Detailed and scholarly, this historical investigation throws much light on Cuban events since 1959. The frustration of the 1933 revolution and the lack of social structure and leadership that followed deprived the regimes of the 1940s and 1950s of any true legitimacy, thereby creating "an ideological vacuum that served as an important precondition for the decisive victory of a new generation of radical nationalists in the 1960s. . . ."