2025/04/17 by Lillian Guerra · 1 voice
Engineering · Social Sciences · #Earthquake and Disaster Impact Studies #Educational Leadership and Practices #Human auditory perception and evaluation
paper · doi:10.1093/dh/dhaf034
openalex publication_date 2025/04/17 · openalex created_date 2025/05/13 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
Mauricio Castro’s impressive book follows the publication of several other recent works which document the relationship between the economic achievements and political culture of South Florida’s Cuban exile community and the Cold War policies of the United States. Like Castro’s book, the best of these, including Michael Bustamante’s Cuban Memory Wars (2021), Javier Figueroa’s El Sueño Inconcluso (2022), John A. Gronbeck-Tedesco’s Operation Peter Pan (2022), and my own draw upon previously ignored or once unknown archives to yield critical analyses of how—and more importantly why—the fiction of Cuban Americans’ “self-made success story” emerged. Mauricio Castro distinguishes Only a Few Blocks to Cuba from these works by broadening his time frame to cover the 1960s through the 1990s. While comprehensive in many ways and definitive in others, the book is far from encyclopedic or a blow-by-blow narrative history. Indeed, he cites neither Bustamante nor Gronbeck-Tedesco, despite their clear analytical proximity to his subject matter. Nonetheless, to prove his points, Mauricio Castro follows these scholars’ paths by relying principally on documents gathered from an array of private collections as well as presidential archives rather than statistics, anecdotes, and contemporary oral testimonies. The result is both remarkable and fascinating.