Rhythm Nation (Page 3)

Eugene Robinson, the Style editor for the Washington Post, focuses his infatuation with Cuba on its music. It's a smart choice. Along the way, he passes on some insights about Cuba's reluctant embrace of hip-hop in 1999 as "an authentic expression of Cuban culture"--meaning they would no longer try to shut it down, a calculation Robinson likens to LBJ's truce with J. Edgar Hoover: "Better to have him inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in."

There are no stunning revelations here, no "big gets" or up-close-and-personal interviews with Castro, Che or Elián. But Robinson has a sharp, quirky take on the island, and he writes with verve. Most of all, he brings a fan's passion to his subject and makes you want to be there at a Bamboleo concert, even in the ghastly and depressing barrio of Alamar, where Cuban hip-hop was born. And he leaves no question that Los Van Van is the greatest band in history. Sounds fatuous? No doubt--but Robinson goes a long way toward making his case. "If you were to combine the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band," he writes, "you'd have an idea what Los Van Van have meant to Cuba over the past thirty years."

Last Dance in Havana lacks footnotes or chapter notes, and occasionally Robinson reaches for the dissonant metaphor, as when he describes Castro as a dancer on the world stage. He describes Castro's reaction to the US invasion of Iraq: "The crafty old dancer-in-chief rose to his feet and began to move." It's a strained trope since, as every Cuban knows, Castro does not dance (one of a number of ways in which he is decidedly un-Cuban). Still, this book works as memoir or travel writing--a well-wrought, breezy essay on that problematic island in the Caribbean.

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