[.ca] Inside the Cuban Revolution: Fidel Castro and the Urban ... (ISBN 0674016122)

Witness to the events finds sloppy research and bias:
As a former representative of Castro's Movement in Washington during the insurrection against Batista, I was interested in how Ms Sweig covered a period I was very familiar with. I was surprised and disappointed. The book's many mistakes reflect sloppy research. Grau San Martín was not the Auténtico party candidate in the 1952 elections. It was Carlos Hevia. Those elections were scheduled for June 1952, not November. It was Huber Matos,not Pedro Miret, who brought the shipment of weapons contributed by President Figueres of Costa Rica. Perhaps her most careless mistake is writing that Felipe Pazos was working in the Inter-American Development Bank in the 1940s, when, in fact, the IADB was not established until 1959! The author, tries to convey an image of thorough scholarship, but, probably due to ideological bias, failed to interview anybody mentioned in the book living outside Cuba. Plus, the sources consulted overseas are heavily biased in favor of the Castro regime. In my case, she quotes me at large and attributes to me a political membership in the Ortodoxo Party that never existed. She also writes about my alleged appointment by the Castro sisters as Washington Representative, yet I never met them. If she had bothered to contact me, and she knew where to find me, she would have avoided these inaccuracies. As to her main thrust that Castro was not involved in the great failure of the April 9, 1958 general strike, nobody who worked with Fidel can believe that. Those of us who were in the Movement at the time and are now free to talk know he was deeply involved. He is too much of a micromanager to have allowed such a central event in his effort against Batista to take place without his participation. The entire book is tainted by the biased sources used by the author. -Ernesto Betancourt

Very informative - that's why they don't like it!:
A very detailed search for the lost civilian underground of M-26-7, despite Mr. Betancourt's criticism. (She does not state he was a MEMBER of the Ortodoxo Party, and his dispatching to Washington by the Castro sisters is credited to Mario Llerena, who was in a position to know.) Mario Llerena also recounted, as M-26's public relations chief in exile, how he only met Castro once and spoke with him only one more time, via shortwave radio; proving that the scattered logistics of the Revolution made it physically impossible for Castro to micromanage many important developments, much as he would have liked to. Without doubt the assassination of Frank Pais and the crushing of the April '58 strike made it easier for the Sierra to consolidate power afterward, but to say that Fidel deliberately sabotaged the urban underground would have him shooting himself in the feet. There was no way he could know that Batista would fold in so rapidly and leave a power vacuum at the top. Castro needed his civilian supporters right up to the end. Although this book only marginally addresses the post-'59 followup, I'll add my 2 centavos in saying that much of the Communist vs. anti-Communist struggles that year were an ill-cloaked continuation of the Sierra/Llano feud, with Fidel struggling to break free of a liberal tutelage his victorious rebel army no longer needed. Sweig did a good job. Buy it. Read it. Learn.

The best book on the Cuban revolution I've ever read:
This book, the best single book I've read explaining the Cuban revolution -- its roots and the people at its vanguard -- serves both the general interest reader and the regional specialist. It is extraordinarily illuminating and required reading for anyone who wants to understand both the Cuban revolution and its long-term consequences for American policy and hemispheric stability. A must-read for anyone who wants to visit Cuba or understand the tortured, 40-year relationship between Washington and Havana. As a Cuban exile who has long sought an unbiased understanding of my people's history -- and who has read every book there is to find, in Spanish and English -- on the subject of the revolution -- I commend Julia Swieg for her research and her unique story-telling ability.

Hard to read but interesting:
This is not an easy book to read. It is as if the author had taken her thesis and expanded it into a book, which is exactly what she did. The book does seem to affirm the importance of the true martyrs of the Cuban Revolution, those fighting Batista in the cities - the "llano" revolutionaries, which have been somewhat pushed aside in Cuban mythology by the exaggerated myth of the Sierra fighters developed by Che Guevara after the Revolution. While the book does affirm and establishes the immense contributions of all the other groups and people fighting the Batista dictatorship, it seems to me that it fails to answer the same question that it raises: WHY did Castro and his band diminish their contributions?, why did they splinter their unions? It was of course the threat of potential "other than Castro and his group" heroes sharing in the victory and challenging Castro's caudillismo and eventual brutal dictatorship. And I wondered what would have happened had Frank Pais not been murdered by Batistianos? And the answer, of course, is that he would have suffered the same fate later on in Castro's hands as countless other Cuban martyrs, who were not Communist, did. The book is well researched, and Sweig has obviously had a lot of access to the Cuban regime's doctored archives. It is because of this access that perhaps she is somewhat soft on her evaluation of Castro and his motives. Nonetheless, regardless of this bias and some apparent historical errors here and there, it remains an interesting, if somewhat hard to read, window on a part of the Cuban Revolution that has been diminished by the regime.

A Truly Revolutionary Glimpse Inside Revolution:
Julia Sweig, as a young grad student, traveled to Cuba and was given access to documents that no journalists, no academics, and no outsiders had ever been allowed to study. Meanwhile she obtained interviews with many of the most influential members of the 26th of July Movement and other revolutionary groups. With this information, Sweig compiled a book that is no less than revolutionary. The writing format is well-planned and easy to read, though a certain forehand knowledge of the Cuban Revolution is expected. Much of the history is based around hundreds of letters sent by M267 members within the organtization and to other members of the Civic Resistance. This is not an A-Z history of the Cuban Revolution. True to its name, this is the most profound INSIDE look at the Cuban Revolution that I've seen in my many years of studying Cuba.