by Seamus Heaney
Farrar, 1987
52 pp. $12.95
by Paul Taylor
Knopf, 1987
371 pp. $22.95
by Loren R. Graham
Columbia, 1987
565 pp. $45
by Luther J. Carter
Resources for the Future, 1987
473 pp. $25
by Brian M. Pagan
Tharnes & Hudson, 1987
288 pp. $19.95
as it has vexed seven U.S. presi- dents. And W. Raymond Duncan describes how Nikita Khrushchev's dream of easy gains in the Third World-and Castro's own arnbi- tions-gave a succession of Soviet leaders expensive new allies in Latin America and Africa.
Tad Szulc
"It was much easier to win the revolutionary war than it is to run the Revolution now that we are in charge."
So Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz observed some months after taking power in Cuba early in 1959. Only 33 years old, he...
n Fidel Castro entered Havana in triumph on January 8, 1959, placards (Gracias Fidel), television cameras, and bell ringers were ready. But there was no need to fake what one American reporter called "the magic of his personality." His political skills would help make him the longest-surviving head of government in a major nation after North Korea's Kim R Sung and Jordan's King Hussein.
WQ WINTER 1988
48
At the age of 62, Fidel Castro seems to be outliving the forces that helped establish...
HE D PARTNE
Raymond Duncan
That the Soviet Union should find its most enduring overseas ally in the Caribbean tropics is one of the great ironies of this century.
In Moscow, Latin America was for decades rather a mystery. Vladi- mir Lenin knew little of the area. Josef Stalin suffered a rebuff in Mexico when the government responded to Cornintern meddling by breaking off diplomatic relations (1930) and offering a welcome to his exiled arch rival, Leon Trotsky. And during the 1950s' when Nikita K...
Cuba is an island, but, notes historian
Hugh Thomas, it was never isolated.
Since the 18th century, when the Cu- bans began producing sugar in quantity for sale abroad, their history "has been like the history of the world seen through the eyes of a child: an invention in Silesia [involving beet sugar], a plague in Africa, a war or a prosperous time in England or France-these apparently unconnected events beyond Cuba's con- trol have determined the lives of Cubans who, despite their tropical i...
Born in Prague in the twilight years of the Austro-Hungarian Em- pire, Franz Kafka (1883-1924) has become the supreme prose poet of 20th-century anxiety. His enigmatic parables-dark, angst-ridden works such as "The Metamorphosis," The Castle, and The Trial-have been taken up by critics of every stripe. To Freudians, they demonstrate a thwarted Oedipal rage; to Marx-ists, the alienation of capitalist society; to existentialists, the loneli- ness and dread of man in a Godless cosmos; to...