[REVIEW] David W. McFadden, An Innocent in Cuba

[rfmcdonald]

I enjoyed David W. McFadden's pleasant enough travelogue An Innocent in Cuba, a much more linear and more attentive Tristram Shandy, until I came to his treatment of imprisoned writer Raul Rivero Castañeda. After taking Castañeda to task for his "oddly sarcastic, bitter, humourless but hot-blooded writing style," his opposition to the Cuban regime, and arguing that he was compromised by the United States because he accepted payments from American newspapers for his articles, McFadden ambivalently concluded that it would probably be best if he was released.

His name seems to have been hijacked by those calling for an invasion of Cuba, so it might be better for Cuba if he were given his freedom. There's a good case for keeping him in jail and a good case for releasing him. But forty years in prison doesn't sound right for a poet opposed to the system. How could any poet worth his tropes not be opposed to the system? I don't know, I just don't know (279).

Would McFadden have written the preceding if he had been talking about an Argentine writer imprisoned during the Dirty War, or perhaps a Chinese dissident in the People's Republic? It's all the same. I was surprised to find out that his work's ambivalent respect for tyranny spoiled the book for me.