From Publishers Weekly
Journalist Guillermoprieto (Looking for History; The Heart That Bleeds; etc.) revisits the six months in 1970 she spent teaching modern dance in Cuba. At the state-supported school where she finds neither mirrors nor music, but dedicated yet ill-trained students, Guillermoprieto realizes she's embarked on a journey that would "thoroughly unravel my life." Her intense commitment to art may seem a contrast to the revolution and its aftermath, yet it provides a jumping-off point for her book about dance, which is really about Cuba and a political coming-of-age. As the then 20-year-old former student of Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham makes the "inimitable elastic flow" of dance visible, she discusses her political education through composite characters, invented dialogue and reconstructed letters. The detail can be daunting, pedestrian even, but the experience is always lifelike. Guillermoprieto captures the complexity of a revolution that scared and bewildered but attracted her. The racism, homophobia and police activities stir "the insidious counterrevolutionary" within, but do not still the discovery that she "belonged to a wider community than that of my friends and fellow dancers." In Nicaragua several years later, Guillermoprieto finds her second calling - journalism - yet she doesn't leave dance behind. It informs her political analysis as she looks back to the failure of the Ten Million Ton Harvest: "any dancer could have told Fidel that the movements of the dance of [harvesting sugarcane]... can't be learned in a single day..."
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Award-winning Mexican-born journalist Guillermoprieto has made Latin America her beat for the past 25 years, writing perceptive and unflinching reports for the
New Yorker and several books, including
Looking for History (2000). She now tells the involving and visceral story of her political awakening, disclosing the fact that this renowned writer of conscience initially wanted to be a dancer and studied with the best: Martha Graham, Twyla Tharp, and Merce Cunningham. Eventually recognizing that she isn't destined for stardom, Guillermoprieto accepts an invitation to teach dance in Havana. Abysmally ignorant about Cuba and therefore utterly unprepared for the harsh realities and painful paradoxes that await, she arrives on May 1, 1970, and is soon struggling to stay sane at a state-run dance boarding school with inadequate food, no mirrors, no music, and students who have never seen modern dance before. Guillermoprieto vividly and purposefully recounts her acute discomfort with the strained and ludicrous rhetoric of the revolution, her sorrow over Castro's catastrophic failures, her astonishment at the great valor of Cuba's people, and her gradual recognition of her true calling as a journalist. Guillermoprieto's riveting portrait of herself as a young artist is an excellent corollary to Gioconda Belli's
Country under My Skin (2002).
Donna SeamanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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