Anthony DePalma was a foreign correspondent for The New York Times focusing on Latin America for twenty-two years. He continues to write for the newspaper as well as other publications. He wrote The Man Who Invented Fidel and Here: A Biography of the New American Continent. In Cubans: Ordinary Lives in Extraordinary Times (Viking), DePalma focuses on life in Guanabacoa, a neighborhood across the harbor from Old Havana to dramatize the optimism as well as the enormous challenges that Cubans, most of whom have lived their entire lives under the Castro regime, now face. It is a snapshot of Cuba with all its contradictions as the new regime opens the gate to the capitalism that Fidel railed against for so long. As people try to navigate their new reality, Cuba has become an old machine kept running with equal measures of ingenuity and desperation. A new kind of revolutionary spirit thrives beneath the conformity of a half century of totalitarian rule. And over all of this looms the United States, with its unpredictable policies. The New York Times called Cubans … “A remarkably revealing glimpse into the world of a muzzled yet irrepressibly ebullient neighbor.”