Review / Contemporary Cuban Writings

Ocean Press has added a significant resource for those interested in issues of race and politics in the nation of Cuba. By publishing AFROCUBA: An Anthology of Cuban Writing on Race, Politics and Culture, Ocean has given academics as well as the general reading audience an additional lens with which to understand race relations and how Cubans themselves view the topic. I only wish this book had been available at the time Carlos Moore\u27s work was published by the University of California Press in 1988. Moore\u27s Castro, The Blacks, andAfrica was one of the first book-length offerings in English to consider Cuban race relations. Unfortunately, however, the book was devoid of a context or alternative perspective which other published literature was able to offer. Moreover, not only did the work raise a multitude of questions concerning Moore\u27s research and sources, it also read like a highly personal foray into important and serious issues of race and politics. For those reasons I judged it to be an inadequate examination of the topic