Cuba - The Pursuit of Freedom [antikvár]

PREFACE I began to write this book on an evening in Havana in July 1961. I stood in the Plaza de la Revolución listening to a speech by Fidel Castro. The immense crowd were treating the occasion as a picnic, despite the sombre tones of the impassioned orator. Small boys sold drinks and hats from stalls and brilliantly dressed girls shook with pleasure as the 'maximum leader of the revolution' lashed himself into a fury against the government of President Kennedy. At about a quarter past eight in the evening, when the sun was beginning to die behind the statue to the Cuban liberator, José Martí, Castro's voice began to give out and it was clear that, though he had not finished his speech (it had by then lasted only four hours), he needed a rest. Doubtless by prearrangement with cheerleaders, the orator allowed one of his remarks to be drowned by shouts and the singing first of the Cuban national anthem, then of the International. In the section of the crowd where I stood, a group of Cubans, some white, some mulatto, some Negro, a few women, began to sing and dance the International to a cha-cha-cha rhythm, the song itself being sung by a huge Negress in the centre, the choruses by a laughing circle round her. The words came over with bizarre syncopation, 'arriba hijos, de la tierra . . As André Breton years before said to the Cuban painter, Wilfredo Lam, 'Ce pays est vraiment trop surréaliste pour y habiter'. The consequence was that I, who had gone to Cuba that summer with the intention of writing a short book about the current scene, embarked on a longer project, in order to explore the springs of this curious event at which I had participated. In the course of the work, I extended the starting point further and further backwards; originally I had thought that the book should begin with Batista's coup d'état in 1952. But this seemed to miss too much and so I looked backwards further to that morning in January 1899 when the last Spanish Captain-General of Cuba sadly handed over power to an Anglo-Saxon, North American General. But that also omitted the absorbing question of slavery and how that decisively affected the character of Cuba, not to speak of the golden age of Cuban sugar in the nineteenth century; and so, after wondering whether there could be such a thing at all as a starting point