The Missile Crisis from a Cuban Perspective: Historical, Archaeological and Anthropological Reflections, by H?kan Karlsson & Tomás Diez Acosta

摘要

The twin purposes of this intriguing little volume are to provide “a historical overview that explains the background and prelude to the [Cuban missile] crisis from a Cuban perspective” and “an archaeological and anthropological investigation of the material and immaterial remains of the crisis located at the former Soviet strategic nuclear missile bases and among people living in their surroundings in the Cuban countryside”—two “themes and dimensions” of the crisis that“have seldom—or never—been presented before” (p. ix). The former, the subject of Part One, was obviously the primary task of Tomás Diez Acosta, a prominent Cuban historian. The second, treated in Part Two, was evidently the chief responsibility of H?kan Karlsson, Professor of Archaeology at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. Their collaboration in this volume presents “a summary of the work carried out so far” in a project entitled “World Crisis from Below” (p. 138), whose admirable task is to help correct the great-power-centric and overwhelmingly political or strategic accounts of what is arguably the most dangerous episode in human history by foregrounding subaltern perspectives.