An American Rebel in Cuba & A Boy Soldier in Sierra Leone

Two books, A Rebel in Cuba by Neill Macaulay and A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, by Ishmael Beah, both reveal what is best about memoirs, the exposition of personal perspective gained from personal experience.

Both Macaulay and Beah present vivid accounts of their experiences in war. As a young man, Macaulay was an American member of the guerrilla movement that overthrew the Batista dictatorship in Cuba in 1958; Beah as a 12-year-old, was sucked into the haphazard army of Sierra Leone which shared the cruelty of the rebel forces that marauded the West African nation's backcountry.

After Beah witnessed and participated in a number of cruelties, two UNICEF workers found him, and took him and fourteen other boy soldiers to a facility to bring them back to normalcy. But almost as bad as the adults responsible for pulling the young boys into war betrayed their responsibility as adults to protect the young, the UNICEF people foolishly mixed in boys from both groups.  The resulting violence that broke out in the facility brought about the deaths of six boys and injuries to a number of others. In addition, after months of being allowed to act on impulse, the boys even attacked staff members who were trying to help them.

One reviewer has called Beah's book "one of the most important war stories of our generation," I heartily agree. It is a seamlessly written account which reveals how far humans have devolved from the supposedly "more civilized warfare" when European men stood on fields in the 18th century and took aim at each other in a gentlemanly manner. In one scene, older soldiers prompted the author and several other boys to participate in a contest: each was to kill a prisoner. The boy whose prisoner died first was the winner.

A Rebel in Cuba, originally published in 1970 and reprinted in 1999, is almost as equally compelling as Beah's book. As a 23-year-old who had just completed a tour of duty in the U.S. Army in South Korea, the author, a graduate of the Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina, was looking for adventure. He found it by joining the Fidel Castro's guerillas in the mountains of Cuba's Pinar Del Rio Province where he fought for one year.

Macaulay's account of the shooting of prisoners is less shocking than Beah's. But the arbitrary decisions that determined which people would be executed are still extremely unsettling to read about. In Beah's experience, the decisions were totally random ones based sometimes on whether the unit commander or a soldier did or did not like the look on a captive's face

In Macaulay's experience, although informers were dead men walking, the guerrillas decision whether or not to execute known supporters of Batista would have not necessarily informed on the guerrillas, hinged on whether at a given moment someone thought that killing such a person would aid or hurt the rebel cause.

In addition to his vivid portrait of the lives of the guerrillas in the mountains and the mindset of his fellow guerrillas, Macaulay also provides a fascinating account of the divisions among the anti-government groups. Not surprisingly, Batista's urban opponents were seeking less radical change than the guerrillas in the mountains who came from landless and destitute peasant families.

Both books are wonderfully antidotal to the Eurocentric and US centric reporting to which Americans are constantly subject. That some Americans refer to the "country" of Africa illustrates this. The bias of American news media is no better illustrated than Macauley's account of hearing a report from CBS on New Year's Eve 1958 which all but claimed that Batista's forces were on the verge of annihilating their opponents. The next morning Coley woke up to news that Batista had fled Cuba!

McCaulay did not remain in on unqualified supporter of Castro. The world really is made up mostly of shades of gray; he became disillusioned with the infringements on personal liberties in Cuba experienced after Castro came to power. But A Rebel in Cuba is a classic example of the value of firsthand accounts. Reading a book like Macauley's makes one hunger to hear more Iraqi and Afghan perspectives on the wars in their land and more Chinese perspectives on the problems and complexity of their country.