33 Revolutions - Whole Book, Spoilers Allowed (January 2017)

[Whitney]

Here are a few comment / questions to help get things started. Feel free to ignore them and comment on any aspects of the book you found interesting.

There were a few comments in the previous thread from people who thought the “scratched record” analogy might have been a tad over used. I counted the number of times it appeared; I was thinking it might have been 33, but it was actually 42. (I hope this doesn’t mean that dreary repetitiveness is actually the meaning of life.)

I can understand the repetitiveness of the phrase being used to further drive home the bleak repetitiveness of the narrator's life in Cuba. Did people think it was effective in this regard? What did you think about Guevara’s use of the phrase at the very end?

Why do you think the main character a hobby photographer? Is the character getting something out of his photography, or is it just to support his literary role as a witness to the failings of the Revolution?

Why do you think the narrator has tastes in minimalist, modernist, aleatoric (cool new word for me) music, “tastes so alien to the tropics” as he says? Is there an element of his discontent that is bigger than just the fact of day-to-day existence in Fidel’s Cuba?

Do you think Guevara had a particular audience in mind when writing this book?

[Marc]

With regard to the broken record analogy and the use of the phrase at the end, Guevara does do a remarkable job of mimicking the kind of mind-numbing repetition of a scratched or broken record, which makes it feel all the more remarkable when change actually occurs. It seems near-miraculous when the demonstration occurs:

For the first time in his life, he witnesses the beautiful sight of a spontaneous demonstration, not the scratched record of a staged event. To be witness to a genuine, albeit minimal, revolt makes him, for a split second, regain his optimism.

And then the boat sinks at the end and visibly "... turns like a scratched record. At thirty-three revolutions per minute... "

It's like nature and history have conjoined to perpetuate this hopeless rut.

Cuba itself lives in a kind of "post-truth world" of its own making when he talks about the earlier sinking of the tugboat and how word travels (and gets distorted) from mouth to mouth. There are no verifiable sources. What does it mean to live with stories that get repeated over and over but seem disconnected from reality?

[LindaJ^]

Marc wrote: "What does it mean to live with stories that get repeated over and over but seem disconnected from reality?"

Is Cuba any different than the rest of the world in that respect? (OK, I'll give you that if one makes an effort, one may be able to discover the truth of a story.)

[Whitney]

I think the difference is, if I'm fully understanding your point, that here and many other countries we can choose to live in that world of oft repeated but disconnected stories. In a country with a single authority controlling information, that choice doesn't exist.

It is an interesting question. Here, people have their preferred news sources that they trust to at least give them a reasonably accurate accounting of reality. You used to hear stories of people coming from countries where the news is tightly controlled by the state having just bizarre ideas of the west. The idea I've gotten of Cuba is of a country where people are fully aware of the truth versus the government version of the truth, but that may be a view skewed by the fact that we mostly hear about the country from Cuban dissidents and intellectuals.

[Kirsten]

I think I'd rather have no news than the news we have where we have "alternate" facts.

Just a thought - but can there be spoilers? There wasn't much of a plot. It was more of a long poem.

[Marc]

I think the point I didn't stress in the quote I provided is that it's the state that is actively providing inaccurate information so that the official word is a lie, Linda.

And, as Kirsten just pointed out, "alternative" facts are becoming more and more the norm. To be fair, we do still have an amazingly free press that still manages to do quality work here in the U.S.

That sounds like some sort of imaginative challenge: Come up with a spoiler for this book!

[Kirsten]

Excellent write up for a new book on that subject in the latest edition of The Nation, Marc: Democracy's Detectives: The Economics of Investigative Journalism by James Hamilton

https://www.thenation.com/article/who...

[Marc]

That looks like a great read (yet another I'm probably not going to get to any time soon), Kirsten!

I can't even conceptualize what it would be like to live in a Cuba or a North Korea in terms of that level of oppression/censorship. Fear of saying the wrong thing to the wrong person. People are touchy enough already talking about religion or politics, nevermind worrying if they might report you to the authorities.

Even here a lot of stories don't come to light. Makes me think of Project Censored--they do a Top Censored Stories every year (the link is to their 2016 list).

[Whitney]

I think that if we buy into the whole "alternative facts" claims of the current US administration, then we are one step closer to the North Korean way of "the truth is what those in power say it is". As much as people criticize the press here, there is some impressive investigative journalism still being done. I know recent events have led me and many other people to subscribe to newspapers to help keep them afloat.

I agree, Kirsten, it's not really a book that can be 'spoiled', given that it's not exactly what I would call plot driven. I suppose the hyper-spoiler alert would consider a statement that he drowns at the end a spoiler.

Thinking about it, the book does read almost like a suicide note from a depressed Cuban poet.

[LindaJ^]

Whitney wrote: "Thinking about it, the book does read almost like a suicide note from a depressed Cuban poet. "

Indeed it does. Would not have come to that conclusion on my own, I don't think!

[Kirsten]

Good point!