Two Books on Race and Politics in Cuba and the Caribbean

Two books chart the tumult in Cuba and the Caribbean in the last two centuries, highlighting how race shapes the region’s politics. An accomplished historian, Pérez shows that Cuba’s heroic mythology of national liberation often omits the messy fact that many Cubans—white and Black—aligned with the colonialists, first from Spain and later from the United States. In the bloody and destructive nineteenth-century wars of independence, wealthy Cubans often fought alongside Spain, which they saw as the best guarantor of social order and their slave-dependent sugar plantations. The Haitian Revolution in the early nineteenth century and its slaughter of whites shaped the Cuban political landscape; many whites saw the drive for sovereignty as synonymous with Black ascendancy. Impoverished mercenary collaborators, including many free Blacks, also fought with Spain, devising cunning guerrilla tactics to entrap pro-independence insurgents. Eventually, many upper-class Cubans welcomed the 1898 U.S. intervention; they saw the United States as the best guarantor of existing social hierarchies and property relations. Pérez concludes, however, that these complexities do not diminish the achievements of the liberation struggles in freeing Cuba from imperial rule.

In Covert City, Houghton and Driggs recount the arrival in Miami of Cuban immigrants, predominantly upper- and middle-class whites who fled the long-feared social insurrection led by Fidel Castro. Miami became a hotbed of U.S. intelligence operations focused on Castro’s Cuba, replete with fleets of small ships and airplanes. But after the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and the chilling Cuban missile crisis in 1962, the Kennedy administration pledged not to invade the island, crushing the exiles’ dreams of return. Eventually, a more sophisticated Cuban American community learned to work within the U.S. political system, aligning primarily with the Republican Party, whose leaders, from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump, appealed directly to the exiles. Repeated waves of migrants, some cynically engineered by Castro, caused severe headaches for several U.S. presidents, including Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. Houghton and Driggs (who hails from a family of Cuban exiles) write with an informal, sometimes snarky style readily accessible to the general reader. But Covert City relies on standard sources and adds little new to the understanding of the shifting politics of the Cuban diaspora.