When I wrote about North Korea (Nothing to Envy: Barbara Demick, Real Lives in North Korea) six weeks ago, several people reminded me that there are similar areas of the world that are still frozen in the middle of the last century. Isadora Tattlin’s Cuba Diaries is about four years spent in one of those countries where the local inhabitants will queue for hours for an item that has briefly reappeared on the market, and where individual enterprise is quashed.
With her husband and two children, she is posted to Havana and spends four years getting to know Cubans, eating in the paladars, seeing the poverty of her house staff and travelling to areas where the hotel has no light, or no water, or very little palatable food.
This is an intriguing insight into Fidel Castro’s Cuba – he even came to dinner! – that describes the period when ‘el triunfo de la revolucion‘ is giving way, at last, to the need for tourism and a more open eye on the world. Isadora Tattlin even visits the first tourist liner that docks in Havana.
She concludes with the story of the US/Cuba clash over the fate of little Elián Gonzáles, the five-year-old who was found off the coast of Miami and fought over by his relatives before ultimately being returned to his Cuban father. As we certainly do, she wonders what the future holds for him and the Cuban nation.