Castro's Island

By Pico Iyer

CUBA: A JOURNEY

by Jacobo Timerman

Knopf; 125 pages; $18.95

Like most people, Jacobo Timerman did not travel light when he went to Cuba. Before his arrival for a four-week stay in 1987, the Argentine journalist had already asserted his support, as a Latin American socialist, for Cuba's right to sovereignty, while also declaring his hatred, as a former political prisoner of the Argentine military, of totalitarianism in all its forms. Opposing predispositions would cancel each other out, leaving him in a state of perfect neutrality.

So much for theory. In practice, most of what he finds is conversations that go nowhere and meetings that trail off. "Cubans are verbally immobilized," he is quick to declare, and "waiting constitutes the inner dynamic of Cuba." The whole tropical police state, in his telling, becomes a land of silences, forged out of apathy or fear. By his first morning in Havana, the ever combative polemist is professing his fury with Castro. Soon he is committing himself to such statements as "It isn't hard to predict that in a free election the candidate Fidel Castro would receive less than 10 percent of the votes" -- a claim that would surprise even some of Castro's staunchest adversaries, and raises unanswered questions about who would get the other 90%.

Occasionally, when its author forgets himself and goes out onto the streets, his brief book catches something of the high-spirited dilapidation of the place. Chatting with hitchhikers, inspecting the nervous squalor of a love hotel, suggesting, intriguingly, that the revolution has led to "the perversion of family ethics," Timerman brings us fresh news of the island. As in his celebrated testament, Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number, his argument is strongest when it sticks to narrative. But after a few tantalizing glimpses, he is back in his room, reading the island through government documents. The result is scarcely more distinctive than trying to interpret the U.S. through the self-contradictions and bromides of a Ronald Reagan speech. Ultimately, Cuba: A Journey is not really about Cuba, or a journey; it is rather an appraisal of the Cuban system by a man who might have come to the same conclusions without ever leaving home.