"La Prehistoria" represents the second installment in the Cuban Academy of Sciences' "Cien Años de Lucha / Cien Años de Ciencia" (One Hundred Years of Struggle / One Hundred Years of Science) series, which explicitly linked scientific development to revolutionary struggle. The cover employs bold modernist typography in red and black separated by navy blue horizontal bars against cream, with a striking red spine creating a dynamic composition that evokes revolutionary banners and Cuban flag colors. This design strategy visually reinforced the series' central argument: that one hundred years of independence struggle culminated in one hundred years of scientific advancement under socialism.
Written by Ernesto E. Tabío, Director of the Anthropology Department at the Cuban Academy of Sciences, this study argues that Cuban prehistory research had been dominated by outdated bourgeois methodologies until the Revolution enabled a "definitive leap in quality" in scientific investigation. Published in 1968 during the "Año del Guerrillero Heroico" (Year of the Heroic Guerrilla Fighter), commemorating Che Guevara's death, the text divides Cuban history into three stages: Spanish colony (mid-19th century to 1898), neocolonial republic dominated by U.S. imperialism (1902-1959), and free socialist Cuba (1959-present). This periodization exemplified revolutionary historiography's project of repositioning scientific knowledge production within narratives of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggle, asserting that authentic scientific development required political liberation from foreign domination.