba on 1 January 1959, scholars continue to debate the origins of socialism in Cuba, the class roots of the Revolution, the role of the Communist party, the character of the Cuban revolutionary vanguard, the impact of historical U.S.-Cuba relations upon the subsequent development of the Revolution, and other related issues. The growth of the literature continues unabated. The early partisan, rather unsophisticated, and mostly journalistic accounts of the Revolution and its origins have by now been superseded by relatively sophisticated, scholarly, "objective" (although really no less partisan) accounts of the Revolution, its origins, and evolution. The four books considered here constitute a varied lot. Nevertheless, collectively, they can be used to raise some important issues about the present state of U.S. scholarship about Cuba, and to indicate some serious gaps in our knowledge and in our approaches. Jaime Suchlicki's Cuba: From Columbus to Castro presents itself as an attempt "to summarize in a concise and readable fashion the major trends and events in the country's development" (p. ix). The intended audience seems to be the not-too-ambitious undergraduate. The explicit assumption is that "enough time has elapsed" to present a tentative analysis of the causes, development, etc., of the Revolution. The implicit assumption is that, based on existing scholarship, a "consensus" exists-or can be made to emerge-about the main outlines of the Cuban story

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