Rumba, Conga, Communism

Neal Ascherson

  • Family Portrait with Fidel by Carlos Franqui, translated by Alfred MacAdam
    Cape, 262 pp, £12.95, September 1984, ISBN 0 224 02268 7
  • Infante’s Inferno by G. Cabrera Infante, translated by Suzanne Levine
    Faber, 410 pp, £9.95, September 1984, ISBN 0 571 13292 8

‘Culture brings Freedom,’ José Marti once vaguely proclaimed. The attempt to make sense of this slogan during the Cuban revolution cost both these outstanding men – Franqui and Infante – their country. One of Fidel Castro’s closest comrades in the war against Batista, Carlos Franqui, came down with him from the Sierra as the bearded men took power; for the first five years after 1959 he was, more than any other single person, associated with the explosion of ‘revolutionary culture’ which amazed and moved Europe and the rebellious young of the Americas. He was the editor of the independent daily paper Revolucion, while Cabrera Infante, already famous as a journalist and novelist, ran the paper’s Monday cultural supplement, Lunes.

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