Joshua Jelly-Schapiro is a geographer and writer whose work has appeared in The New York Review of Books, New York, Harper’s, The Believer, Artforum, and The Nation, among many other publications. Educated at Yale and Berkeley, he is the coeditor, with Rebecca Solnit, of Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas. He is a visiting scholar at New York University’s Institute for Public Knowledge. Island People is his first book.
This digital edition first published in Great Britain in 2019 by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
Introduction copyright © Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, 2019
Chapters 1, 2, 3 from Island People, copyright © Joshua-Jelly Schapiro, 2016 “On the Verge” copyright © Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, 2016
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
Chapters 1, 2, and 3 appeared in Island People by Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, published by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, in 2016.
Chapter 4: “On the Verge” was originally published in the New York Review of Books in 2018.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
eISBN 978 1 78689 762 6
Cover photo © Noah Friedman-Rudovsky
CONTENTS
| Cuba Libre | |
| Chapter 1 | Cuba Sí |
| Chapter 2 | Cuban Counterpoints |
| Chapter 3 | Autumn of the Patriarch |
| Chapter 4 | On the Verge |
Bibliography and Further Reading
INTRODUCTION
For a man long said to be the only Cuban who didn’t dance, Fidel Castro always had a stellar sense of timing. Before he died in 2016 at age ninety, Cuba’s leader for half a century was also a bogeyman for six U.S. presidents, a hateful villain to Cubans in Miami whose island he “stole” in 1959, and an outsized hero across what was once called the third world. As a politician who was also his country’s foremost celebrity, the bearded icon known to his countrymen as “Fidel” grabbed every spotlight he could—whether by turning up, in his revolution’s early years, just in time to be photographed helping his troops repel invaders at the Bay of Pigs or by appearing on a ferryboat in Havana’s harbor, decades later and after that revolution had soured, to remonstrate with fleeing countrymen trying to hijack the vessel to Florida. But as the survivor of hundreds of attempts on his life, he had a keen sense—his fondness for hours-long speeches notwithstanding—for when to seize or exit a stage. Which is perhaps why the timing of his death, which he managed to effect on his own terms and as an old man in bed, shouldn’t have been surprising. His younger brother, Rául Castro, Fidel’s successor in power, announced the “physical disappearance” of Cuba’s eternal comandante on November 25, 2016—mere days after the nearby nation that served as Fidel’s bête noire elected Donald Trump president.
This coincidence didn’t go unnoticed on the Internet. One meme that went viral after Fidel’s death recalled that he had promised, long ago, that he’d only let himself expire when el imperio—the United States—fell apart. If the ascent there of a vain buffoon who won the White House by tweeting lies from his phone signified to Fidel that this day had come, he wasn’t alone. Either way, that momentous month in the northern hemisphere saw the demise of one figure who symbolized an era and the rise of another who may do the same. The nearness of events felt dramatic indeed, in two countries long joined by what a leading scholar of U.S.–Cuba relations termed “ties of singular intimacy.” And especially so, given some dramatic recent changes in their bilateral ties.
Those changes would have been quite unimaginable during the Cold War, to Fidel and everyone else. They saw Rául Castro respond to historic entreaties from Barack Obama in ways Fidel never could have—and take significant steps, after his and Obama’s joint announcement of détente in late 2014, toward burying the mighty hatchet that had for sixty years defined U.S.–Cuba relations.
Among the resultant shifts was a lifting of limits on Americans’ ability to visit Cuba. By late 2016, these changes had already allowed a million people—curious tourists enticed here by Buena Vista Social Club and also Cuban Americans thrilled to be able to visit kin as they wished—to board new direct flights to do so. They also allowed me, days after Fidel’s death and as a devotee of Cuba who for twenty years had grown used to traveling here as a journalist and researcher only via Canada or Mexico, to have a novel experience: I called up JetBlue and booked a simple forty-minute flight from Fort Lauderdale to the provincial town of Holguín, in Cuba’s rural east, to catch the end of a funeral cortege that saw Fidel’s cremated remains driven the island’s length in a little green jeep. The solemn procession ended in the city where Fidel first made his name, Santiago, and where he’s now interred in a grave marked by a twenty-ton granite boulder hauled there from the nearby Sierra Maestra and affixed with a bronze plaque inscribed with a single word: FIDEL.
That funeral, and a fateful election in the United States, is what November 2016 will be recalled for by historians. My closer relations and I will also recall that month for the publication of my book, Island People. That book, many years in the making, comprised a portrait of the Caribbean that approached the region’s islands—from Cuba to Puerto Rico, Jamaica to Trinidad, Barbados to Martinique—not in the way they’re often imagined these days: as “exotic” spots to vacation. Island People, rather, understood the nations of the Greater and Lesser Antilles as places that belong at the center of any story we tell ourselves about the making of our modern world.
These fertile islands, long before their shores became famed for sun and sand, were the rocks into which Columbus bumped on his hunt for Asia and “where globalization began.” They’re where the Triangle Trade was then centered, for three centuries, by colonial powers who brought six million enslaved
