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Centro de Estudios sobre America (ed.) THE CUBAN REVOLUTION INTO THE 1990S: CUBAN PERSPECTIVES. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992.
All official literature on totalitarian regimes fits the same mold and exhibits similar characteristics. This set of essays by assorted Cuban functionaries, teachers, and researchers is no exception. By and large, this is self-serving, ideologically hidebound writing. Logical fallacies (formal and material), characterized by a predominance of petitio principii are abundant throughout these articles. For the uninitiated, this fare is almost exotic. Contributors have a tendency to posit large categorical assertions, especially in the political realm, without much concern for, or interest in, either rules of evidence or documentary proof [e.g., "calls for creation of other institutions or parties are heard only in Miami or in tiny, marginal sectors of Cuban society" (p. 15)]. In the same vein, the various authors tend to analyze economic situations or outcomes only in terms of their proximate causes, seldom looking past the immediate situation to seek more remote antecedents or explore general explanatory patterns or models.
As a whole, the book is a rambling potpourri of unrelated topics and comments (economic, social, political, historical) that lacks focus or any kind of thematic unity. The essays are repetitive and redundant, marked by a considerable overlap of subject matter. Most annoying to the reader is the prevalence of prima facie statements made without the slightest attempt at proof or substantiation. This, indeed, is preaching to the converted. Prevailing throughout is a marked distaste for the market system and its allegedly adverse social effects.
The entire anthology is based upon a kind of glorification of the Revolution, the significance and beneficence of which is assumed to be so obvious that there is no need to explain or justify its existence. It is apparent that it never ocurred to the contributors or, indeed, even to the editor, that all readers might not operate on the same assumption and harbor reservations as to its millenarian nature. Even less would it occur to them that anyone might question it in toto.
In line with these assumptions, the bibliographical references appended to the chapters are highly selective and the sources utilized are, with rare exceptions, both local and mutually reinforcing as a result of revolutionary self-fertilization.