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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
50 Years of Feelings Coming Out
The Cuba We Lost preserves firsthand memories from people who experienced the upheaval following the 1959 Cuban Revolution as children, teenagers, and young adults. When did you realize your generation’s memories were disappearing along with the people who carried them?
I was actually sitting in a circle of historians who were trying to document the voices of the last survivors of the Holocaust and the challenges of their advanced ages in many cases, and my brain flipped to my own Cuban heritage and the fact that the generation that brought us out of Cuba, our parents and grandparents, had mostly passed on and that we, who were children at the time, are the last living witnesses to that event and also had firsthand knowledge from our parents.
Many contributors experienced these events as children or teenagers. What does a child’s perspective reveal that a conventional historical account might miss?
Although I did not know this when I started writing, the voices that were coming out of the adults that were sitting across from me ,were actually the voices of the kids. They took my soldier, they took my doll, they were mean to me, etc., and then the torrential flood of grief that flowed was unexpected and exhausting. The words were not measured, as the words of an adult usually are.
How can oral histories contribute to our understanding of major historical events in ways official records cannot?
Oral histories, I believe, add a human dimension to any event. The official written history cannot tell us how it actually felt while the event was happening. These testimonies reveal the fear, the anxiety, and the quiet triumphs that are the underlying thread connecting the written histories. Written history is about facts and oral histories are about feelings.
You describe the project as becoming “a chronicle of quiet voices preserving personal and family histories.” When did you realize that was what the book had become?
I realized deep into the interviews that we had all kept quiet for over 50 years, and now the stories gushed out amid tears. I was not expecting that. Those being interviewed sobbed, and I sobbed. I realized that we were all collectively recounting the most traumatic event in our lives.
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Voices from Cuba’s Golden Exile
Can you imagine what it must have been like to watch your country disappear?
Between 1959 and 1962 hundreds of thousands of Cuban families were forced to make heart wrenching decisions that would forever alter their lives and the lives of their families. Families were separated. Homes, businesses ,schools and religious institutions were transformed overnight. Childhoods were interrupted and ended too soon. Uncertainty, fear and hope became part of everyday life.
The Cuba We Lost preserves those memories before they are lost to the world forever. Through many testimonies, men and women who lived these events as children and young adults recount what they saw and how they felt and more than that, how they survived one of the most dramatic periods in Cuban history. As they tell their stories, they weave in the memories and experiences of their parents and grandparents creating an intimate portrait of a country im transition and families force dto flee to exile.
The stories told are not political statements nor are they historical arguments. They are deeply personal memories of schools, friendships, parks and dolls being yanked from their hands. Some left via Operation Pedro Pan and others escaped via different personal routes. All carried with them memories of a homeland they would never see in the same way again.
Interwoven throughout the book are historical notes that place each testimony within the unfolding events of the Cuban revolution, so as to give the reader a context to the date of departure.
Whether you are Cuban, a descendant of Cuban exiles, a student of history , or a person that values memories of human interest, The Cuba We Lost offers you a window into a world that vanished.
For the generations of the future, this is more than a collection of memories, it is the story of Cuba’s Golden Exile.
The Cuba We Lost
Genie Milgrom’s The Cuba We Lost: Witnesses to the Last Days of Freedom, 1959 Through 1962 is an oral history of the first years of the Cuban Revolution, built from the memories of people who experienced political upheaval and exile as children, teenagers, and young adults. Milgrom organizes the testimonies chronologically according to when each person left Cuba, placing brief historical accounts before many of the individual stories so that private memories unfold alongside events such as nationalization, growing Soviet influence, the Bay of Pigs invasion, religious repression, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. The approach gives readers two perspectives at once: the public record of a country undergoing rapid transformation and the intimate record of families trying to understand what those changes meant inside their homes. Milgrom describes her purpose as preserving the memories of a generation whose parents and grandparents are disappearing, allowing the witnesses to speak in their own voices and creating a record intended especially for descendants who have no firsthand memory of Cuba.
The book’s greatest strength is the accumulation of precise, often childlike details. Political change is remembered through objects and sensations: a favorite doll damaged by soldiers, armed milicianos walking a neighborhood street, jewelry hidden inside clothing or toys, a small Christmas tree decorated with costume jewelry, the sound of an air-raid siren in Miami, or the sight of relatives crying behind airport glass. These details give the book an emotional texture that broad historical summaries rarely capture. One of Milgrom’s own memories is especially representative. Soon after arriving in Miami, she asked her grandfather when they would return to Cuba, and he told her, “We will not return in my lifetime and possibly not in yours. This is our country now.” That exchange expresses one of the book’s central tensions: many families departed believing their exile would last only months, while the children grew into adults in a country that gradually became home. The recurring memories of beaches, schools, grandparents, food, music, churches, synagogues, neighborhoods, and family gatherings make the lost Cuba of the title a lived place.
The individual testimonies also reveal how varied exile could be. Some families had wealth and professional standing in Cuba and arrived in the United States to take factory jobs, work in grocery stores, pick tomatoes, or crowd several relatives into a small apartment. Some children traveled with their parents, while others endured painful separations that lasted months or years. Catholic families describe the closing or confiscation of religious schools and the expulsion of clergy, while Jewish contributors recall the effects of nationalization, emigration, and the assistance of organizations such as HIAS. Several accounts intersect directly with the Bay of Pigs, including stories of fathers who joined Brigade 2506, imprisonment, and families left waiting in Miami. Across these differing circumstances, the book repeatedly returns to education, work, family solidarity, religious life, gratitude, and the rebuilding of professional and personal identities. The repetition is meaningful because each testimony approaches similar events through a different household. Taken together, the accounts show exile as both a historical movement and a collection of thousands of private disruptions whose consequences continued for decades.
By the epilogue, Milgrom makes clear that the project became as much about memory as about chronology. She reflects on witnesses who had rarely or never spoken about their experiences and on the enduring presence of childhood fear, separation, grief, and longing in their adult lives. She summarizes what the collection became in a particularly fitting sentence: “The book became a chronicle of quiet voices preserving personal and family histories.” That description captures the achievement of The Cuba We Lost. Its historical value comes from preserving firsthand recollections before they disappear, while its emotional force comes from the ordinary details through which people remember extraordinary events. The book records the severing of families from a homeland, but it also follows those families into the lives they created afterward, making resilience, cultural inheritance, and intergenerational memory essential parts of the story. As a result, Milgrom has produced both a testimony to a particular generation of Cuban exiles and a family-centered archive intended to carry their voices beyond that generation.
Pages: 333 | ASIN : B0HDV895LW
