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Cuba: Island at a Crossroad
Shows and describes life in modern Cuba, and provides an overview of Cuban history and the impact of lost Soviet aid
- GenresPhotography
252 pages, Hardcover
First published October 1, 1999
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 22, 2024
The photos are very much worth the price of admission here, as for the text...it's from 1999 and shows it.
There's a pretty good capsule history of Cuba in there that expresses some of the frustrations of the Cubans with the colonial and imperialist history of the island. It's a pretty good primer on who Bautista was but in case you were wondering who was telling this story there are more than a few periodic reminders that this book is written by Americans in the period just a few years after the fall of the Soviet Union. There's a tone here of hegemonic triumphalism that looks at the plight of a Cuba experiencing the loss of Soviet subsidies and so the text is also full of that particular brand of neo-colonial exultant expectation of imminent collapse.
And so reading this book 25 years after it was written is full of these moments where you read the words expecting Fidel Castro to die very soon (the author and photographer would have to wait another 17 years for that. And as for the regime collapsing immediately after that...well as of 2024, still not happening.
One of the more telling moments was a picture of a group of Cubans getting together for their local residential committee meeting and the text accompanying it was something along the lines of "most Cubans think they already have a democracy" because of this participatory decision making on a local level but they don't have any national say. I mean, given how little say we have in national issues in this country versus how much say we might have in a local community association I'd say it's maybe uncomfortably similar.
But the neo-colonial attitudes of the authors of this text wouldn't brook that comparison.
There's a pretty good capsule history of Cuba in there that expresses some of the frustrations of the Cubans with the colonial and imperialist history of the island. It's a pretty good primer on who Bautista was but in case you were wondering who was telling this story there are more than a few periodic reminders that this book is written by Americans in the period just a few years after the fall of the Soviet Union. There's a tone here of hegemonic triumphalism that looks at the plight of a Cuba experiencing the loss of Soviet subsidies and so the text is also full of that particular brand of neo-colonial exultant expectation of imminent collapse.
And so reading this book 25 years after it was written is full of these moments where you read the words expecting Fidel Castro to die very soon (the author and photographer would have to wait another 17 years for that. And as for the regime collapsing immediately after that...well as of 2024, still not happening.
One of the more telling moments was a picture of a group of Cubans getting together for their local residential committee meeting and the text accompanying it was something along the lines of "most Cubans think they already have a democracy" because of this participatory decision making on a local level but they don't have any national say. I mean, given how little say we have in national issues in this country versus how much say we might have in a local community association I'd say it's maybe uncomfortably similar.
But the neo-colonial attitudes of the authors of this text wouldn't brook that comparison.
December 10, 2009
Outdated now, but an interesting little book. Gives a quick survey on Cuban history, in particular its relationship to the center of the universe, us, America.
April 10, 2009
One of my favorite photographic journals about Cuba.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews