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Before the Revolution: The Untold Story of 100 Years of Friendship Between The United States and Cuba
Mario Cartaya’s Before the Revolution is a sweeping, deeply personal history of the relationship between the two countries, with particular attention to the decades before Fidel Castro came to power. Cartaya’s central idea is that Cuba and the United States shared far more than proximity: they developed overlapping economic interests, military alliances, cultural habits, scientific partnerships, business relationships, and personal friendships. The book moves chronologically from Spanish colonial rule and Cuba’s wars for independence into the Cuban Republic, then explores diplomacy, banking, commerce, sugar, tourism, science, baseball, music, television, cinema, and everyday life. Cartaya repeatedly returns to the physical evidence still standing in Cuba, treating old banks, hotels, government buildings, stadiums, factories, monuments, and even vintage American cars as historical witnesses to an era he believes has been poorly remembered. That architectural approach gives the book an unusual organizing idea and makes its history feel tangible.
The most engaging parts are often the ones where Cartaya’s research intersects with his own family history. His father worked for Frigidaire in Havana, later ran an accounting business serving American and Cuban clients, and maintained relationships with companies such as Sylvania and Emerson. The family drove a blue-and-white 1957 Ford, shopped at Sears, visited Woolworth, and had connections to Milton Hershey’s sugar-producing community outside Havana. These details turn what could have been a dense catalog of trade agreements and economic statistics into something closer to a remembered world. Cartaya is particularly adept at showing how international relations filter into ordinary routines. American companies, Cuban workers, baseball players, scientists, musicians, tourists, and families become part of the same story. His discussion of the Hershey community is especially effective because commerce, technology, housing, education, transportation, and family memory all come together in one place.
Cartaya writes with a clear point of view, and the book is best understood as a historical argument as much as a historical survey. He wants readers to reconsider the familiar image of pre-revolutionary Cuba by emphasizing its economic development, international connections, cultural vitality, and extensive cooperation with the United States. His recurring “My Take” sections make that interpretive voice explicit, while the photographs and descriptions of surviving buildings reinforce his larger theme that the past remains visible even when the political story told about it changes. The range is impressive. One chapter can be discussing banks and sugar production, another yellow fever research and hurricane forecasting, and another the Negro Leagues, the Cuban Sugar Kings, Desi Arnaz, mambo, Hemingway, or Havana nightlife. Cartaya sees all of these as expressions of the same long relationship, one that shaped popular culture as much as diplomacy or business. His cross-cultural chapter makes that case particularly clearly, arguing that music, entertainment, television, cinema, literature, and baseball all developed through sustained exchange between Cubans and Americans.
I’d recommend Before the Revolution to readers interested in Cuban history, Cuban American identity, twentieth-century U.S.-Cuba relations, architectural history, or the social history that sits underneath major political events. It should also appeal to readers who like history told through places, artifacts, family stories, businesses, sports, and popular culture. The book’s emotional center is Cartaya’s experience as a Cuban who left the island at nine and grew up hearing his father speak about American colleagues as friends, something that helps explain why friendship, trust, and loss carry so much weight throughout the narrative. By the final pages, the book has become as much about memory and inheritance as foreign relations. Cartaya follows the rupture of 1959 to 1961 into the Cuban exile community in the United States, suggesting that the relationship he has spent the book documenting didn’t simply disappear. In his telling, much of it migrated with the Cubans who rebuilt their lives in America.
Pages: 323 | ASIN : B0HGQBMZWG
Understanding Our Forefathers
Before the Revolution reveals the forgotten century of exchange between Cuba and the U.S. through the businesses, ballfields, music, science, and family memories that connected two neighboring cultures. Why was this an important book for you to write?
During the last 67 years, the history of the Republic of Cuba’s era of progress has never been taught in US and Cuban classrooms. The Cuban regime does not want to acknowledge the 100 years of friendship with the United States—a country and people they refer to as Imperialist. It is not taught in the United States either. The story of a troublesome communist island which once hosted Soviet missiles aimed at the US is not part of the standard American history curriculum, either. I sought to eliminate this vacuum of knowledge by spending a year researching 100 years of documents between Cuba and the United States stored within the US Library of Congress and then writing a book about it.
Understanding our forefathers’ struggles, successes, and failures can help move history from lifeless texts onto richer human perspectives. I seek to provide the people of both nations with an enlightenment capable of advancing a dialogue that can reset relationships between nations.
Of all the places you researched, which most changed your understanding of pre-revolutionary Cuba?
The most unexpected history lesson I discovered during my year-long research in the US Library of Congress was Thomas Jefferson’s role in the birth of the sovereign and independent Republic of Cuba.
In 1823, US Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams sent a letter to Thomas Jefferson in which he wrote about Cuba’s preparation for a War of Independence from Spain. He writes that the war would lead to a destabilization of Cuba and a weakened Spanish army. This, he worried, might create an opportunity for England to take over the island of Cuba and continue north through Spanish-controlled Florida—forcing the United States to eventually have to fight a second War of Independence with England. Adams asked Jefferson’s support in annexing Cuba.
Thomas Jefferson responded with his own letter in which he disagreed with the American annexation of the island. People of a small island brave enough to fight the greatest colonial power of its time, he mussed, would make them fiercely independent people that could never be governed. The US would be better off partnering with a nascent Cuba than attempting to control those who won’t be controlled. Jefferson’s letter would become US policy towards Cuba during the next 137 years.
Can it be argued that as a result of his letter, Thomas Jefferson was in fact the father of two countries?
Your own childhood memories and family history gradually become part of the larger story. How did you decide where to place yourself in the book and where to step back?
I decided that my role in the book would be best in cameo appearances in order to introduce human context to the storytelling of a history book. Born in 1951, I was a child witness to the final years of the US and Cuba’s era of friendship and progress. I am in fact a part of the story.
Baseball is one of the book’s most personal and lively threads. What do you think the history of Cuban and American players reveals that conventional diplomatic history misses?
Baseball is more than just a game, it is about family moments, memories made, allegiances formed, loyalty, and life lessons learned. It bonds families with friends and strangers. Heals nations and opens doorways to understanding and acceptance. As such, baseball in Cuba was a part of the Cuban family conscience, an opportunity for American black players to play with Cubans and white American Major Leaguers in a tropical climate, and a bridge to future integrated Major League Baseball teams.
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During the US-Cuba era of progress, the friendship between these two countries was strong, and their differences were few. It was an era of common goals and hope. The future had never seemed brighter. Today, the story of the US-Cuba years of progress lives on in the structures it left behind on the island. They stand as silent witnesses to this beautiful and rewarding time.
Journey with author Mario Cartaya into the history of this era, documented in the historical records of the time—catalogued in the US Library of Congress, US National Archives, US Department of State, US Naval Mission, various academic and museum archives, as well as in concurrent national/international newspapers and journals. Discover the documents, persons, and buildings that attest to the US-Cuba story of friendship rooted in shared human values, cultures, needs, assistance, and goodwill.
Before the Revolution offers a richer human perspective that can advance dialogues aimed at resetting the relationship between these two nations. For the US and Cuba, the time for this conversation has come.
Before the Revolution: The Untold Story of 100 Years of Friendship Between The United States and Cuba
Before the Revolution reads like an excavation of a relationship that has largely vanished from public memory. Mario Cartaya looks at Cuba and the United States not primarily as political adversaries, but as neighbors whose lives were once intertwined in ways that reached far beyond government. His story moves through war, diplomacy, commerce, banking, tourism, science, baseball, music, television, architecture, and everyday family life. The cumulative effect is revealing. A diplomatic relationship becomes something you can actually picture: Americans vacationing in Havana, Cuban players sharing ballfields with Americans, scientists exchanging research, businesses crossing the Florida Straits, and families absorbing pieces of each other’s culture. Cartaya’s stated purpose is to recover an era he believes should be understood on its own terms, and the book’s considerable range gives that argument weight.
One of the book’s most distinctive qualities is Cartaya’s instinct to look at history through the things people built and left behind. He’s an architect by profession, and you can feel that perspective throughout the book. The Cuban Capitol, embassies, banks, hotels, factories, hospitals, stadiums, the old Hershey community, and even Havana’s surviving American automobiles become more than illustrations. They’re part of his evidence. He treats a building almost like a document, asking who financed it, who designed it, what purpose it served, and what its later transformation says about Cuba’s political history. That approach works particularly well in his account of the Hershey sugar town, where railroads, schools, homes, electrical plants, mills, and family memories combine into a surprisingly intimate portrait of economic cooperation. By repeatedly returning to these physical remnants, Cartaya gives the book the feeling of a guided walk through a country whose earlier history is still visible if you know where to look.
The liveliest sections come when the grand historical argument gives way to people pursuing things they love. The baseball chapter, for example, traces generations of Cuban and American players moving between leagues and countries, including Black American players who found opportunities in Cuba before Major League Baseball was integrated. Cartaya then brings the story home with his own memory of attending the Cuban Sugar Kings’ dramatic 1959 championship game with his father. The chapters on science and popular culture work in much the same way. Carlos Finlay and Walter Reed’s yellow fever research, Cuban and American hurricane researchers, Desi Arnaz, Afro-Cuban jazz, mambo, cha-cha-chá, Hollywood, Hemingway, and television all become examples of ideas moving back and forth across ninety miles of water. Read from this perspective, the book is really about exchange: how neighboring cultures alter each other, often so thoroughly that later generations forget where one influence ends and the other begins.
What stays with you at the end is Cartaya’s sense that history also lives inside families. His father, his childhood, the blue-and-white Ford, baseball games, business relationships, the town where his mother’s family lived, and the eventual departure from Cuba keep resurfacing beneath the larger national story. By the conclusion, the subject has shifted almost imperceptibly from relations between two governments to the movement of people, memory, skills, and identity from Cuba into the United States. Cartaya describes Cuban professionals rebuilding their lives in American cities and sees the exile community as another chapter in the long relationship he’d spent the book documenting. That makes Before the Revolution especially rewarding for readers drawn to Cuban and Cuban American history, architectural and cultural history, baseball history, or books that connect geopolitical events to the texture of ordinary life. Cartaya turns a century of U.S.-Cuban history into something you can see, hear, walk through, and remember.
Pages: 240 | ASIN: B0H5T48MQM
