Cuba

For decades, all the outside world knew was that Patrice Lumumba, the Congolese independence leader, had been done away with. Like so much connected with the Congo, details were lost in the murk of Africa’s magnificent but broken giant. He had been fed to Katangan pigs, drowned in the river — or was perhaps even still alive and being held hostage in the Ituri rain-forest. So radiotrottoir assured me variously in January 2001 when I made my first visit to Kinshasa around the 40th anniversary of Lumumba’s disappearance. The reason for my trip felt darkly familiar: one of Lumumba’s successors as national leader, Laurent Kabila, had himself just been assassinated

Carlos Acosta, the greatest dancer of his generation, grew up in Havana as the youngest of 11 black children. Money was tight, but Carlos won a place at ballet school, and before long he was enthralling audiences at Covent Garden as a half Jagger, half Nureyev figure with a twist of the moon-walking Jackson in the mix. Now Acosta is about to leap into the world of literature with a debut novel, Pig’s Foot, written over a period of four years during rehearsal breaks. For all its manifest debt to Latin American so-called ‘magic realists’ (Marquez, Borges, Vargas Llosa), the novel stands triumphantly on its own. In pages of salty-sweetprose,

Before the revolución of 1959, Havana was, effectively, a mafia fleshpot and colony of Las Vegas. Before the revolución of 1959, Havana was, effectively, a mafia fleshpot and colony of Las Vegas. Graham Greene first visited in 1954, when the dancing girls wore spangled headdresses. The Batista regime was then at its height, and tourists flocked to the Cuban capital for its promise of tropical oblivion. George Greene, the ‘GG’ of the title of this novella, is an English holidaymaker on the prowl in pre-communist Havana. Castro’s revolution is less than four years away — it is the summer of 1955 — and George hurls himself promiscuously into Batista’s grimy

Very long books appear at intervals about Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. Rarely do they contain anything both significant and new, and they get longer and longer. This one too is a long book, though it is mercifully an abridgement of the original Spanish edition, which ran to over 1,400 pages. Anything in it both significant and new has escaped me. Most of it is about Castro’s childhood, youth, the overthrow of Batista and the early years of the revolution: Castro gave up smoking many years ago, but here he is still puffing away. All the same, it provokes thoughts. The first is that it confirms the view that history