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