Book review

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/intejcubastud.11.1.0120
• Published date: 01 July 2019
• Date: 01 July 2019
• Pages: 120-123
• Author: Gary Prevost

120 BOOK REVIEWS

InternatIonal Journal of Cuban StudIeS 11.1 Summer 2019

Teishan A. Latner, Cuban Revolution in America: Havana and the Making of

a United States Left, 1968–1992 (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North

Carolina Press, 2018), hb 368 pp. ISBN: 9781469635460

Reviewed by Gary Prevost1

In this important contribution to scholarship on the Cuban Revolution, Professor

Teishan Latner explores a topic lacking previous focus. Cuban Revolution in

America: Havana and the Making of the United States Left, 1968–1992 explores

the two-way relationship that developed in the 1960s between organisations on

the left in the US with the Cuban revolutionary government. The author docu-

ments how US citizens studied Cuba’s achievements in universal education,

health care, economic redistribution, racial and gender equality, and how many

embraced Cuban revolutionary theory. In turn, Cuba’s leaders looked to US

progressive forces as a collaborator in the global battle against inequality and

imperialism and an ally in its struggle with Washington. The Cuban government

supported black radical organisations such as the Black Panther Party, New Left

groups such as the Venceremos Brigade, and the Cuban American students of

the Antonio Maceo Brigade and granted political asylum to US activists like

Assata Shakur and Robert Williams. In the process, Cuba became a significant

influence on US radicalism from the 1960s to the present.

The organising framework of the book, though not fully emblematic of all

relations of solidarity between the two countries, has a primary emphasis on

three frameworks of that two-way solidarity, the Venceremos Brigade, the

Antonio Maceo Brigade and Cuba’s granting of political asylum to African

American activists. The result is a very rich narrative on these movements based

on painstaking primary source research both in the US and in Cuba. Inevitably

this focused approach leaves out solidarity activities of a range of US activists

who have worked against the US blockade of Cuba including US parties of the

Left like the Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party and, for the last

25 years, the Pastors for Peace Cuba Caravan which challenges US law with

travel to Cuba for humanitarian principles.

The first organisation studied is the Venceremos Brigade which made history

in December 1969 when it organised over 200 US volunteers to go to the island

to cut sugar cane in violation of a US travel ban that had been in place in Cuba

since 1962. The brigade worked alongside Cuban students and workers as well

1 Gary Prevost is Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Latin American Studies at the

College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University (USA).