One in the Lonely Planet Journeys Series
Author: Zoë Brân

Intrigued by the many disparate views of Cuba, Brân visits the country of contradictions and, interweaving history and current events, personal and wider viewpoints, she paints a vivid and compelling picture of contemporary Cuba. She finds a land that has little in common with the tourist image of tropical paradise, encountering a different country whose people reveal an individuality and tenacity at once astonishing and humbling.

Brân has always been fascinated by the gap between the ideals of the world’s socialist countries and the arduous hand-to-mouth struggles of the people who live in them. Castro’s Cuba is one of the last such places on earth. Seeking to understand the realities of Cuba today, Brân travels the length of this beautiful island. Beneath the surface of music and dancing, cockfights and animal sacrifice, she finds a land of complex ambiguities: a fertile land where many hunger; an educated country with scant knowledge of the outside world, a nation exhausted by socialism but proud of its independence and history of revolutionary struggle. From Havana to the pastoral hinterland, Brân talks with writers and artists, with expatriates, with committed revolutionaries and those desperate to escape abroad. Enduring Cuba presents a kaleidoscope of Cuba and its people, whose tenacity and endurance is at once astonishing and humbling.