Scholarship and the State

IE CUBAN REVOLUTON placed deficiencies of American scholarship on Cuba in sharp relief. Fifty years of close diplomatic and economic relations rarely generated anything more than casual attention to the Cuban past, producing, for the most part, a rather meager and inauspicious corpus of scholarship. Rarely have modern historiographic antecedents been so ill prepared to receive an event of such transcendental magnitude as the Cuban Revolution. Older studies, previously out of print, reappeared to provide twentieth-century perspectives to the Revolution. One of the more important studies to enjoy a second printing was Charles E. Chapman's A History of the Cuban Republic, first published in 19271 and reissued in 1969.2 For a generation of Latin Americanists, A History of the Cuban Republic served as the standard reference work on twentieth century Cuba; for more than thirty years, Chapman's study provided the point of orientation for all subsequent inquiries into the history of the Republic. The reappearance of A History of the Cuban Republic in 1969 met the renewed interest and wider market demands generated by the Cuban Revolution. The original publication in 1927, however, was in response to and the result of American policy needs in Cuba. Inspiration for a history of Cuba originated with Ambassador Enoch H. Crowder. Originally appointed as Special Representative of the President in Cuba, General Crowder arrived in Havana in 1921 with instructions to overhaul Cuban national administration. During the

Political science · Scholarship · State (computer science) · Computer Science · Cuban History and Society · History · Law