Cuba Down at Heel

Laurence Whitehead

• The Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Documents
  Brassey (US), 376 pp, £15.95, March 1994, ISBN 0 02 881083 X
• The Cuban Revolution: Origin, Course and Legacy by Marifeli Pérez-Stable
  Oxford, 252 pp, £16.95, April 1994, ISBN 0 19 508406 3
• Cuba on the Brink: Castro, the Missile Crisis and the Soviet Collapse by James Blight, Bruce Allyn and David Welch
  Pantheon, 509 pp, $27.50, November 1993, ISBN 0 679 42149 1
• Castro’s Final Hour: The Secret Story Behind the Coming Downfall of Communist Cuba by Andrés Oppenheimer
  Simon and Schuster, 474 pp, $25.00, July 1992, ISBN 0 671 72873 3
• Revolution in the Balance: Law and Society in Contemporary Cuba by Debra Evenson
  Westview, 235 pp, £48.50, June 1994, ISBN 0 8133 8466 4
• The Problem of Democracy in Cuba: Between Vision and Reality by Carollee Bengelsdorf
  Oxford, 238 pp, £32.50, July 1994, ISBN 0 19 508026 2
• Back from the Future: Cuba under Castro by Susan Eva Eckstein
  Princeton, 286 pp, £25.00, October 1994, ISBN 0 691 03445 1
• Fidel Castro by Robert Quirk
  Norton, 898 pp, £25.00, March 1994, ISBN 0 393 03485 2
• Healing the Masses: Cuban Health Politics at Home and Abroad by Julie Feinsilver
  California, 307 pp, £35.00, November 1993, ISBN 0 520 08218 4
• Contesting Castro: The United States and the Triumph of the Cuban Revolution by Thomas Paterson
  Oxford, 364 pp, £22.50, July 1994, ISBN 0 19 508630 9

Even after 35 years, the simplest questions about Cuban politics remain almost beyond the reach of objective analysis. Is the Castro regime a tyranny which can only perpetuate itself by resort to repression, as the Cuban-American community in Miami and elsewhere insists? Or does it persist, despite the disintegration of the Soviet bloc and the deepening economic crisis, essentially because it incarnates a national identity struggling for survival against the engulfing pressure of US political, economic and cultural expansionism? Is the regime doomed to collapse, with only the ruthlessness of the Jefe Máximo to delay the inevitable? Or has it so transformed Cuban society that the next generation are bound to construct their future largely on the foundations laid down by the Revolution?