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Rating: 
Summary: Book contains some errors and needs revision
Review: I do not recommend this book for the casual reader nor for the beginning student of Cuban History.
This text is filled with errors in various places. The most distorted portion seems to deal with the Pre-Revolutionary, Pre-Castro Cuba. Mr Perez explains, for example, that "approximately 892,000 Cubans were fully employed in 1958 and of these 62 percent earned $75 (US) a month or less."
The fact is that Cuban union workers earned about $40 per week in 1958. The lowest paid workers were those who worked in construction. They were paid more than what Mr. Perez believes. Bricklayers earned an average of $4 a day and other construction workers about $7 per day. Construction work in the decade of the 1950's was on the increase - not decrease. And even if we were to accept the figure of $75 per month (for which I'd love to know the source) this would be a decent salary in the Cuba of the 1950's. Rents at that time were as low as $15 or $20 per month, for apartments. Rent control existed in Cuba as far back as 1940. (Although new construction, anything built post-1940, did not have to be rent-controlled.) A gallon of gasoline in 1958 cost about $0.32...
Writing about Cuba in 1958, on page 304 of the Second Edition, Mr. Perez continues, "The neighborhoods of Luyano, Jesus del Monte and Las Yaguas were crowded with tens of thousands of poor, unemployed, unemployable, living in squalor and destitution, eight to a room in hovels of tin sheeting and cardboard without sanitary facilities, garbage collection, sidewalks, or street lighting, and increasingly without hope."
The statement above is only true of one neighborhood called 'Las Yaguas,' but the statement is not accurate about the other neighborhoods.
The fact is there were no 'Yaguas' in Jesus del Monte, nor in Luyano. Jesus del Monte had broad avenues, theaters, churches (The Passionists), homes - new construction of poured concrete and slab - built in the mid 20th century after the Great Depression and WWII, so that by 1958 the homes in this part of the city would have seemed new. In 1958, Luyano was also a middle class neighborhood. It too was a neighborhood composed of new homes, new construction - such as the home built by my own grandmother in 1953 on the corner of Fontz and Cumbre, hospitals (such as 'casa de socorros') etc.
Las Yaguas was a slum. It was home to perhaps as many as 5000 people. President Batista attempted to move its residents into new housing in the 1950's, into something akin to public housing here in the US, in a place called 'Mantillas,' but the people moved back to 'Las Yaguas' on their own because in Las Yaguas they paid no rent. Theose people would routinely illegally vandalize the homes in Mantillas - selling toilets or whatever they could - and return on their own to Las Yaguas.
Castro then did finally move these indeed 'unemployable' people, as Mr. Perez describes them, out of Las Yaguas and into government-built housing after 1959. But this success was only due to Castro's mandate, this is to say it was something achieved by force, practically at the point of a gun.
Leonardo Puig
Union City, NJ
Rating: 
Summary: Best Cuban history book available
Review: I read this book 8 years ago (the first edition) and still remember it as being the best Cuban history book available. Perez tells Cuba's history thoroughly, using fascinating details and stories, and does a masterful job at explaining the main tendencies in the island's history. His writing is clear, entertaining and well-referenced. His political position does not dominate his account either and refrains from bashing or glorifying the revolutionary period. If I was going to suggest only one book on Cuba's history, it would be this one. (And I've read most of what's available)
Rating:
Summary: Too much economics, but good analysis of events.
Review: Louis Perez -I had a cousin by that very name- is very well documented, but focuses on economics and statistics with a vengeance, touching ever so lightly on other aspects of Cuban history, like its culture through the centuries. He is repetitive. The good news is, he is a very good analyst of events and people. I can say that, because I lived some of the history he writes about and heard some more from parents and grandparents.
Rating: 
Summary: A good internal political history of Cuba.
Review: Louis Perez has written a good history of internal political developments in Cuba from Columbus to Castro. What is missing, however, is the role of the U.S.; Perez almost totally ignores it. He has a separate volume dealing with U.S.-Cuban relations, but it still seems that more should have been included in this one. Perhaps Perez views Cuban events as just that: purely Cuban with outside influences mattering little.
Rating:
Summary: A good internal political history of Cuba.
Review: Louis Perez has written a good history of internal political developments in Cuba from Columbus to Castro. What is missing, however, is the role of the U.S.; Perez almost totally ignores it. He has a separate volume dealing with U.S.-Cuban relations, but it still seems that more should have been included in this one. Perhaps Perez views Cuban events as just that: purely Cuban with outside influences mattering little.
Rating:
Summary: Cuba, from A to Z
Review: This is a history book, wonderfully thorough, that unfortunately at times takes on the disguise of a dozen monographs torn apart and chronologically slapped back together into one volume. It is an appropriate jumping-off point for further study of Cuba.What Perez presents in Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution is a book that few students of Cuban history can write: it is unbiased. My political and emotional perspective on Cuba is strong and personal, yet try as I may, the two times I've read this book, I did not ever find it tarnished by the rhetoric of propagandists. I recommend this book to teachers and professors searching for a complete and honest history of Cuba for classroom use, and to independent students and learners who really want a strong background knowledge on the long history of Cuba.
Rating:
Summary: Cuba, from A to Z
Review: This is a history book, wonderfully thorough, that unfortunately at times takes on the disguise of a dozen monographs torn apart and chronologically slapped back together into one volume. It is an appropriate jumping-off point for further study of Cuba. What Perez presents in Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution is a book that few students of Cuban history can write: it is unbiased. My political and emotional perspective on Cuba is strong and personal, yet try as I may, the two times I've read this book, I did not ever find it tarnished by the rhetoric of propagandists. I recommend this book to teachers and professors searching for a complete and honest history of Cuba for classroom use, and to independent students and learners who really want a strong background knowledge on the long history of Cuba.
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