Cuba; or, The Pursuit of Freedom was published by Eyre & Spottiswoode in 1971, a decade after The Spanish Civil War, and it confirmed Thomas’s reputation as one of the great narrative historians working in English. The book tells the history of Cuba from the colonial period through the Castro revolution, with particular attention to the sugar economy, slavery, the independence movements of the nineteenth century, the American intervention, the Batista dictatorship, and the revolution itself.
Thomas’s Cuba is a country whose history is shaped by a single crop — sugar — and by the labor systems (slavery, then indentured servitude, then wage labor) created to produce it. The book’s early chapters on the plantation economy are among the most detailed accounts of sugar slavery in English, and they establish the economic foundation without which the political history of Cuba is unintelligible.
The twentieth-century sections — the corruption of the republic, the American dominance, the rise and fall of Batista, and the revolutionary movement — are narrated with the same combination of balance and vividness that distinguished The Spanish Civil War. Thomas is sympathetic to the revolution’s aims (the genuine poverty and injustice it responded to) while clear-eyed about its methods and consequences. His portrait of Castro is complex: a man of extraordinary ability and energy whose authoritarian instincts were visible from the beginning.
Collecting Cuba; or, The Pursuit of Freedom
First edition (Eyre & Spottiswoode, London, 1971): Cloth binding, dust jacket. A substantial volume (over 1,500 pages).
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $40–$120
- Without jacket: $10–$25
- US edition (Harper & Row): $30–$80