The irrational mood about Cuba and the Castro Revolution which pervaded the United States in the early 1960s has dissipated enough to allow for publication of serious, careful studies on the transformation taking place on the island today. Certainly Andrés Suárez Cuba: Castroism and Communism, 1959-1966 belongs in the list. Suárez is a Cuban who was active in the struggle against the Batista dictatorship and who then served Premier Fidel Castro’s government in the Ministry of the Treasury. He draws from his abilities as a scholar and his active participation in public affairs to produce a readable account of Castro’s affiliation with communism.

Suárez shows with extensive documentation that the old established Cuban Communist Party (which after 1944 took the name Partido Socialista Popular, PSP) played a very limited role in Castro’s successful revolution. In part, this is explained by the fact that the old party, nominally illegal in pre-Castro times, operated rather openly in Havana and elsewhere as a result of a special indulgence by Fulgencio Batista during the 1950s. As a consequence of this somewhat tenuous impunity, the PSP turned its back on the so-called “action groups” that opposed Batista and lent aid to Castro. To be sure, its role in the years from 1952 to 1958 was a complicated one. But Suárez’ first chapter does much to make it intelligible and to lay the groundwork for the party’s role in the Castro era.

The bulk of the book deals with events from 1959, when Castro came to power. The author holds that Castro’s conversion to Communism, which helped transform the island into a Communist state, took place after he assumed power. Moreover, it is Suárez’ conviction that even Ernesto “Che” Guevara could not be considered a Communist in 1959. While he admits that Guevara “is the only veteran of the Sierra Maestra who seems to have found the time to read Marxist texts,” he adds that “I have not been able to find a single document showing that Guevara was familiar with the classics of Marxism or could be identified completely with any Communist position before the summer of 1960” (p. 39). Suárez holds, however, that Guevara played a major role in the conversion to communism, in part because of his feeling that a revolution needed an ideology. “Under the impact of the revolutionary process this ideology finally took a Marxist shape,” Suárez concludes (p. 39).

Of equal importance in the conversion of Castro to Communism, however, were a host of foreign policy considerations. As Castro’s relations with the United States grew more bitter in this early period, and as he broke ties with Latin America’s “democratic left,” Suárez maintains that he “needed a means of protection strong enough to deter his opponents” abroad (p. 71). This was also a critical time at home in which he had not yet consolidated the revolution. Since many European sources of arms and other supplies were drying up as a result of United States pressure, Suárez is convinced that the Soviet Union provided the only source of arms “not reached by American influence” (p. 72). Castro’s conversion to communism followed, he concludes.

Many another exile will disagree with Suárez on the time of Castro’s conversion to communism, but Suárez’ argument and evidence are impressive. His dislike for Castro, which decided him to seek exile, is obvious in these pages. Yet Suárez concedes Castro’s particular political genius. As Ernst Halperin, one of the translators, correctly remarks in his foreword, Suárez “does not portray Castro as a fool, a coward, a traitor, or a Soviet stooge, as so many émigré writers have done” (p. ix). Instead, he has given a reasonable measure of the man now in power in Havana.

As to the future, Suárez sees little profit in trying to suggest the way events will go. But his analysis of Castro’s present position is worth noting. Castro, he writes, is not happy with the state of his relations with the Soviet Union. The island is isolated not only from its traditional partners in the Western Hemisphere, but also by geography and temperament from other Communist nations. For Suárez, “the historic drama of the Cuban Revolution has not reached its conclusion.” He adds that it may be “approaching one of its most exciting episodes” (p. 248).