Customer Reviews

The Handsomest Man in Cuba: An Escapade

5 star:		(49)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I really enjoyed The Handsomest Man In Cuba because it is something that seems like a rarity these days -- a book about a politicized subject that is not a one-sided rant. Lynette portrays Cuba as complex, often perplexing, sometimes disturbing -- the way the world really is. Travelling by bicycle, and being an outgoing Aussie, she was able to get close to the people of Cuba and get at least a glimpse of their everyday life and daily struggles and joys. Her description of life at this level - at street level - gives a valuable insight into the successes and failings of the Castro regime, one that US politicians might do well to consider.

This book brought a torrent of bittersweet memories. Like Lynette I'm of Chinese descent, but born in Cuba. It's very rarely that one bumps into a very original travel account like hers. Least of all, not that many have had the opportunity to see the side of Cuba never shown to ordinary tourists. What I really appreciate is her non-biased approach as she shows the daily hardships ordinary people encounter to survive, without rambling on what's already known about living conditions there under Castro. She brings to life the resilience of the people there rather candidly. This is important - the character of the people, not the ugly politics. Lynette, when is your next bike trip back to Cuba? Please let me know I have several suggestions.

The Handsomest Man In Cuba by Linette Chiang is a wonderful book not to be missed, whether you are a hard core bicyclist, casual traveler, or just interested in the world around you.

Lynette provides an intimate and insightful look into the lives of ordinary Cubans as she chronicles her adventures bicycling across the country, making new friends as she goes. Preferring to live simply among the people and avoid the typical insulated "tourist" experience, she manages to show all sides of Cuba. She misses nothing, describing the tiniest details of the people and places she encounters, and her own adventures along the way. Her perceptive outlook, frank honesty, humor and compassion gives a provocative perspective of this remarkable country, it's people and their culture, and in the process provides some profound reflections on the comparison to our own "Western culture". She reminds us how easy it is for us to forget (or never realize) to appreciate what we have in our lives...that perhaps the cost of what we've gained may not always be worth what we've lost.

After reading her book I experienced a tremendous restless urge to just take off on a bike somewhere across the world for a year or so. That may have to wait a bit (being a parent of young children). But it's certainly the next best thing to be able to experience vicariously Lynette's courageous and free adventure by reading this book. It's a remarkable tale written by a remarkable woman, and I have a new appreciation and understanding of Cuba and its people as a result. Highly recommended!

--Ray Arkin
Eugene, Oregon

I just finished reading the book, The Handsomest Man in Cuba, and wanted to let everyone know how much I loved it.

I live in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and was in Cuba about 6 weeks ago. I loved it. I will admit, I was one of those tourists who stayed at a resort in Varadero. I speak some Spanish and used it often - my friends didn't, so I had to translate quite a bit for them. We made it off the resort a number of times and made friends with a variety of the locals.

There were so many times where the person I was speaking with didn't speak any English at all, and my Spanish wasn't nearly perfect...but there was a point where we were both reaching...and it just worked. Perhaps it is the universal language we all posess?

I was left wanting more. More than the tourist experience. So I went on Amazon.com looking for books on Cuba and found this one. It was exactly what I needed. Lynette's insights on the state of the country are very interesting. I found myself wondering if Cubans are better off than they think they are, and how it would be if they did have the same freedoms as ourselves in North America?

It was a pleasure to read such a refreshingly honest and sentimental story of her trip. I'd love to read a "part 2"!!

This is not your typical travel book, from the seat of her Bike Friday, Lynette Chiang (deemed a "Rugged Individual" by Forbes magazine) takes the reader on a journey of discovery and in the process provides Western readers with a whole new perspective on Cuba. Chock full of grand adventures that include wonderful and warm people and great food to misadventures on a high order complete with questionably sane flashers and colorful muchachos...

And Lynette goes a little further than the average writer from a personal perspective, she gives us a big glimpse of the real Lynette with candid thoughts about her broken heart and graphic descriptions of the joys and sorrows of being a nomad world rambler. This book is definitely fresh and new...

Viva La China!

First let me start out by saying I am NOT a literary critic. I love Lance Armstrong's book even though some of my "Smart" friends said it was not written very well. I don't care because I thought it was a great story and it entertained me. Lynette Chiang's book "The Handsomest Man in Cuba" is a great story as well. It entertained me and some of the lines in her book are magical. Little gems of a sentance that I had to read two or three times. I found the book to very inspirational. If this small Chinese / Australian woman with a self admitted bad sense of direction could ride her bike all over Cuba on the cheap, so could I and so could you. If you are like me and try to avoid the tourist spots and instead see what the locals see, you will definitely like her approach to this book.

That man on the front cover isn't exactly handsome.

Maybe bookstores should display the book with the back cover facing out! It holds a lively promotional blurb explaining what the book is about: author Lynette Chiang's adventurous free-form, low-budget 3-month tour of Cuba, mostly by bicycle.

The author does have a taste for irony...

I read the blurb, opened the book and found very enthusiastic quotes from reviewers. Those five stars overhead say that I am just as enthusiastic.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. For now, onward, into the body of the work.

Prank time again! In the first few pages, Chiang gives precise description, acute insights into personalities, delightful twists of language, and light, self-deprecating humor, but she lets on that she has not read a newspaper in months. She hangs out in Havana with other foreigners -- drifters and wanderers -- leading to speculation that she might be just like them. She tosses off a few mysterious little asides about her past.

Well, Chiang _will_ allow you to get to know her if you are patient, and I assure you, it's very much worth the effort.

Warning: analysis follows. If you want to let Chiang's story unfold for yourself in your own way -- just order the book. You won't regret it.

*********

Chiang's book is no ordinary travelogue, it's much more. A free-form, solo bicycle tour is a time of constant improvisation, unexpected turns of events, invitations to family dinners where the tourist feels like an insider and outsider at once.

Avoiding tourist traps, Chiang pedaled out into the real Cuba, where she found great physical beauty of mountains, beaches, ocean - as well as decrepit buildings; the televised _novela_ (soap opera), with its blaring soundtrack; superb meals or barely tolerable ones, depending upon a home cook's talents with rice, beans, pork fat and a few vegetables and fruits.

Less is more when it comes to actually getting to know a country and its people. The five-foot-tall Lynette Chiang on her Bike Friday folding bicycle has scooped the distinguished journalistic competition in depicting the lives of ordinary Cubans. She often stayed with them in their homes, and found most Cubans friendly and generous. Many, unlicensed to take in paying guests, risked heavy fines to house her for the night, and sent her off with gifts of food despite having barely enough for themselves.

Through vivid descriptions of personal encounters, and without passing judgment, Chiang describes a country where "everybody seems to belong to someone, somewhere" - familial love and generosity to strangers have not yet fallen before the onslaught of modern ways. She takes a fair look at the seamier side, too: go-getters hustling tourist dollars; prostitution and sugar-daddy relationships with foreigners; petty thefts; racial tension; the "usual questions" from eager Cuban men - "are you married, do you have children" - and a couple of encounters that could have ended much worse.

Chiang offers trenchant comments on the effect of different political systems on national character, drawn from her personal experience. To her surprise, she found "no overt military presence" from the Communist government but rather, "a single, invisible leash...long enough to join [Cubans] as a nation...but taut enough to press on the nerve that says "_I want change._"

But more yet: as Chiang's tour hits its stride, her musings blend into a moving self-portrait of a seeker, not only a tourist. We may first come properly to appreciate her when she opens up our frame of reference to the whole world, from her camping spot on an empty ocean beach on the millennium New Year's Eve.

She does not seek to drown out troublesome thought by invoking any credo or mantra. Rather, in two masterful paragraphs and one short sentence, she simply _takes us there_. She lists several locations thousands of miles away, and people with whom she might have spent this day of all days, then evokes her centered satisfaction in being where she is -- alone, underway without fixed destination. The rhythm is reminiscent of a cyclist's pedaling up a hill, stopping at the top to look around, and then pushing off. This passage is powerful. I won't go further into specifics: you may read them from her.

The book includes several other passages of similar power and poetry, and describes a number of unforgettable events: a seasick voyage with an obsessive sailor, ending in their being towed into harbor, at Chiang's insistence, in a tourist trap from which Chiang makes a hilarious escape; a collision between a tanker truck and a passenger train, through whose cars there spreads a rumor of a family tragedy with a wrenching twist; a sermon by a preacher who is supposedly full of holiness but is mostly full of himself...

The book breaks into verse in three places. They describe a dead-end relationship with a man; closeness with a young girl met while on tour, then left behind; pains of love. Here, Chiang is most revealing of herself.

The narrative in the second half does slow occasionally, though the return from Cuba at the end is startling and memorable. More careful proofreading could have removed a number of small errors, as with _many_ books these days. Some background comments get repeated -- weeks apart in Chiang's source diaries, only an hour or two apart in reading the book. But these are minor flaws.

The subtitle of the book is "an escapade" - as in a caper, something undertaken on a whim, a clever plot that succeeds in spite of the rules. You might, then, read the book only as an adventure tale. But "escapade" isn't the same as "escapist." Chiang succeeds in her interactions with Cubans, and with readers, because she is cheerful, engaging, and acutely perceptive -- but perceptiveness also is a burden.

Though Chiang doesn't toss off literary references, she _must_ be well-read, except for those newspapers which, it turns out, she found depressing. She does mention Dante, Thoreau, and Kerouac: her sensibility owes something to the Beats, only it's more upbeat: free-form travel reflects a deep need for renewal, come what may. At its deepest level, Chiang's narrative returns, again and again, to a quest for a sense of belonging in a world which offers no secure promises, by an acutely observant mind and pure heart. As the Cuba tour ends, Chiang has found no place of repose.

Five years later, at the time of the writing of this review, Chiang works as traveling "customer evangelist" for the company that made her bicycle. She has a Web site and three weblogs, where her postings are numerous, energetic, usually cheerful, often wildly humorous, and show a great appreciation of beauty in graphic art. Through support of an orphanage in Peru that she visited on a tour, she has found a cause, and an ongoing connection with children. She gives contradictory impressions of agile energy and calm, of reserve and bold candor. As for the time before she became a world traveler, she indicates little more than that she walked away from a conventional suburban existence in Australia. Maybe she is working Zen-like to keep her readers off-base and on the move, like herself - or maybe not -- who knows? Who cares? Do we have to care?

Her postings do strongly suggest that her disquiet has waned before her creative power. And more power to her. She has let it be known that she is working on another book. Tracking her progression will be interesting indeed.

Bottom line: Chiang's book moved this graying-bearded reviewer/bicycle tourist repeatedly to laughter, to cries of recognition, and to tears -- 40 years since he read the Beats and Existentialists. Read it. And the next one.

************

© 2005 John S. Allen
May be reproduced, in full, with attribution

John S. Allen is a Regional Director of the League of American Bicyclists, and the author of Bicycling Street Smarts.

Lynette allowed me to vicariously enjoy Cuba and the Cuban people. I felt she gave a real life look at the people more so than another tourist brochure and glossy airconditioning tour company promotions. But hey, that is what bike touring is about, Bravo Lynette

I was given this book and it set by my bedside for several weeks. Once I picked it up I was pulled into one of the best bike travel stories I have read. I could not put it down. Lynette gives a glimpse of Cuba and it's people that is unique. She is somehow able to get inside and connect with the people. She let's us see a country of poor but proud individuals yearning for a better life. Her since of humor allows us to laugh and enjoy her many encounters with humanity on it's most basic level.

Direct, upfront travel diary of biking through Cuba. Love that it had lots of useful information about the logistics of bike touring! Perfect book for bike tourists or for anyone who's interested in no-frills traveling.