Book review

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/intejcubastud.10.2.0266
• Pages: 266-269
• Published date: 01 December 2018
• Date: 01 December 2018
• Author: Stephen Wilkinson

InternatIonal Journal of Cuban StudIeS 10.2 WInter 2018

Emily J. Kirk, Anna Clayfield and Isabel Story (eds), Cuba’s Forgotten

Decade: How the 1970s Shaped the Revolution (London: Lexington Books,

2018), hb 260pp. ISBN: 9781498568739

Reviewed by Stephen Wilkinson

Following on from one of the most interesting and stimulating panels at the

2018 Latin American Studies Association Congress in Barcelona, the partici-

pants now publish an equally engaging and original book that undoubtedly ful-

fils its stated purpose of making an important contribution to the field of Cuban

Studies. To some extent, one would agree with its editors’ claim that the 15

chapters articulate the complexity of the 1970s and move beyond the tendency

to simplify the changes during this period by subsuming them under the catchall

noun: ‘Sovietisation’.

Indeed, throughout this book, the term is reproduced in speech marks, to sug-

gest perhaps that such a process never occurred at all. Moreover, in some contri-

butions, for example, in the one on the political and economic relationship

between Havana and Moscow, it is expanded into the ‘Sovietisation thesis’, to

which is also added the hypothesis that the relationship was one of ‘superclient/

surrogate’. While the ‘superclient’ approach is undeniably a Cold War postula-

tion of the right to comply with its Manichean discourse of seeing the hand of

the Soviet Union behind every insurgency in the then ‘Third World’, ‘Sovietisation’

is rather more accurately descriptive, one would argue, of a definitely discernible

shift in Cuban socialist practices and policies that may still be defended and

which, this book, try as it might, does not entirely lay to rest.

There is an underlying tension in the contributions that seems to be wrestling

with a subtext of trying to distance Cuba from the Soviet Union, when in fact,

this is impossible to do. It would be far better, in my view, to accept that Cuba

was deeply influenced by the Soviet Union and indeed benefitted greatly from

this association rather than to seek ways of saying that it was not influenced as

much as some of the Revolution’s detractors like to emphasise. To my mind, no

matter how one tries to differentiate Cuban socialism from the Soviet system,

there can be no escaping, nor is there anything to be gained from denying, the

fact that without the Soviet Union, Cuba would not have been able to make any

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