Just released from Fernwood Publishing.

Arnold August’s Third Book on Cuba.

Cuba–U.S. Relations: Obama and Beyond

This book could not have been more timely. With Fidel Castro’s death focusing outside attention on Cuba’s future and with Trump’s election throwing U.S.–Cuban “normalization” into question, Arnold August contests the common assumptions and public rhetoric about Cuban politics and about that “normalization.”

— Antoni Kapcia, University of Nottingham

A short extract from the Foreword to the book by Keith Ellis:

What does a Canadian progressive intellectual do when a revolution made by the people of Cuba has won, because of its spirit and its achievements, his admiration and his loyalty? What does he do when this revolution, which, he shows, is the authentic culmination of a process that has involved all the salient stages of Cuba’s history, of its struggles, now finds itself in a time of unprecedented complexity and new difficulties, fed in part by the very successes of the Revolution? Arnold August brings to the task his finest gift, his superbly developed talent as a journalist, understanding this to mean the habit of assessing different aspects and representations of reality, so that he offers an ultimate fairness to the reasonable and humane reader. August constantly exhibits a related attribute: his remarkable power of analysis. The two together make the experience of reading him an enlightening one. His research work for this book, as for others on related topics, led him to live in Cuba for important periods of time, to live among Cubans and notice 1) how Fidel’s extraordinary power of analysis has been reflected in the Cuban population and 2) the impact its diffusion throughout the society has had on producing the calm, pleasant affability that underpins the stability of Cuba during times that could have been tempestuous. The people know how to think, and August has the superior skills, derived from his affinity for truth-telling, to produce a reliable picture of the complexities of their reaction to attempts to beguile them.

For nine other endorsements from Canada, the U.S. and the U.K., the Table of Contents, the biographies of Keith Ellis and Ricardo Alarcón (the author of the Introduction to the book), and how to purchase the book from Fernwood Publishing (Halifax), please click here.