"Frequent insights, stimulating historical comparisons, and command of the data relating to Cuba's economic and social performance." — Foreign AffairsUncritically lauded by the left and impulsively denounced by the right, the Cuban Revolution is almost universally viewed one dimensionally. In this book, Samuel Farber, one of its most informed left-wing critics, provides a much-needed critical assessment of the Revolution's impact and legacy."The Cuba...

This reexamination of Ernesto "Che" Guevara's thoughts on socialism, democracy, and revolution is a must-read for today's activists—or anyone longing to fight for a better world.Fifty years after his death, Guevara remains a symbol to legions of young rebels and revolutionaries. This unique book provides a way to critically engage with Guevara's economic views, his ideas about revolutionary agency, and his conduct as guerrilla commander and government administrator in Cuba....

Analyzing the crucial period of the Cuban Revolution from 1959 to 1961, Samuel Farber challenges dominant scholarly and popular views of the revolution’s sources, shape, and historical trajectory. Unlike many observers, who treat Cuba’s revolutionary leaders as having merely reacted to U.S. policies or domestic socioeconomic conditions, Farber shows that revolutionary leaders, while acting under serious constraints, were nevertheless autonomous agents pursuing their own independent ideolog...

A semi-fictional account of the friendship between Samuel Beckett (the Playwright) and Andre 'The Giant' Roussimoff (the Wrestler) when Andre was a young boy and Beckett had lived adjacent to the Roussimoff's farm in Ussy Sur Marne, just outside of Paris.In 1960, when Andre was fourteen, the school had told his parents that Andre could not continue attending as he was too big to ride the small school bus they had for the village and it was too far to walk. Distraught, his mother Ma...

From 1932 until his death in 1990, Hal Draper was a prolific Marxist writer and socialist organizer who successfully combined rigorous research and passionate outrage to assess his political era. In this still-indispensable collection of essays written in the 1950s and 60s, Draper grapples with the role of the United States in the world, situating post-war American imperialism in a global picture of capitalist competition and expansion. The essays in this volume include Draper’s discussion...