Spectacle of the Rats and Owls

Malcolm Deas

• Against All Hope by Armando Valladares, translated by Andrew Harley
  Hamish Hamilton, 381 pp, £12.95, July 1986, ISBN 0 241 11806 9
• Castro by Peter Bourne
  Macmillan, 332 pp, £14.95, April 1987, ISBN 0 333 44593 7
• Fidel: A Critical Portrait by Tad Szulc
  Hutchinson, 585 pp, £14.95, June 1987, ISBN 0 09 172602 6
• Castro and the Cuban Labour Movement: Statecraft and Society in a Revolutionary Period (1959-1961) by Efren Cordova
  University Press of America, 354 pp, £24.65, April 1988, ISBN 0 8191 5952 2
• Fidel and Religion: Castro talks on revolution and religion with Frei Betto translated by the Cuban Centre for Translation
  Simon and Schuster, 314 pp, £14.95, September 1987, ISBN 0 671 64114 X

‘Fidel Castro, alas’ one would have to answer if asked what 20th-century Latin American had cut the largest figure in the world. The best short account of the cultural reasons for lamentation is G. Cabrera Infante’s ‘Bites from the Bearded Crocodile’ (LRB, 4-17 June 1981). The economic and social reasons for being less than enthusiastic are set out in the leaden pages of Jorge Dominguez’s Cuba: Order and Revolution of 1970: it is worth bearing in mind that the present state of the Cuban economy can only be sustained by the receipt of something like half of all Soviet aid to the so-called Third World. And now there is Armando Valladares’s Against All Hope, a distinguished prison memoir.