Reviews for Congress, the executive, and foreign policy

The average rating for Congress, the executive, and foreign policy based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-08-29 00:00:00 Joseph Jennings As I'm rather burnt out on history books at the moment, I rarely describe them as "impossible to put down." This book is an exception to that rule. It's an incredible piece of scholarship that challenges many preconceived notions about Cuba and the Cold War.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-09-28 00:00:00 Jeffrey Dennis Fantastic book. Gleijeses wrote this because he was curious about Cuba's intervention in Angola, which is exactly why I chose to read it, but he finds the Cuban foreign policy of the era was quite consistent beyond just Angola. He makes a point of writing the history a Third World country, arguably a loser in the Cold War, in a way that does not view it solely from a US perspective. He wrote a history for the losers, essentially, and the Cuban interventions in Africa were far more idealistic and revolutionary than the motives of the US or USSR in any proxy war. Parts of this are very long and detailed attempts to put together a military history which was poorly recorded. Gleijeses had unprecedented access to some classified Cuban archives, which is fascinating at times and tedious others. Nonetheless he is a very good writer, the story is well told. My take away from this is how Cuba took huge economic and political losses for the goal of spreading the ideology which they believed would save their fellow Third World nations. In light of stagnant totalitarianism on the island, solidarity with Africa may be Cuba's greatest unsung legacy.