Book review

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/intejcubastud.8.1.0123
• Pages: 123276-125
• Published date: 01 April 2016
• Date: 01 April 2016
• Author: Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie

BOOK REVIEWs 123

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Gerald Horne, Race to Revolution: The United States and Cuba during

Slavery and Jim Crow (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 2014) 276pp.

ISBN: 9781-583-644-51

Reviewed by Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie

This book pursues connections. In 1959, the US-backed regime in Cuba was

overthrown in a remarkable revolutionary coup. At the same moment, a power-

ful Civil Rights Movement was gearing up to destroy Jim Crow racism in the US.

While most scholars agree on these events’ significance, few pursue their histori-

cal conjuncture. Race to Revolution’s key objective is to explain how ‘these

interlinked processes’ (p. 27) destroyed US legal inequality and American influ-

ence in Cuba. This ambitious agenda results in a sweeping transnational narra-

tive that should inspire students, provoke scholars and intrigue general readers.

Gerald Horne, the John and Rebecca Moores Professor of African American

History at the University of Houston, is a prolific scholar. His university web-

page lists 15 book publications since 2001. Professor Horne’s research focuses

upon the transformative roles of workers and intellectuals of African descent,

especially in colonial and anti-colonial struggles on the global stage. This book

places him within an African American radical tradition in which Cuba was vital

to liberation in the US from abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass, Martin

Delaney and Henry Highland Garnet, to intellectuals such as Zora Neale

Hurston, Rayford Logan and Langston Hughes, to communists such as James

W. Ford, Harry Haywood, Paul Robeson, Ben Davis, William Patterson and

Angela Davis.

Race to Revolution examines ‘U.S.-Cuban relations in the bitter context of

slavery and Jim Crow’, with a focus ‘on the words and deeds of U.S. Negroes –

and their “white” counterparts’ (p. 8). One prominent activity was cross-border

travel by Americans to Cuba and Cubans to the mainland, including runaway

slaves, anti-colonial rebels, Confederate refugees, US Negro musicians, American

and black Cuban baseball players, missionaries, travellers, soldiers, communists

and so forth. The author’s key focus, though, is upon broader social and politi-

cal processes (but strangely not economic; sugar production, marketing and con-

sumption receive scant attention) in which the US, especially Texas and Cuba,

fortified African slavery in Cuba, while Jim Crow attained a ‘more muscular

presence’ in Florida and Cuba after 1898 (p. 21). Push-back by African Americans

opposed to Jim Crow and lynching as well as black communists in Cuba and the

US meant that the ‘concentrated racism of Jim Crow was being assailed from

both sides of the straits, shortening its shelf life’ (p. 23).