Cuban Art & Living

I’ve just finished reading “Cuba, A New History,” and would like to recommend it to anyone who knows little or nada about the country and wants to better understand it.  

British author, Richard Gott has been traveling to Cuba and digging into the archives of Havana and Madrid for decades to write this epic.   The specter of 328 pages of unusually small type is at first daunting, but then the scholarly writing and the fascinating story win over.

After moving from the days of settlement, slaughter and slavery to Spanish brutality, wars of independence, and a Republic of masacres and dictatorships, Goff then dedicates more than half the book to Castro’s Revolution. 

In the end, Gott plays with the question on all of our minds, “What will happen when the Castro era is over?” He says if you look at the long running themes of bloodshed, you could justifiably assume there will be blood in the streets.  However, he says that, and I paraphrase, the last 49 years has been the Cuban people’s longest continual era of relative peace in 500 years.  And that, he speculates, is what could make all the difference.