Book review

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/intejcubastud.10.1.0114
• Pages: 114418-118
• Published date: 01 April 2018
• Date: 01 April 2018
• Author: Al Campbell

InternatIonal Journal of Cuban StudIeS 10.1 SprIng 2018

BOOK REVIEWS

Alejandro de la Fuente (ed.), Cuban Studies 45 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of

Pittsburgh Press, 2017), hb 418pp. ISBN 13: 9780822944638

Reviewed by Al Campbell

As with the two previous once-a-year editions of Cuban Studies under the par-

tially new editorial team that has guided it since its three-year hiatus earlier in

this decade, 2017’s number 45 is ‘rich’ (See the review of number 43 by this

reviewer in this journal, 7(2) Winter 2015, pp. 265–269.)

In total, 18 ‘normal articles’ are presented in four groups; Dossier 1: Hacia una

nueva Constitución; Culture and Society; History; and Dossier 2: New Approaches

to the History of Health, Medicine, and Disease in Cuba. Then, in addition to a

one-page reproduction of the work that won the 2015 Permio Nacional de Artes

Plásticas, two ‘non-normal’ articles are grouped as ‘Primary Sources’: 14 pages

excerpted from a much longer unpublished autobiography of a businessman from

the 1940s and 1950s, and an interview of Edith García Buchaca. The 14 book

reviews are divided into two groups; History, and Culture and Society.

I want to say a few words about the two ‘dossiers’.

As suggested by the term ‘dossier’, these two collections of articles have an

intended (and this reviewer feels achieved) coherence beyond the useful proce-

dure a journal is able to do when it groups individually submitted articles. This

was the result of the contributors being aware that their works would be part of

a focused set of articles before they wrote them.

As the introduction to ‘Dossier 2: New Approaches to the History of Health,

Medicine, and Disease in Cuba’ explains, in this case, this resulted from two

people who were researching the history of medicine and public health in early

twentieth-century Cuba reconnecting almost a decade ago. Over the following

years, they drew several other people into the process of interacting on the sub-

ject. But, what makes this particularly interesting, beyond the level of interest it

would yield just from that sort of connected work, is that they were interested

in, and worked to develop, a new approach to the history of medicine in Cuba.

As they express it,

The three articles on the history of medicine and public health in early twentieth-

century Cuba presented in this issue constitute a long-overdue reorientation of the