The most recommended books about Cuba

This refreshing book uncovers the reality behind Cuba’s so-called raceless Revolution. Benson traces early, state-led campaigns against racism, both their accomplishments and missteps. She reveals that in response to the new government’s claims to have eradicated racial discrimination, some Afro-Cubans rejected this Pollyanna rhetoric and mobilized for true racial equality. But Benson doesn’t just examine domestic racial policies and debates; she also delves into transnational exchanges between Cubans, exiled Cubans, and African Americans—rightfully situating Afro-Cubans within postcolonial, global movements against anti-Blackness. 

I write books for children, so I love to read middle-grade novels. Though the action in this one centers around three young protagonists and eventually connects their stories, there are plenty of family moments, historical facts, and tense encounters that will appeal to adults.

One child flees Nazi Germany; another escapes Cuba, and yet a third leaves Syria after a bombing. The way the author portrays the danger, hardship, loss, and deception that the families experience on their journeys makes the reader feel powerfully connected and sympathetic to their plights.

It is a real eye-opener regarding what families throughout history had to endure. Unfortunately, people are still experiencing such perils today due to our unstable world. 

A watershed work in the new history of “the global Cold War” in the Third World, where Cuba’s revolutionary government acted with remarkable audacity to offer material, human, and military support to African revolutionaries (with the Soviet Union often a minor player). Gleijeses performed archival feats in Cuba, Africa, and the U.S. to bring together this many-sided portrait of skullduggery, intimate solidarity, and Cuban revolutionary agency.  

Drawing on vivid “coolie” testimonies and slave narratives, this book shows how Chinese contract laborers worked alongside African slaves in the final decades of slavery in the nineteenth century, forming cross-cultural ties and engaging in bitter rivalries as well as other experiences in between. The book features the voices of both sets of groups, including complicated commentary by slaves on the lot of so-called coolies. A powerful read, it brings to life the personal experiences of members of these groups of people during a brutal era of history.

Tom Chaffin is a great writer of narrative history, and this, his exciting first book, covers the daring filibuster attempts between 1849 and 1851 by a native Venezuelan to liberate Cuba from Spanish rule. López and many of his recruits died in two futile invasions of Cuba in 1850 and 1851, as his landings on Cuba’s shores were brutally repressed by Spanish military authorities. Lopez’s story fascinates on many levels, one of them being his contacts and intersections with key southern politicians of the time like John C. Calhoun, Jefferson Davis, and Mississippi’s radical secessionist governor John A. Quitman, as well as New Yorker John L. O’Sullivan, the newsman often credited with coining the famous term “manifest destiny.” The book is great on the nuts and bolts of mounting filibuster expeditions and how filibuster leaders managed to launch their expeditions from U.S. soil despite attempts by U.S. legal officers and… show more.

I was privileged to know Marty Sherwin in person. He was the friendliest person ever with a tremendous sense of humour – and a magnificent, honest scholar.

He was the friendliest person ever with a tremendous sense of humour – and a magnificent, honest scholar. History, as Paul Ricoeur has reminded, is not a record to be played. The Cold War nuclear standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union, and mainly, the Cuban missile crisis did not have to end as they did, peacefully.

When two A bombs were dropped on Japan in 1945, a genie was released that the world will not be able to get rid of any time soon. Martin J. Sherwin, the doyen of American nuclear historians always argued that this did not have to be so. Nuclear technology could have been placed under international supervision and arms race and proliferation could have been… show more.

Among the books on this list, Gosse’s Where the Boys Are is truly a classic. I first encountered this book a few years after I finished my dissertation and found it to be one of the most original works I had ever read. I still find that to be true. Gosse (with whom I was later a colleague at Franklin & Marshall College) weaves together cultural, intellectual, political, and diplomatic history to show how the Cuban revolution inspired youth in late 1950s America and subsequently helped launch a “New Left” in the United States. Gosse reminds us of how popular Fidel Castro was across the United States in the brief period before he became Enemy #1. But his methodological approach, combining novels, films, and diplomatic records, is truly a model for later interdisciplinary scholarship as well.

Cristina Garcia has become the definitive chronicler of both Cuba and Cuban exiles. King of Cuba tells the story of two men: El Comandante (also called the despot, the tyrant, or El Líder—clearly this is Fidel) and a Miami exile, Goyo Herrera, who is as old and infirm as Castro himself. Garcia’s portrait of the desperation and ignominies these two old guys suffer, and of their hopeless attempts to cleave to past glories, transcends Cuban history and brings us two men I found cantankerous and self-inflating, but irresistible.

Max Hastings is a journalist and author of several dozen books mainly on warfare. Being well-connected he is able to draw on a wide circle of friends and acquaintances to contribute their experiences, research, and ideas to his own analysis of one of the most potentially dangerous events in post-war history.

His books draw on a very wide range of sources and are invariably highly readable but also reliable. Much has been written about the Cuban Missile Crisis and Abyss pulls facts together in a digestible way with references throughout and a useful but far from complete bibliography.

What is remarkable is that the work was undertaken within the constraints of the Covid-19 pandemic that effectively closed off archives and libraries for up to two years.

Chase illuminates for readers the central role played by women in the Revolution, from the urban insurrection and political activism of the 1950s to mobilization for women’s rights in the early 1960s. This book rejects assertations made by leaders, such as Fidel Castro, that men initiated women into activism and that the Revolution rescued women from oppression. The book instead emphasizes how women organized to make public demands and even sometimes convinced reticent leadership to accede to their proposals. Most exciting to me is the final chapter on dueling efforts to fortify the family, as Chase demonstrates how revolutionary supporters and opponents each rested “their political authority in claims that they best protected the family” (p. 14).