Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know

Author Julia Sweig

Compact guide to the history and political issues surrounding Cuba. Remarkable book organised into 128 questions, ranging from 'What were the main features of Cuban life during Spanish colonial rule?' to 'How extensive is Cuba's cultural projection - music, art, film, literature - on the global stage?'. The discussions are detailed and authoritative, reinforced with an extensive index and a short, but useful, bibliography.

2016 edition includes chapter on post 17 December 2014 US-Cuba talks.

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This remarkable book sets 128 questions, ranging from ‘What were the main features of Cuban life during Spanish colonial rule?’ to ‘How extensive is Cuba’s cultural projection – music, art, film, literature – on the global stage?’ Julia Sweig is director of Latin American Studies at the US Council on Foreign Relations, so her 280 pages of answers are detailed and authoritative, reinforced with a longish index and a short, but useful, bibliography.

Divided into sections covering Cuba’s early, colonial, history, the 1959 Revolution and the Cold War,  and two sections each on Cuba in the World and US – Cuba relations, Sweig’s answers range from a single paragraph to several pages in length. Detailed coverage is given to the 1962 Missile Crisis, the young Cuban Elian Gonzalez held hostage in the US, the Mariel, and subsequent, refugee crises. The ‘Special Period’ is covered sympathetically, and the case of the Heroic Cuban Five is covered in –almost- sufficient detail, given the overall plan of the book.

The remarkable nature of this book consists in the deft combination of the didactic with the dialectical; myriad facts show that Cuba-US relations are the result of US imperialist ambitions that pre-date its own foundation, rather than some ephemeral ‘Cuban communism’. Is it too much to hope that the current US administration can build on such conclusions?

Roger Fletcher for CubaSi magazine (review of 1st edition)