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Book Market in Plaza de Armas, Havana
Greetings!
We are just back from an eye-opening visit to the Republic of Cuba. We traveled on our own, stayed in private homes, and ate in the emerging sector of small, private restaurants. Our purpose was to explore the island’s extensive and enormously successful small-scale, organic farming initiative (especially urban agriculture) that has developed in response to the crisis following the collapse of the Soviet Union. We visited large inner-city farms surrounded by apartment blocks, enjoyed lengthy discussions with agronomists, and browsed in a variety of markets – state as well as private and cooperative.
Not surprisingly, we also visited a number of bookstores and book markets. None were particularly impressive. The shops seemed to have limited inventory and mostly bored, desultory staffs. The sprawling book market in the Plaza de Armas is largely oriented to the tourist trade with numerous souvenir titles by the revolutionary icons Fidel Castro – History Will Absolve Me – and Che Guevara – Bolivian Diary. We were disappointed to be unable to find books by Cuban poet and novelist Reinaldo Arenas who clashed with the Castro regime, was imprisoned, and ultimately fled the island in 1980. His autobiography – Before Night Falls – was on the New York Times list of the ten best books of the year 1993, but not a single copy in Spanish or English was to be had in either Havana or Santa Clara.
Our general impressions were largely positive – 99.7 literacy rate, 78-year life expectancy and a 4.76 infant mortality rate (figures that equal or better our own). We enjoyed a hearty welcome, safe streets and vibrant, ubiquitous music. A few days at the beach took the edge off the northwoods winter. For the first time in sixty years we were able to identify most of the cars on the street by make, model and year! A large percentage of the cars are 30’s, 40’s and 50’s American cars that have been nursed along for well over half a century. Many have been lovingly restored and are hot tourist attractions, most are held together with baling wire and serve the usual quotidian functions.
While we are not Cuba experts, in any sense of the word, we have been invited to give a presentation on our exploration of Cuban urban agriculture at Northland College in Ashland. The event will take place on at 7:00pm on February 17th at the Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute on the Northland campus. All are invited.
Remember, if you’ve lost yours,
we are your local bookstore!
All of us at AIB
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Upcoming event...
Railways of the Harbor City
Presentation by Robert Nelson
Sunday, January 31st at 2pm
Bayfield Heritage Association
30 North Broad Street, Bayfield
Bob Nelson is a lifelong Bayfield resident and his family has been here for generations back. He is passionate about preserving the amazing history of our region. Bob will present a series of slides and readings regarding the railroad history during the late 19th century in Bayfield. There will be guest readers representing several historical figures.
Bob is the author of two books; Apostle Islanders (should be back in stock by end of May 2016) and Harbor City Chronicles Volume One. We are looking forward to much more from Bob in the future. In the meantime, we look foward to seeing you on the 31st.
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What we're reading...
 Ordinary Heroes
by Scott Turow
Our previous exposure to Scott Turow has been through his legal thrillers and mysteries. This robust war story is a revelation. The narrator, retired reporter Stewart Dubinsky, stitches together a harrowing WWII tale from letters, notes, and journals left to him by his late father. The characters are richly drawn and deeply layered. The moral conflicts are complex and disquieting. The love story is urgent and sensitive. The bloody experience of warfare is starkly rendered. This is gripping fiction that reads like non-fiction.
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 Hunters in the Dark
by Lawrence Osborne
This one has been compared to Graham Greene, Patricia Highsmith, Paul Bowles, Evelyn Waugh, and Ian McEwan. That’s pretty good company by our lights and this powerful novel delivers. A late-20’s Sussex teacher heads for Thailand ostensibly for a break from his seemingly dead-end life. He crosses the border into Cambodia and wins a bit of a bundle in a casino, intersects with a number of Khmer characters, is befriended by a calculating American, and falls in with a Khmer woman. The slow and languid plot unfolds almost as a meditation (with periodic eruptions) and flows like the dreamy, winding Mekong River that provides the setting. This one of the best new novels of the year.
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 My Name is Lucy Barton
by Elizabeth Strout
Pulitzer Prize winner and widely admired author Elizabeth Strout, whose previous books including Olive Kitteridge and The Burgess Boys have been runaway bestsellers, has a new and extraordinary novel. Lucy Barton is recovering from complications of a simple operation when her estranged mother comes to visit. Small talk opens a reconnection between them and then things deepen into the pathos of Lucy’s life – her painful childhood and her escape from it; her efforts to become a writer; her marriage; and, her daughters. Lucy’s voice – or is it Strout’s?-is deeply observant and expresses both the tenderness and longing of the mother/daughter relationship.
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Final Thoughts...
Urban farmer in the heart of Havana
The problem will be to maintain balance between large-scale food production and the small-scale, organic production that we rely upon now. When relations are restored with the United States, the temptation will be great to revert to high-input, industrial farms and imports. The question is whether cheaper and more efficient will win out over healthiness and better environmental practices.
~ Greco Cid, Cuban Agronomist
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Hooray!
