Nearly twenty years passed from the time of this book's first incarnation as a doctoral dissertation to its appearance in 1993. Were I faced with the task of writing The Cuban Revolution again, tabula rasa, I might approach it somewhat differently. Yet I take some satisfaction in the fact that I have had to make only minor changes in this edition to update the original content, while adding a new chapter to broach more fully the developments of the 1990s. In 1998, Madrid's Editorial Coli-bri published the updated book in Spanish. For me, Cuba has never been an emotionally neutral topic. I repeat what I expressed in the first preface: this work is more than a scholarly endeavor; it is a charge from the heart. Readers should know the wellspring of my voice: from the early 1970s until the late 1980s, I supported the Cuban Revolution.