Our Woman in Havana: Reporting Castro’s Cuba

Rainsford, who was posted in Havana for the BBC from 2011 to 2014 and returned during 2017, weaves a lucid account of the country’s past and present. She interviews Cuban athletes, writers, civil servants, entrepreneurs, doctors, youth, and old-timers to take the country’s pulse. Her wide-ranging and evocative portrait of contemporary Cuba covers its housing deficit, underground economy (Castro’s Communist government guaranteed free education, housing, and healthcare, but “never succeeded in quelling consumer instinct”), expanding privately run restaurant scene, “sleeping” Catholic faith, art preoccupied with “emigration and separation,” and popular music and dance clubs. Weaving in Cuba’s history, Rainsford also follows the footsteps of Graham Greene and other writers seduced by hedonistic pre-revolutionary Havana, with its cabarets, bars, and casinos often run by American gangsters. She conjures the Hotel Sevilla of the 1950s and ’60s, which became a crossroads for writers and reporters doubling as secret agents; the glamorous Tropicana nightclub; and the lurid strip clubs in Chinatown. She describes the brutal pre-revolutionary Batista regime, the idealistic early months of Castro’s revolution, Castro’s forced labor camps for “deviants,” the country’s economic uncertainty following the fall of the Soviet Union, its rapprochement with the U.S., and its current “paralysis.” Rainsford presents an atmospheric portrait of a country on the brink of a new era. Agent: Matthew Hamilton, Aitken Alexander Associates. (Oct.)