Review of That Infernal Little Cuban Republic: The United States and the Cuban Revolution (Hardcover)

Before I read this book, I knew that Southern leaders had already cast eyes on Cuba in the 1850s, as the Ostend Manifesto showed. But, I did NOT know that way back in the early 1820s, under the administration of President Monroe and Sec'y of State John Quincy Adams, we landed troops on Cuba for the first time. Is it any wonder that Cuba has leery concerns about our proclaimed best intentions?

As for the "snarky" part, Schoultz is a history prof at North Carolina, and the book gets blurbs from folks like former Colin Powell assistant Larry Wilkerson. So, we're not talking alt-weekly newspaper snarky. But, for an academic-level history, we are.

Here's a sample, from page 209:

"Although he could barely find Brazil on a map, (Dick) Goodwin..."

On the serious side, after a few chapters of buildup, Schoultz gets us to Batista, then Castro. He doesn't turn a blind eye to Castro's nationalization, or other early issues but does present a symmpathetic view of his rise to power. He also shows the obsessiveness, first of the Kennedy brothers (and Dick Goodwin's Camelot torch-carrying for them), then of LBJ in full macho bully pose.

Since this is about US-Cuban relations and written from a US point of view, the history is framed from that way. After the introductory and background chapters, we get 1959 and Castro's success, 1960 and Eisenhower's attempt to grasp the situation, 1961 and the Bay of Pigs, 1962 and the missile crisis, and "state sponsored terrorism" (which is a totally true description) to wrap up the Kennedy years.

After that, we get one chapter devoted to each US Presidential Administration, an easy way to focus this narrative.

An excellent epilogue sums up how American political leadership still "doesn't get it" about Cuba in many ways. In essence, long before George W. Bush's ideology-driven invasion of Iraq, when we haven't marginalized Castro's Cuba, assistance we have offered has tended to have strings of Wilsonian idealism attached to it that we've never applied to even Russia/USSR or China.



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