Customer Reviews

Dancing with Cuba: A Memoir of the Revolution

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

The person who stressed this is a memoir is on target though I think it is quite well written. As a long time admirer of Guillermoprieto's journalism I found this a fascinating and unfaiingly honest account of her life as a dance teacher in Cuba before she became a writer. IT IS a memoir and the self pity of her young self is conveyed with a brutal honesty--it is the middle-aged writer descibing where she once was and her perspective is a perfect balance of scorn and affection for who she was. If you are looking for a wide ranging view of the revolution, this is not the book you want to read, though you will get a very interesting perspective on life in Cuba in the early 1970s. If you have not read anything by her before, read The Heart That Bleeds and Looking for History (as well as Mark Danner's The Massacre at El Mozote, a story she was responsible, with Ray Bonner at the Times, for breaking in 1982. She is a remarkable writer and this memoir was one of my favorite reads of the last several years.

Dancing with Cuba is written by a woman who has experienced Cuba firsthand after the revolution. Her ability to write details is daunting, but this gift throws us into a life that most Americans have never experienced. I am a Cuban book collector and "Dancing with Cuba" and a Cuban picture book (for kids) set in Miami's Little Havana festival with an all Cuban cast,are my family's two favorites.

I highly recommend this book for Cuba lovers.

This book is a commentary on a failing economic system as seen through the eyes of young woman utterly committed to ballet. That she has the acumen to look back twenty-five years and make sense of what she felt then and bring it to the page now makes her a wonderful storyteller. Her narrative provides a portal into a world few Americans understood except as a menace, and her change over the course of six months is a captivating tale told well. Read the book as a personal essay, not a commentary on politics, though it is.

Her courage and honesty grabbed me in the first pages, and never let go. Gillermoprieto's longing to submit herself to the demands of dance moved me deeply. As a fellow dancer, I understood her keen feeling that she would never be as good as she wanted to be. Perhaps every dancer with the capacity to be honest feels it too. It was also a revealing glimpse into the lives of artists in a country swept up in a political and ideological crisis. Wonderful writer. Great read.

I hated this book the first time I read it. The writing is that good - it definitely evokes strong emotions. However, I kept coming back to the ideas in the book, especially her conflicts as an artist and as a dubious and somewhat neurotic 'internacionalista.' So, I read it again a year later....and loved it.

What I mean to say is, upon a fast reading, it comes off as just another anti-Castro 'terrified' take on the heady first decades of the Cuban rev, or the navel-gazing of a somewhat neurotic artist. The book deserves a closer look, though, because the memoir actually has a much more interesting - and complicated - narrative to tell. The character of Elfrida alone could generate volumes of reflection. It's really fascinating.

In 1970, Alma Guillermoprieto left her home in New York to teach modern dance in Cuba for six months. There, she found herself in the heart of the Cuban revolution. Though a memoir all the way, the book is peppered with historical background and short biographies of Cuba's most important heroes and figures. The author tells of her desire to have the faith of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, her horror over her ignorance of evil after watching a film on the Vietnam War, the conflict between her previous ideas about identity and purpose in comparison to those of her Cuban friends. Her memoir is a good recounting of her struggle, against the backdrop of Cuba's very complex history and culture. Though not by any means a reference on Cuban history, the book does give a good inside look at how Cubans as well as outsiders viewed the revolution that was taking place. This is an enjoyable coming of age memoir, especially for fans of dance and Cuba.

I too, thought this book would be a well-written account from which I could learn. While learning about Cuba during the Revolution, I was a bit bored and quite frankly annoyed by the writer's self pity and confusion. On behalf of Guillermoprieto, I will say that she does create some powerful imagery. I was sorry however, that I wasted the money on a hard cover!

This book is a marketing tome for communism, a failed system. I was expecting more of a novel, but unfortunately it fell short of my expectations.

Why is it that so many readers, incorrectly, think a memoire is going to teach them something -- in this case about Cuba and Fidel? This is a memoire, folks. You won't get all the facts. You'll get the writer's reactions to the events of her life as they occurred against the background of an historical era or event, not details of what "really happened." If you're looking for history, read a history book.

Anyhow, I enjoyed this book, but didn't think it was particularly well written. The conversations were stilted and used only to convey information, not really to show what the people speaking were like. The author told the reader repeatedly how awful the director of the school was, but I never really saw it for myself.

But I read with sympathy for this young woman, adrift in a very strange country and for the people she met who were affected by the revolution.

Guillermoprieto's memoir of the Cuban Revolution is a very personal account of one person's experience in Cuba after the revolution. She does not endeavor to provide broad background information regarding the history or politics in Cuba and is in fact quite naive and ignorant of even basic current events during the memoir. While I wasn't particularly moved by her story, her aloof and intimate account of her time in post-revolution Cuba does provide a very readable and accessable introduction to the subject.