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Imprint: Arcadia
Format: B Format
ISBN: 9781908129505
Price: £ 11.99
Pages: 300 pp
Date: 26th April 2012
‘Witty yet observant … this book smells of train travel
and will appeal to wanderlusts as well as armchair train
buffs’ Time Out
‘Succeeds in capturing the wonder of America that the
iron horse made accessible to the world’ The Times
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Slow Train to Guantanamo
Peter Millar (About this author)
A rail odyssey through Cuba in the last days of the Castros
It is an island more than a thousand kilometres long and was the
sixth in the world (before its colonial master Spain) to have a
national rail network. In 1958 it had more cars and colour
televisions per head of population than any other save the US.
Cuba today looks and feels like a nation at the end of a long, hard
war. Crippled by an American blockade, with a communist system
that has delivered first-rate health care but atrocious standards of
living, most of its population are more used to getting around on
horse-drawn carts, clapped-out Cadillacs, rickshaw taxis or, in the
capital, dirty overcrowded buses. Peter Millar jumps aboard a
railway system that was once the pride of Latin America and is now
a crippled casualty case to undertake a railway odyssey the length of
Cuba in the dying days of the Castro regime. Starting in the
ramshackle but romantic capital of Havana, once dominated by the
US mafia, he travels with ordinary Cubans, sharing anecdotes, life
stories and political opinions to the far end of the island where it
meets a more modern blot of American history, the Guantanamo
naval base and detention camp. Millar may not have all the
answers but he asks a lot of the right questions on an anarchic,
entertaining and often comic adventure. A journey everyone will
want to read about but nobody in their right mind would want to
emulate!
More Books by this Author:
1989 The Berlin Wall: My Part in its Downfall
All Gone to Look for America
The Black Madonna
The Shameful Suicide of Winston Churchill
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