CATHERINE STEEL relishes a compelling novel about Augustus’s right hand man, but misses the politics, the cultural shifts, and more detail about his restoration of Rome
CUBA has always attracted the passionate sympathies of poets everywhere. “Cuba, my love, they put you on the rack,” wrote Pablo Neruda in Canto General, “cut your face, pried open your legs of pale gold, crushed your pomegranate sex, stabbed you with knives, dismembered you, burned you.”
The country’s national poets, Jose Marti and Nicolas Guillen, were revolutionaries and Che Guevara was also a poet.
After the fall of Batista, poets like Allen Ginsberg, Nazim Hikmet, Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Hans Magnus Enzensberger visited Cuba to write about the revolution.
JOE DWYER of Sinn Fein reflects on the links between the Irish and Cuban struggles for independence and on Castro’s personal engagement with the cause of Irish freedom
DR STEPHEN WILKINSON assesses the life and legacy of a revolutionary giant
MIGUEL YOSHIDA explains the evolution and influence of the Cuban Casa De Las Americas in joining culture to the revolutionary struggle
A teaching delegation to Cuba offered IAN DUCKETT a powerful glimpse into a schooling system defined by care, creativity and the legacy of the island’s remarkable 1961 literacy campaign



