Six Days in Havana

“James A. Michener, one of the most celebrated writers of our time, has an extraordinary talent for finding the essence of a place. His books give readers an unmistakable ‘you are there’ feeling, whether set in the South Seas, Alaska, Afghanistan, or Poland.
Six Days in Havana has the same immediacy, providing the first glimpses of a city that has been a mystery to the Western world for thirty years.

With his associate, John Kings, Michener visited Havana during research for a new novel on the Caribbean. He was only looking for a house and a sugar plantation in which to set the Cuban portion of his story, but he found much more to excite his interest. Fascinated initially by the spectacle of once-grand public buildings and ornate mansions slowly falling into ruin, Michener and Kings set out to explore all of Havana that they could set in six days.

John Kings’ evocative photographs and James Michener’s perceptive text record their impressions of Havana thirty years after the Revolution. The words and pictures beautifully complement each other, offering views of a city that many people may never otherwise see. Michener and Kings visited residential districts, the downtown business and government zone, the old city, churches, museums, a distillery, coffee and sugar plantations in the outlying areas., La Vigia, the former home of Ernest Hemingway, and the fishing village Cojima, the setting for Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, talked to about two hundred Cubans – labourers, office workers, Catholic religious, diplomats, and journalists. Michener even held a  no-holds-barred press conference for Cuban and foreign journalists.

This is firsthand reporting of the finest kind. Michener’s impressions of modern Havana opens a unique window on a country that is at the heart of the Western world and yet isolated from it.”