My Amazon Review of Mark Asquino's "Spanish Connections:.........."

 A Diplomat’s Life

 

 Mark Asquino has written a memoir of his 40 year career working as an information officer and ultimately as an ambassador. I admire him for having the fortitude to write his memoir. I know all too well how hard it is  because I have 70 pages written for my own memoir that has been sitting as a word file for a very long time, but I digress.

 

Mark Asquino is a child of the gritty Providence Rhode Island of the 1950’s. According to stereotype an Italian kid there was not supposed to grow up to become an ambassador. The choice then, in a cartoon version, was for him to become either a priest, policeman/fireman or a member of the Mob. Nevertheless Asquino overcame the stereotype and graduated with honors from Brown University and went on to get a Ph.D. in literature there.

 

A teaching career was not for him and by a circuitous path he ended up working for the U.S. Information Agency. In short, he worked as public information officer for various embassies.  Among his better postings were in Spain, Venezuela, and Chile. However he served in post-Ceausescu Romania, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Sudan, and finally Equatorial Guinea. Those postings could hardly be characterized  garden spots and in more than a few cases he faced imminent physical danger and he had to stand up to ruthless dictators.

 

Asquino made his bones in Uzbekistan where he was fortuitously stationed at the time of 9/11. After the 9/11 attacks Uzbekistan became a major base of operation for U.S. forces and as result it became a hotbed of political and journalistic activity. Of a sudden, Asquino became a real player. Indeed he was involved in the construction of a bridge into Afghanistan which he and his ambassador crossed over into that war torn country.

 

From there he moves up in the State Department and I learned that it takes quite a bit of lobbying for a career officer to gain an ambassadorship. Because of his interest in all things Spanish he ends up in Equatorial Guinea, which at one time was a Spanish colony. His description of this despotic country of 1.5 million people and lots of oil, makes one think of Donald Trump’s comments on certain African nations.

 

Asquino gets personal in writing about his parents, girlfriends, meeting his first wife and getting divorced. Much later, in Romania, he has middle-aged romance with Jane, a Peace Corps volunteer, who would become his wife.

 

In reading this book I got a strong sense of what life is like in the diplomatic trenches where nameless and faceless foreign service officers serve America every day. The public knows little of what they do, but their work is of the highest importance. I only wish the author had a better editor, because details are great, but too much detail can overwhelm the reader.

For the full Amazon URL see: A Diplomat's Life (amazon.com)