Your snapshot description of the Cuban Revolution as a black Cuban vs. white Cuban event could be correct, you just have the sides mixed up. Castro and Che and Cienfuegos and all the other heroes of the Revolution were white, while Bautista was black. The Cuban refugees in Miami may be angry and white, but the Castro legacy isn't a hell of a lot more diverse.

Having recently returned from Cuba, I found the book, Santeria-the religion by Migene Gonzalez-Wippler to be very helpful in understanding the religion and opening up wider discussions among the populace.Two other books I enjoyed were Welcome to Havana, Senor Hemingway by Alfredo Joese Estralla,(a marvelous voyage to pre- Castro Cuba),and a newer novel, Es Cuba-Life and Love on an Illegal Island by Lea Aschkenas.

a couple of things: it's jinEteras, not jinteras. And it's Hotel Inglaterra, not Anglaterra.

Thank you for pointing out these typos, we will make the change.

While it's no masterpiece, King Bongo, by Thomas Sanchez, better known for Rabbit Boss, Mile Zero, etc., is a wonderful beach read. Colorful, absurd, even cartoonish at times, it pulls you along through a Cuba on the brink of revolution. You can taste the rum punches and hear the bongo drums, with death always just around the corner. The north american characters are especially funny--clueless gangsters, mindless molls. It'd make a blast of a film.

"When I pulled out, I was all smeared in shit, and it disgusted her. Not me. I have a strong sense of the absurd, and it keeps me on guard against that kind of thing. Sex isn't for the squeamish."

How can you introduce the authors of Havana without mentioning the exuberantly filthy exploits of Pedro Juan Gutiérrez? His "Dirty Havana Trilogy" (from which the quote above is – so to speak – extracted) is a pornographic picaresque that had me squealing on the F line five minutes after I'd opened the book. The first friend I lent it to had to sneak off to the stalls at work to relieve his tension. It's that juicy.

Gutiérrez continues his raunchy chronicle in "Tropical Animal," and by the time he reaches "The Insatiable Spiderman," even I was satiated. But his first trilogy is a must-read for any aficionado of Havana, promiscuity or comic, scurrilous literature of the highest order. Rarely is the profane this profound.

In Alejo Carpentier's hallucinatory The Chase, the words just pour onto the page. This Cuban writer is sometimes credited as the inventor of Latin American magic realism.

Cabrera Infante's great sex comedy, Infante's Inferno, has a seemingly endless stream of outrageous situations.

That's certainly another element of the nuanced politics of the island. For all of Castro's lip service to racial euqality, when it comes to the top tiers of government, there's much more cream than coffee.

What an offensive, misinformed article Tony D'Souza penned about Cuba. I wonder why Salon didn't select an expert on Cuba to write this. Why didn't Salon choose someone who'd actually written about Cuba before, perhaps even in book form (Ben Corbett and Lea Aschkenas come to mind as two recent authors)? Why didn't Salon choose a writer who could spell jinetero and Hotel Inglaterra, a writer who spent more than a few days or weeks on the island, a writer who could speak Spanish and meet Cubans other than those catering to the lowest common denominator tourists such as D'Souza. Despite what his article (and his uninspired list of Cuba reads) might lead people to believe, there is more to the island than rum, prostitutes, and cheap cigars. Shame on D'Souza for trying to pass himself off as someone who knows something about Cuba, and shame on Salon and its editors (who really should have known better) for accepting such a shallow story about this complex and misunderstood island.

I generally like D'Souza's work, having read it in Tin House, etc., but of all these Salon travel essays, this just doesn't give you any particularly good reading ideas. It has the feel of an assignment taken on reluctantly by someone unfamiliar with the island who cobbled something together using internet information. How about just rewriting the thing?