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Luffing to Cuba: Michael Henry’s First “Non-Fiction” Book
I am not often at a loss for words, but in reading Michael Henry’s Luffing to Cuba, I find myself somewhat confounded. Part of that may be the Coda with which he finishes the book. Part is also the extreme changes to life we have experienced in the year since his adventure.
Michael Henry is a writer of many parts. Here on Ricochet he has often shared humorous fiction based on politics. They tend to be very light pieces. His fictional novels are mostly legal thrillers. They are serious in content, although there is often light banter between characters and light moments within the novels. I have commented before that his Willie Mitchell Banks character muddles through the stories rather than being the lantern-jawed tough guy who knows all the answers. Luffing to Cuba falls somewhere between the two while also being mostly non-fiction. Or perhaps I should say that it is non-fiction with flights of fancy interjected throughout. While in a way being of a piece and on the spectrum of his other writing, it has a very different feel, since the people and events are real.
Earlier today I finished the final volume of The Gulag Archipelago. Whereas Mark Twain defines a work of great literature as “Something that everyone wants to have read but no one wants to read,” I still think I’d like to re-read this one. There’s very little I can do for the multitudes processed through the Soviet prison camps, but I can bear witness. To that and to the camps that are still maintained in North Korea, Cuba, and other dictatorships around the world.
America will, per a new last-minute decree from Obama, no longer automatically grant asylum to Cubans who make it to US shores. Instead, Cuban refugees (and they really are refugees from that island hellhole) will automatically be sent back to Cuba, overturning a policy that has been in effect since Castro seized control of the island nation. The current policy (known as Wet Foot / Dry Foot) was a product of the Clinton administration, and stipulated that Cubans had to actually touch US soil, where before they were given asylum merely for being picked up at sea.
A panic is sweeping the land – or at least something like it has unnerved CNN, Vox, and other precincts of progressive sensibility. They are alarmed that millions of Americans are being misled by “fake news.”
President Obama issued the following statement: