Book review

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/intejcubastud.9.2.0260
• Pages: 260304-262
• Published date: 01 December 2017
• Date: 01 December 2017
• Author: Gary Prevost

InternatIonal Journal of Cuban StudIeS 9.2 WInter 2017

BOOK REVIEWS

Dirk Kruijt, Cuba and Revolutionary Latin America: An Oral History (London:

Zed Books, 2017) pb. 304pp. ISBN: 9781783608027

Reviewed by Gary Prevost

Cuba and Revolutionary Latin America – An Oral History is an important con-

tribution to our understanding of the role that the Cuban revolution has played

in promoting revolutionary and progressive movements in Latin America over

the last six decades. The primary strength of this work is the source material that

its author – Dirk Kruijt – has painstakingly amassed. He interviewed more than

60 Cuban officials, primarily the activists of the Department of the Americas,

the Cuban institution responsible for the revolution’s changing relationships

with Latin America. Kruijt has documented how Cuba has remained an impor-

tant force in the political life of Latin America, from its role in support of revo-

lutionary guerrilla movements in the 1960s, down to its role in the leftward

direction of Latin American politics in the twenty-first century, through the

Bolivarian Alliance of the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) and its central role in

facilitating an end to Latin America’s longest running civil war in Colombia.

Throughout the book, Kruijt provides historical background and analysis to

Cuba’s revolutionary role in the hemisphere but the most important contribu-

tion of the book comes from his interviews with Cuban officials. Kruijt inter-

viewed officials of Cuba government that carried out the work of the Cuban

revolution in Latin America, breaking them down into two primary groups. The

first cohort participated in the insurrection that took place between 1953 and

1958 against the dictatorship of Batista. This group radicalised in the swift tran-

sition towards socialism in the early 1960s. The succeeding age group was too

young to have participated in the insurrection, but radicalised during Cuba’s

health and literacy campaigns. Kruijt calls the latter group revolutionary inter-

nationalists and passionate Fidelistas who were always inspired by the ironic

revolutionary figure of Che Guevara. It is through their stories that the organisa-

tion of the internationalism of the Cuba revolution is analysed for the first time.

Through these stories, we learn how the tactics and strategy of Cuba’s revolu-

tionary ethos unfolded beginning in the decade of the 1960s when replicating the

Cuban revolution across the continent and in the wider world was the objective.

The focus for that era is on how the Cubans identified revolutionary groups