In Cuba has been called reportage for want of exact definition. It is more than that. It is the compendium of Cardenal's far-ranging impressions during visits to the island in 1970 and 1971. If we must define things by genre, the closest we can come to is the form practiced in Brazil called the crônica (chronicle), which is freer than the essay and broader than journalism, the form used, indeed, by so many of the first Europeans who came to the New World and wrote down their impressions. The Cuban José Lezama Lima has used a variant of this same form as fiction in his novel Paradiso, thus remaining true to his title, which is drawn from Columbus' chronicles and only indirectly from Dante. The book is also a kind of auxiliary anthology as Cardenal includes several poems by Cuban writers, most of which are Englished here for the...