Three Books on the Cuban Revolution

Three new books shed light on the long legacy of the Cuban revolution and on the island’s fraught relationship with the United States. Of the countless memoirs dwelling on the Cuban revolution of 1959, Sheppard’s may be the most heart wrenching and the most beautifully written. In her unflinching yet graceful style, Sheppard memorializes her beloved “small town rich” family, which was sundered in two by the revolution. Half the family migrated to Miami, where they felt guilty for living in comfort while their relatives back home suffered ever-worsening deprivations under communism. On both sides of the Florida straits, the family members suffered suicides, hurricanes, and dementia, adding to the book’s emotional atmosphere of physical decay, romantic anguish, and irredeemable regrets. As the bifurcated family grew further apart and photographs faded, the lives of those living in the United States gradually normalized. In her lyrical homage, Sheppard wraps her family’s tragic saga in the rich cloth of Cuban history.

Already near collapse, the Cuban economy continues to contract, and previous gains in education and health care are receding memories. As socialist central planning failed to produce sustained growth, the ruling Cuban Communist Party has, reluctantly, allowed citizens to open small-scale private businesses. Marshaling what little reliable data exists, Torres Pérez provides a uniquely valuable survey of the country’s emerging private sector. Since 2021, the government has granted legal status to 11,000 small and medium-sized firms, which collectively employ some 60,000 workers in light manufacturing, construction, lodging, and the restaurant industry. Yet authorities keep a tight rein on the private sector, which they continue to perceive as a source of unwelcome competition with state-owned enterprises; an accumulation of private wealth might transform into a formidable political opposition. For the Cuban leadership, Torres Pérez concludes, the private sector is a mere pressure-release valve, easing unemployment and furnishing consumer staples, not a promising engine of dynamic growth.

Desi Arnaz (1917–86) grew up in Santiago de Cuba, the epicenter of Afro-Cuban music, where he learned to play guitar and dance the conga. He would turn those skills into brilliant careers as a popular Latin bandleader in Miami and New York and, later, a pioneering television studio executive in Hollywood. In this meticulously researched and masterfully written biography, Purdum, a veteran journalist, explores the secrets of Arnaz’s triumphs—his striking sexual magnetism, risk-taking business acumen, burning ambition, and plain hard work—as well as his self-destructive decline into alcoholism and depression. Purdum writes that as a Hollywood power broker, Arnaz retained pride in his “cubanidad, his intense feeling of national identity and ego.” His celebration of the ethnically mixed family in his smash-hit television series, I Love Lucy, in which he starred alongside his wife, Lucille Ball, made Arnaz a “breakthrough cultural figure.” In a fascinating aside, Purdum links Arnaz’s rise in the 1940s to U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy, which advanced commerce and diplomacy with the countries of the Southern Hemisphere, and the resulting popularity of all things Latin American.