PoliticsRichard Gott's Cuba: A New History opens with a map illustrating not only the country's principal geographical features, but the sites of hostile landings, from Diego Velásquez in 1511 to the Cuban exiles who went ashore at the Bay of Pigs in 1961. This is a deliberate depiction of Cuba as a martyred island, whose population want nothing more than to be left in peace by a hostile world.
Gott races through the period that stretches from the arrival of the Spanish conquistadores to Fidel Castro's seizure of power. The author's impatience with detail in these early chapters is almost palpable. There are few attempts to insert developments on the island into a wider context, while frequent contradictions in the narrative are never ironed out, and little or no thought is given to social and cultural matters. For the author, the priority lies in explaining why Cuban independence took so long to come about; behind this delay stands a lack of common ground among the island's inhabitants - the Amerindian population, African slaves and freed men, and Europeans, mostly immigrants from Spain (itself hardly a model of national cohesion) - and interference by the US. When independence did come, it was in the shape of an American protectorate, overt or covert, which lasted until the late 1950s.
When, in 1953, Fidel Castro finally enters the scene through his disastrous attack on the Montada barracks, Gott is at last able to devote some time to a single subject. Castro "became one of the more extraordinary political figures of the 20th century"; it was his revolution that "created the Cuban nation, giving meaning to the struggles of the past" (which sounds suspiciously like rewriting history while simultaneously crushing all dissenting opinion); he was "the most charismatic leader of the Third World during its heyday"; he "became a world hero in the mould of Garibaldi".
The Cuban Revolution, we are told, compares favourably with the French and Russian revolutions. We are left with the impression that Gott really wanted to write a history of this tropical revolution, much of which he witnessed first-hand: having met the "unbelievably beautiful" Che Guevara at a reception in the Soviet Embassy in Havana, he later identified Che's corpse after his execution in Bolivia. The resulting imbalance in the content is overwhelming and significant. We learn far too little about Castro's predecessor, Fulgencio Batista, the first non-white ruler of Cuba and a non-commissioned officer capable of both seizing power by force and winning elections.
Having built up Castro, Richard Gott must then substantiate his claims as to the Cuban leader's greatness, and this proves a most difficult task. After a brief experimental period, Cuba drifted into the Soviet orbit, with the USSR acquiring much more direct influence over Cuba's economic and political life than the US had ever enjoyed. When, in the face of American hostility, Castro sought a military alliance with the Soviets, Nikita Khrushchev imposed the presence of 40,000 troops and nuclear weapons on Cuba's soil. The Cuban missile crisis was played out with little or no input from a powerless Castro.
This uneven relationship with Moscow left Cuba bereft of initiative, addicted to Soviet financial aid, and in dire straits when that aid was cut off by Mikhail Gorbachev.
The one policy the author claims as a distinct success is Cuba's intervention in African, notably Angolan, affairs, which Gott links to the collapse of apartheid. This puzzling jump from Angolan to South African affairs is telling, because for Angola foreign intervention in the wake of independence from Portugal was the driving force in a disastrous and prolonged civil war which claimed untold lives and has left a legacy of misery and corruption.
Some 300,000 Cubans served in Angola, and Gott should have been far more critical about this costly venture, of no direct relevance to Cuba, but catastrophic for the Angolan people (if not for the leaders of the ruling MPLA party).
Gott sees in the Cuban regime's ability to survive the collapse of the USSR a demonstration of its popularity (something that is hard to gauge, since the book shies away from Cuba's repression of undesirables, such as political dissidents and homosexuals), and suggests that it will even outlast Castro's death. He argues that Castro is, by now, a figurehead, Cuba being governed by "a competent team that could run the affairs of any country at any time". But would such a team survive an electoral test open to all Cubans?
Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses lectures in Modern History at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth
Cuba: A New History By Richard Gott Yale University Press, 384 pp. £18.99