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C. Peter Ripley

Auteur de Witness for Freedom: African American Voices on Race, Slavery, and Emancipation

10 oeuvres 106 utilisateurs 2 critiques

Œuvres de C. Peter Ripley

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Ripley, C. Peter

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Conversations with Cuba par C. Ripley
I read this because I'm traveling to Cuba in a few weeks and it was recommended by the local tour company. I appreciated the author's perspective as someone who started out an outsider and, over a decade, became invested in the country.

He devoted plenty of time to lengthy quotes from those friends about their daily lives and thoughts about the Revolution. I was especially interested in a deeply humane, insightful comment by Victor, a man who had been involved in the Revolution and was still a staunch supporter of the world's last Marxist government:


"I am a Marxist," he said in response. "I believe it's the solution for the third world. But I am also a humanist, and our Revolution's great contribution was that it gave the individual man [especially black men, persecuted under the Spanish and Batista regimes] a dignity, a liberty, a freedom. If you know our past, you understand that. You know how bad things were before the Revolution and how much the Revolution changed Cuba. Our Cuban viewpoint was very different from those of China and Russia. We had an original way, a Cuban way. Because our culture was very different, so was our Revolution.

"Our big mistake? I'll tell you. To compromise with the Soviets. We took their model of government and society and lost our own way. The Soviet ideology in which the state has to control everything, even education and the media, and looks over the lives of everybody should never have been adopted in Cuba. Never.

"But that's what we had to do to survive against American guns. Fidel's wisdom is that he saved the core of the Revolution, even until today. Fidel did it the only way possible. Without Fidel there would be nothing."


The author (who is definitely the protagonist -- the introduction makes a big deal about the drawbacks of journalistic "objectivity") is a Baby Boomer and comes at this from a very Boomer perspective. He's constantly responding to assumptions his generation has about Cuba -- Communism made them all miserable and starving -- that my generation doesn't share, or even think about much. Which is fine; the book was published when I was in college, so that was his audience. The book is at its best, though, when Ripley is quoting Cubans and giving context, rather than editorializing.

Because good grief, his overwritten romanticizing! He insists upon referring to Cuba with a female pronoun, and every other sentence is a forced metaphor of the form: "Paulo was young and on the make, like Cuba herself" [paraphrase]. He also has a vaguely gross, exoticizing attitude toward young women, using phrases like "an innocent cry by a latte-colored beauty" [not, unfortunately, a paraphrase] and portraying Castro's crackdown on Cuban prostitutes as primarily affecting foreign men who no longer came on vacation and the trickle-down effect on Cuba's economy. No exploration at all of the forced choices many of those women were likely making. He couldn't even bring himself to straight-up use the word "prostitution," describing them only as girls looking for entertainment that they couldn't afford if foreign men weren't paying.

I went back and forth between rolling my eyes and being fascinated by this American portrayal of 1990s Cuba. I'm glad I read it, I think, but I definitely need an updated perspective -- ideally by a Cuban woman.… (plus d'informations)
 
Signalé
SamMusher | 1 autre critique | Sep 7, 2019 |
Conversations With Cuba par C. Peter Ripley
FROM THE PUBLISHER
This sympathetic, street-level pilgrimage through a revolutionary society in transition is the story of a passionate, struggling, sometimes discouraged but always proud country, told by citizens whose confidence in their revolution is both enduring and conflicted. Located in the "special period," that ambiguous time in the 1990s characterized by the end of the Soviet Union's aid to Cuba, a tightening of the U.S. embargo, and Cuba's search for economic salvation through tourism, Ripley's narrative recounts his six trips to Cuba between 1991 and 1999. We come to know, among many citizens eager to help a foreigner understand their passions and their suffering, Roberto, with his trust in the idea of an ongoing Cuban revolution; Neddie, a teacher whose early confidence is chipped away; and Paulo, a college student turned "fixer" who becomes Ripley's guide and friend.… (plus d'informations)
Cet avis a été signalé par plusieurs utilisateurs comme abusant des conditions d'utilisation et n'est plus affiché (show).
 
Signalé
librarychick | 1 autre critique | Nov 9, 2005 |
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Œuvres
10
Membres
106
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#181,887
Évaluation
½ 4.5
Critiques
2
ISBN
23

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