Book review

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/intejcubastud.12.1.0151
• Published date: 01 July 2020
• Date: 01 July 2020
• Pages: 151-154
• Author: Al Campbell

BOOK REVIEWS 151

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

Alejandro de la Fuente (ed.), Cuban Studies 48 (Pittsburgh, PA: University

of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), hb 432 pp. ISBN: 9780822945611

Reviewed by Al Campbell1

‘Something old, something new.’

This reviewer has written in this journal (IJCS) on two of the previous yearly

editions of Cuban Studies (CS) since its three-year interregnum early in the decade.

Issue 43 from 2015 was reviewed in the IJCS 7(2) (Winter 2015), pp. 265–269,

and issue 45 from 2017 was reviewed in IJCS 10(1) (Spring 2018), pp 114–118.

This examination maintains the same general view of CS as was expressed in both

those earlier reviews.

The ‘old aspect’ that characterises this number 48 in the Cuban Studies series

is straightforward and simple: the continued quality, and interesting nature, of

its articles.

There are at least six ‘new aspects’ (the lengthier description ‘aspects of the

structure of this issue different from the standard CS structure’ would be more

precise, but clearly unacceptably awkward to use repeatedly) that give this issue

a significantly different ‘feel’ from other recent issues of CS.

The first thing that strikes a reader immediately is that, contrary to its stand-

ard bilingual structure, all thirty-seven entries are in Spanish. This is the result of

the source of the entries and hence the source of this issue, which also explains

several the other new aspects that will be indicated.

The second new aspect of this issue of CS is that, as opposed to the usual

procedure of selecting from proposed papers each of which is written on what-

ever topic on Cuba they happen to be written on, the entries for this issue came

out of a specific conference on a specific theme. ‘El Movimiento Afrocubano:

Activismo e Investigación. Logros y Desafíos’ was held at the Afro-Latin

American Research Institute at Harvard on 14 and 15 April 2017. This of course

was central to giving this issue, which appropriately refers to itself as a ‘special

issue’ of CS, a very different feel from a standard issue.

The third new aspect comes directly out of the nature of the source just indi-

cated: it is a theme-based issue, ‘dedicado en su totalidad al vibrante movimiento

afrocubano’ as the editor says in the opening sentence of his introductory edito-

rial note. Of course, editors always try when possible to generate as much the-

matic coherence as they can through various means. For example, as my review

of issue 45 noted, part of that issue consisted of different ‘dossiers’, some created

1 Al Campbell is Deputy Editor of the IJCS and Emeritus Professor of Economics at

the University of Utah.