Fernández’s passions, the immediacy of his reportage from the battered Communist redoubt, and his understanding of the Cuban...
A compressed epic of the suffering, heroism, and determination that evinced itself in the Cuban refugee crisis of the 1990s—which in this translation carries heavy moral weight with intensely wrought, sometimes pedantic prose.
Following the 1989 collapse of the Soviet bloc, living conditions in Cuba deteriorated rapidly, and a series of political crises (generally involving US-Cuban brinkmanship) culminated in the frantic attempts by Cuban rafters to reach Miami between 1993 and 1996 (and since then). Fernández offers a terse but detailed narrative from within Cuba, capturing the desperate ingenuity of the Cuban people (both to build rafts, and merely to survive the post–’89 socialist privations), as well as the hoary treachery of the Castro regime (which constantly manipulated the rafters’ fates for political gain, first viciously attacking the refugees, then promising no interference to those who leave promptly). Although there were moments of both absurdity and triumph for the rafters, Fernández dwells on the horror: addressing the little-acknowledged fact that perhaps four times as many rafters died at sea as found land or rescuers, he narrates a long string of anecdotal suffering—typhoons, shark attacks, starvation, family members watching each other drown, and merciless “example-setting” killings by Cuban armed forces. Thankfully, Fernández also pulls back for the crucial global view, examining Castro’s long run, Cuba’s contentious relationship with other Latin American nations, and its perpetually worsening relations with the Clinton administration—culminating in the 1996 Cuban Air Force attack on the airborne exile group Brothers to the Rescue, and the punitive Helms-Burton Act that followed. The author’s portraits of these players and politicians, juxtaposed with details of the perpetually struggling Cubans, are laced with mordant irony.
Fernández’s passions, the immediacy of his reportage from the battered Communist redoubt, and his understanding of the Cuban people’s willingness to risk all for better lives make this a substantial contribution to a thorny international debate.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2000
ISBN: 1-55885-300-6
Page Count: 215
Publisher: Arte Público
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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