The Thin Red Line

It was a stroke of serendipity that I happened on the same day awhile back to stumble on both Mandy MacDonald’s Culture Smart Cuba and Nancy Alonso’s Closed For Repairs on the same day.    It seems to me that we mostly hear about Cuba only in terms of the political agendas of some wealthy Miamians who have an agenda and the various other political players who have to play with or against them.     What is sadly lacking is any reporting that sheds light on the real lives of the remarkable Cuban people whose struggles and in spite of the United States continuing embargo are creating a new path for themselves.

The Culture Smart guide is one of a series of titles that attempts to give travelers to poorly understood parts of the world a base understanding of the people, cultures and pressing local issues they will encounter.  The guides also seek to give the traveler the knowledge  and confidence to veer of the well trod tourist path and allow himself to meaningfully interact with the people whose country he is visiting.

By contrast Havana author Nancy Alonso’s Closed For Repairs, a selection of eleven fictionalized vignettes of Cuban’s dealing with the realities of life under the US embargo from planting vegetable gardens in pots  in urban apartments to dealing with the sometimes dysfunctional transportation and distribution facilities.   This English translation by Anne Fountain is available from Curbstone Press.   Combined with the somewhat more marketing oriented Culture Smart volume, Alonso’s front line reportage on the lives of work a day Cubans provides a rare opportunity for an informed glimpse about a part of the world so close by but in such a real sense so far, far away from the US.   Both are Highly Recommended.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 27th, 2008 at 12:01 am and is filed under Book Reviews, Books, Fiction, Non-Fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.