Came across two stories with tangential connections to Cuba this am. What if Ian Fleming’s Miss Moneypenny kept a diary? It’s a question author Kate Westbrook answers in the affirmative in the second installment of her Moneypenny Diaries. Moneypenny, she asserts, would have had more access to the behind the scenes, including the Cuban Missile Crisis. Demonstrating a 21st century sensibility, the word Westbrook uses to characterize the time is “murky.” Something tells me we shouldn’t expect the delineation of good guys and bad guys we see in Bond movies. Story here.
The Missile Crisis is also latent in a fictionalized account of a little known “adventure” in the life of famed Poet Robert Frost. Fall of Frost is a novel based on Frost’s misguided trip to Russia to reach out to Nikita Kruschev, a trip author Brian Hall says he undertook to make up for botching his part in Kennedy’s inaguaration. According to Hall, even as the negotiations were going on, the missiles were being sent to Cuba. I don’t know if I can cope with an imagined inner life of Frost, but the details of Frost’s life highlighted in this article are riveting. I’m going to have to try.
…an island on the net without a bearded dictator
