Dancing with Cuba: A Memoir of the Revolution (Hardcover)

by Alma Guillermoprieto (Author)

Editorial Reviews

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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From The Washington Post

Other admirers of Alma Guillermoprieto's reportage from Latin America may well be as surprised as I was to learn that the title of this memoir is literal. Nearly three and a half decades ago Guillermoprieto went to Cuba to teach at the National School of Modern Dance, "about eight miles from the center of Havana in a suburb once known as Marianao." It wasn't a lark, and it wasn't an exercise in fellow traveling. It was a job pure and simple, though of course it turned out to be a good deal more than that.

Herself Mexican by birth, Guillermoprieto had studied in New York under Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham and had been a minor performer in Twyla Tharp's company. Her entire existence revolved around dancing -- "It would never have occurred to me that there might be anything better in life than dance" -- but she had come to understand that "my intrinsic physical limitations: my flat feet, my lack of 'turnout' -- the rotation of the femur in the hollow of the pelvis, which allows the knees and feet to point completely outward" made it certain that "I was never going to achieve technical virtuosity." She was 20 years old, "and no one had ever said to me, 'When you move, it enraptures my soul, dance forever.' "

So when Cunningham told her about the opportunity to teach dance in Cuba, she took it, though she did so with qualms. She had been interviewed in New York by the school's director, Elfriede Mahler, who "struck me as unbearable," and Guillermoprieto worried that they would not get along well together, but she accepted "a one-year contract, with my plane ticket, travel expenses, and lodging all covered, and a salary of $250 a month," in exchange for which "I would give two classes a day for a year." After a few bureaucratic hassles, she arrived in Havana on May 1, 1970, and was taken to her bedroom at the school:

"I recall an impression of dampness, frustrating darkness, and the muted background roar of the jungle. The mosquitoes were an invisible army. My room's lone lightbulb gave off a sad, faint light. As soon as I was alone, I felt as if I were about to collapse from the anguish closing in on me from under my skin: What am I doing here? What have I done, what have I done, what have I done? From the moment I got off the plane I'd felt as if I were wearing a corset that was squeezing me tighter and tighter, and by then it was no longer allowing me to breathe."

She soon decided that it was better to fight than to quit, bucked up her spirits, and got to work. "The open faces of the youngsters who would be my students immediately disarmed me when I finally met them," she writes. "I'd asked myself again and again how I would keep them from noticing my fear, my inexperience, the inadequacy of my skills. But after that first glance my primary impulse was to protect them." Almost immediately she "was enchanted with each one's unique beauty and with their intensity," but she also realized at once that "their training had been almost criminally deficient." The workers' paradise that Fidel Castro was constructing was not, it seemed, a very good place for the training of dancers.

Another teacher explained "that Fidel -- and Che too, of course -- didn't want revolutionaries to waste their time dancing." Eventually she became friends with some artistically inclined young people, one of whom told her: "The revolutionary process can't have been easy for anyone, but even so I have to say that those of us who've had to endure the most . . . have been those who work in the arts. I've often wondered what would happen if all the artists in the country piled onto a gigantic raft and went rowing off to the ends of the earth. You can bet there wouldn't be a single member of the honorable Politburo of the Cuban Communist Party or of the whole Central Committee who would shed a tear."

The question, as she posed it many months later in a letter to a man she loved, haunts the entire book: "Can it be that art, as I have understood it and have tried to live it, has no hope within the Revolution, and that there is no hope for me within the Revolution, and that art is worthless?" Guillermoprieto did not go to Cuba with revolutionary fantasies -- "it had never occurred to me that I had a moral obligation to protest against injustice. I'd never once imagined that I belonged to a wider community than that of my friends and fellow dancers" -- and she was offended by the "sledgehammer" rhetoric of Castro's Cuba, but she was also offended by "the United States, with its atomic arsenal, its hatred, and its implacable will to destroy the Revolution."

Much else went on in her life during the (as it turned out) six months she spent in Cuba, but these were the matters with which she wrestled from first to last and which she remembers most vividly at a remove of nearly three and a half decades. In recalling and reconstructing those days, she has given us a convincing portrait of a young woman torn between her sympathy for those in need and her desire to do nothing except her art, between her conviction that the Castroites were trying to do good and her revulsion at their rhetoric, their methods and their very selves. As she told a friend:

"What worries me is that I don't like the Revolution. I don't like it because I'm an artist, and the Revolution doesn't treat us well. I don't like it because I'm anarchic, and the Revolution wants to control everything. . . . I don't like it because I don't think there's any harm in the Beatles, or that having long hair has anything to do with whether you're a revolutionary or not. . . . But in the end . . . what I'm trying to say is that I don't like living here, and at the same time it's clear to me that the Revolution is absolutely necessary to the better future of humanity. But then what do I do with my own opinion? How can I fight what I feel?"

Or, as she put it in another of the many letters she wrote, "I don't know where this terrible rhetoric I'm spouting comes from, or why the Revolution matters so much to me when the revolutionaries I've met all strike me as a little brutal and boring and soooo square." She was learning that when idealism and reality cross paths, idealism almost always gets run over. Her beliefs -- "a mixture of sincere elements of antiauthoritarianism, anticlericalism, horror of torture, revulsion at social inequality, defense of animals, terror of any type of violence, and distrust of anything related to big business, especially advertising" -- were heartfelt and legitimate, or so at least they seem to me. But the rhetoric in which the communists couched their ostensible commitment to these and other ideals was wooden and mechanical -- "crushing words, without nuances or secrets" -- and the methods they used to advance their interests were authoritarian, often involving violence, torture and mendacity.

She was, as she eventually came to understand, very much a member of her own generation. She had "unquestioningly accepted Che's principal dogma: in order to have a meaningful life and contribute to the well-being of the human race, it was necessary to die, and fast," yet her anarchic, antiauthoritarian streak was powerful: "I think that particular combination of blind obedience and total rebellion embodied my generation's dilemma and gave it meaning and purpose." It is a theme that arises frequently in studies of the '60s and '70s; Guillermoprieto's account of how it entered her own life gives it new shadings as well as a seriousness that often can be difficult to detect in accounts written by others of her generation.

Today Guillermoprieto looks at Castro with a cold eye -- "Fidel's revolution has failed tragically at its stated goals -- greater social equality and better living conditions for all -- while remaining hostile to the range of civil and individual rights even its sympathizers now demand" -- but she also understands that the goals were and remain wise even if the revolutionaries were not. It is a dilemma that, in an unjust world, will forever be with us.

Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 290 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon; 1 edition (February 10, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375420932
• ISBN-13: 978-0375420931
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,061,335 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dancer, May 21, 2006

By	J. M. Belanger (Indiana) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Dancing with Cuba: A Memoir of the Revolution (Paperback)

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.

10 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Gorgeous and Intelligent, March 5, 2004

By A Customer

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.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Deserves a close reading, September 10, 2006

By	Ana E. "Fulana" (Gran Manzana) - See all my reviews

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.