Review: Our Man in Havana – by Graham Greene

Graham Greene delivers here a classic espionage novel, fiction, set in Cuba around the time of the revolution, Greene writes in his knowledgeable subject area of expertise a comedy account of a chance vacuum salesman being recruited by Mi6 as their ‘Man in Havana.’ Struggling lone parent Wormold runs a little enterprising vacuum franchise and looks after his blooming teenage daughter, Milly. It is his spoiling her with a horse that he kind of seizes on the opportunity of becoming a spy, reasoning with himself solely really that he is in it for the extra cash. Hawthorne is the Mi6 officer who recruits Wormold and he is to and for between Cuba, Jamaica and London head office reporting on the growing successful mission of Our Man in Havana. Wormold delivers in what he sees as the safest way possible a series of critical intelligence to the British government. He has photographs of military installations in the Cuban Sierra (not dissimilar to the Russian / Soviet military installations of the later Cuban Missile Crisis), a string of local agents infiltrating and influencing critical areas of Cuban society. He is creating much excitement and hover in London they are well pleased. He collects his enhanced expenses and the bosses decide to expand the operation and send out an assistant and also the lovely young spy/secretary, Beatrice. Wormold’s secret, however, is that he’s actually fabricating all the intelligence with a keen imagination. The military installations are just a state of the art vacuum cleaner that’s been taken apart. The agents are fictitious people or people he has never even met. Yet the reports seduce the bigwigs back in Blighty. The farce grows more and more out of control until it actually becomes a real spy adventure with mishaps including the assassination of his German drinking buddy and best friend, Dr Hasselbacher and he is under a lot of scrutiny by the dirty old corrupt abusive brutal police chief, Captain Segura. Captain Segura wants the freshfaced teen Milly to be his bride and isa a bit lenient on our man, Wormold, as result of seeking the bride’s hand in marriage. Things get totally FUBAR and Wormold ends up shooting a suspected enemy agent and is forced to finally flee the Caribbean Island and head back to the safety of the United Kingdom. His charade is exposed but incredibly despite all the fake evidence, the actual real spy stuff that he accidentally does and to avoid embarrassment leads to him being retained by the intelligence service and ultimately he cops off with secretary Beatrice in a pleasant romantic twist to a wild old tale of Cold War era espionage gambits.

Review: A Great Perhaps? Colombia: Conflict and Convergence – by Dickie Davis, David Kilcullen, Greg Mills and David Spencer

David Kilcullen has had a few books included on my shelf recently. As a military expert on Guerrilla Warfare, I was thrilled to find this new book on the Colombian Civil War which he coauthors with a group of specialists who went on extensive field research around Colombia, with a view to learning lessons about the relative recent successes at a peace, in order that other similar international (mainly African) nations can apply similar strategies in order to prevent conflict escalation. I have researched FARC (FARC-EP) and the Colombia Civil War and criminal narcotrafficking issues for a long period of time. Very often getting real information about FARC and the guerrilla conflict can be quite difficult and the literature is relatively sparse. I found this book which is very up to date, to fill in a lot of the missing jigsaw pieces and it has the best par excellence new material that I have learnt about FARC since I read Ingrid Betancourt’s autobiographical account of her kidnapping by these jungle communist insurgents. From the FARC inception by Manuel Marulanda over six decades ago, rural zones in Colombia have been dangerous warzones of guerrilla occupation as the FARC fight a ideological struggle against government forces (Colombian Army and Police), narcotraffickers, right-wing paramilitaries, and USA government aid and materiel. The conflict has ebbed and flowed but towards the 1990s, FARC moved on the capital and had Bogota surrounded, forcing the Colombian government to act in order to avoid revolution or a collapsed failed state. Innovative new mature and thoughtful ideas and policies from a succession of populist Government leaders succeeded in changing the face of the conflict. On the whole, FARC were driven back and in retreat. Targeting of their leadership meant that many key members of he secretariat were murdered. FARC had grown significantly and despite the fall of the Berlin Wall and the lost support of the Soviet Union they remained powerful due to conflict profiteering by boosting their coffers with billions of pounds of cocaine drug-trafficking dirty cash. Peace talks were at the time of publication underway between FARC and the Colombian government in Havana, Cuba. Will FARC follow ELN and disarm sand become active in government democratic politics? Or will the habits of civil war be prolonged. Since the pushback and lead up to peace talks, government have focussed activity not just on military solutions but have also strove to win hearts and minds. The conclusion of the book compares the situation in Colombia with the British conflict in Malaya and also the more recent troubles in Afghanistan. The book is relatively concise yet freshly written with clear ideas and well-researched expert analysis. For any student of the Colombian Civil War this should be essential reading.

Review: Prison Writing of Latin America by Joey Whitfield

Joey is a teacher of mine at MLANG in Cardiff University. This is his first book. It explores prison writing in Latin America and looks at abolitionism of the penal system and draws on some really rather delicate themes that expose the dark brutality of prisons in a developing continent where sometimes human rights can be totally thrown out of the window. There is a schism in the penal code between political prisoners and criminals and Joey looks at how these two groups affect each other’s progress through the system. Often it is the poorest and racially discriminated against that suffer the worst fates in the prison system. Poor, indigenous women victims of Reagan’s War on Drugs when Latin American governments need to satisfy captivity quotas in order to get their dollar funding are the ones which are locked away as they are easy targets for a corrupt police force. The first chapter looks at political writing within the prison system. I was totally blown away by the imprisoned Costa Rican author José León Sánchez. This man was a true victim of the system and was wrongly given a life imprisonment term on the barren prison island colony of San Lucas, condemned to carrying a ball and chain around with him whilst manacled all day. In the face of adversity, Sánchez became literate and his work ‘La isla de los hombres solos’ catapulted him into national and international fame, his original work confounding all the critics. Chapter 2 of Whitfield is very dark and difficult to read. It explores homosexual love in the prison system, from rape through to desperate displays of machisimo. The men turn to each other in a way of confronting the system. This chapter looks mainly at imprisoned Cubans. Chapter 3 is brutal in the way it describes the prison massacres of Senderoso Luminosa captives who fight wars with the Peruvian authorities from behind the door, all in defence of their leftist communist ideologies. Some of the worst prison massacres in history occurred in Peru during the 1980s at the peak of the Senedero resistance guerrilla war with the state. Chapter 4 is about the War on Drugs where the Reagan administration turns its Southern hemisphere politics away from leftist insurgents and criminalises the narcotics industry, creating a new criminal class. Comando Vermelho (Red Command) is Brasil are a drug-trafficking criminal gang that originate in prisons and go on to seize control of the urban favelas in Brasil and based on resitance tactics and influence from political prisoners their command structure do a lot for prisoner rights within South America. There are interesting references to the decadent tourist industry in La Paz where the Bolivian prison system has been opened up by a UK prisoner’s book (Marching Powder) which glamourises the capitalist excesses of the jail there.
I found Whitfield’s book to be neat and compact, well-researched, with clear translations from the author when excerpts of Spanish or Portuguese texts were required. There is a shock element to the book and it is hard to imagine what life is really like for these prisoners. Through literature they have discovered a means of dealing with their suffering and I think that one of the main points that Joey makes is that this prison literature is important if we wish to develop more progressive ideas about how to deal with this marginalised element of society. There is sympathy there but also we see excesses of the banality of evil that lurks in these bins of society and this is often mirrored in real life in the criminal enterprises that originally give birth to the prison.

Review: The Repeating Island – The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective – by Antonio Benítez-Rojo

The Cuban author offers a postmodern view of the Caribbean. It is a sociocultural study that encompasses aspects of history, economics, sociology, cultural anthropology, psychoanalysis, literary theory, and non-linear mathematics, incorporating chaos theory. The book’s aims and theories are laid out in a flowing introduction whereby Benítez-Rojo’s notion of the ‘repeating island’ is explored, through the lens of polyrhythms and meta-archipelagoes. Benítez-Rojo sees in all of the Caribbean a repetitive streaming of ideas, of resistance to slavery, of Plantation culture of postcolonialist discourse. The book focuses on a series of Caribbean authors and poets, from Gabriel García Márquez to the author’s poet of preference, the Cuban Guillén. Critical essays explore how a multitude of creative characters have interpreted their lives in the Antilles, and recurring themes of the cult of the Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre or of the sacrificed slave Mackandal, reverberate in the author’s dissections of West Indian culture. This book gives a valuable postmodernist insight into the supersyncretic culture that comprises the Caribbean.

Review: Cocaine Nation – How The White Trade Took Over The World – by Tom Feiling

This is an enthralling, well-researched book, that reveals many unknown new facts about the global cocaine industry. The book opens with a chapter focussing on the USA, the biggest market for the Cocaine industry, where 66% of Cocaine users exist. We then enter into the producing and transit phase of the drug and examine Colombia, Mexico and the Caribbean in detail. Colombia has the infamous Medellín and Cali cartels, much responsible for the initial production of Cocaine. The role of the FARC, AUC and the Colombian Civil War is documented and the political difficulties with America’s Plan Colombia and the extreme bribery involved in Colombian political life. In Mexico, we see how the various cartels such as Sinaloa, Juárez, Gulf and Tijuana have gone to war, recruiting the services of such paramilitaries as Los Zetas. The Caribbean covers Jamaica in detail and also Cuba, Haiti and the various tax haven islands. In Jamaica we see how politics have heavily influenced the gang culture and the rise of the Shower Posse is documented. In all of the Western producer country sphere, the USA and its policies is never far from the forefront. The ‘War on Drugs’ in force from many successive administrations at the White House, often focuses on producer and transit countries and is totally supported by draconian United Nations international legislation. The European market, in particular the United Kingdom is the second largest market for Cocaine and some countries here have introduced decriminalisation. In places such as Holland and Portugal, drug use is not penalised. The author explores how users are affected by the drug and explores addiction, in particular the problems of crack cocaine. In the final part of the book we look at possible legalisation solutions although, despite Feiling’s enthusiasm for this to happen, I fear it will be many generations before this becomes politically possible. Perhaps with potential cannabis decriminalisation and legalisation on the agenda, it will open up the doors for other narcotics to follow suit? I enjoyed the book and it really does go into detail on what is an interesting subject and a truly global industry.

Review : Chávez: Venezuela and the New Latin America – by Aleida Guevara

This book is based on a series of interviews given by Venezuelan leader, Hugo Chavez, to the daughter of Che Guevara, Aleida. Although the book doesn’t cover the entire period of Chavez’ rule up until his demise, it presents a wonderful tale and grasps fundamental insight into the way the mind works of one of the most popular Latin American leaders of the modern era. Chavez, a man of military background, discusses his rise to power in Venezuela, his roots and also the wider world of South America. His relationship with Fidel Castro is striking and his leftist tendencies are very apparent. His goals for the Venezuelan people and socialist objectives cover the first part of the story and he moves onto topics as diverse as the Gulf War and his family in the second, more broken series of short interview chapters. The book concludes with appendices of a TV interview with Hugo and Aleida and also with some of the insider details of the attempted military coup d’etat that took place against Chavez. I found the book to be very insightful and interesting on a subject that I previously understood very little.

Review: To Have and Have Not – by Ernest Hemingway

To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This Hemingway adventure is set in Cuba and involves a wily sailor who is involved in the murky smuggling business between Havana and his home port in Florida. Harry Morgan is a man in conflict with his morals. He is a family man, fully supportive of his wife and daughters and he aims to put food on his table. But, how he does this, is with a selfish immoral attitude. After a chartered fishing expedition goes wrong and his client fails to pay, Harry is left to make up his income in any way possible. The dark episodes in the story are sudden and explosive and the murky world of criminals, murder, revolutionaries, smuggling and rummy alcoholics jumps out of the pages at you with venom. There is a contrasting world of high society where things aren’t so desperate, but equally there are sinister undertones here too. The main tale ends in tragedy though one can tell that Harry has been riding his luck for a while. To Have And To Have Not is a vivid tale and makes one question morals. Harry, the antihero, goes from bad to worse, yet, as a reader you are always looking our for him and hoping he gets through and achieves salvation.

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Review: The Cuban Revolution: Origins, Course, and Legacy – by Marifeli Pérez-Stable

The Cuban Revolution: Origins, Course, and Legacy by Marifeli Pérez-Stable
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’m doing a university essay question on the Cuban Revolution so felt that this was a good text to read ahead of doing my assignment. The book certainly covers the Cuban Revolution and its aftermath in a lot of detail. It is a modern history of Cuba. However, whereas other works on the Cuban Revolution focus on perhaps the more glamorous side of the actual taking of the island and the chief protagonists, this book delves a little deeper and assesses the actual politics of the revolution and its real implications. Every finding is backed up with real data and the author, who initially was very supportive of the revolution, is clear in her latter condemnation of its impact. Cuba is, for sure, an anomaly among world states. I found the impact of ‘Fidel-Patria-Revolucion’ and the development of Cuban ‘conciencia’ very important in the whole ideology of the new Cuba. The anti-imperialism of the regime is clear, but Cuba’s almost solitary dependence on sugar left it open to all sorts of fundamental problems. It cosied up to the Soviet Union during the Cold War but this left its own impact as the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union broke apart. It is very bizarre how Cuba the revolution has survived intact but what future lies ahead? This book gave me a lot greater understanding of what the revolution meant specifically to the Cuban people and its lasting legacy. It’s a thorough read and though occasionally it does bog you down in detail it is an academic text and this can be expected.

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Review: The Old Man and the Sea – by Ernest Hemingway

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is only a short book and I read it in a couple of hours. The brevity doesn’t, however, take away from it being a great tale. An old fisherman heads out to sea off his native Cuba and endures an epic battle with a Marlin, the first fish he has caught in over 80 days. He is alone at sea, his unsuccessful fishing meaning that his child partner can no longer go out to sea with him. The man faces a battle with his aging body and mind in addition to the fight he has with the graceful, strong fish. After three days of hard labor, he finally lands the Marlin. Unable to fit on the boat he has to strap the fish to the outside and, having drift far too out to sea for comfort, he faces a long struggle home, where his real battle against the elements of the sea begin. Sharks are the danger and, as the dead catch releases its scent and blood into the water, the scavengers of the ocean set out to undo the old man’s work. He repels the attacks using every weapon to hand but they are too plentiful and finally he reaches shore, with just a skeleton remaining of the giant Marlin. He is glad to be home and exhausted, he can face his community with a little more pride as from the skeleton they can tell that he is still a great fisherman.

Hemingway weaves his magic, using simple language and colorful prose imagery. He obviously has a deep love for fishing and his knowledge of the sea comes direct from his own fishing experience. The novel captures the reality of ocean-fishing and with the loneliness of the sea offset by the old man’s fondness of baseball and his dreams of lions on the beach in Africa, we read a cleverly weaved tale and it is no surprise to me that Ernest Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature as a direct result of writing this masterpiece.

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