Child of the Revolution

Child of the Revolution

Sacha Molitorisz, reviewer
June 19, 2006

Memoir of a childhood in Castro's Cuba is thick with cigar smoke and
summer sweat.
Child of the Revolution: Garcia deftly balances his own reminiscences
with the bigger picture.

Alarm bells start ringing whenever I see a sub-title such as Growing up
in Castro's Cuba. I know I'm in for a memoir and that too many memoirs
are meandering, self-absorbed and dull.

But when the author is Luis M. Garcia, that alarm bell is muted. To
declare my interest: until 1998 Garcia was a colleague at the Herald,
where we were acquaintances, though not close. His writing was concise,
thorough and elegant. Not flamboyant, but efficient. He was the
antithesis of the personality journalist who makes himself the
centrepiece of every story.

Still, I had one nagging worry: would Garcia be able to muster enough
flamboyance and colour? Or would his voice be too concise and efficient?

Child of the Revolution is Garcia's first book (he has previously
co-authored a biography), and the good news is it tells a compelling
story. After being introduced to a frightened 12-year-old boy boarding a
plane bound for exile, we backtrack to Garcia's childhood, beginning
with his birth in July 1959. Six months earlier, President Batista fled
the country, leaving Fidel Castro's rebels in charge. The timing is
sweet: Garcia arrives six months after the birth of modern Cuba, making
a memoir of his boyhood a neat parallel for the story of communist
Cuba's early years.

In the first person and in the present tense, Garcia deftly balances his
own reminiscences with this larger history. In October, 1962, with
nuclear war looming, Garcia tells how his mother goes to extremes to
smuggle a leg of pork in the boot of the family car. With just as much
detail, we take in Christmas, cigars and Carnival, all described by an
innocent young communist embarrassed by his anti-revolutionary parents.

Garcia captures his embarrassments, and also his enthusiasms - such as
for the local bookshop, where the shelves were crammed with biographies
of Lenin, which sold for "next to nothing".

"They are not fancy books - the covers are dull and the pages inside are
badly glued together, so that they come apart almost as soon as you walk
out of the shop. This is not a bad thing since by the time you get home
with your Russian tome of Lenin's What Is To Be Done you can just make a
hole through the loose pages and pin them up next to the toilet bowl for
when you run out of toilet paper. I know, I know: it's not a very
revolutionary thing to do but, believe me, even communists need toilet
paper."

Garcia's writing has an engaging immediacy and the surprise is that the
prose is not just efficient and fact-filled. Instead, it's thick with
cigar smoke and summer sweat. That is, alive with personality.

By the by, it's interesting to see how Garcia's politics have evolved.
An eager young communist as a lad, he quit the Herald eight years ago to
become chief of staff for NSW Liberal leader Kerry Chikarovski. Now what
would Fidel have to say about that?

http://www.smh.com.au/news/book-reviews/child-of-the-revolution/2006/06/19/1150569266808.html