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The thirteen-day stand-off between the US and USSR in October 1962 was the most dangerous period of the Cold War. Richard Hollis chanced to be in Cuba as the Soviet troops were arriving, documenting his experiences with a camera, through diaries and letters. Months before, the Spanish novelist Juan Goytisolo had toured the island writing the journals he was to turn into a book. The Cuban film-maker Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s masterpiece, Memories of Underdevelopment, is set in 1962 and conjures perfectly the tense atmosphere of that time. Half a century later, JS Tennant visited several of the former missile bases in Cuba, collecting oral histories and photographs. This talk provides the reader with a basic political context to the Missile Crisis. More than this, Cuba ’62 attempts to conjure that year through juxtapositions of text and image, past and present; it is a love song to cinema and photography and an elegy for a Cuba that no longer is.

JS Tennant has been visiting Cuba for twenty years. He worked with Richard Hollis on the new Five Leaves’ book Cuba ’62. His big book on Cuban history comes out from William Collins in 2024.

This talk will include illustrations from 1962 and subsequently

Tickets: £3.00, including refreshments

Please book via Eventbrite.