Not Dancing with Cuba: a Public Autocritique

Comrades,

I cannot – as I had hoped – post about Alma Guillermoprieto’s Dancing with Cuba today.  I am afraid that in this case there are no overenthusiastic dogs, no dodgy Argentine internet connections; I can’t even blame the cat Koba, and he can be blamed for most things.  No, the truth is that I tried to formulate a review of this extremely slippery book and failed.  I turned it this way and that, but by the time I found a successful approach my brain was trickling out my ears and it was too late to write a coherent review.

I weighed up the pros and cons and concluded that it was probably better to post an apology than to write something crappy.  In the meantime, I’ll leave you with another, more impressive public apology: Fidel’s speech on the failure of the ten million ton harvest, as rendered by Guillermoprieto.

He repeated several times that there were problems with the harvest, that the possibility of not reaching ten million had to be considered, and then suddenly, in what appeared to be an uncontainable outburst, totally unexpected by anyone in the audience, Fidel said: “But if you want me to tell you in all clarity what the situation is, it’s simply that we’re not going to make it to ten million tons.  Simply that.  I’m not going to beat around the bush.”

My review of Dancing with Cuba, unlike the ten million ton harvest, will appear soon.

This lovely photograph of Fidel is a work for hire created between 1952 and 1986 by one of the following staff photographers at U.S. News & World Report: Warren K. Leffler (WKL), Thomas J. O’Halloran (TOH), Marion S. Trikosko (MST), John Bledsoe (JTB), or Chick Harrity (CWH). It is part of a collection donated to the Library of Congress. Per the deed of gift, U.S. News & World Report dedicated to the public all rights it held for the photographs in this collection upon its donation to the Library. Thus, there are no known restrictions on the usage of this photograph.