Book Review [Havana Real: One Woman Fights to Tell the Truth about Cuba Today by Sanchez, Yoani]

Abstract

As a foreign correspondent back in the 1980s, I realized that Marxist Nicaragua’s economy had officially flat-lined on the day that a peasant in the countryside who had helped a colleague with a broken-down car asked to be paid not in the cordoba, the country’s official currency, but toilet paper. When you can non-metaphorically say that a country’s money is not worth wiping your butt with, it’s time to face the fiscal facts. I had a similar economic epiphany about Cuba while reading Havana Real, a compilation of posts by renegade blogger Yoani Sanchez about her communist shipwreck of a country. She wrote in 2009 of chatting with a friend named Xiomara who lives in Pinar del Rio, the tobacco-farming province at the far west end of the island.