Last Dance in Havana; The Final Days of Fidel and the Start of the New Cuban Revolution

New York, NY: Free Press, 2004. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. xi, [3], 272, [2] pages. Includes Appendix: A Listener's Guide to Cuba; Acknowledgments; 10 Black and White Photographs; and Index. Inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper to Steve Roberts. Inscription reads: "To Steve, Thanks again, and best to you and Cokie. Eugene Robinson". Eugene Harold Robinson (born March 12, 1954) is an American newspaper columnist and an associate editor of The Washington Post. His columns are syndicated to 262 newspapers by The Washington Post Writers Group. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009, was elected to the Pulitzer Prize Board in 2011 and served as its chair from 2017 to 2018. Robinson also serves as NBC News and MSNBC's chief political analyst. Robinson is a member of the National Association of Black Journalists and a board member of the IWMF (International Women's Media Foundation) The author argues that the music of Cuba is the country's real news, and that those who make the music are the real journalists, analysts, and social commentators. Derived from a Kirkus review: An African-American journalist travels through Cuba, returning with news that, while the glory days of socialism are gone, Castro and company are very much in charge. "After forty-four years," writes Washington Post editor Robinson, "Fidel is still in firm control of Cuba. He faces no serious challenge." Meantime, the Cuban people make music, dance, and worship ancestral gods brought from Africa and blended with Christian traditions to make a religion quite specific to the island; as Robinson writes, this mixture "allowed the slaves to pray to the orishas in a way that their Spanish overlords not only had to tolerate, but encourage. They probably knew . . . that the slaves who came to the churches to pray so fervently before the statues of the Virgin Mary were in fact praying to a sultry black demigoddess who would help them find their way in affairs of love." Foreigners-Italians, Canadians, and visitors from other nations not strapped by America's longstanding prohibition against free travel to Cuba-bring money and ideas, soak up the atmosphere of storied venues like the Tropical Club, and return with CDs, rum, and cigars, but rarely anything more untoward. Those who perforce remain on the island have weathered a long economic crisis brought on by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the disappearance of its financial support, and, writes Robinson, are now discovering that long-dormant inequalities are returning, since most of the money sent to the island by expatriates comes from whites and goes to whites. What's to come from all this hardship? Perhaps a peaceful transition to a new government, once Fidel shuffles off the mortal coil; perhaps harder times as doctrinaire Communists vie for leadership. Full of sharp observations on modern Cuba-for policymakers and travelers alike.