Book review

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/intejcubastud.6.1.0099
• Published date: 01 April 2014
• Date: 01 April 2014
• Pages: 99266-100
• Author: Stephen Wilkinson

BOOK REVIEWS 99

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others continue to project their own visions’. Krull ironically comments in her

Introduction that ‘clearly, in some instances, internationalism has its limits’.

The projection of one’s own ideas upon Cuba is a trap that we all, if we are

honest, all too readily fall. The third section of this book, labelled ‘Transnation-

alism’ traces projection in its opposite direction – that of Cubans onto the world.

Here, my former colleague at London Metropolitan University, Jean Stubbs,

provides an essay on the Cuban cigar as a transnational product. There follow

essays on Cuban f‌ilm, the Cuban diaspora in Spain and Florida, a predictably

critical essay on the issue of race, and f‌inally another on the continuing

transnational potency of Che Guevara. Mette Berg argues in her essay on the

Spanish–Cuba relationship that the time is ripe for there to be a ‘de-territorial-

ised’ nation-state. The idea is again one that is prescient as the recent migration

reforms in Cuba have made tentative steps towards such a development. While

some of this volume has dated since the chapters were written, many have not.

This is a f‌ine collection containing much of value.

Stephen Wilkinson, International Institute for the Study of Cuba, UK

Jennifer Ruth Hosek, Sun, Sex and Socialism: Cuba in the German Imaginary

(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012) hb 266pp. ISBN: 9781442641389

Reviewed by Stephen Wilkinson

An attractive title and an iconic cover photograph of a restored North American

car shining resplendently outside the Hotel Nacional in Havana entice the reader

into this insightful history of the German–Cuban relationship told from the

German point of view but with a counterbalancing Cuban take at the end in the

form of a short, personal essay from the celebrated Cuban writer Victor Fowler.

Indeed, the title could apply to any nation’s imagined Cuba (speaking as a

Briton, the alliteration would certainly sum up our response to the island), but

in the case of Germany, it has a curious resonance since there were, until the end

of the Cold War, two Germanies, and it is in the comparison and juxtaposition

of the two very different relationships that this book most interests.

The tortured English prose of the author aside, this book is a mine of useful

empirical research and theoretical applications. Any scholar intending to make a

study of the cultural signif‌icance or inf‌luence of Cuba on any popular discourse

should refer to this book. It is both comprehensive in scope and incisive in depth,

presenting a triangulated study of the way in which the two Germanies had

what the author calls ‘creative misunderstandings’ of what Cuba is about. Both

were guilty of projecting their own ideas of utopia onto the Caribbean space –

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