Word: cuba
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Ambush. Led by Guide and Roberto ("Coco") Peredo, two Bolivian brothers who joined the country's Communist Party and visited Cuba in 1965-66, the guerrillas are armed with automatic weapons, grenades and modern communication equipment. Their field of operation - a 1,300-sq.-mi. area that straddles important oil lands between Santa Cruz and Camiri-is steep and covered with thick, thorny vegetation and huge plants with leaves so sharp that they can slice through clothes and skin. The guerrillas first surfaced in March, when they ambushed and killed seven men on an army patrol. Since then, they...
...company, then fled with five soldiers as his prisoners. Last week a manifesto signed by Negro was making the rounds in La Paz, calling on Bolivians to make their nation a "strategic center of continental revolution." To win over peasants in the countryside, the guerrillas-apparently financed by Cuba-often pay double prices at the local stores as a friendly gesture, and buy soda pop for the kids; one of their doctors recently performed an appendectomy on a farm worker...
...Malabre's Cuba, there is "no longer bourgeois variety for the happy few, only flat socialist equality for all." The convent school that his wife once attend ed is now the Lenin Workers Training Center, and the elegant home of a former friend now houses an embassy. The greatest change is the appearance of an entirely new vocabulary. Tracatrán, a new coinage onomatopoetically suggesting machinelike response, refers to a person who carries out orders implacably; parquear la tinosa means "to park the buzzard," or pass the buck; saram-pionado, or "measled," describes someone who shows a rash...
...book comes to life most in the final pages, dealing with the missile crisis. Malabre, frightened and exhilarated, is in bed with his newest mistress, Noemi, when he hears the radio voice of John F. Kennedy announcing the quarantine. As army tanks rumble through the streets, Malabre reflects that Cuba is "no longer an insignificant colony, we've already rushed into history, we have the same weapons that the Russians and Americans rattle at each other...
Author Desnoes, 37, was working as a journalist in New York when Castro took power, and went home of his own accord because "I never would be anybody outside my country." He now lives in Havana and is an editor of Cuba's national book-publishing company. The novel seems to give a picture of Castro's Cuba, warts and all: the endless waiting in lines, bureaucratic inefficiency, food shortages, paucity of merchandise in stores, and such trivial but revealing irritations as delays in deliveries of soft drinks because there are no corks for the bottles...