REVIEW: 'The Cubans: Ordinary Lives in Extraordinary Times,' by Anthony DePalma

In "The Cubans: Ordinary Lives in Extraordinary Times," Anthony DePalma, a former reporter covering Latin America, hopes to present a noncontentious picture of the lot of ordinary Cubans since the revolution. Inspired by a photograph of his Cuban-born wife as a child in 1960, he focuses on Guanabacoa, a borough of Havana where her relatives once lived. There he follows a handful of "minor characters in Cuba's never-ending passion play."

There is Cary, a woman of Jamaican descent and a loyal Communist, who was given opportunities under Castro that were unimaginable for a black female under the previous regime. Sent to the Soviet Union to study, she returned to rise as a resourceful factory manager — to the consternation of the male employees — and went on to become the vice minister of light industry. Eventually, however, she began to chafe under her own privilege, quitting her post to start her own little business, a precarious undertaking.

Near the other end of the ideological spectrum is Mari, who refused to renounce her Christian beliefs, sacrificing a career suited to her talents. And there is Jorge, whose son, grandson, and other family members were among the people killed trying to escape to Florida in a tugboat sunk by the Cuban coast guard. He has devoted himself to holding the government accountable, first in Cuba and subsequently from Florida, where he managed to emigrate.

Finally there is Arturo, an accomplished artist allowed to live out of the country, only to return years later, drawn back by the light essential to his art.

DePalma opens up these lives, following spouses, children and colleagues, showing the determination and ingenuity with which Cubans have overcome material hardship and the rigors of their own government. The island, so vulnerable to geopolitical forces, suffered terribly with the collapse of the Soviet Union when billions in aid suddenly vanished. The 1990s became known as the "Special Period," one of extreme deprivation during which Cubans were reduced to eating fried grapefruit peel and, if DePalma is to be believed (which, in this instance, I do not), cut-up blankets in tomato sauce.

While reading his book, one wished DePalma had asked those of his subjects who remembered pre-revolutionary Cuba how the two dispensations compared. Certainly, under communism, speech and the media are policed and travel out of the country is tightly controlled. On the other hand, as he acknowledges, education and medical care have improved for ordinary people, even as a punitive United States has crippled the country's economy.

He does mention that the Special Period's hardships reminded one subject of life under Batista, but does not pursue the subject. Objectivity may be impossible. Even now, as DePalma says quoting a U.S. diplomat, "Cuba has the same effect on some people 'as the full moon has on werewolves.' "

Katherine A. Powers, a Minnesota native, reviews for the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere.

The Cubans
By: Anthony DePalma.
Publisher: Viking, 368 pages, $28.