Cuba is heading into another month of blackouts, queues for food and growing piles of rubbish on street corners, thanks to a near-total fuel blockade imposed by the United States in January. This morning, Stuart Ramsay, chief correspondent for Sky News, who had returned to the island after only a couple of months, told how he was “taken aback at how dramatically conditions have further disintegrated… The spectre of social and political collapse… is very real.”

J S Tennant’s forthcoming book, Mrs Gargantua: Reports from Cuba (William Collins, £25, July 16), could hardly be more timely — though last-minute tweaks might be tricky. The book, his publisher says, is “a brilliantly unconventional and riveting ride through Cuba’s history, drawing on the David-and-Goliath dynamic of its confrontations with the US and other superpowers”. It “forms an entirely original, compelling inventory of the author’s 20-year relationship with the island and its people, while also attempting to sketch Cuba’s wider importance to a political understanding of the Americas, both in tangible and imaginary terms”.

The book’s title comes from an account of Maria Hoyt, a US heiress who raised a gorilla in Cuba that was later sold to a circus in the United States and became celebrated as “Mrs Gargantua”. Like the gorilla, Tennant argues, Cuba has suffered at the whims of the human circus that tries to tame her.

Tennant is from North Yorkshire and studied at Trinity College, Dublin, the University of Salamanca and Cambridge. Formerly poetry editor at The White Review, he is the co-author (with Richard Hollis) of Cuba ’62: preludes to a world crisis. In 2020, his proposal for Mrs Gargantua won him the Michael Jacobs Award from the Gabriel García Márquez Foundation for Journalism, a prize set up after the death in 2014 of a writer renowned for his work on Spain and Latin America.

Coincidentally, among books I’ve come across only post-publication, there’s a new history of the US: This Land Is Your Land: On a Road Trip to Make Sense of America (Oneworld, £22) by Beverley Gage. In the run-up to the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence (July 4, 2026), Gage, a historian at Yale and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century, offers a “behind-the-steering-wheel retelling of US history, starting at Philadelphia’s Revolution-era sites and ending at Disneyland in the 20th-century California dream”. Reviews have appeared in publications including The Times, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.
In an interview with Yale News last month, Gage said the book is “about the conversation that has been happening over 250 years about what it means to be American, what the founding legacy is about, who gets to claim it, who gets to reinterpret it, and who gets to try to throw it away and invent something else”.