Cuban Revolution in America: Havana and the Making of the United States Left 1968 – 1992

Teishan A. Latner’s Cuban Revolution in America: Havana and the Making of the United States Left, 1968 – 1992 is an excellent new book on left- wing activists, the complex politics of solidarity, and US- Cuban relations. It acts as a worthy sequel to Van Gosse’s classic Where the Boys Are (New York: Verso, 1993), which analyzes the New Left and its identification (and admiration) of the Cuban revolution and the Castro brothers’ masculinity in the 1950s and early 1960s. Latner moves his analysis forward in time and argues that American activists used travel as a way to forge solidarity with the Cuban revolution and that, in turn, the Cuban government capitalized on these friendship brigades as a way to win ideological points in its ongoing public relations war with the United States. “Cuba like all nations, needed allies abroad,” Latner explains, “and Havana’s relations with U.S. leftists grew in...