The next generation may not regard this work by two Reader’s Digest editors as the most authoritative account of how Communism stole the Cuban revolution—but for the present it qualifies for that description.
What Monahan and Gilmore have done is sift hundreds of interviews (some conducted clandestinely with people still in Cuba) to put together a comprehensive report both detailed and broad in scope. It contrasts remarkably with those books which merely relate personal experience or observations of pre- and synchro-Castro Cuba.
Interview-type history, however, in its difficulty in documentation is always subject to both deliberate and unintentional distortion, and time may find that this is the case here. For one thing, hindsight as to Castro’s intentions is obviously better than foresight. For another, doubtless hundreds of Cubans can truthfully note that they “said all along Fidel was a Communist,” albeit with no more reason than had U.S. Ambassador Earl E. T. Smith. Smith’s book, The Fourth Floor, is principally valuable for making clear Smith “knew” Castro was Red because Fulgencio Batista said so, and Batista was such a jolly fellow at parties.
Likewise, there remain honest differences between Cubans on many elements. For instance, Monahan and Gilmore make a strong case that Carlos Rafael Rodríguez and two Communist colleagues perpetrated the rape of the original Agrarian Reform Law whose principles gained Castro so much support without the knowledge of its author, Minister of Agriculture Humberto Sori Marín. Yet when this reviewer discussed this particular point in another publication, the next day an irate Cuban refugee telephoned him to assert in all sincerity that he “knew” Sori Marín was a Communist and had been for years—although Sori Marín resigned and went underground a few days before the text of the Rodríguez version was published, was later captured at La Cabana on April 20, 1961.
But it is the technique of the takeover rather than its personalities that is the major subject of this or any other book on recent Cuba. And Monahan and Gilmore have given us a graphic illustration of that technique in capsule form in their description of events preceding and at the Cuban Federation of Labor (CTC) Congress of November 18, 1959. The book is worth reading for these few pages alone; but all of it is worth reading.
