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Carlos Alberto Montaner, born in Cuba in 1943 and currently living in exile in Spain, is a novelist, journalist, essayist, and film-script writer who has also been a press correspondent in a number of Latin American, European, and Middle Eastern countries, and who writes a column syndicated in various Spanish and Latin American newspapers. In Cuba, Castro, and the Caribbean: The Cuban Revolution and the Crisis in Western Conscience (Transaction Books, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J. 08903; $19.95), translated by Nelson Duran, he has written one of the most interesting, solid, and at the same time provocative analyses to date of the impact of Castroism on present-day Cuba, of the probable future of Sovietization in that country, and of the choices that confront the United States in its attempts to destabilize the destabilizers of the Caribbean basin.

Like every messianic leader, Castro considers himself not primus inter pares, but simply primus: a unique figure sprung full-blown from his own head —outside of the history he denied, and continues to deny, at his risk. With perhaps willful ignorance, Castro, in adopting the Soviet system for his model and the Kremlin for his protector, missed the essential truth that the Communist world is not the direct opposite of the Western one, but its offshoot: in Montaner’s words, “a huge and cumbersome Western appendix, thinly veiled under lofty rhetoric and singular successes in space exploration and military-related industries.” The result is that, “by accepting Soviet overlordship, Castro was not able to evade the cultural leadership of the West. He merely adulterated this leadership by putting it through a thick and useless sieve.” Castro “is not rescuing Cuba from the West but simply delaying and deforming an inevitable process.”

CW

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Chilton Williamson Jr.

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Carlos Alberto Montaner, born in Cuba in 1943 and currently living in exile in Spain, is a novelist, journalist, essayist, and film-script writer who has also been a press correspondent in a number of Latin American, European, and Middle Eastern countries, and who writes a column syndicated in various Spanish and Latin American newspapers. In Cuba, Castro, and the Caribbean: The Cuban Revolution and the Crisis in Western Conscience (Transaction Books, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J. 08903; $19.95), translated by Nelson Duran, he has written one of the most interesting, solid, and at the same time provocative analyses to date of the impact of Castroism on present-day Cuba, of the probable future of Sovietization in that country, and of the choices that confront the United States in its attempts to destabilize the destabilizers of the Caribbean basin.

Like every messianic leader, Castro considers himself not primus inter pares, but simply primus: a unique figure sprung full-blown from his own head —outside of the history he denied, and continues to deny, at his risk. With perhaps willful ignorance, Castro, in adopting the Soviet system for his model and the Kremlin for his protector, missed the essential truth that the Communist world is not the direct opposite of the Western one, but its offshoot: in Montaner’s words, “a huge and cumbersome Western appendix, thinly veiled under lofty rhetoric and singular successes in space exploration and military-related industries.” The result is that, “by accepting Soviet overlordship, Castro was not able to evade the cultural leadership of the West. He merely adulterated this leadership by putting it through a thick and useless sieve.” Castro “is not rescuing Cuba from the West but simply delaying and deforming an inevitable process.”