The Pageant of Cuba

The pageant begins when the gentle-spirited naked natives crept to the shore to witness the arrival of ships they thought had come from heaven—ships bringing Columbus and the heavy-weaponed Spaniards, who bore Christian commissions and an unconscionable lust for gold. The story proceeds through the brutal days of colonization and the bloody search for treasure, through the pulse-racing times of the corsairs to the gay, easeful, dolce far niente days and nights of courtship and dancing and gaming, through the patriotic struggles for freedom from autocracy to the intoxicated decades of liberty, of phenomenal wealth, terminating in the recent [early 1930s] economic and political turmoil.

But whatever the quality of tropical background, whichever political party is in or out, Mr. Strode has stressed the foreignness—the other-worldliness—of the island. The locale shifts from remote country districts to the gilded capital, from modest brooks to brigand-infested mountains, from battle-fields to fountained patios. The machete and guitar, the garrote and rumba, the cock-fights and nuns-of-the-orphanage, jai-alai, the collapse of sugar, the frequent sudden death knells, eternal ships slipping in and out the hundred harbours, the rotten deaths from fevers, the glories of the Cuban sky by day and night, the national game of love-making—all are elements in the drama of the land which Columbus said was the fairest man’s eye had ever looked upon, Mr. Strode’s story of this neighbor island, which has been so vivid in the world’s limelight these past two years [i.e. 1933 and 1934] and about which many people are foggy or intolerant or sentimental, is justly sympathetic and noncontroversial. No such comprehensive one-volume work on Cuba’s four centuries’ history has before been written.

The Pageant of Cuba has all the qualities (plus a heightened dramatic sense because of the more dramatic material) of Mr. Strode’s Story of Bermuda … The new [as of the mid-1930s] book is perfect as a gift, indispensable as a guide-book, and as vivid and exciting as a good novel.
—from the front flap of the dust jacket

Illustrated with fifteen photographs
Includes Sources and Acknowledgments, a Selected Bibliography, and Characters of the Chronicle
pre-ISBN edition