Book review

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/intejcubastud.10.1.0119
• Published date: 01 April 2018
• Date: 01 April 2018
• Pages: 119178-122
• Author: Marcos Antonio da Silva

BOOK REVIEWS 119

IJCS Produced and distributed by Pluto Journals www.plutojournals.com/ijcs/

Vladimir Pomar, Cuba: Revolução e Reforma (Coleção Nossa América

Nuestra) (São Paulo: FPA, 2016), pb 178pp. ISBN: 978-85-5708-026-3

Reviewed by Marcos Antonio da Silva

Despite recent advances, much of society and the European academy still have

relative ignorance or detachment from Latin America. This generated what a

Brazilian thinker, Francisco de Oliveira, called ‘Invisible Boundaries’, which

have always been more subtle, deeper and more effective than official bounda-

ries and help us to understand the dynamics and limits of such a relationship.

In the case of Cuba, in addition to the aforementioned aspects, and despite

the apparent number of publications, such ignorance is evident and reinforced

by ideological barriers, the ‘eternal cold war’, which hinders the development of

objective, comprehensive and complex analyses of society and contemporary

Cuban identity with its specific characteristics, its advances and contradictions,

its dilemmas and challenges.

In this sense this book is important for the knowledge of the Caribbean

island and its actuality. This work is part of the ‘Nossa América Nuestra’

collection of the Perseu Abramo Foundation,’ linked to the Workers’ Party of

Brazil, which, in addition to the reference to the great Cuban leader José

Martí and his Latin American perspective, intends to overcome the lack of

knowledge and the scarce bibliography about the region and to the so-called

‘progressive cycle’ in the region of the governments of Lula and Dilma

(Brazil), Chávez and N. Maduro (Venezuela), Evo Morales (Bolivia), Néstor

and Cristina Kichner (Argentina), Tabaré Vásquez and Pepe Mujica

(Uruguay), Rafael Correa (Ecuador), Daniel Ortega (Nicaragua) and

Mauricio Funes and Salvador Sánchez Cherén (El Salvador), as well as Raúl

Castro (Cuba), among others.

Thus, as mentioned in the book’s introduction, The Nossa América Nuestra

collection integrates a broader research and research programme of the Perseu

Abramo Foundation (FPA), which aims to gather and produce data, analyses

and interpretations on the processes and meanings of the ‘progressive cycle’ in

Latin America. This programme includes scholars with a long academic, profes-

sional and/or militant trajectory in relation to the Latin American and Caribbean

context:

The purpose of the Foundation is to foster research into the political, social,

economic and cultural dimensions of this process, in each country and region as a

whole, and to assess its geopolitical implications, whether in what concerns its

insertion in the international order. (Pomar 2016: 11)