Cuba Today and Tomorrow: Reinventing Socialism By Max Azicri. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000. 396p. $55.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

Extract

Max Azicri writes with acumen on the Cuban revolution in the very different decades of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, and he offers an insightful assessment of the changes and challenges of the 1990s. His objective is to answer the puzzle of what he calls the “Cuban miracle”: the island's surprising survival in the face of the deep economic crisis associated with the collapse of the socialist bloc and the ongoing “punitive” policies of the United States. Azicri is not the only scholar to attempt an interpretation of Cuba in the 1990s. Susan Eckstein (Back from the Future: Cuba Under Castro, 1994), Ken Cole (Cuba: From Revoution to Development, 1998), Julia Jatar-Hausman (The Cuban Way: Capitalism, Communism, and Confrontation, 1999), and Robin Blackburn, (“Putting the Hammer Down on Cuba,” New Left Review, July-August 2000 (4): 5–36) are among those who have examined the nexus of Cuba's past and future in the post–Cold War context. An explosion of travel writing also demonstrates the intrigue of contemporary Cuba, as does the list of new detective thrillers—some of them bestsellers—with a Cuba setting. Azicri's book has a distinctive place in this literary landscape.