Cuba: What Everyone Needs To Know, Second Edition (What Everyone Needs to Know (Paperback))

In this second edition of the widely hailed Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know, Julia Sweig, updates her concise and remarkably accessible portrait of the small island nation, covering the key events of the last few years: Raul Castro's assumption of power from his brother Fidel and the changes in US-Cuba relations following the election of Barack Obama. Expansive in coverage and authoritative in scope, the looks backward toward Cuba's history since the Spanish American War before shifting to recent times. Focusing equally on Cuba's role in world affairs and its own social and political transformations, Sweig divides the book chronologically into the pre-Fidel era, the period between the 1959 revolution and the fall of the Soviet Union, the post-Cold War era, and--finally--the post-Fidel era. Informative, pithy, and lucidly written, it is the best compact reference on Cuba's internal politics, its often fraught relationship with the United States, and its shifting relationship with