Trading with the Enemy: A Yankee Travels through Castro's Cuba by Tom Miller

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Synopsis

”Havana knew me by my shoes”, begins Tom Miller’s lively and entertaining account of more than eight months traveling through Cuba, from coastal cities to mountain villages, from the Bay of Pigs to both sides of the fence at Guantánamo, mixing with its literati and black marketeers, its cane cutters and cigar rollers. Granted unprecedented access to travel throughout the country, the author presents us with a rare insight into one of the world’s only Communist countries. Its best-known personalities and ordinary citizens talk to him about the U.S. embargo and tell their favorite Fidel jokes as they stand in line for bread at the Socialism or Death Bakery. Miller provides a running commentary on Cuba’s food shortages, exotic sensuality, and baseball addiction as he follows the scents of Graham Greene, José Marti, Ernest Hemingway, and the Mambo Kings. The result of this informed and adventurous journey is a vibrant, rhythmic portrait of a land and people too long shielded from American eyes.

Boston Globe

A lively, rueful, informal portrait of our forbidden neighbor.

Biography

Tom Miller has been writing about the American Southwest and Latin America for more than twenty-five years. His six books include The Panama Hat Trail and On the Border, and his articles have appeared in Life, the New York Times, Rolling Stone, and other publications in the United States and Mexico. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.