Cuban Revolution in America

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368 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 22 halftones, notes, bibl., index

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-5920-6
Published: February 2020
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-3546-0
Published: February 2018
E-book EPUB ISBN: 978-1-4696-3547-7
Published: January 2018
E-book PDF ISBN: 979-8-8908-5093-5
Published: January 2018

Justice, Power, and Politics

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Justice, Power, and Politics Website

Cuba’s grassroots revolution prevailed on America's doorstep in 1959, fueling intense interest within the multiracial American Left even as it provoked a backlash from the U.S. political establishment. In this groundbreaking book, historian Teishan A. Latner contends that in the era of decolonization, the Vietnam War, and Black Power, socialist Cuba claimed center stage for a generation of Americans who looked to the insurgent Third World for inspiration and political theory. As Americans studied the island’s achievements in education, health care, and economic redistribution, Cubans in turn looked to U.S. leftists as collaborators in the global battle against inequality and allies in the nation’s Cold War struggle with Washington. By forging ties with organizations such as the Venceremos Brigade, the Black Panther Party, and the Cuban American students of the Antonio Maceo Brigade, and by providing political asylum to activists such as Assata Shakur, Cuba became a durable global influence on the U.S. Left.

Drawing from extensive archival and oral history research and declassified FBI and CIA documents, this is the first multidecade examination of the encounter between the Cuban Revolution and the U.S. Left after 1959. By analyzing Cuba’s multifaceted impact on American radicalism, Latner contributes to a growing body of scholarship that has globalized the study of U.S. social justice movements.

About the Author

Teishan A. Latner is assistant professor of history at Thomas Jefferson University.

For more information about Teishan A. Latner, visit the Author Page.

Reviews

"Teishan Latner's fascinating Cuban Revolution in America, with its focus on histories of travel, hijacking, and exile across Cold War barriers, is an important intellectual weapon against both the [travel] ban and the blockade."—Labour/Le Travail

"An outstanding piece of scholarship that merits a book prize."—Journal of American History

"Scholars of the left should consider this required reading. It is these multiple lefts, white, Latinx, and African American, that Latner explores over twenty-five plus years, arguing that Cuba was the biggest global inspiration for a new generation of activists who shunned the Old Left for the new."—American Communist History

"A critical contribution to scholarship on the global Cold War and the postwar internationalist left. . . . Latner's text offers crucial insights about the world in which we live as well as illuminating lessons from past attempts to change it."—Public Books

"[A] groundbreaking book on a quarter century of interaction between the Cuban Revolution and US radicals."—The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture

"Latner's book joins a growing body of work on trans-national political influences relating to the Cuban Revolution."—American Historical Review