Accenting the Positive

...Even within his microcosm, he flits over important areas, such as education and the economic organization, or disorganization, of Mayari under Socialism, particularly in the crucial relationship between the town and the surrounding rural municipality...

...One can take or leave Yglesias' notions about revolutionary uplift...

...Without benefit of tape recorder, he has a writer's ear for dialogue...

...But there are those who have been maimed by the Revolution, and there are the "indifferent...

...It was a terrible moment to live through...

...I decided that this might well be what would make Mayari a valley of paradise," he conoludes...

...There is, in addition, a lack of historical perspective in an approach that bases the whole story on what certain people, encountered virtually by accident, have to say within a span of less than three months...

...Out of their individual stories emerges a sort of collective memory of the pre-revolutionary past, which is full of contradictions, and a picture of the present which does not hide the tensions and psychological contortions of a turbulent period of transition...

...Upon his arrival in Mayari, in Cuba's eastern Oriente province, he advises the night clerk at the new state-owned hotel that "I sympathize with your Revolution and I have come to see how it is...

...A moment later, he is reassured by a meeting with Soni Beccles, a Cuban Communist party official who is one of the prosaic revolutionary heroes of the new times in Mayari...

...The important thing is that the rich cast of characters he brings into play offer a most valuable contribution to an understanding of the complexities of a revolutionary process as deep and powerful as the Cuban experience...

...These personal statements are what hold the book together...

...They are less "simpatico...

...The people of Mayari were at their ease with him, and a Cuban at ease puts himself irrepressibly into words...

...Do you know that Yankee is an honorable term...

...The minister was the one person I had met in Mayari whom the Revolution had done a gratuitous injustice, one that revolutionary necessity could not explain or justify...

...This reviewer has visited Mayari on newspaper assignments both before and after the period in which Yglesias lived in the town...

...No one was looking at me, no one was thinking of me...

...It was a thought I did not finish," writes Yglesias...

...Reviewed by JUAN DE ONIS Correspondent, New York "Times" Jose Yglesias has brought back from revolutionary Cuba a fine set of rubbings of the "new life" under Fidel Castro's regime...

...For instance, Yglesias tells of being present during a neighborhood rally where townspeople he had come to think of as friends were roused by a speaker condemning United States aggression in Vietnam...

...Arranging his material skillfully, he presents a detailed, intimate, even gossipy account of what people do, and say, and think in Mayari and Preston, and he provides many valuable insights on what day-to-day life is like under the Castro regime for ordinary Cubans...

...but I felt ill-used and angry...

...At the other end of the table I saw Gorra raise a fist and yell, 'Down with the Yankees!' "From all over the yard they answered him: 'Down with the Yankees!' "I could not see and I could not hear for the rush of blood to my head...

...There are moments in an outsider's encounters in Cuba that no electronic device or opinion sampling method can render...

...They are flawed...

...In the Fist of the Revolution is a true picture...

...He doesn't fit into the happy, positive conclusion...

...The Cuban Revolution is a strongly emotional experience, and Yglesias does not shield himself from it behind false objectivity...

...But leaving aside the lack of an adequate backdrop, Yglesias stages his exhibit well...

...Since the break in relations between Cuba and the United States in 1960, the American eye has tended to see Cubans as an anonymous mass, isolated and obscured from view by the towering figure of Fidel Castro...

...He is not as pushy about his value judgments as the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution...

...He has given identity to the faces in the Cuban multitude...

...I took no tape recorder and no sociological discipline with me," he says...

...These people come alive as characters under Yglesias' questioning...

...For example, one would welcome a more factual treatment of how United Fruit developed the Mayari area, for without this extensive development of the sugarcane economy over the past 60 years, Mayari would still be little more than a logging camp on a seasonal creek...

...Over and over, never getting to the next groove...

...I think always in words and in my head a reply began: Do you know that Yankee is an honorable term...

...It is misleading to read that when the Revolution took over the sugar-mill it found that "la United had left little behind...

...In fact, it had left behind virtually everything that makes up Mayari, including the contradictions and passions that generated the Revolution...

...I was not singled out...

...Yglesias shows at least one lively segment of what the underside of the Cuban Revolution is like...

...He speaks fluent, colloquial Spanish, to the point that many of the Cubans with whom he talked remarked, "you are more like one of us...

...From their conversation, the author decides that the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, whose many tasks include nominating political hostiles, beatniks, lumpen, flower people, and crap-shooters for the labor camps, are fulfilling a "revolutionary necessity...

...They have not been born again to the new life...

...They brought a wonderful sanity and healthiness to their organization's pushiness about people's lives: an insistence that the open life?open to the view of one's neighbors —is the natural life of man...

...Let it be said from the start that this is not a dispassionate report...

...The focus is too narrow for that, and the time span Yglesias allowed himself is too short...

...So this "study of the life of a town," commissioned by Pantheon as one in a series on social changes in the world as seen by the people involved, is an almost uninterrupted chain of conversations between Yglesias and townspeople in Mayari and the ex-United Fruit sugarmill...

...These are the heroes for Yglesias...

...So, through Yglesias, the reader meets a variety of interesting people at the coffee bar, pizza parlor, hospital, hotel patio, courtroom, barbershop, up and down the mean streets of Mayari and Preston, on buses, and in jeep rides...

...They emerge as the human stuff of the revolutionary process...

...he had spent sixteen months in the umap [forced labor camp] away from his newborn child...

...There are those, like Dr...

...Raul Padron, a young Negro doctor who directs the new hospital at Mayari, for whom the Revolution has been a release and a challenge to personal fulfillment...

...He made his collection during a three-month sojourn last year in the town of Mayari and the nearby sugarmill at Preston, a former property of the United Fruit Company that was nationalized in 1960...

...An American whose Cuban grandparents moved to Florida, Yglesias does not fly under false colors...

...At the end of his three months in Mayari, 289 pages later, Yglesias tells the town's Methodist minister, who has just been released from a forced labor camp, that he is "very sympathetic to this Revolution" although not uncritical of concentration camps...

...Yglesias is well equipped for this approach...

...It has no method, other than Yglesias' apparent conviction that he can discover in the words people speak the most meaningful, underlying realities of the Cuban revolutionary experience...

...They are also allowed to tell their story, although they get low marks from the author...

...Such interjections of subjectivism, or perhaps of Latin intuition, give In the Fist of the Revolution a personality as vivid as the metaphor of its title...

...Of course, the choice of one town of 8,000 people and one sugar-mill does not tell the whole story of what is happening in Cuba...

...The minister, who quietly complains about the loss of individual freedom and personal guarantees under the revolutionary regime, poses a problem for the author...

...They are "sick...