THE RIGHT BOOKS

HL. Mencken, in his droll account of the 1917 rebellion against the President of Cuba, General Mario G. Menocal, accurately represented the American perception of Cuban political history as a series of comic episodes in an interminable opéra bouffe. One need not be a rabid anti-colonialist to regard his condescending view as grossly inaccurate. There exists no more refined specimen of Western civilization than Latin society in its highest form, and the tragedy of the Pearl of the Antilles is that, despite the vagaries of its political development, Cuba was, in many ways, such a society.

Néstor Carbonell is descended on both sides from the Cuban intellectual and political elite that labored against all odds to produce the constitution of 1940, a liberal (in the best sense of the word) document more enlightened perhaps than any comparable plan of government ever devised in Latin America. Under it, Cuba might well have enjoyed a political life commensurate with its social existence. Unfortunately, the first man elected president of the republic under the new plan was an intemperate, intransigent, and obstreperous army sergeant named Fulgencio Batista, who, in return for electoral support, rewarded the Cuban Communist Party by giving cabinet posts to two of its leaders. In the ensuing struggles, lasting 19 years, between the Communists and the Batista partisans, the principles of the 1940 constitution were trampled under foot; they were scraped up and formally buried on December 1, 1961, when Fidel Castro, Premier of Cuba, brought his famous speech to a climax with the assertion, “I am a Marxist-Leninist, and I will be one until the last days of my life.” Forty-nine years after its adoption, the constitution remains a corpse awaiting resurrection, while the grandson of Dr. José Manuel Cortina, “Tribune of the Republic,” continues to reside in the United States, to which he immigrated with his parents and grandparents in 1960 and where he currently works as a business executive with Pepsi International. His book And the Russians Stayed: The Sovietization of Cuba (Morrow, $22.95), further subtitled A Personal Portrait by Néstor T. Carbonell, is a most interesting and deeply moving account of a historical tragedy and its personal aspect.

CW

About the Author

Chilton Williamson Jr.

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HL. Mencken, in his droll account of the 1917 rebellion against the President of Cuba, General Mario G. Menocal, accurately represented the American perception of Cuban political history as a series of comic episodes in an interminable opéra bouffe. One need not be a rabid anti-colonialist to regard his condescending view as grossly inaccurate. There exists no more refined specimen of Western civilization than Latin society in its highest form, and the tragedy of the Pearl of the Antilles is that, despite the vagaries of its political development, Cuba was, in many ways, such a society.

Néstor Carbonell is descended on both sides from the Cuban intellectual and political elite that labored against all odds to produce the constitution of 1940, a liberal (in the best sense of the word) document more enlightened perhaps than any comparable plan of government ever devised in Latin America. Under it, Cuba might well have enjoyed a political life commensurate with its social existence. Unfortunately, the first man elected president of the republic under the new plan was an intemperate, intransigent, and obstreperous army sergeant named Fulgencio Batista, who, in return for electoral support, rewarded the Cuban Communist Party by giving cabinet posts to two of its leaders. In the ensuing struggles, lasting 19 years, between the Communists and the Batista partisans, the principles of the 1940 constitution were trampled under foot; they were scraped up and formally buried on December 1, 1961, when Fidel Castro, Premier of Cuba, brought his famous speech to a climax with the assertion, “I am a Marxist-Leninist, and I will be one until the last days of my life.” Forty-nine years after its adoption, the constitution remains a corpse awaiting resurrection, while the grandson of Dr. José Manuel Cortina, “Tribune of the Republic,” continues to reside in the United States, to which he immigrated with his parents and grandparents in 1960 and where he currently works as a business executive with Pepsi International. His book And the Russians Stayed: The Sovietization of Cuba (Morrow, $22.95), further subtitled A Personal Portrait by Néstor T. Carbonell, is a most interesting and deeply moving account of a historical tragedy and its personal aspect.