Book review

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/intejcubastud.6.1.0101
• Published date: 01 April 2014
• Date: 01 April 2014
• Pages: 101284-103
• Author: Steve Ludlam

BOOK REVIEWS 101

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Stephen Kimber, What Lies across the Water: the Real Story of the Cuban Five

(Winnipeg, Manitoba: Fernwood Publishing, 2013) pb 284pp.

ISBN 978-1-55266-542-8

Reviewed by Steve Ludlam

Stephen Kimber is a Canadian Professor of Journalism who encountered the

case of the Cuban Five in a holiday resort in the island in 2004, long after their

arrests. He later asked a Cuban friend to explain the case, and was referred

to a long speech by Fidel Castro. Shocked by the story and by the near total

silence about it in the North American media, he wrote this book (instead

of a planned Cuba-based novel). Kimber has scoured the source materials,

interviewed the Five and many others directly or indirectly involved in Cuba

and the US, and had his f‌inal draft reviewed by two of the Five. The result is

a robustly-researched account of the complex worlds of US-hosted anti-Cuba

terrorism and its respectable front-men, of US government complicity, and of

the Cuban anti-terrorist agents who fought them, including the Five. It is written

in ‘datelined’ passages that build up the compelling and accessible narrative of a

complex reality – at times unreality, as the ambiguous title implies – of terrorist

and counter-terrorist activities that have poisoned US-Cuba relations.

The book provides horrendous material on anti-Cuban terrorism: bombing

hotels in Havana with fatal effect in the late 1990s, and attempting to massacre

the performers and audience in the famous Tropicana nightclub. The plot was

foiled only because the man employed to do it was a Cuban agent himself who

gave evidence at the trial, and published his own account (Percy Alvarado,

Confessions of Fraile: a Real Story of Terrorism, La Habana: Editorial Capitán

San Luis, 2004). It sheds light on the fatal combination of US-based armed

threats and provocations, and Cuba’s fears and consternation, that resulted in

the Brothers to the Rescue shoot-down and the subsequent conspiracy to murder

charge against Gerardo Hernandez. The book offers details of the participation

not only of paramilitary terrorists, but also of the leaders of the apparently

respectable Cuban American political lobby who moved unmolested between

lobbying and paramilitary activities. They had little fear of off‌icial US interference,

since as one puts it, for them the authorities were always on vacation. What

Kimber’s detail suggests is that in the 1990s, far from being an obsolete sideshow

in Miami, US-hosted anti-Cuba terrorists remained a plausibly deniable form of

long-running, US-tolerated death-squad politics in Latin America, in this case

arbitrarily targeting Cubans and tourists on the island, or in aircraft en route to

its resorts.

IJCS6_1 101 06/06/2014 11:35