Sloman, Joel
Description
Three decades ago, poet Joel Sloman recorded his unusual experience as a young brigadista in the cane fields of Cuba. In 1970, members of the Vencerem
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os Brigade, young radicals from various backgrounds, traveled to Cuba to participate in the massive effort to harvest ten million tons of sugar cane. In addition, they visited schools, factories, homes, and got a firsthand look at the revolution. Now published for the first time, Cuban Journal is a diary in verse form, an account of daily life with the Venceremos Brigade.
"More than any prose account, poetry can evoke the memories of the senses: the smells, the tastes, the music, the colors, the feel of the air. Sloman's complex and nuanced account of his Cuban adventures gives a powerful picture of young Americans entering a different world. It brought back my own memories of the Venceremos Brigade with a rush. Every line felt 'right' and distance between decades disappeared."--Margot Adler
"Joel Sloman's poetic notes of a now fog-shrouded age of youthful optimism have survived the shipwreck of ideology to emerge miraculously relevent and none the worse for all those years at sea."?Andrei Codrescu
Sloman's energetic, rambling, and diary-like account of working with the Venceremos Brigade in the Cuban cane fields in 1970 is useful in documenting the faded glow of anti-Vietnam War angst. Experiences such as bringing in a huge sugar-cane harvest, wearing workshirt and straw hat, suffering "Cuban diarrhea," and "resting from vast physical effort" are sincerely described and recall the admiration Tolstoi's Levin felt for Imperial Russian peasantry."--Publishers Weekly, January 2000
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