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Assessing Everyday Life in Post-Soviet Cuba

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AY, CUBA! A SOCIO-EROTIC JOURNEY. By CodrescuAndre and David Grahamphotography. (New York: St Martin's, 1999. Pp. 206. $25.00 cloth.)
WAITING FOR FIDEL. By HuntChristopher. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. Pp. 259. $13.00 paper.)
CUBA—GOING BACK. By MendozaTony. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997. Pp. 155. $22.95 paper.)

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Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2022

Michael Snodgrass
Michael Snodgrass*
Affiliation:
Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis
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Abstract

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Type
Review Essays
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 36 , Issue 3 , 2001 , pp. 204 - 220
Copyright
Copyright © 2001 by the University of Texas Press

Footnotes

*

I wish to thank Marc McLeod for commenting on an early version of this essay.

References

1. Marifeli Pérez-Stable, The Cuban Revolution: Origins, Course, and Legacy, 2d ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 173–75; and Andrés Oppenheimer, Castro's Final Hour (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992).

2. Thus Richard Fagen observed in the late 1960s, “Since 1959 on, there has been no dearth of persons willing to testify to the imminent collapse of the Castro regime.” See Fagen, The Transformation of Political Culture in Cuba (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1969), 159.

3. The divided perspectives of Havana's youth are captured well in the documentary Cuba Va! The Challenge of the Next Generation, directed by Gail Dolgin and Vicente Franco (San Francisco, Calif.: Cuba Va Video Project, 1993).

4. This seemingly radical response to external exigencies and domestic pressures proved consistent with a history of erratic revolutionary policy reforms. See Susan Eva Eckstein, Back from the Future: Cuba under Castro (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), 6–12, 88–127.

5. Ibid., 113–27.

6. William Beezley offers a noteworthy example, to which this analysis is indebted, in Judas at the Jockey Club and Other Episodes of Porfirian Mexico (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987).

7. Current restrictions on research, a possible dearth of government archives, and the unreliability of basic statistical evidence augment travel writing's value as a primary source for social historians. For example, one journalist recently found Cuba's 1985 per capita gross domestic product calculated at rates ranging from $2,058 (by dissident Cuban economists) to $3,652 (U.S. Chamber of Commerce). Related figures for 1996 varied between $900 (Columbia Journal of World Business) and $1,200 (National Bank of Cuba), a significant discrepancy that reveals a conspicuous trend. See P. J. O'Rourke, “Cubanomics,” Rolling Stone, 11 Nov. 1996, 108–13.

8. Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan, Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), vii–x. Along with first-person travel narratives, the genre includes anthologies, reprints of travel classics, photography books, and abundant guidebooks for this age of mass tourism. In addition to the works reviewed here, other recent Cuba travel accounts include Tom Miller, Trading with the Enemy: A Yankee Travels through Castro's Cuba (New York: Maxwell Macmillan, 1992); Stephen Smith, The Land of Miracles (London: Little, Brown, 1997); Jacobo Timerman, Cuba: A Journey (New York: Knopf, 1990); and The Reader's Companion to Cuba, edited by Alan Ryan and Crista Malone (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1997).

9. See John Kirk and Peter McKenna, “Trying to Address the Cuban Paradox,” LARR 34, no. 2 (1999):214–26.

10. George Black, The Good Neighbor: How the United States Wrote the History of Central America and the Caribbean (New York: Pantheon, 1988), 1–16. Adriana Mendez Rodenas analyzes mid-nineteenth-century travel writing on Cuba in Gender and Nationalism in Colonial Cuba: The Travels of Santa Cruz y Montalvo, Condesa de Merlin (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1998).

11. Black, The Good Neighbor, 31–105; see also Fredrick B. Pike, The United States and Latin America: Myths and Stereotypes of Civilization and Nature (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992), 154–296. Earlier examples of the genre include Basil Woon, When It's Cocktail Time in Cuba (New York: H. Liveright, 1928); and Sydney Clark, Cuban Tapestry (New York: R. M. McBride, 1936).

12. The following accounts appear commonly in university libraries: Warren Miller, 90 Miles from Home (Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown, 1961); Elizabeth Sutherland Martinez, The Youngest Revolution (New York: Dial, 1969); John Clytus, Black Man in Red Cuba (Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1970); Andrew Salkey, Havana Journal (New York: Penguin, 1971); Ernesto Cardenal, In Cuba (New York: New Directions, 1974); and Lee Chadwick, Cuba Today (Westport, Conn: L. Hill, 1975). Meanwhile, a legion of Cuban émigrés have penned memoirs that cast a contrary view of social and political conditions on the island. See Louis A. Pérez, Jr, Essays on Cuban History: Historiography and Research (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995), 158.

13. In addition to the publications reviewed here, a number of magazines also published reports from contemporary Cuba. More informative accounts include Robert Stone, “Havana Then and Now,” Harper's Magazine, Mar. 1992, 36–45; Marc Cooper, “For Sale: Used Marxism,” Harper's Magazine, Mar. 1995, 54–65; Joy Gordon, “Cuba's Entrepreneurial Socialism,” The Atlantic Monthly, Jan 1997, 18–23; Alma Guillermoprieto, “Love and Misery in Cuba,” New York Review of Books, 26 Mar. 1998, 10–15; Saul Landau, “The Revolution Turns Forty,” The Progressive, Apr. 1999, 24–32; various authors, “The Cuba Issue,” Cigar Aficionado, May–June 1999; and John Putnam, “Cuba,” National Geographic, June 1999, 2–36.

14. Tourist apartheid refers to the systematic exclusion of Cubans as visitors from the island's tourist hotels and resorts, making these places enclaves where native employees serve a foreign clientele.

15. For the contrasting style of a National Geographic photographer whose selection of images and format creates a more romanticized picture of the island, see David Alan Harvey, photographer, and Elizabeth Newhouse, Cuba (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999).

16. For a brief but provocative comparative analysis of communist Cuba, Eastern Europe, and Asia, see Pérez-Stable, The Cuban Revolution, 197–201.

17. Eckstein presents figures on per capita gross domestic product and caloric intake in Back to the Future, 220, 226.

18. According to Rosendahl, 14 percent of Palmera's adult population held party memberships, compared with the national average of 10 percent (p. 91).

19. Readers may find Rosendahl's comments on political repression cursory and belated. Not until the final chapter does she acknowledge, “The Cuban system is often called totalitarian and repressive. I would describe the Palmeran system as marked by strong social control” (p. 146).

20. For an example of this point of view, see Christopher Howard, Living and Investing in the “New” Cuba: A Guide to Inexpensive Living and Making Money in the Caribbean's Most Beautiful Tropical Paradise (Miami, Fla.: Costa Rica Books, 1999).

21. Rosalie Schwartz, Pleasure Island: Tourism and Temptation in Cuba (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 210–12. On the government's most recent and apparently successful efforts to remove sex workers from Havana's public spaces, see Silvana Paternostro, “Sexual Revolution: Communism versus Prostitution,” New Republic, 10 July 2000, 18–23.