Grandmother’s footsteps

Towards Che himself she is unfashionably sympathetic. Those who delighted to rubbish The Motorcycle Diaries for its hagiographic piety, claiming instead that the guerrilla icon was simply another thuggish dogmatist of the left, will scorn her approval as mere embarrassing naivete. Yet perhaps the Marxist gunman was genuine in proselytising for that common good whose value our gourmandising, self-indulgent capitalism seems so reluctant to acknowledge. In Murphy’s reading, Cuba as a whole has not made too bad a fist of living up to Guevaran ideals. Almost everyone she meets is literate, healthy, adequately fed and properly employed. It is easy to see why most of them are protective of Castro, defensive of the government and not necessarily falling over each other to welcome the notional blessings of American hegemony.

Should Cuba therefore be commended for its role as a persistent morsel of grit in a giant’s shoe? Aware of the regime’s shortcomings, more especially as regards the repression of freedom among writers and journalists, Murphy nevertheless takes a dim view of its chief opponent, the Cuban American National Foundation, spliced together from CIA-funded terrorists, their operators in Washington and the directors and major shareholders of Bacardi Rum. As for America’s continuing embargo, we can readily endorse her implicit conclusion that this represents nothing more exalted than a prolonged sulk over Cuba’s courageous rejection of its former role as a corrupt Caribbean satellite of the mainland superpower.

The trouble with The Island That Dared is not its writer’s opinions, from which readers are free to dissent, but the muddled nature of its basic concept. In earlier books she has contrived a skilful balance between personal narrative, things seen and broader observation on the flow of history and the social conditions of the countries visited. Here, in contrast, it is hard not to feel that we are reading two different works simultaneously, a travel memoir and a political analysis, both of them arresting but the former rather too aggressively brushed aside by the latter. Clearly Murphy’s authorial gaze, in its resolute inquisitiveness, remains beady, but its focus is less on Cuba as a place than on the country’s idea of itself as a democracy and on its geopolitical role as a maverick David defying the modern Goliath.

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