Cuban Revolution in America: Havana and the Making of a United States Left, 1968–1992, by Teishan Latner

Abstract

In his recent book, Cuban Revolution in America: Havana and the Making of a United States Left, 1968–1992, Teishan Latner makes a key contribution to the growing literature about the Cuban Revolution and U.S. leftists. Cuban Revolution in America provides a multi-faceted look into why and how “the Cuban revolutionary project remained the most consistent foreign influence on left-wing radicalism in the United States” (6) in the 1960s and subsequent decades. Through five thoroughly-researched and well-written chapters, Latner convincingly demonstrates this argument, and lays an important foundation for the political history between the U.S. radicals and the Cuban State. A range of scholars and readers will find Latner’s book compelling. Cuban Revolution in America speaks to historians of U.S. foreign relations, political history, and U.S.–Cuba relations, while scholars of African American Studies and Cuban American history will find much here. There is a lesser emphasis on cultural history, although Latner certainly posits the idea of the radical imagination. And although communist history is not the book’s focus, scholars of the left should consider this required reading. It is these multiple lefts, white, Latinx, and African American, that Latner explores over twenty-five plus years, arguing that Cuba was the biggest global inspiration for a new generation of activists who shunned the Old Left for the new. Latner begins his book in the cauldron of the late 1960s, arguing that U.S.–Cuba connections in the early 1960s have had greater coverage. The first chapter on the Venceremos Brigade (VB) provides Cuban Revolution in America’s foundation. Beginning in 1969, and continuing to this day, the Brigade sought to facilitate solidarity with the Cuban Revolution by bringing work brigades of Americans to Cuba and challenging U.S. policy towards Cuba in the United States: “a radical Peace Corps for the civil rights and antiwar generation” (28). As Latner points out, the Brigade is woefully understudied given the thousands of “brigadistas” in our midst. Originally conceived of by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) leader Carl Oglesby, the VB arose as SDS splintered, and Latner argues that it was “as much about the reconstitution of the U.S. Left,” (34) and the transformation of U.S. society as it was about supporting Cuba. The Brigade was marred by its official homophobic stance and marked by racial tension. But the persistence required for the Brigade to send diverse delegations to Cuba year after year amidst enormous logistical challenges and political tension makes it a fitting microcosm for the U.S. left’s solidarity with the Cuban Revolution in the coming decades: fraught and messy, yet creative and persistent. Another consistent thread is the United States government’s antipathy not only toward the Cuban Revolution, but with the U.S. left’s support of it. In chapter two, Latner examines the dialectic between Cuba’s replacement of the Soviet Union as the primary inspiration for the U.S. left in the 1960s, and the U.S. government’s singular preoccupation with the Cuban