What Lies Across the Water: The Real Story of the Cuban Five

Stephen Kimber, What Lies across the Water: the Real Story of the Cuban Five (Winnipeg, Manitoba: fernwood Publishing, 2013) pb 284pp. ISbn 978-1-55266-542-8Reviewed by Steve LudlamStephen Kimber is a Canadian Professor of Journalism who encountered the case of the Cuban Five in a holiday resort in the island in 2004, long after their arrests. He later asked a Cuban friend to explain the case, and was referred to a long speech by Fidel Castro. Shocked by the story and by the near total silence about it in the North American media, he wrote this book (instead of a planned Cuba-based novel). Kimber has scoured the source materials, interviewed the Five and many others directly or indirectly involved in Cuba and the US, and had his final draft reviewed by two of the Five. The result is a robustly-researched account of the complex worlds of US-hosted anti-Cuba terrorism and its respectable front-men, of US government complicity, and of the Cuban anti-terrorist agents who fought them, including the Five. It is written in 'datelined' passages that build up the compelling and accessible narrative of a complex reality - at times unreality, as the ambiguous title implies - of terrorist and counter-terrorist activities that have poisoned US-Cuba relations.The book provides horrendous material on anti-Cuban terrorism: bombing hotels in Havana with fatal effect in the late 1990s, and attempting to massacre the performers and audience in the famous Tropicana nightclub. The plot was foiled only because the man employed to do it was a Cuban agent himself who gave evidence at the trial, and published his own account (Percy Alvarado, Confessions of Fraile: a Real Story of Terrorism, La Habana: Editorial Capitan San Luis, 2004). It sheds light on the fatal combination of US-based armed threats and provocations, and Cuba's fears and consternation, that resulted in the Brothers to the Rescue shoot-down and the subsequent conspiracy to murder charge against Gerardo Hernandez. The book offers details of the participation not only of paramilitary terrorists, but also of the leaders of the apparently respectable Cuban American political lobby who moved unmolested between lobbying and paramilitary activities. They had little fear of official US interference, since as one puts it, for them the authorities were always on vacation. What Kimber's detail suggests is that in the 1990s, far from being an obsolete sideshow in Miami, US-hosted anti-Cuba terrorists remained a plausibly deniable form of long-running, US-tolerated death-squad politics in Latin America, in this case arbitrarily targeting Cubans and tourists on the island, or in aircraft en route to its resorts.The other strand to Kimber's narrative relates the Cuban agents' activities. And here the book reveals not only the bravery and commitment of the agents, but also about the difficult interaction of their personal lives and their professional duties, the tensions of the separation from families (many of whom believed their loved ones had betrayed Cuba), or of sustaining friendships and intimate partnerships in Miami without blowing their covers. The book deals not only with the Five, but also with the stories of other members of the Wasp network who either returned to Cuba before the arrests, or who were arrested and did deals with the US authorities, to avoid prison. …

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