Walking to Guantanamo

“I admit that it was a strange idea,” Richard Fleming writes in the opening chapter of his engaging debut as a writer. Despite having a wonderful girlfriend, a downtown Manhattan apartment, and a thriving career, he is afraid that his life is spiraling into “nightmarish mediocrity.” After obsessing over the notion for years, he finally decides that crossing the island of Cuba on foot might somehow rescue him from the fate he fears. Walking to Guantánamo is the chronicle of that journey.

And a thoroughly self-deprecating and wry chronicle it is. Rarely has a book about Cuba been so shorn of pretension, ideological blinders, or misplaced romanticism-and hardly ever has it been so genuinely funny. Fleming’s vision of the Pearl of the Antilles is, in the phrase of Madison Smartt Bell, truly “ground-level.” Uninterested in—and certainly unfazed by—either the hysterical attitude of the US government or the smug pose of the Cuban one, Richard Fleming sets out across Cuba literally one step at a time.

In doing so, he reveals a popular culture, particularly in music and spiritual life, of deep complexity. A discerning observer of daily life who rejects the clichés of Cuba’s enemies and friends alike, Richard Fleming ranges over the Cuban countryside with a rare ability to distinguish reality from façade and slogan from fact—and to do it all in often hilarious if singularly modest style.

Richard Fleming is an inveterate traveler, photographer, amateur musicologist, sometime deejay, and self-described “rabid birdwatcher” long enamored of the music, culture, and wild places of the Greater Antilles. Since his graduation from Princeton University in 1987, his work as a sound recordist in documentary film has taken him to the farthest reaches of the globe. He’s been around the world with Kofi Annan, flown missions over Kandahar with the US army reserve, followed Imelda Marcos on the presidential campaign trail in the Philippines, camped with geologists in Antarctica, and sweltered on a nuclear aircraft carrier plying the waters of the Persian Gulf. When not on the road, he lives in Brooklyn, New York. Walking to Guantánamo is his first book.