history / caribbean & west indies / cuba

The story of political prisoners finally freed in December 2014, after being held captive by the United States since the late 1990s. Anti-Castro groups based in Florida carried out hundreds of military attacks on Cuba through the 1980s and 1990s, bombing hotels and shooting up Cuban beaches with machine guns. The Cuban government struck back with the Wasp Network--a dozen men and two women--sent to infiltrate those organizations. The Last Soldiers of the Cold War tells the story of those unlikely Cuban spies and their eventual unmasking and prosecution by U.S. authorities. Five of the Cubans received long or life prison terms on charges of espionage and murder.

"Yoani Sanchez is an unusual dissident: no street protests, no attacks on big politicos, no calls for revolution. Rather, she produces a simple diary about what it means to live under the Castro regime in Cuba: the difficulty of shopping and chronic hunger; the art of repairing ancient appliances; the struggle for real news and the burdens of reading the party newspaper; the fear of admission to hospitals that lack the supplies for basic sterilization; and a life structured by a propaganda machine that pushes deep into the media, the public square, and the schools. Each sensitive dispatch is a brutal and honest depiction of Cuban life today. For these simple acts of truth telling--which are published online at Generation Y, and collected here in English for the first time--Sanchez is treated as a domestic radical: she is summoned by the police; her friends are threatened; she was recently kidnapped and beaten. The state newspaper has gone so far to call her "a spy in the pay of capitalism." Her ultimate concern, however, is for her friends in prison, and for the many who have fled, and for all those who have ceased to believe in the future of Cuba. Here the situation is elegantly expressed from the perspective of important and compelling new voice, one that has already found a worldwide audience online"--.