Driving Through Cuba: Rare Encounters in the Land of Sugar Cane and Revolution

The author recounts his three-month automobile tour of Cuba with his family as they experience the culture of a country with an unstable economy and a quality of life few people have encountered

In 1987 British novelist Gebler (son of writer Edna O'Brien) flew to Cuba with his wife and daughter, rented a car and became a "tourist of the revolution" more interested in Cubans' daily life than in ideology or politics. His detailed, informative account is largely about oppressive heat, torrential rains, bad roads, broken-down cars, cockroaches, water-rationing and discontented citizens. The reader is introduced to a few semi-Ugly Americans, although the author gives Canadian tourists the prize for objectionability. Essentially this is a collection of gloomy sketches, given weight by chunks of Cuban history, and relieved by Gebler's sense of irony and intermittent flashes of humor. On the way home the travelers stopped off in Prague; the author's ecstatic description of that city makes his Cuba trip seem like a visit to purgatory. Photos.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Armed with a grudgingly given three-month visa, Gebler, in an ailing Russian auto, travels the length of inaccessible (to most of us) Cuba. Abandoned vintage cars, decaying architecture in Old Havana, and once famous beaches swamped with dead crabs revolt him as much as propagandist museums of the Bay of Pigs invasion and the revolution. A sweltering evening in a bat-infested Cienfuegos theater and other personal inconveniences are the least of the Englishman's discomfiture, as he encounters skeptical anti-Castros, and policemen wary of his notepad. Though he seems to be aware of Cuba's history, he is incapable of understanding the appeal Castro had after the Batista dictatorship. Gebler's narrative is dry and lacks analysis, but this might be a worthwhile accompaniment to James Michener's and John Kings's photographic coverage, Six Days in Havana (LJ 8/89) . --Bibi S. Thompson, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.