Rum Socialism: A Travel Diary of Communist Cuba [Kindle Edition]

Kris Romaniuk (Author), Kara-Lis Coverdale (Editor), Vitold Polyak (Illustrator)

Book Description

Rum Socialism follows author Kris Romaniuk off the resort and onto the streets of Trinidad, Cuba where he meets street hustlers, witch doctors, corrupt cops, foreign operatives, and host of colorful characters. The result is a week-long bender of booze, satire and insight into Cuban Communism, and a system that is trying desperately to reinvent itself in the face of harsh economic realities of the modern world.

The book also features a recipe for mojitos that is worth the price tag on its own. Please drink responsibly.

Product Details

• File Size: 242 KB
• Print Length: 109 pages
• Publisher: Kris Romaniuk; 1 edition (October 2, 2011)
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
• Language: English
• ASIN: B005S4FLJI
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• X-Ray: Not Enabled
• Lending: Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #621,139 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2.0 out of 5 stars Less about Cuba, more about drunken anecdotes... March 16, 2012

By BrokenAndroid

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

If you are looking for information on Cuba, this book has none. If you want to read about a single male continually getting drunk and recovering from hang-overs, pointless interactions with other tourists, girl arse descriptions, semi-believable anecdotes, spelling mistakes and grammatical errors, then, you'll love this book to bits.

For light reading, you may find this book enjoyable.

4.0 out of 5 stars Is authenticity overrated? January 25, 2012

By Laura Roberts

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

I'll leave the HST parallels and perpendiculars to others and leave it at this: the book has a strong voice, plenty of drinking, and a voyage out from the safety of the all-inclusive resort in Cuba that leaves the reader both wondering what-if and wanting more.

Romaniuk writes about Cuba's Communism as an outsider - a tourist on a bender, bored with the all-inclusive resort that visitors are consigned to, wanting to find the "real Cuba." Does he find it? That's up to the reader to decide, but he make a valiant effort in the name of authenticity by bribing locals, searching for a real machete, learning to salsa with a gold-toothed whore, and getting stuck in the back of a police Jeep driven by inebriated lawmen in the middle of the night.

In a country where everything's for sale, yet the best things in life cannot be purchased with common currency, the narrator finds himself paranoid that his tourist paradise and, indeed, his entire life is a sham, and the friends he's chosen for his adventures are even more lost in this foreign land than he is, all of them trusting in the essential goodness of humanity where it's unclear whether this trust is warranted.

Take this one poolside on your own beach getaway and ponder some bigger questions.

1.0 out of 5 stars Not Hunter S. Thompson January 14, 2012

By Cupples Peet

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

The legend of Hunter S. Thompson's "new style of journalism" and substance-abusing lifestyle has grown so large over the last forty years that every supposedly true tale of authorial drunkenness is acclaimed as the work of the "new" Thompson. What is generally over-looked in such attributions (and, what has definitely been over-looked by Romaniuk) is the fact that Thompson could write. Romaniuk can't. "Rum Socialsim" is ungrammatical for no discernible reason and badly written. It is impossible to determine if the author thinks he is creating a style with such mistakes or if he genuinely knows no better.

Even more unforgivable, however, is how boring and predictable the book is. Canadian man of indeterminate age travels to Communist paradise and falls into the company of other Canadians with exotic names and the whole lot proceed to go on a seven-day bender during which they have meaningless interactions with a few locals and brief, uneventful run-in with the police. This non-action is enlivened by the writer oogling every woman under thirty that he meets and offering what one believes were intended to be his "sensitive," conflicted views of an economically oppressed people. Author then slightly sobers up and flies home to what one assumes are the less-than-thrilled arms of the woman with whom he claims to be in a committed relationship. Before reading this book I had never believed the geographical generalization that all Canadians are boring. Romaniuk makes an excellent case for changing my mind.

If you are looking for a book about how to get drunk cheaply in a foreign country, this might be the book for you. If you want to learn anything about Cuba, keep looking.

Oh, by the way, the author drinks beer, not rum.

More About the Author

Kris Romaniuk is the author of the satirical travel memoir, "Rum Socialism: A Travel Diary of Communist Cuba," and the collection of short stories "Portraits: Short Stories About No One in Particular." He is a writer of truth and lies, and is currently working on two novels, due out in 2012 and 2013 respectively.

Kris lives in Montreal with his demons and delusions of grandeur. He enjoys drunken walks on the beach, smoking in the boys' room, and the smile of a pretty lady.