Without the scholarship and literary achievements of Philip Foner and Louis A. Pérez Jr., yanquis would know little and understand still less of their nation’s crucial and often shameful relations with Cuba. Foner’s The Spanish-Cuban-American War and the Birth of American Imperialism, 1895–1902 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), rescued the reality of U.S. invasion and colonization from seven decades of self-serving distortion and willful forgetting. Brilliant and prolific, Pérez offers readers numerous approaches to Cuban-American history, including Cuba and the United States: Ties of Singular Intimacy (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1990), Cuba Between Empires, 1878–1902 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh “Press,” 1983), and The War of 1898: The United States and Cuba in History and Historiography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
Other fine introductions to U.S.-Cuban history include Jules R. Benjamin, The United States and the Origins of the Cuban Revolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990) and Thomas G. Paterson, Contesting Castro: The United States and the Triumph of the Cuban Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). The best read on the subject in years is Tom Gjelten’s original and moving study Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba: The Biography of a Cause (New York: Viking, 2008).
Concerning the United States’ intervention in Cuba in 1898, one good starting place is Graham A. Cosmas, An Army for Empire (Shippensburg, Pa.: White Mane Press, 1994), which defines the war by examining the force that fought it.
Donald H. Dyal’s Historical Dictionary of the Spanish-American War (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998) is an indispensable source. George O’Toole, The Spanish War (New York: Norton, 1984) and David F. Trask, The War with Spain in 1898 (New York: Macmillan, 1981), are the best popular histories, and A. B. Feuer’s The Santiago Campaign of 1898: A Soldier’s View of the Spanish-American War (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1993) is an excellent relief from the general’s-eye view. Willard B. Gatewood, Black Americans and the White Man’s Burden, 1898–1903 (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1975) and Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998) consider the war’s racist and gender-addled ideologies.
Theodore Roosevelt’s self-contradictions are so many and so consequential it’s no wonder that Edmund Morris’s marvelous three-volume biography—The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, Theodore Rex, and Colonel Roosevelt—sometimes fails to reconcile one T.R. to another. Deeply researched and tremendously readable, Morris’s trilogy lets Teddy be Teddy, an occupation that never had much to do with consistency and self-awareness.
Among Cuban overviews of 1898, no study is more fascinating than Felipe Martínez Arango’s sometimes hour-by-hour timeline of tragic and heroic events, Cronología crítica de la guerra hispanocubanoamericana (Santiago de Cuba: Universidad de Oriente, 1960).
Cuba writes more about its latest revolution, but Spain still turns out numerous studies of its Cuban wars. Standouts include José Calvo Poyato, El Desastre del 98 (Barcelona: Plaza & Janés, 1997), José Antonio Plaza, El Maldito Verano del 98 (Madrid: Ediciónes Themas de Hoy, 1997), Antonio Elorza and Elena Hernández Sandoica, La Guerra de Cuba (1895–1898) (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1998), and Juan Batista González, Santiago de Cuba: La batalla que pudo no haberse perdido (Madrid: Silex, 2005). Norteamericano scholar D. J. Walker has written an enlightening study of Spanish Women and the Colonial Wars of the 1890s (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008).
To learn about Cuba between 1898 and Batista’s fall, Americans might start with The Crime of Cuba by Carelton Beals, with photographs by Walker Evans (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1933), an unforgettable indictment of the U.S. sugar industry’s influence on neocolonial Cuba.
From the Cuban perspective, Santiago de Cuba en el Transito de la Colonia a la República, by Santiago historian Reynaldo Cruz Ruiz (Santiago de Cuba: Ediciónes Santiago, 2008), and Santiago de Cuba en la neocolonia, by Concepción Portuondo López (Santiago de Cuba: Ediciónes Santiago, 2008), are superb monographs on Oriente’s experience of neocolonialism.
Santiago Insurreccional 1953–56, edited by Reynaldo Cruz Ruiz and Rafael Borges Betancourt (Santiago de Cuba: Ediciónes Santiago, 2008), and Enrique Olutski, Gente del llano (La Habana: Ediciónes Imagen Contemporánea, 2000), are standouts among Cuban studies and memoirs of the revolt that toppled Batista. Readers seeking a single-volume introduction to the Cuban Revolution and its most charismatic figure should pick up Jon Lee Anderson’s magnificent biography Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life (New York: Grove Press, 1997).
How has that Revolution turned out? What’s Cuba under Castro really like? Among sociological studies, Inside the Revolution: Everyday Life in Socialist Cuba by Mona Rosendahl (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997) and Fidel Castro and the Quest for a Revolutionary Culture in Cuba by Julie Marie Bunck (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994) follow ordinary cubanos’ experience of socialism into the Special Period. For Cuba before the Soviet collapse see Juan M. del Aguila, Cuba: Dilemmas of a Revolution (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1984) and Wilbur R. Chaffee and Gary Prevost, eds., Cuba: A Different America (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1988). For what’s coming, Daniel P. Erikson, The Cuba Wars: Fidel Castro, the United States, and the Next Revolution (New York: Bloomsbury, 2008) offers one intriguing U.S. perspective.
Among norteamericano journeys in Cuba, my two favorite reads are Tom Miller, Trading with the Enemy: A Yankee Travels through Castro’s Cuba (New York: Atheneum, 1992) and Ben Corbett, This Is Cuba: An Outlaw Culture Survives (Cambridge, Mass.: Westview Press, 2002), memoirs written with open hearts and wise eyes.