Book review

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/intejcubastud.10.1.0123
• Pages: 123132+ viii232+ x-125
• Published date: 01 April 2018
• Date: 01 April 2018
• Author: Renzo Llorente

booK REVIEWS 123

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William Rowlandson, Sartre in Cuba – Cuba in Sartre (Cham: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2018), hb 132 pp. + viii. ISBN: 9783319616957

A. Javier Treviño, C. Wright Mills and the Cuban Revolution: An Exercise in

the Art of Sociological Imagination (Chapel Hill: The University of North

Carolina Press, 2017), pb 232 pp. + x. ISBN: 9781469633107

Reviewed by Renzo Llorente

In the early years of the Cuban Revolution, countless intellectuals, academics,

journalists and artists descended upon Cuba with the aim of witnessing first-

hand the extraordinary social transformation taking place on the island. Among

these visitors were the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and the American

sociologist C. Wright Mills, and their visits to Cuba proved to be the most

momentous of all, for Sartre and Mills were, as A. Javier Treviño notes in

C. Wright Mills and the Cuban Revolution: An Exercise in the Art of Sociological

Imagination, ‘largely responsible for the initial excitement among Europeans

and North Americans concerning Cuba’ (p. 14). Sartre and Mills generated this

‘excitement’ by publishing, very soon after returning from Cuba, works which

defended Cuba’s nascent social experiment and were very widely read. Treviño’s

study and William Rowlandson’s Sartre in Cuba – Cuba in Sartre explore these

works, along with the circumstances of the trips that inspired them, and each

author convincingly argues that his subject’s report on Cuba was far more defen-

sible than detractors have claimed.

Jean-Paul Sartre arrived in Havana, accompanied by Simone de Beauvoir, in late

February 1960 and stayed in Cuba for about a month. This was not Sartre’s first

trip to Cuba; he had previously visited the island in 1949. In Sartre in Cuba – Cuba

in Sartre, Rowlandson shows that Sartre’s first visit to Cuba, together with his

abiding interest in developments in Cuba during the 1950s, helped to shape his

1960 articles, which were first published in the French magazine France-Soir and

subsequently appeared in English as the book Sartre on Cuba. Indeed, Sartre in

Cuba – Cuba in Sartre demonstrates that Sartre was quite knowledgeable about

Cuba and deeply interested in the country, and this is certainly one of the book’s

major virtues. Rowlandson also makes it clear that Sartre planned at one time to

publish a book on Cuba that would be different from the France-Soir articles;

the 1100-page manuscript unearthed by researchers in 2007 may have contained

a draft for this abandoned project (p. 101).

Over against those who have dismissed the intellectual significance of Sartre’s

Cuba articles, Rowlandson contends, plausibly enough, that these reports actu-

ally offer ‘a digestible exposition of his [i.e., Sartre’s] philosophical concerns’