Bay Of Pigs Chapter Summary

As a student with very limited knowledge on the Cuban revolution, with information only gathered from movies about the Cuban missile crisis and short reads on the Bay of Pigs, as well as the numerous sightings of Che Guevara shirts, I found this paper to be a great opportunity to learn more about a subject that has been a large part of American politics. However, after reading the chapter about the Cuban revolution in Jan Rogozinski’s book, I found that there were main issues that could be addressed to make the reading easier and the information more concise. I personally found that it would go in extensive details about less important parts by stating facts that stray us from the ac-tual story while barely talking about major events that could …show more content…
For example, we are given a chart of cuban population in the 20th century. After looking over it carefully, I returned to the text only to find that it had nothing to do with the chapter. This little break in the reading, along with many other examples, are one of the reasons why I felt so uninterested even though I personally picked the topic. Giving us charts and numbers and names that do not tie into what the paragraph is about ends up breaking my patience and only makes me feel like I am learning numbers and facts for a history quiz. Similarly Rogozinski drowns us with names of presidents after generals after revolutionaries. Not knowing if the name is important, readers spend time trying to remember who they are, even though minimal background is given, and then a few lines later, the name disappears and is never brought up again. The names Jose Marti, Gerardo Machado y Morales, Fulgencio Batista, Fidel Castro, Tomas Estrada Palma, Jose Miguel Gomez, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and John F. Kennedy might seem a fair number of names whose story to learn over thirty pages, However these were all stated and barely explained in the span of less than two pages (226-227) along with a chart of Cuban Population estimates. All these names worked the same dark magic as the useless facts that made me want to put down the book and watch a video on the Cuban revolu-tion to learn some concise and useful information. All these facts and names that bore readers might have been useful or even enriching to the book if they were tied back into the whole story. Even though some names are obviously key to the story, many names could have been omitted and it the story would have still been as fulfilling and even more