Vicente Botín

Vicente Botín has worked for Televisión Española for 38 years, on programmes such as Informe Semanal and En Portada. Deeply knowledgeable about South America, he has reported on the region hundreds of times. In 1999 he was named the public channel’s correspondent for Argentina and other Southern Cone countries. From January 2005 to October 2008 he was its Cuban correspondent, a difficult job given the strict control that the State Security exerts over foreign journalists. No-one on the island is allowed to tell the truth about what really goes on there. Correspondents can only approximate the truth through double entendres and metaphor, always needing to exercise a measure of self-censorship to avoid being kicked out of the country. This book, written mostly in Havana, is a kind of catharsis with which Vicente Botín tries to expunge the frustration of not having been able to tell the truth, or at least the whole truth, about Cuba.