Z Kostariky na Kubu, chceš-li dostat přes hubu – Jakobec Milan (2025)

With the book From Costa Rica to Cuba, if you want to get punched in the face, readers are handed the entertaining memoirs of diplomat Milan Jakobec, in which he confesses mainly about his numerous professional failures – for example, when he failed to save the dying indigenous people in Costa Rica, did not capture and bring Viktor Kožený to justice in the Bahamas, and did not fulfill the task of the transformation department of the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs to turn the Cuban dictatorship into a state that respects human rights.

The comparison of the two Central American countries, where Costa Rica is a top student in the school of democracy, while Cuba is a hopeless failure, is made lightly and briskly, based on human fates and personal experiences. The author became paralyzed in Cuba and nearly died. A few months of "dying" in a Cuban hospital, where he was unsure whether the doctors were tasked with healing him or torturing him, gave the author a chance to view Cuban reality from unusual angles.

The plot of the book takes place at a time when the Czech Republic was trying to help Cuba with the democratic transformation of discredited but stubbornly enduring Castroism by supporting the emergence of civil society and independent information structures. Jakobec witnessed the release of prisoners...