October 13, 2004

All too often, Cuba conjures up images of a last communist stronghold, Fidel Castro's beard and an American military base holding Afghan prisoners. Richard Gott's invaluable Cuba: A New History dispels many convenient myths. Gott, a frequent visitor to the island, guides us through its troubled history, from the first colonisation by the Spanish in 1511 to the present day.  It is a savage story. Even Diego de Velásquez, who began with the intention of treating the Indians well, became brutal when they refused to work for foreign invaders. By the early 17th century, Africans brought in as slaves formed half the total population. Racism was always endemic. With the brief British occupation of Havana in 1762, however, the city suddenly became an international port, and North American tradesmen set up business there. Initially, the struggle for Cuban independence involved war with Spain, in which José Marti, the great 19th-century poet, was a notable fighter. The United States began to take an interest in the Cuban-Spanish conflict only after the US battleship Maine - which had not been on a war footing - exploded in Havana in 1898, with the loss of 258 American lives. After the ensuing war, the US occupied Cuba for four years.

When a new Cuban party, the Independent Party of Colour, was formed in 1907 and launched an armed protest movement five years later, US Marines arrived to protect American sugar cane estates, and in the repression that followed, some 3,000 black Cubans were killed. The influence of Communism, as Gott skilfully explains, now became pervasive. Cuban Socialists were impressed by the Russian Revolution and formed an embryonic Communist Party in 1925. Several of its members were Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe. Significantly, the Communists had no prejudice against blacks taking a leadership role in the party. A revolutionary junta was set up in September 1933, led by a mulatto typist named Fulgencio Batista. A university professor, Dr Ramón Grau San Martín, was chosen as Cuba's new president. He refused to service the debt on American loans and nationalised the Cuban American sugar mills. However, Fidel Castro, in a highly significant 1985 comment aptly cited by Gott, sniped at Grau's - and, by implication, Batista's - claim to be revolutionary in character. The fact is that Communists were allowed to operate legally under Batista and even to launch their own newspaper, Hoy. In return, the Communists promised Batista the political support he lacked. During the second world war, Batista himself became President of Cuba and ruled as a social democrat, welcoming Communists into his government.

On July 26 1953, Fidel Castro led an armed attack on the Moncada fortress barracks in Santiago - Cuba's second city. He was arrested after the assault failed and served less than two years in jail before being amnestied by Batista. I would have welcomed more details to explain why Castro was already so convinced that armed insurrection was the only way forward. After all, the author points out that Batista, on winning the November 1954 presidential election, announced the return of constitutional rule and guaranteed a free press. Nevertheless, Castro was proved right: in Batista's second term in power, he became cruelly repressive. In Mexico City, Castro's brother, Raúl, introduced Fidel to Che Guevara and Gott describes this first meeting wonderfully. The two men initially got on very well. Che badly needed a political cause, while Che gave Fidel valuable insights into other revolutionary experiments around Latin America. Batista fled Cuba on New Year's Eve, 1958, and Castro arrived in Havana as Cuba's new leader on January 8, 1959. Gott might usefully have included at this point a remarkable quotation from a speech Fidel made on May 21 1959, in which he declared: "Our revolution is neither capitalist nor Communist ... Capitalism sacrifices the human being; Communism, with its totalitarian conceptions, sacrifices human rights."