Welcome to Litsy!

What I love most about this book is that ordinary Cuban people are the heart of it, just as they‘re the heart of Cuba. I think DePalma was the perfect person to write such a book, not being Cuban but being someone who loves a Cuban (his wife) and who loves the people, makes him someone capable of standing on a balanced line of neutrality and compassion. I found it unbiased but matter-of-fact, and yet so filled with emotion too. A much needed book…

“What concerned her far more than a new president who acted the same as the old one, or a revised constitution that offered no more rights than the one it replaced, was the survival of deeply personal traditions that linked her to the Cuba of fine manners and noble intentions that still existed in her memory.”

“This government will never take care of things… unless the people force it to. But after sixty interminable years, Cubans were burned out and far too focused on just surviving to organize themselves into an opposition the way the disaffected did in Venezuela.”

“…that resourcefulness is also their most paralyzing weakness. Instead of marching to the Plaza de la Revolución demanding change, or locking arms with dissidents to fix Cuba‘s grim reality, most simply accept and then adapt to the latest privation.”

“It didn‘t take much vision to see that Cuba was getting poorer every year, and that the centralized economy was so stagnant that the popular street saying ‘They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work‘ seemed like doctrine.”

“Eventually, she was allowed to separate herself from the [communist] party. When she was completely free from it, and from all the blind allegiance it demanded, she realized she had stopped being a revolutionary, but she had not stopped being a patriot.”

“But as much as she did not want to accept it, she knew that if she hadn‘t been a vice minister, if she hadn‘t been a ranking member of the communist party, her mother would have suffered in a local hospital without receiving the care she needed. She still believed in the revolution, but she could no longer gloss over this glaring inconsistency.”

“The prolonged blackouts, the empty store shelves, the clinics that had not even the simplest medicines and were forced to rinse and reuse latex gloves until the fingertips wore out, all were pushing the famous Cuban trait of putting up with anything to the limits of what a sane person could endure.”

“The surveillance network was so pervasive that Cubans grew fearful of voicing any complaint. Even in their own homes, they refrained from mentioning the name Fidel, in case anyone was listening. Instead, they stroked an imaginary beard when they dared to criticize el comandante."

I knew reading this book would stir up a lot of feelings for me. That surveillance network is the very reason my mother‘s side of the family was torn apart.

Now, I‘m back to working my way through my TBR pile. Next up is some nonfiction. I‘m Cuban American and have been looking forward to reading this one for a while!

Ordered a signed copy from my favorite bookstore in Miami. For those who don't understand Spanish it says, "From my cell of light and peace." Can't wait to get to this one.