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Devyn Spence Benson, Antiracism in Cuba: The Unfinished Revolution (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), pp. 332, $29.95, pb.

information technologies in the pursuit of information gathering could lead to violent outcomes. Equally fascinating is the idea of ‘governing through sound’ (p. ) – that states sought to create imagined communities of listeners yet rarely achieved this desired end. The messiness of media technology’s dissemination, adoption and application proves to be one of the book’s more vital through-lines. Yet the whole here is less than the sum of its parts. For instance, Bronfman elaborates on telegrams as both objects and subjects of history, yet this approach turns out to be little more than a discussion of traditional archives and Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s wellknown concept of silencing the past. The book also contains digressions that, while germane, take too long to build up to main claims. In the ‘voice’ chapter, a lengthy set-up about the cultural politics of language in Jamaica and Haiti could have been whittled down to provide more space for a discussion of voice on the radio, which the chapter promises at the outset yet addresses only cursorily at the end. Other anecdotes veer away from the book’s themes altogether. This is the case with vignettes about journalist Herbert Seligman in Haiti, marine shootings during the occupation, the killing of insurgent Charlemagne Péralt, the market price of coffee, and the activities of the anti-Trujillo opposition, to name a few. These detours of various lengths leave many claims sketchy when they are addressed. Related to these digressions is the lack of context that hampers full examination of other, relevant anecdotes. To give one example, the attempt to soothe edgy marines in Haiti with classical music needed more interrogation. Did these working-class military men, a plurality of whom were foreign-born, enjoy classical music, or was this genre imposed by US-born middleclass occupation managers expressing their own musical tastes? The anecdote, unfortunately, passes too quickly for it to be given much scrutiny. The brevity of the chapters mandates a limited attention to any given detail or analysis of evidence, yet brevity does not prevent the proliferation of metaphors and tropes. The ‘ears’ metaphor turns out to be about the metaphor of fidelity, in particular the fidelity of listening publics, which are then referred to as mediated publics. An attempt to keep track of the cascade of concepts proves distracting. Criticisms aside, Isles of Noise provides a template for thinking through communications technology in other contexts. Scholars in the emerging field of radio history in the Global South will find advantageous the book’s account of mass media under late colonialism and neocolonialism. Bronfman’s framework could prove productive for the study of how vernacular languages and US influence shaped the introduction of radio in much wealthier colonies like Trinidad. The examination of vernacular languages in sound media, moreover, raises important questions on tangential topics, such as how to explain a dearth of patois/Creole in Jamaican popular music lyrics until the s. By opening a view onto power and media technology, Isles of Noise can inspire subsequent research on the modern Caribbean and beyond.