The Missile Crisis from a Cuban Perspective: Historical, Archaeological and Anthropological Reflections, by Håkan Karlsson & Tomás Diez Acosta

The twin purposes of this intriguing little volume are to provide "a historical overview that explains the background and prelude to the [Cuban missile] crisis from a Cuban perspective" and "an archaeological and anthropological investigation of the material and immaterial remains of the crisis located at the former Soviet strategic nuclear missile bases and among people living in their surroundings in the Cuban countryside"-two "themes and dimensions" of the crisis that "have seldom-or never-been presented before" (p.ix).The former, the subject of Part One, was obviously the primary task of Tomás Diez Acosta, a prominent Cuban historian.The second, treated in Part Two, was evidently the chief responsibility of Håkan Karlsson, Professor of Archaeology at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.Their collaboration in this volume presents "a summary of the work carried out so far" in a project entitled "World Crisis from Below" (p.138), whose admirable task is to help correct the great-power-centric and overwhelmingly political or strategic accounts of what is arguably the most dangerous episode in human history by foregrounding subaltern perspectives.Part One (six chapters) offers a businesslike, efficient, though occasionally overly terse historical summary.It faithfully presents what has become the standard Cuban story of the crisis-one that has indeed "seldom" been presented before.For the most part, however, it is not new, hewing quite closely to the more detailed presentation and analysis in James G. Blight et al., Cuba on the Brink: Castro, the Missile Crisis, and the Soviet Collapse (2nd ed., 2002).Indeed, Chapter 6, "Fidel Castro's Reflections on the Missile Crisis"-is virtually a verbatim reprinting of parts of the conference transcript that forms the heart of that earlier book.While Karlsson and Diez cite this work extensively, they do not draw on other works in which the Cuban perspective is presented in extensive detail, such as Thomas G. Weiss & James G. Blight (eds.),The Suffering Grass: Superpowers and Regional Conflict in Southern Africa and the Caribbean (1992) and James G. Blight & Philip Brenner, Sad and Luminous Days: Cuba's Struggle with the Superpowers After the Missile Crisis (2002).Perhaps most unfortunately, Karlsson and Diez entirely overlook the only extant firsthand account of Cuban intelligence during the crisis: Domingo Amuchastegui, "Cuban Intelligence and the October Crisis" (in Intelligence and National Security, 2008).Part One does include some new information-for example, on Cuban mobilization plans in anticipation of President John F. Kennedy's televised announcement of the discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba on October 22, 1960-but it is not free of factual errors.Most notably, it repeats the widely

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