Colonel Fulgencio Batista overthrew the government of President Ramón Grau San Martín on January 15, 1934. Subsequently the island was rocked by more than 100 strikes, culminating in a general strike commencing February 25, 1935. Public school teachers, joined by their students, struck for increased government education funding. They were in turn joined by university students, professors, and, eventually, labor unions. The strike was crushed after Batista declared martial law.
This is the dramatic context that situates Ariel Mae Lambe's engaging monograph on Cuban antifascism. The author opens with a brief biographical vignette of Teresa “Teté” Casuso and her husband, Pablo de la Torriente Brau, who fled Batista's Cuba for New York City after the general strike. After attending a rally in Union Square, the exiles soon immersed themselves in the struggle for Spain. These two intellectuals and activists appear throughout the book at key moments to organize the Cuban...
