Caribbean Picture

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30064, 23 February 1963, Page 3

Caribbean Picture

Red Rumba. By Nicholas Wollaston. Hodder and Stoughton. 230 pp.

Mr Wollaston’s latest travel book describes a four and a half month journey which he made through the Carribbean and Central America in 1961. He arrived in Cuba before the abortive April invasion, continued through the banana, coffee and sugar republics of Central America, and returned to Havana shortly after the invasion had been crushed. Mr Wollaston’s method of getting to know places in a short time, is to wander through the streets and countryside, talking to journalists, clergyman, streetwalkers, soldiers and barmen; anyone, in fact, who likes to stop and talk. The snatches of conversation he reproduces are often vivid and humorous thumb-nail portraits, displaying a command of gently irony. His language is terse, and skilfully edited to achieve sharpness of impression. Mr Wollaston is ready to listen respectfully to other people’s opinions, but the conclusions he forms are based on his own shrewd observations. In Cuba he was

impressed by the great energy which he saw on all sides: the agrarian reform, the housing projects, the tentative beginnings of industry. His chief regret as that the progress had come so late, and accompanied by such needless violence. Nor was he blinded to the fact that the bureaucratic system was disorganised and inefficient, or to the general feeling of instability, reflected in the guns and uniforms, the persecution of the Church and the purges in uni. ersities. In the other countries Mr Wollaston ,-isited he saw greater poverty and illiteracy. His encounters with beggar children and the stony indifference of the wealthy few (“They needn’t be poor if they don’t want to be. They only have to work. They can go to an institution to get food”), turned him from detachment to sympathy and anger. At La Perla in Puerto Rico, the filthy shacks and the silent stares of children made him feel ashamed of his suede shoes and his Leica camera; in Haiti he was disturbed to find 90 per cent of the population illiterate. and ui "ble to speak the official language, which is French.

Mr Wollaston is emphatic that the most pressing need of the under-developed countries is education. He is in sympathy wi Nicaragua’s dictator, President Somoza, who is pledged to the same view. Without education, President Somoza told him, there could be no democracy, and little hope of increasing production. Mr Wollaston has also high praise for Cuba’s ambitious educational programme, known as Alfabetizacion, which was launched in 1961 in an effort to reduce the country’s illiteracy rate (at that time 30 per cent). This is a stimulating book, and a valuable guide to the conditions existing in countries which. with the exception of Cuba, we seldom hear much about.

In his column a short time ago, Mr O. O. Mclntyre asked who could tell, without looking it up, the present tense of the verb of which “wrought" is the past participle.