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Modern Cuba comes alive in a vibrant portrait of a group of families's varied journeys in one community over the last twenty years.
Cubans today, most of whom have lived their entire lives under the Castro regime, are hesitantly embracing the future. In his new book, Anthony DePalma, a veteran reporter with years of experience in Cuba, focuses on a neighborhood across the harbor from Old Havana to dramatize the optimism as well as the enormous challenges that Cubans face: a moving snapshot of Cuba with all its contradictions as the new regime opens the gate to the capitalism that Fidel railed against for so long.
In Guanabacoa, longtime residents prove enterprising in the extreme. Scrounging materials in the black market, Cary Luisa Limonta Ewen has started her own small manufacturing business, a surprising turn for a former ranking member of the Communist Party. Her good friend Lili, a loyal Communist, heads the neighborhood's watchdog revolutionary committee. Artist Arturo Montoto, who had long lived and worked in Mexico, moved back to Cuba when he saw improving conditions but complains like any artist about recognition. In stark contrast, Jorge García lives in Miami and continues to seek justice for the sinking of a tugboat full of refugees, a tragedy that claimed the lives of his son, grandson, and twelve other family members, a massacre for which the government denies any role. In The Cubans, many patriots face one new question: is their loyalty to the revolution, or to their country?
As people try to navigate their new reality, Cuba has become an improvised country, an old machine kept running with equal measures of ingenuity and desperation. A new kind of revolutionary spirit thrives beneath the conformity of a half century of totalitarian rule. And over all of this looms the United States, with its unpredictable policies, which warmed towards its neighbor under one administration but whose policies have now taken on a chill reminiscent of the Cold War.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
May 26, 2020 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9780593166543
- File size: 365379 KB
- Duration: 12:41:12
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Robertson Dean's resonant voice makes for a lively rendering of Anthony DePalma's fascinating cultural history of Cuba and its people. Starting before the Communist Revolution of 1959, when Fidel Castro overthrew the U.S.-supported Batista regime, Dean helps to flesh out Cuba's long history as a Caribbean power: from a Spanish colony relying on African slaves to a nascent republic, a military dictatorship, and finally a Soviet-backed satellite state. Dean's narration turns what could be a dry litany of facts into a riveting tale. But it is in the stories of contemporary Cubans that Dean's narration really shines. Their everyday struggles, triumphs, and tragedies make for a riveting audiobook on par with any sweeping work of fiction. D.G.P. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine -
February 24, 2020
Journalist DePalma (The Man Who Invented Fidel) delivers a sensitive portrait of Cubans navigating their “bizarre mash-up of an economy” from the 1970s through 2018. Drawn from the eastern Havana neighborhood of Guanabacoa, DePalma’s subjects include Caridad “Cary” Luisa Limonta Ewen, a Communist party member and economic engineer of Jamaican descent, and artist Arturo Montoto, who returned to Cuba after a “self-imposed exile” in Chile and Mexico and makes “subtle social commentaries” in his still-life paintings. Though the U.S. embargo has created a culture of deprivation since 1960, the situation grew much worse, according to DePalma, during the “special period” in the 1990s after the dissolution of the Soviet Union left Cuba without its main backer. He movingly relates the story of one survivor of the 1994 sinking of the 13 de Marzo, a tugboat filled with refugees that witnesses say was attacked by the Cuban coast guard, resulting in the deaths of 37 people. Recent food shortages, uncertainty over the transition of power between Raúl Castro and newly elected resident Miguel Díaz-Canel, and a crackdown on private businesses and wealth accumulation, DePalma writes, have led to fears that more hard times are coming. In impressively specific detail, DePalma captures the suffering and resilience of ordinary Cubans caught between the political posturing of their government and the U.S. Readers will savor this intimate, eye-opening account.
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