The fact that the North American ideologist of Japanese origin, Francis Fukuyama, predicted the «end of the History», it was a necessity very favourable for the strengthened capitalism in eradicating circumstances, to bury in the apathy all that omened a reflux of the progressive tendencies after the collapse of the socialism of East Europe. It was a subtle form of beheading the dissidence, because without History the references and the tentatives of building an alternative would disappear.

Certainly, the History,  as a group of the last facts that sustains the trajectory of the present and profiles the construction of the future, it was losing land for many people; it no longer cared; it no longer constituted reason of pride, neither of inspiration. It should start from zero and should build other realities, but without forgetting the substrates that promoted it. An example of this is a Rolando Rodriguez new book Cuba: the masks and the shades. The first occupation.

National Prize of Social Sciences 2007, the author with this book, published by the Editorial of Social Sciences, demonstrates that the History has still a lot to offer, because the important thing is not to look, but to where to look. The work dives in the stormy years when the yank longings blocked the victory of the Cuban Army Liberator over Spain and the Yankees appropriate the Island when the crisis of power and the disunion prevailed in their political forces and was conceived as a disappeared continuation of Cuba: the forge of a nation.

Although it is a topic that it possesses a wide bibliography so much Cuban as strange it becomes still necessary to deepen more on him, because not everything has achieved the enough success and not only for the subjective factor that marks to the historiographic production for the historian's premeditation. In this editor's opinion, this book is able to put the points on it places in many aspects where misunderstandings and misinterpretations have become, conscious or not, regarding the positions of American and Cuban in the years that it lasted the foreign occupation and the later setting-up of the Republic.

One of them, for example, is the difference between occupation and intervention, two categories managed by the historiography that the mere diversity of terms transcends. In consequence, the occupation approach is defended by the author by the methods with which the northern government and their representatives in the Island mediated in the supposed organization of the politic-economic lattice of the nation. Leonard Wood attitude, the decisions that took on the destinations of Cuba, already responding to the anexionist pretences of the nascent empire, they are demonstrated like a conquest more than like a disinterested mediation after the Cuban independence.

The scandals of northern officials' corruption, the fight for the possession of the economic wealth and the pretence of imposing an  American educational system are the trustworthy samples of how the Platt Amendment instrumentation was not anything else  but the colophon of a plan orchestrated to settle down in Cuba a bourgeois colonial republic, monitored from Washington, in benefit of the expansionary longings that were camouflaged in solidary and developing intentions of a «sensitive»  power with the fight of the Cubans to be pulled up the Spanish retrograde oppression. For that reason, the approach of «protectorate» doesn't agree in the practice to that what happened.

Everybody who wants to deepen in the knowledge of a stage so convulse, with its defects and virtues, its traps and intents, its perspectives and lacks, will be able to find in Cuba: the masks and the shades. The first occupation, of Rolando Rodriguez a sharp and developing text, solicitous and sustained that more than to profile the History in a sense or other, allows to feel the facts in all their dimension. I don't think that Rodriguez work is postulated an absolute thesis, but rather it proposes the objective analysis that our past deserves.