Synopses & Reviews
Big fat cigars. Tropicana dancing girls.
Mojitos. Hemingway. A guy named Fidel.
This is not a book about the Cuba you already know.
The Handsomest Man in Cuba is an intensely personal, on the road tale of what it is like to eat, drink and be cautiously merry among ordinary and extraordinary Cubans, as told by a lone traveller who can take almost everything that's flung at her and just about everything is.
From pedalling across the country on a small folding bicycle, voyaging to Trinidad with the world's worst sailor, fighting off feet-eating mosquitoes and males with mucho calor (loosely translated as a lotta hotta testosterone) and adapting to a country that hits the pause button for precisely one hour every day for a syrupy soap opera, Lynette Chiang unveils a wild and crazy land that embraces life, a little food, a lot of love, a huge family and her.
La China, as the Cubans call her, discovers a people who earn as little as $10 a month, yet refuse to accept money for help, arguing that friendship is better. Who are rationed one bread roll a person per day, but insist she take their share 'for energy'. Who might have to choose between a bottle of shampoo or food in any given month, yet who seem strangely more at peace with themselves than the average wealthy foreigner.
This is not just a story about Cuba, but about what people were like just before the world started spinning too fast to jump off.
Review
"The only time you will put it down is when you finish it." Peter Sutherland, Australian Cyclist
Review
"One of the best on-the-road travel books of this generation." Martin Stevenson, the Launceston Examiner
Review
"In the glut of Cuban travel books, this one really stands out." Caroline Baum, the Sydney Morning Herald
About the Author
At 34, Lynette Chiang fled a decent job, three-bedroom house, fastish car and a nice bloke in Sydney and, armed with a congenitally poor sense of direction, set off to see the world on a folding bicycle. Her distinguished careers include that of computer programmer, failed waitress, commis-chef, manager of a mountain-top hotel, creative director of Saatchi & Saatchi Advertising in Costa Rica and swanning about outside Windsor Castle in the freezing cold dressed as an English Lady. She has lived in enough countries to learn that to not fit in, is part of the experience. She claims she developed a personality only in the past six years.