Resumo de The Cuban Revolution And The United States: A History In Documents, 1958-1960

In this book, Mark Falcoff debunks longstanding myths about the early years of the Cuban revolution, drawing primarily on previously classified materials and other primary sources. He covers the decline of the Batista regime, the ascendancy of Fidel Castro and communism, and the growing alignment with the Soviet bloc, as well as U.S. attempts to remove Castro. The documents Falcoff examines underscore the confusion and impotence of the United States when it was faced with a ruthless and determined revolutionary backed by another superpower and prepared to play a high-stakes game regardless of the ultimate cost to his people.
Falcoff is a resident scholar at AEI and was previously a visiting fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. His recent books include A Culture of Its Own: Taking Latin America Seriously (1998) and Panama's Canal: What Happens When the United States Gives a Small Country What It Wants (1998). The following summary is adapted from his introduction to The Cuban revolution and the United States.
Few foreign policy issues of the postwar era have been subject to so much myth and misrepresentation as the circumstances surrounding the United States's reaction to the Cuban revolution. The way that we view Castro's revolution-its origins, course, and consequences-has been strongly influenced by our evolving notions of that larger event, and the Cuban regime has unquestionably benefited these past thirty years from the advance of revisionist interpretations.
Thus, the story goes, an innocent Castro, seeking help from a cold and unfeeling United States, was "forced" to turn to the Soviet Union. In spite of the fact that the Cuban dictator himself has on occasion denied that this was the case and in spite, too, of repeated findings to the contrary by historians, this basically fictitious version has won near-universal acceptance. But now a huge cache of formerly classified materials, taken together, explodes the myth of the United States driving Cuba into revolution. The most important of these sources is a volume edited by John P. Glennon, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958-1960: Cuba. While it is an invaluable source for historians, it is cumbersome and-at more than a thousand pages long-even a bit intimidating for the general user. And while the editor provides some explanatory notes, they are far from adequate for the laity. The Cuban Revolution and the United States is an attempt to extract from that volume its most valuable essence and add background (and at times a running commentary), while enriching the findings with additional materials whose inclusion, logically, would be out of place in a diplomatic yearbook.

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