Publisher's Synopsis
This book documents the writer's trip to Havana and Trinidad in Cuba in 2009.
It was a trip off the normal tourist trail around the backstreets of Havana and Trinidad and far from the commercialized and characterless mass tourism resorts.
The writer had previously worked behind the Iron Curtain in the Soviet Union, China and Czechoslovakia and was curious to visit one of the last strongholds of Communism.
Things were changing fast in Cuba. Fidel Castro was ailing and his brother was now, nominally, in charge of a country that was becoming more open to its capitalist neighbours.
The many features of life, which had made Cuba so fascinating to the visitors, (and sometimes difficult for the locals) were in danger of disappearing under a fast approaching homogenous and bland wave of globalized capitalism.
January 2009 was the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution that had brought the Communists to power. It was also the anniversary of the local hero Jose Marti.
In some ways, the clock had stopped after the revolution, as Cuba had become isolated from most of the countries around it and from the American dominated West in general. Its closest allies were the Soviet Union and the far-off Communist Block, which were in their own particular time warp.
This was the kind of place that appealed to the writer: not overrun with tourists, with a strong self-image, historic, exotic, colourful, slightly wayward, musical and most of all original.
All this may be about to disappear. It was time to go there, before it was too late.
