Highly reminiscent of the grimness of both Goya's Caprichos (from which the opening epigraph is taken) and Los desastres de la guerra, [View of Dawn in the Tropics] is a personal view of the history of Cuba from a time well before that of the first inhabitants down to the present. It is a tragic, fatalistic, ironic, sarcastic, and, at times, humorous account of a series of events linked by violence and suffering, such as the massacre of the native Indians by the Spanish conquistadores, the bloody suppression of uprisings of slaves and peasant workers against the landowning establishment, the arduous struggle for independence and the political tortures and murders of the national governments which followed, the Castro-led revolutionary movement against the tyranny of Batista, the perilous exodus of anti-Castro Cubans, and the violations of the human rights of conterrevolutionary political prisoners.

In an attempt to be both...