Our Woman in Havana
Reporting Castro's Cuba
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
Graham Greene saw the Castros rise; Sarah Rainsford watched them leave.
From the street where Wormold, the hapless hero of Greene’s Our Man in Havana, plied his trade, BBC foreign correspondent Rainsford reports on Fidel’s reshaping of a nation, and what the future holds for ordinary Cubans now that he and his brother Raul are no longer in power.
Through tales of literary ghosts and forgotten reporters, believers in the revolution and dissidents, entrepreneurs optimistic about the new Cuba and the disillusioned still looking for a way out, Our Woman in Havana paints an enthralling picture of this enigmatic country as it enters a new era.
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Rainsford, who was posted in Havana for the BBC from 2011 to 2014 and returned during 2017, weaves a lucid account of the country's past and present. She interviews Cuban athletes, writers, civil servants, entrepreneurs, doctors, youth, and old-timers to take the country's pulse. Her wide-ranging and evocative portrait of contemporary Cuba covers its housing deficit, underground economy (Castro's Communist government guaranteed free education, housing, and healthcare, but "never succeeded in quelling consumer instinct"), expanding privately run restaurant scene, "sleeping" Catholic faith, art preoccupied with "emigration and separation," and popular music and dance clubs. Weaving in Cuba's history, Rainsford also follows the footsteps of Graham Greene and other writers seduced by hedonistic pre-revolutionary Havana, with its cabarets, bars, and casinos often run by American gangsters. She conjures the Hotel Sevilla of the 1950s and '60s, which became a crossroads for writers and reporters doubling as secret agents; the glamorous Tropicana nightclub; and the lurid strip clubs in Chinatown. She describes the brutal pre-revolutionary Batista regime, the idealistic early months of Castro's revolution, Castro's forced labor camps for "deviants," the country's economic uncertainty following the fall of the Soviet Union, its rapprochement with the U.S., and its current "paralysis." Rainsford presents an atmospheric portrait of a country on the brink of a new era.
