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New West Indian Guide Vol. 85, no. 1-2 (2011), pp. 79-84 URL: http://www.kitlv-journals.nl/index.php/nwig/index URN:NBN:NL:UI:10-1-101384 Copyright: content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License ISSN: 1382-2373 JEAN STUBBS AN ISLAND CAllED CUBA An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba. RUTH BEHAR, pho- tographs by HUMBERTO MAYOL. New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007. xiii + 297 pp. (Cloth US$ 29.95) Fidel Castro: My Life: A Spoken Autobiography. FIDEL CASTRO & IGNACIO RAMONET. New York: Scribner/Simon & Schuster, 2008. vii + 724 pp. (Paper US$ 22.00, e-book US$ 14.99) Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know. JULIA E. SWEIG. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. xiv + 279 pp. (Paper US$ 16.95) These three ostensibly very different books tell a compelling story of each author’s approach, as much as the subject matter itself. Fidel Castro: My Life: A Spoken Autobiography is based on a series of long interviews granted by the then-president of Cuba, Fidel Castro, to Spanish-Franco journalist Ignacio Ramonet. Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know, by U.S. political analyst Julia Sweig, is one of a set country series, and, like Ramonet’s, presented in ques- tion/answer format. An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba, with a narrative by Cuban-American anthropologist Ruth Behar and photographs by Cuban photographer Humberto Mayol, is a retrospective/introspective account of the Jewish presence in Cuba. While from Ramonet and Sweig we learn much about the revolutionary project, Behar and Mayol convey the lived expe- rience of the small Jewish community against that backdrop. Ignacio Ramonet begins his introduction to Fidel Castro by describing the setting of Castro’s personal office in the Palacio de la Revolución, in the early hours of the morning, with the aging but pre-illness leader tireless amidst revered icons: Latin American independence leaders Simón Bolívar and Antonio José de Sucre, Cuba’s independence leader José Martí and North America’s Abraham Lincoln, along with Cervantes’s fictional Don Quixote astride his steed Rocinante, co-revolutionary Camilo Cienfuegos (tragi- cally killed soon after the 1959 triumph of the Revolution), writer Ernest Downloaded from Brill.com09/23/2021 02:29:48PM via free access 80 New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids vol. 85 no. 1 & 2 (2011) Hemingway, and his Galician-born father Angel Castro. The scene is set for the book’s depiction of Castro as liberator of the Americas, fighter for ideals, a man of culture, a son. Ramonet had the idea for the book in 2002, when he was in Cuba for the Havana Book Fair, after publishing his (shorter) conversations with Mexico’s Zapatista Subcomandante Marcos. Joseph Stiglitz, the winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize for Economics, was also there, and the two of them engaged in conversation with El Comandante over the alternative globalization move- ment. Among his reasons for wishing to do the book was making known to younger generations the Fidel Castro who had erupted onto the global stage over half a century ago, lived through and been protagonist of some of the most convulsive moments of those years, and led Cuba’s continuing defence of socialism and noncapitulation to the neoliberal “Third Way” conventional wisdom of the post-1989 world. In Ramonet’s view, “Whether his detractors like it or not, Fidel Castro has a place in the pantheon of world figures who have struggled most fiercely for social justice and with greatest solidarity come to the aid of the oppressed” (p. 11). Ramonet knew Castro was unlikely to write his own autobiography, so proposed the long interview format, giving him full control over the final text, to amend and add where he saw fit. He had no intention of interrogating, inquisitorial fashion, but rather of eliciting a “personal interpretation” (p. 17). Long sessions in January-March 2003 produced a first draft, already longer by far than four previous works, but new events, including the Iraq war, occa- sioned the need to fill in gaps and more sessions in late 2004 and again in late 2005. Finally, notes were added. The first edition came out in Spain in April 2006, and in Cuba a month later, before Castro, due to “obligations of state,” had personally read it. Then he started reading with a fine eye, completing it after his August 2006 surgery and temporary secession of power to his brother Raúl – subsequently to become permanent in February 2008. There have been various iterations and titles of the book. It appeared in Spanish as Cien horas con Fidel (o Fidel Castro: biografía a dos voces) (“A Hundred Hours with Fidel [or Fidel Castro: A Biography in Two Voices]”), and in French as Fidel Castro: biografie à deux voix – titles that perhaps more aptly capture a book which is neither biography nor autobiography, but rather a series of questions and answers around key topics, from childhood up to the present, but omitting any reference to Castro’s adult personal life. Most informative is translator Andrew Hurley’s note in the English-language edition (pp. 627-30), in which he recounts how he originally worked from the proof pages for the first Spanish edition, supplemented by corrections as it went to press. Then a new set of proofs was sent him for a completely revised and restructured Spanish edition, some one hundred pages longer, to be used for the English-language version. So began the gargantuan task of tallying all the changes Castro had made. For those interested in comparing the finer points, all editions are in the public domain. Downloaded from Brill.com09/23/2021 02:29:48PM via free access REVIEW ARTIclES 81 Much ground has been covered in previous studies, as also the voluminous speeches given and various accounts and books penned by Castro. However, there are new facets and nuances, from the vantage point of hindsight, some occasioning further questions in this reader. In the context of Cuba’s contem- porary emphasis on health and its humanitarian involvement in neighboring Haiti, how formative was the Haitian black presence in Castro’s early life, in Birán and in Santiago de Cuba, and his early experience of the Santiago Spanish community’s cooperative medical facilities? And what of his assess- ment that there was no class consciousness in 1950s Cuba, except among those in the Popular Socialist Party, whom he describes as having more of a class instinct than class consciousness? Critical moments in history are glossed over, such as slavery, worker struggles, and the revolution’s treatment of homosexuals. Ambivalence over the death penalty contrasts with vociferous condemnation of U.S. covert “fifth column” tactics to bring down the Revolution. Yet, Ramonet’s final introductory words hold: “In the winter of his life and now, due to health concerns, a little distanced from power, he is still driven to defend the energy revolution, the environment, against neoliberal globalization and internal corruption. He is still down in the trenches, on the front line, leading the battle for the ideas he believes in – ideas which, apparently, nothing and no one will ever make him give up” (p. 21). For Julia Sweig, Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know was a personal jour- ney of a different kind. She, too, opens her introduction with images: of a first visit to Cuba in 1984 as a student, sitting in a Havana park beside the imposing, modernist sculpture of Don Quixote and his Rocinante, watching youths in the park and reflecting on the lack of branding in Cuba at the time – except for the brand name of Fidel Castro, whose presence she describes as ubiquitous. Many trips later, in 2008, she reflected on how, while in some ways unchanged, in others Cuba had become almost unrecognizable, most notably for the absence of Castro. It wasn’t that he had evaporated, but she saw and felt a Cuba that was moving on. She returned to the park and found it filled with an open-air market of vendors selling food, clothing, books, and jewelry – “an urban scene that could easily have been plucked from any city in Latin America” (p. xxi). The emphasis of her book is on the U.S.-Cuba relationship and explain- ing why Cuba under Raúl and its next leaders will in all likelihood continue defying imperial power. The fundamental question she sets out to answer is why the revolution has endured beyond the cold war and the half-century in which Castro was in power. Some of the answers, she states, might seem obvious to those outside the United States, who have had more contact with Cuba, but contrast with the prevailing U.S. belief that Washington should somehow manage regime change on this island just 90 miles away. Patently not a book about the personality of one man, or one man and his brother, this is rather an attempt to explain Cuba’s trajectory, domestically and on the Downloaded from Brill.com09/23/2021 02:29:48PM via free access 82 New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids vol. 85 no. 1 & 2 (2011) world stage, which has both shaped and been shaped by them. Her goal is to paint a Cuba that is “far more textured and complex than the romanticized myth still resonating from that sculpture in Havana” (p. xxii). Sweig has crafted an excellent and well-written overview with the U.S. reader in mind, highlighting some of the better- and lesser-known episodes in both historical and contemporary periods. The pre-1959 chapter is brief, dominated by the late nineteenth-century overthrow of Spanish colonial rule in what came to be known as the Spanish-American war (a term that with the stroke of a pen obliterated thirty years of Cubans’ struggle for independence) followed by U.S.

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