On New Year’s Eve 1959, Burt Glinn left a party in New York and boarded a plane to Havana. What he found upon arrival—Castro’s motorcade moving through the city, soldiers embracing in the streets, ordinary Cubans taking up arms—became one of the defining photographic records of the Cuban Revolution’s first days. This collection, published by Dewi Lewis in 2001, gathers those images for the first time in book form. Many had gone virtually unseen since the moment they were made.

Glinn, a Magnum photographer whose career spanned conflicts and cultural shifts across several continents, brought to Havana the instincts of a reporter and the eye of someone who understood that history is often most legible in gestures and crowds rather than speeches. The photographs here dwell on faces, on the physical proximity of people to their new leaders, on the mixture of exhaustion and exhilaration that follows any sudden political rupture. Rafael Acosta de Arriba and editor Nan Richardson contribute essays, and Glinn himself reflects on the assignment in a memoir piece. The entire volume appears in both Spanish and English.

What distinguishes this book from later retrospectives of Cuban photography is its temporal proximity to the events it describes. These are not images made with the benefit of hindsight, nor are they nostalgic. They register uncertainty as much as triumph. The sequencing, across 128 pages and 83 duotone plates, allows small moments to accumulate into a larger argument about how revolutions feel to those living through them.

For collectors of photojournalism and Latin American history, the book occupies a useful position: substantial enough to serve as a serious document, compact enough to read as a single sustained encounter. Its bilingual format and the presence of Cuban as well as foreign voices make it more than a foreign correspondent’s notebook. It is a record of a moment when the direction of a country was still genuinely open.