Before stepping into the pages of journalist Ullekh NP’s Mad About Cuba, you might want to get a glimpse of the place where the author grew up, a corner of Kerala where Cuba, an island country many seas away, has held sway as an influence for years. Ullekh confesses to having grown up with this strange fixation, fed on a steady supply of literature about the Cuban Revolution and the Communist connection. When he calls the trip he finally made in the summer of 2023 the “Cuban dream”, the euphoria is evident. Much more than a travelogue, the book is a canvas where all that he had imagined about Cuba proves to be real – for him.
In love with Cuba
Ullekh is clear which was his sympathies lie. He admits that his monologue to a young Cuban server about the damage done to Cuba by the US sanctions is filled with jargon. She has to intervene politely to tell him that the reasons for Cuba’s economic downfall are not what bothers the young. What they want are results, she says, so that they too can have lives like the ones they watch on Instagram. “Our life is our life, I tell you. Life is easy for you, isn’t it? Then it must be easy for me too,” she tells him.
This encounter takes place in Havana, where he has chosen to stay at the government-run Hotel Nacional de Cuba. Ullekh begins the chapter not with the journey from home but with an anecdote about a meeting in the Cuban capital with a kindred soul named Enrique, who too is “politically in love with Cuba.” The writer takes into account every sort of reader and explains his own fascination with Fidel Castro’s country.
Choosing, as it did, the world’s first democratically elected Communist government in 1957, Kerala preceded the Cuban Revolution that would overthrow a military dictatorship and bring in Castro. Ullekh explains Kerala’s strange love for faraway histories and culture: The magical realism of Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, the football of Argentina, and the leaders of the Cuban Revolution. “Kerala is not just known for its fascination with the books of [Garcia] Márquez but also for its romantic notion of communism that flowered with the success of the Cuban Revolution,” Ullekh writes, adding that Garcia Márquez’s support for Cuba further endeared him further to Malayalis.
Not hamstrung by a need to balance different viewpoints, Ullekh stresses on the US sanctions – or the economic blockade as the Cubans call it – bringing the subject up every few pages to lament the lack of opportunities and the heavy losses it brought to the island country. The embargo had begun at the time of the 1959 Revolution, preventing trade between the two countries, a factor that would dissuade other countries too from doing business with Cuba, Ullekh notes in many places. His history of the land is peppered with real-life anecdotes of people he meets at different jaunts. Like the young server in Havana, he meets an interpreter who tells him how all her friends have migrated to other countries for better-paid jobs and opportunities. The youth are leaving, Ullekh writes mournfully.
The book might have become a sort of long research paper if it weren’t for Ullekh’s anecdotal writing and personal recollections, and the endearing comparisons between his home state and his dream nation. He finds a Kerala connection nearly everywhere – even the way coffee is poured at a height from jug to tumbler the way it’s done in the “chayakkadas” of Kerala. But the most enriching account is from his visit to a tobacco farm, where he finds a moving connection between the beedi workers of Kerala and the cigar-rollers of Cuba. The rolling of beedis long ago became a significant source of income for people in Kerala. During the rolling, one individual would be given the task of reading newspapers or books to the others – a practice that Ullekh discovered among Cuba’s cigar-rollers. he notes that in both places, “the quest for political literacy appears insatiable, especially among the working classes.”
At home in Cuba
The writer does not say it in as many words, but Cubans also appear to share the Malayali fondness for a drink. The books lets the reader in on the stories of bars and pubs of Cuba, including joints like El Floridita where Ernest Hemingway nursed his daiquiri. Ulleskh recounts ordering two drinks together for fear of not being able to get more later, and receiving a stern rejoinder from his wife after texting her. On one occasion, he sends a photo taken with University students to her, asking whether he too does not look like a student. Her response? “Maybe their dad!”.
Only once in the book does Ullekh admit to missing his family, but as a rule he seems very much at home in Cuba, full of reverence for the founding fathers and allotting entire chapters to Castro and Che Guevara and the way they shaped Cuba into a self-sufficient country where most people owned their homes and had access to free education and healthcare.
Of course, the view is almost always from the perspective of a Cuba-lover, examining even the aftermath through his eyes. I do wish though that the writer had explored the stories of Cuban exiles, of what made them flee the country after the Revolution, and of their alleged roles in the attacks on Castro. It is to please them and win votes in the swing state of Florida that Donald Trump went back on his predecessor Barack Obama’s promise of finally lifting the sanctions on Cuba, as Ullekh points out.
As a reader, you feel the loss when Ullekh leaves the country for the US on his way back to India, where officials tell him that they’re going to pour away the precious rum and burn the Cuban cigars he has carefully handpicked for friends. Very little of what is Cuba-made can pass through the US, he notes. Ullekh appears to have made his dream trip in good time, for going on this Cuban journey now might have led to a loss of much more than rum and cigars.
Mad About Cuba: A Malayali Revisits the Revolution, Ullekh NP, Penguin India.