Cuba: The Morning After--Confronting Castro's Legacy

Rating:
Summary: It misses the Cuban spirit
Review: Most books on Cuba talk about the charm of her people, the delights of her women (for male authors, anyway) and the chaos of her economy. I visited Cuba in December of 2002 and can cheerfully report that Cuba is a highly seductive place, a place of great charm and beauty, and Cuban women are the sweetest in the world.

In this book, we see a very different Cuba, Economic Cuba. And Economic Cuba is a disaster. Harvests are failing. Equipment is failing. Sugar cane is rotting in the fields. Tourist hotels are booming but enrich only a tiny percentage of the population.

Economic Cuba, then, doesn't have a chance. The author paints a grim portrait of a country time forgot, one where there was little hope of any kind of economic recovery.

I have no doubt that this book is factual, as far as it goes. But it reads like someone who has never taken a stroll on the Malecon, the seawall. Beautiful but decaying examples of ancient architecture line the vast, American-built promenade. On the other side, the ocean, in its magnificence, and beyond the twin towers of the Hotel Nacional and the slick sterility of the Melia Cohiba hotel. The occasional Cuban girl offers the male tourist his favourite kind of company, as he strolls past enjoying the sunset.

In other words, this book underestimates the pull and the charm of Cuba, for tourists and future residents alike. If Cuba is opened up to investment from Americans, if investment laws can be made fair and the ugliness of Communism swept away into the dustbin of history, I have no doubt life on the island will become dynamic and fun once more.

But those are a lot of "if"s. If this book had done a good job analyzing them, I would cheerfully recommend it. But its analysis, in 25 brief pages, is superficial and reads like it came from someone who has never visited the island or enjoyed its charms.

Rating:
Summary: Oh dear this is bad
Review: This book is written by a man who doesn't care about Cuba. The island is for him only a place to fear (e.g. he actually discusses the possibilities of virus injected into migratory birds as biological warfare), or a place for future investments. The book is actually worse than I expected, and it makes me sad that scholars can produce such useless material about an interesting place as Cuba is. I guess Falcoff just isn't curious, or feels no empathy for other cultures. He says "Americans are - unlike their European, Canadian, or Latin American counterparts - intrusive and inquiring". I know the author is an educated man, but this to me is nothing but stupidity. Save Cuba from this!

Rating:
Summary: It's a dirty job, but someone has to do it.
Review: Yes, Cuba is a charming and seductive place to visit. But as any one of the thousands of desperate migrants from that troubled land can tell you, it is a brutally hard place to live. Those women the tourist meets stolling along the seawall aren't out there for the view or the exercise. They are locked in a heart-wrenching struggle to eck out another day's subsistence using the only thing the state hasn't stolen from them (yet).

So it is a dirty job, but someone has to look past the charm and facade of today's Cuba and examine the cruel reality of Castro's legacy objectively. Numbers don't lie--they are what they are. That Cuba's numbers are horrible is not the fault of the author; those numbers (and the human suffering they entail) are the fault of Castro and the legions of boot-licks who have kept him in power, lo these many years. Left-wing American journalists, academics, democrat politicians, and celebrity activists figure prominently in that group, to their shame.

Mark Falcoff did this dirty job about as well as anyone could have expected. It's always a challenge to study a closed society such as Cuba's, where important facts are hidden away, crucial incidents are covered up or denied, and the official story is always a deliberate lie. I've studied Cuba closely for years, and I have always hoped that the long-sufering Cuban people would one day have a brighter future, free of Castro's suffocating bite. I was as disheartened as the previous reviewers were to be confronted with the ugly facts, but there they are. Complaining about them won't help.

Those who really care about Cuba should thank Mr. Falcoff for the 'heads up' this book provides. I hope our policy makers are aware of the information and analysis this book provides, and have some kind of plan to deal with the societal implosion the book predicts.