Since so much has been written about the Cuban Revolution over the
years (especially about the 1960s, the system’s remarkable survival in
the 1990s or now as the historic generation nears its final act in power),
what more can be said? Essentially, what this study intends is to correct
the common tendency to squeeze something called ‘the Revolution’ into
pre-existing paradigms, which have rarely corresponded to what was, or
is, really happening.
What will be argued here is based on almost five decades of research
on Cuba and four decades of travelling around sixty-five times to
Cuba, giving me much material for trying to shape that ‘correction’.
That material has been garnered from years of conversations with
Cuban friends, acquaintances, interviewees, academics and politicians
(former and current), from conversations with (and reading the work
of) numerous non-Cuban experts of various kinds, and sometimes
simply from observing the many different ways that things work (and
don’t work) in Cuba. It has also arisen from mind-numbing personal
experiences of Cuban officialdom (the mythical burocracia) at all levels.
All of this has led to conclusions about the overall system, then weighed
up against the theories and conventional explanations.