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An insightful personal memoir that contrasts firsthand the dream of the Cuban Revolution as it was in the early 1960s with the deprivations, hardships, and loss of hope that haunt Cuban society today.
- Sales Rank: #3717916 in Books
- Published on: 1994-02-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.50" h x .63" w x 5.51" l, 1.02 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 212 pages
Features
- ISBN13: 9780826512505
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
From Library Journal
Halperin, now 88, first visited Cuba in 1935 (and was promptly deported by the Batista government). He returned in 1962 and lived in Cuba for six years, teaching and advising the Castro government. He has since published stinging critiques of Castro's Cuba in The Rise and Decline of Fidel Castro (LJ 10/1/72) and The Taming of Fidel Castro (LJ 2/15/81). His latest book is the result of a final month-long visit Halperin made in November 1989. His central theme is the contrast between daily life in present-day Cuba and the Cuba Halperin knew in the 1960s. He is appalled at the deterioration of Havana and cites inherently bad planning as the chief cause. Visits to old friends vividly illustrate the sharp decline in the standard of living. Halperin offers an insider's perspective on the Cuban economy and reconsiders Castro's dominant role in Cuban life. This is an important assessment that joins other recent reports (e.g., Jacobo Timerman's Cuba: A Journey, LJ 10/15/90) as a continuing indictment of the Cuban experiment. Recommended for academic and large public libraries.
Thomas A. Karel, Franklin & Marshall Coll. Lib., Lancaster, Pa.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
Halperin offers an insider's perspective on the Cuban economy and reconsiders Castro's dominant role in Cuban life. This is an important assessment that joins other recent reports as a continuing indictment of the Cuban experiment.
--Library Journal (starred review)
Maurice Halperin knew Fidel and Che then--and he continues to understand them now. No other observer and no other book can give you a better idea of how the Cuban Revolution, the inspiration and prototype for so many revolutions of our age, finally came out. The way it was and the way it is: it's all here.
--Georgie Anne Geyer, Political correspondent and author of Guerilla Prince: The Untold Story of Fidel Castro
From the Back Cover
Written by a former supporter of Fidel Castro, this personal and insightful memoir contrasts firsthand the dream of the Cuban Revolution as it was in the early 1960s with the deprivations, hardships, and loss of hope that haunt Cuban society today. Blacklisted during the "Red Scare" of the 1950s, Professor Maurice Halperin and his wife, Edith, cut their losses and left the United States on an odyssey that would take them to Mexico, Moscow, and eventually, at Che Guevara's personal invitation, to Havana. Arriving virtually on the eve of the Cuban Missile Crisis, they unexpectedly found a country bursting with the patriotic fervor of the Revolution. Fearless of their neighbor to the north, Cubans were feverishly engaged with plans for the future, their country sizzling with the ever-present rhythm of the "cha-cha-cha". For six critical years, Halperin lived and worked in Cuba, as university lecturer and government official, before leaving to take up a teaching post in Canada. In November of 1989, after an absence of more than twenty years, Halperin returned to Havana to visit old friends and to see for himself the long-term effects of Castro's regime. What he found was a changed society. Cubans were constantly frustrated by rationing and by a system that provides often menial jobs for everyone but also ensures poor production and offers little prospect or incentive for advancement. Devastating losses of economic support from the Eastern bloc after the advent of Perestroika were weakening an already shaky system. Hope for a productive socialist Cuba, so apparent in the sixties, had disappeared. Return to Havana is a careful and often poignant analysis of how and why the Cuban Revolutionhas failed. Told from the viewpoint of a seasoned scholar who has warm feelings for Cuba and its people, this first-person account offers new insight into the Revolution's systemic deficiencies: an economy of smoke and mirrors, an improbable foreign policy, and a domestic political regimen based fatally on the priority of appearances. Halperin's detailed examination of Castro's personality places him, the architect of Cuba's recent past, at the heart of all its current problems. Halperin concludes with a sobering vision of the near future, predicting great turmoil for Cuba and a serious foreign policy challenge for the United States when Castro departs, leaving the rubble of the Revolution behind.
Most helpful customer reviews
12 of 15 people found the following review helpful.
A must read! Castro must go!
By A Customer
The onset of the Cuban Revolution brought about the prospect of reform. Instead the result was a total destruction of a great and unique society. The book chronicles the destruction and will serves as a guide for those unaware of Cuba's declined status.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
A belated epiphany for an old commie
By John Desmond
Halperin was not only a fellow traveller but was an actual Soviet agent while in the OSS. All the more reason that his profound disillusionment with the communist movement, and Castro's Cuba in particular, rings very true. The amazing thing is that it took so long for this clearly intelligent man to see the truth. His comparison of his own views of Cuba from the 60s to his visit in the late 1980s is telling in that he noted that the better lifestyle in Cuba compared to what he had seen in Russia was due to the fact that Cuba had still been living off the fat of the capitalist system. When that ran out, only misery remained.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
An elder b----es and moans about the Cuba that's no longer any more fun than anything else in life
By Marco Buendia
Author Maurice Halperin was an academic who was run out of Oklahoma in the Thirties because he favored the New Deal and run out of the United States in the Fifties because he favored intellectual freedom. He spent time in the USSR and Cuba, and wound up settling in Canada, that "kinder and gentler" USA. His best-known published work is:
The rise and decline of Fidel Castro : an essay in contemporary history (1972)
I myself haven't read it. Nonetheless, I'm inclined to recommend it over "Return to Havana". *
"Return to Havana" is the book of a tired old man. After a tired autobiographical section, he describes his tired return visit to Havana in 1989. Cuba had come down in the world since his last visit in the Sixties. He's most attentive to the lack of creature comforts, and complains about this lack bitterly, and complains about the heat. An inauspicious beginning for a book that I'd hoped would be a serious resume of the ossified Cuban police state on the eve of its removal from the artificial support of the USSR. It didn't get any better, I'm sorry to say.
Unlike most Americans over the last twenty years, I appreciate physical affluence but haven't fetishized it politically. 1) Political freedom, 2) intellectual and religious freedom, 3) opportunity for cultural criticism and self-awareness/personal integrity, and 4) direct attention to the general common good, are, for me, the marks of an advanced society. So I would not have claimed that Cuba was an advanced society except in the last respect (4). and probably not so much even there after the first few years.
There wasn't much discussion of this sort of thing in the book. Nonetheless, someone who knew nothing about Cuba might profit somewhat by reading it. Halperin starts off by describing the sugar industry as it stood in mid-century, paired with the rice industry. It would be no surprise to most people that Cuba derived a lot of its hard currency from sugar. It would be less well-known that Cubans were big rice eaters. The antics associated with Cuba's machinations using the two commodities would be hilarious if the Cuban people hadn't been impacted in such an ugly way. We might say "score a win for the 'Free World" if we didn't remember the politics of sugar in the USA and elsewhere, or the odd legal context of rice cultivation in America's critical ally, Japan, until rather recently. But certainly it's true that plain Cubans lost.
The next section deals with Cuba's military adventures, starting actually with Che's gaddings about in the Congo. (BTW, the author, by this time ferociously anti-Castro, had to admit that Che had considerable charm.) I don't disagree with Halperin's viewpoint that these adventures in Ethiopia and Angola were an unnecessary burden on the Cubans, and that for other reasons as wellCuba should have stayed out of other people's affairs. And in fairness, he does admit that these adventures were supported by Cuban popular opinion. But I did sense an unnecessary quasi-partisan rancor about it, and these violent escapes were not rightly contextualized in the Cold War between the US and its proxies and the USSR (and ditto). Moreover, Halperin stayed out of Latin American geopolitics, where the Americans from Kennedy through Bush the First blimm-blammed constantly about Cuban meddling, It was largely nonsense; odd that Halperin didn't address it. Perhaps because he would have felt compelled to admit that here was an area in which the devil Castro wasn't as black as he was painted?
Then we hear about medical care. Not as good as some people would have you believe. However, as I read about rural doctor shortages, wait times, odd assignments of doctors, politicization of HIV-positive people, I couldn't help thinking of close parallels in the USA. And, of course, general b----ing. It's the government's doing, so there's no limit to b----ing. One thing about free enterprise, when people really believe in it, is it reduces b----ing. "Why don't you go somewhere else?" To admit you can't is an admission of personal failure. Whereas in Cuba, or the UK, or Holland, you can b---- in chorus. Blame the government.
Then we get to more interesting stuff: the trials for drug-dealing among the military, and the military's gradual corruption, in part developed in Angola. Finally, of course, Fidel.
He's a megalomaniac, an egomaniac, etc. He meddles in everything, etc. All true, of course, but there's a personal rancor here that was quite striking. I suppose it's common enough among those former fans who've become disgruntled with Fidel, different in kind and origin from those who never had any kind of liking for him and his revolutionizing. Eventually, we hear things like "Americas Watch reports that Cuba has more political prisoners, per capita, than any country other than South Africa and Red China." Back when Kennedy was prancing back and forth on the podium and leering at the gulls in the American electorate, this sort of thing was Exhibit A against Castro and the Cuban Revolution. Until the American CIA organized a proxy invasion of Cuba and stationed atomic missiles on the Black Sea. This brought about a response that made things as bit more interesting, going far beyond Castro's outrages against Cuban dissenters, personality types the Americans themselves heartily despise in their own country. And the routine American threats, embargo, and ritualized bluster since then has helped to keep blowhard Fidel in power. Riff-raff and failures chucked from Cuba became a feared pressure group to both major American parties, adding insult to the US Gov't's injuries inflicted on Castro (if was injured) and the Cuban people.
The author died in a few years after this book was written; he was nearly ninety. The Nineties were a new epoch. And yet, as I type this, Fidel and Raul Castro are still alive, with Cuba still a dinosaur stuck in a morass. On the American side, current President Obama announced recently that he will discard all of those elements of the US vendetta against Cuba and its people that the POTUS can legally, by himself, discard. Unfortunately, much of America's histrionic rage against the Cubans was written into legislation by session after session of Congressional yahoos seeking the votes of professional "Cubans" and armchair Cold Warriors. It won't be easy to rid the country of this stuff, but it was striking how little uproar ensued upon the announcement from the much-demonized Obama. The professional anti-Castro screamers, Cuban or not, are now dead or certified as demented. Young people are unenthusiastic about the sort of meanness that drove Kennedy et al to threaten the island with destruction and US dissenters with ostracism; they have found other ugly games to play: howling about Muslims, continuing skin-gamism, manic libertarianism etc.
* I found "Return to Havana" in the dumpster behind the Zero Public Library (Mississippi). For once I can seen why they tossed it. I just asked them to order the 1972 book from a big library in Alabama. I'll see what the old man (RIP) had to say about Cuba when he was dapper enough to be unbothered by tropical heat and cockroaches.
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