Highly sympathetic to the Cuban revolution and done with a minimum of research, La rivoluzione cubana suffers from the usual deficiencies of books written more to applaud than to explain. Umberto Melotti, a young Italian leftist, follows the customary pattern of those who take an uncritical stand in favor of the Cuban revolution: first, a somber picture of pre-Castro Cuba, then the exaltation of Castro’s heroic figure, a brief acknowledgment of certain revolutionary mistakes, and finally the constant promises of a brilliant future for Cuba.

It is to the author’s credit that he took the trouble to go back in Cuban history as far as the sixteenth century in an effort to present the historical factors which have helped to form Cuban society. Some of his points are, if not entirely original, certainly valid: the social and economic impact of the Ten Years War (1868-78); the influence of the Platt Amendment; and the weight of the sugar latifundio on the Cuban economy. But the general picture lacks both balance and solidity.

Some of the minor mistakes of the book evidently result from hasty research. For example, Cuban Indians were not the primitive and peaceful Caribs” (p. 16), for the Caribs never inhabited Cuba, and they were famous for their bellicosity. Gerardo Machado was reelected in 1928, not in 1930. More serious errors result from Melotti’s desire to present only one side of the picture. To stress the educational effort of the revolutionary government, for example, he distorts the prerevolutionary situation. In Cuba, he writes, the rate of illiteracy was as bad as the rest of Latin America, for in 1953 it reached the level of only 41 percent (p. 149). What he omits to say is that this figure (taken from the census of 1953) refers only to the rural population; that according to this same source, the percentage of illiteracy in urban areas was only 11 percent ; and that the national figure was 27 percent, one of the lowest in Latin America.

This tendency to offer only incomplete data, suited to prove a thesis, makes Melotti’s book very unreliable “sub specie historiae.” When dealing with the Cuban agrarian problem, to mention another example, he asserts that the conditions of land tenure in Cuba were tragic; for according to his interpretation of the 1946 census, 1.5 percent of farms comprised more than 46 percent of the total area. This interpretation is debatable, and it does not coincide with figures given by some of Castro’s economists (e.g., “Terratenientes y Monopolios,” by Oscar Pino Santos, Nueva Revista Cubana, Año I, Num. 2 [Julio-Septiembre 1959], 123-137). The point is that Melotti again omits figures from that same census which show that 58 percent of Cuban farms were operated by their proprietors or administrators—a high index of natural land distribution compared with the rest of Latin America.

Finally, it is surprising to read Melotti’s horror at the low level of existence in prerevolutionary Cuba. The per capita income of something more than $300 per year, he writes, “was totally insufficient even for Cuba” (p. 69). Melotti seems to ignore the general conditions of Latin America. At that time Cuba ranked third among Latin American countries in per capita income (only Venezuela and Chile were above her). Melotti’s horror seems especially ironic because he is Italian. Harry T. Oshima once wrote: “The per capita income of Cuba in 1953 was not less than $430 . . . [and] it was of the same order of magnitude as the per capita incomes found for Italy and the Soviet Union” (Food Research Institute Studies, Stanford University, Vol. II, No. 3 [November 1961], 214).

On the period of the revolutionary struggle the author is naturally more enthusiastic than objective. He does not reach the delirium of Régis Debray, who proclaimed that Cuban guerrillas were invincible when they fought at a ratio of one against five hundred (for Melotti, the ratio was one against forty). But he ignores or downgrades all efforts outside the fight in the mountains. Also he tells how Castro was captured and saved from being killed on the spot by the generous intervention of a lieutenant who defied Batista’s orders out of friendship (p. 88). (Pro-Castro writers always ignore the fact that in 1953 Fidel Castro’s brother-in-law was an influential figure in Batista’s government and intervened in his favor.) Melotti offers the curious explanation that Batista was forced to free Castro from prison because of massive labor demonstrations organized by the Cuban Communist party—which at that time had neither the influence nor the desire to carry on such tactics.

Then comes the metamorphosis of the revolution from democratic and moderate to radical and socialist. The author seems to attribute this process to an inescapable law of revolutions. According to him, the economic mistakes of the first five years were only a “crisis of growth” (p. 163). The enthusiasm of the people and the defeat of imperialism assures a brilliant future for Cuba. His picture, though, lacks the exuberant colors of those painted at the beginning of the sixties. Also his statistics are more modest, although he does predict that by 1970-72 Cuba will produce more citrus fruits than the United States and will utilize more fertilizers than France. Above all, Cuba remains for him the leader of nations, the light of hope for an oppressed and exploited Latin America.

Written with a vivid style and illustrated with valuable photos, the book ends, for no apparent reason, with a long appendix presenting a Castro-Lockwood interview of January 1967.