El sumo inconcluso: Historia del Directorio Revolu-cionario EstudiantilD.R.E., Cuba 1959-1966

Javier Figueroa de Cardenas,

Miami FL: Ediciones Universal, 2022. 723 pp. (Paper US$46.95)

El sueno Inconcluso is a fascinating study of one of the most important anti-Castro groups of the early 1960s, the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (dre). Javier Figueroa de Cardenas, a retired professor from the University of Puerto Rico, was involved with the dre as a young teenager and has remained close to its former members over the years. But this is not a memoir or participant account. Figueroa has conducted exhaustive research using declassified CIA documents, the group's archived papers in the University of Miami library, and several private collections, as well as extensive interviews, and other new sources. The result is a meticulously researched, engagingly written, and analytically nuanced reconstruction of the dre's history that combines the access of an insider with the critical eye of a scholar.

While anchored in a detailed analysis of the dre, the book is more than a history of one anti-Castro group. It gives us broad insight into the epic conflict unleashed by Cuba's 1959 Revolution, offering important findings that will be of interest to historians of Cuba, U.S.-Cuban relations, and U.S. foreign policy. Figueroa's discussion of the dre's formation in October 1960 adds significantly to our understanding of the anti-Castro opposition that emerged in underground and in exile. Other authors, such as Don Bohning and Jesus Arboleya, have studied the anti-Castro movement, but Figueroa surpasses those previous studies with his vast archival research and his careful attention to the politics of the dre, including a nuanced exploration of the social Christian ideals and the lay Catholic organizations that were so central to anti-Castro activism in this period. He also provides a fascinating description of the extent of anti-Castro activity prior to the Bay of Pigs invasion. He notes that the revolutionary government still had overwhelming popular support, but that the dre nevertheless managed to organize an extensive urban underground in Havana and a rural guerrilla front in Oriente province. One of the book's most gripping sections is Figueroa's reconstruction of the way the constantly shifting strategies of the cia and White House in preparation for the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion left the dre scrambling first to adapt, then merely to survive. The invasion's defeat and the mass roundups that ensued largely put an end to the dre's underground phase. After that it was mostly an exile group forced into ever-closer relations of dependence with the cia.

The complexity of that relationship is underscored in the book. Figueroa shows unequivocally that exile anti-Castro groups were never mere puppets of U.S. government agencies. Indeed, he carefully documents the increasingantagonism of the dre and other exile groups toward the U.S. government, beginning with the Bay of Pigs but consolidating further after the Missile Crisis. He shows that the dre conducted paramilitary activities that were expressly prohibited by the agency, released statements and intelligence without warning the CIA, and at times even openly denounced the U.S. government in its propaganda. At the same time, the dre continued to rely on cia funding and hoped the cia would share actionable intelligence. As Figueroa argues, the dre imagined its relationship with the cia as one of equals, and chafed at agency efforts to exert control. The cia, for its part, was frustrated by the group's defiance.

The chapter on the dre's short-lived military base in the Dominican Republic in 1964, when the U.S. government increasingly demanded the offshoring of exile paramilitary actions, explores these complex relations and their transnational projection. Figueroa patiently walks readers through every angle of this fascinating episode, illuminating the conflicting positions and motivations of the cia, the dre, the State Department, the Dominican military, and Dominican president Donald Reid Cabral, all against the backdrop of increasing instability in the Dominican Republic and a U.S. government still reeling from the assassination of JFK. By this time the dre was on tenuous ground. Crippled by the gradual reduction of cia funding and the inability to raise sufficient funds on their own, the group now also found itself stripped of a physical base from which it could stage commando attacks. Figueroa thus suggests that the dre effectively met its end in the Dominican Republic in late 1964, a fate colorfully symbolized by the sinking of one of the group's prized ships in the Ozama River during the Dominican civil war shortly afterwards.

Published in Spanish by Miami-based Ediciones Universal, it would be easy for this book to pass under the radar of historians in the U.S. academy. But that would be a mistake. It is a landmark study that offers new insights into the extraordinary events that engulfed Cuba, the United States, and the greater Caribbean in the early 1960s.