AND THE RUSSIANS STAYED
The Sovietization of Cuba
Nestor Carbonell
William Morrow and Co., Inc.
384 pp., $22.50
And the Russians Stayed is not a book about the Bay of Pigs, the ill-fated attempt to overthrow the Castro regime that took place on April 17, 1961. It is rather a book of personal reminiscences that its Cuban-American author, Nestor Carbonell, has cleverly interwoven with events of Cuban history from the last thirty years, roughly the period that Castro has been in power. Once one is done with the last chapter, however, it is difficult to avoid the impression that there is one climatic moment in the narrative--the section devoted to the tragic landing--and that everything following is but aftermath.
Despite the ample historical ground the book covers, it is hard not to identify the central story, the recurring, unifying theme that sets the mood and feeds the passion underlying the writing. Almost immediately after he set his foot on U.S. soil as an exile, Carbonell became active in the Democratic Revolutionary Front, the Cuban organization that sponsored the operation. It should surprise no one, then, that his scars are still visible.
Nowadays Carbonell is business executive for Pepsi-Cola, and he has never claimed to be a historian. He himself warns the reader in his opening remarks that his "memoir does not purport to have the detachment and intellectual rigor of academia." Yet even the most strict and demanding researcher would have to admit that Carbonell's chapters discussing the Bay of Pigs make a substantial contribution to our knowledge of the elusive subject.
As a member of a prominent Cuban political family, he was close to the top men in exile circles and, consequently, had access to sources beyond the reach of other investigators. Cuban public figures have no tradition of donating their private papers to public institutions, and Jose Miro Cardona, president of the Cuban Revolutionary Council (the successor to the Democratic Revolutionary Front), was no exception. Carbonell is the only writer with the good fortune to have had access to Miro Cardona's papers, as well as the personal notes of his aides and closest friends.
There is no way of exaggerating the significance of this, for despite the availability of eyewitness accounts and partial commentaries, the Bay of Pigs has largely remained virgin historical territory. Some months after it happened, Tad Szulc and Karl E. Meyer published their biased and shallow-witted version of the events. But since then, it is surprising how little has been written about what commentators used to call--with remarkable lack of proportion--the most dramatic and traumatic occurrence of modern American history. It is obviously a distasteful topic and, in addition, one that concerns the recent past--men, conversations, acts, and decisions that are too close to us to be easily evaluated with the impartiality and sense of balance required in serious and principled investigation. This lack of perspective is no doubt one of the reasons why most of the books and articles that cover the subject or make reference to it do not go beyond the level of journalistic accounts. They have neither depth nor breadth and, for the most part, are fragmentary and unsystematic. None of
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