As John Gronbeck-Tedesco argues in his new book, revolutionary ambitions in Cuba caught the imagination of North American radicals from the 1930s through the 1960s, bridging the Popular Front of the Old Left to the New Left's quest for radical authenticity. Yet transnational engagement and genuine solidarity across the Caribbean proved elusive, as imperial assumptions and practices often remained well entrenched, and nascent coalitions fractured along lines of race, gender, and class. The result is a fascinating and well-written book in which “disillusionment makes up a central motif” (p. 275). The hopeful revolutionaries, both in Cuba and the United States, wind up sadder and wiser. The political and cultural historians who reflect on this insightful analysis, however, will find themselves engaged and enlightened.
Gronbeck-Tedesco's exploration of the period spanning the Cuban political upheaval of the early 1930s through the revolutionary transformation of the 1960s is one of the book's greatest...