Last Dance in Havana (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The old-time Cuban Buena Vista Social Club may have won riches and international fame with its surprise hit recording and documentary film, but life under Fidel Castro remains a struggle for most of the group's compatriots. This is the story of bands that play in Cuba, hoping to score audiences of foreign tourists or the few Cubans who can cough up a $10 cover charge. This account places life on the island against the backdrop of music, dance and racial politics, and shows how culture is political in Cuba—and for the U.S. officials who control entry visas. Robinson, an assistant managing editor at the Washington Post, commits two sins common to journalists: an overabundance of taxi drivers' opinions and of accounts of himself taking notes. He also has an annoying tic of referring to the "Carnegie Hall of Cuba," to the "Li'l Bow Wow of Cuba," the "Juilliard of the Caribbean," the "Justin Timberlake of...": you get the picture. But Robinson makes up for that by conveying the energy of, and his passion for, the island, its music and the players. He does an excellent job of recounting how Cuba's hip-hop scene has challenged the regime, getting away with what nobody had until one band finally crossed the line.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From The Washington Post

"Another Cuba book?" my wife asks with a laugh whenever a slightly bulky tan mailer arrives for me. The flow of books about the Caribbean's largest island has accelerated in recent years to the point where CAUTION: FREQUENT FLOODING signs should be posted. The books have a sameness to them, though, whether they're concerned with public policy or private lives. But Eugene Robinson's Last Dance in Havana has the rare distinction of showing the influence of the public on the private, and it's a most satisfying look at Cuba today.

For more than 10 years now, the Havana street has led the Cuban government. Whenever a phenomenon was successful with ordinary Cubans, the state took it over. Private restaurants in people's homes were neither legal nor illegal in the early 1990s. When that entrepreneurial activity became popular with foreigners, the government started regulating it. Likewise, lodging international visitors was not forbidden, and became widespread -- and the state moved in to control that enterprise as well. The street always offered a far better pesos-for-dollars exchange rate than the state, until one day government kiosks popped up all over town with the street rate, effectively usurping the freelance trade. And, as Last Dance in Havana shows, when hip-hop culture became too popular to ignore, when the scene was too big to overlook, when rappers were routinely getting overseas interest, the government moved in front of the phenomenon and legitimized it as "an authentic expression of Cuban culture."

The street, the people, the lumpen -- in short, friends and neighbors -- are the stars of Last Dance in Havana. Robinson, a former overseas correspondent and foreign editor for The Washington Post who now heads its Style section, has performed an adroit task, mixing with Cubans in dank night clubs, crowded homes and poorly equipped concert halls to give us a credible and at times hopeful look at the daily struggle on this "gorgeous wasteland of excellence and decay." His book is well-reasoned and lively, informative and animated. And he uses dance and music to tell the larger picture of Fidel Castro, his government and its dominance.

Castro, who turns 78 next month, is portrayed as "impresario" of the "Cuban carnival . . . barker, ringmaster, daredevil, lion tamer, roustabout, tightrope walker, but never clown. He . . . wore the island of Cuba like a mood ring." When Soviet largesse disappeared, he "had to shift, give way, step left and then right and then left again -- he had to dance like a youngster again, and by now he must know that he can never rest. He will dance until he dies."

Robinson makes a good case for his claim that to grasp where the country stands you must appreciate its perpetual undercurrents: music and dance. "Those who make the music," he asserts, "are the real journalists, analysts, social commentators." As for dance, "Cubans move through their complicated lives the way they move on the dance floor; dashing and darting and spinning on a dime, seducing joy and fulfillment and next week's supply of food out of a broken system. Then at night they take to the real dance floors and invent new steps." The author characterizes one couple's moves as "classical ballet on amphetamines."

Last Dance follows individual musicians and politicos -- yes, Cuba has the latter, and sometimes they're the same as the former -- as they struggle to gain acceptance, prominence and their daily bread. Robinson uncovers the music scene that "coexisted with the official, sanctioned world of Fidel's revolution but had its own mores and hierarchies, even its own economy." He follows the enormously popular group Bamboleo as they change personnel and musical style over time. He portrays the loyal band Los Van Van as a combination of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Bruce Springsteen. Visionary Juan de Marcos, the country's leading music producer, tells Robinson: "Cuban music is Afro-Cuban music. There are no whites in Cuba. There are people who think they are white, but they are all African."

Finally there is hip-hop which, with government support, is the focus of international festivals, neighborhood gatherings and widespread propaganda. "You had to listen to what kids were playing on their boom boxes," Robinson explains, "you had to notice how, when you got away from the tourist zones, the soundtrack switched from Buena Vista nostalgia to hard-edged rap." The hip-hop generation "knew all about the promises the Cuban revolution had broken and very little about the promises it had kept." Rap touched on subjects such as rough police treatment and the daily struggle, but never questioned the premises of the revolution itself.

Into this milieu strolled Clan 537, raperos whose song "¿Quién Tiró la Tiza?" ("Who Threw the Chalk?") touched that raw nerve by focusing not just on race but class and inequality. The song, as Robinson describes its trajectory, leapt out of hip-hop culture into mainstream Havana by word of mouth and worn-out cassettes; eventually, by popular demand, hip-hop clubs and radio stations put it in heavy rotation. To counteract this lively song mocking the very foundations of the regime, the government put out its own answer song, so poorly conceived and performed that it got laughed out of existence. As for Clan 537's hit, suddenly it was no longer played by deejays in the clubs or on the air. "Every loudspeaker controlled by the state stopped playing it." The song, a bureaucrat in the music industry told a friend of the author's with a straight face, "has been suspended." That's when the government withdrew much of its support from the hip-hop world. Hip-hop's expression of Cuban culture had become a bit too authentic.

The book is not without its faults. The breezy, informative and friendly writing occasionally suffers from unnecessarily repeated introductions of people, ideas and places, a surfeit of metaphors -- and could we do with fewer cabbies quoted? Sometimes a good editor needs a good editor. In all, though, Last Dance in Havana gives as reliable a sense as you are likely to find of what it's like to live in Cuba's capital right now, who your neighbors are and the soundtrack that accompanies you throughout the day and night.

For a thorough schooling in what preceded today's music scene, you could do no better than to read Ned Sublette's Cuba and Its Music, a well-written and brilliantly researched book that explains how music on the island has been influenced through the centuries by immigration, warfare, slavery, tourism, poetry, sugar cane, miscegenation and spirituality. Its detailed, first-rate scholarship makes Cuba and Its Music valuable and worthy, yet it will appeal to anyone with a jones for Cuba and its culture. It starts long before Columbus with the development of Cuba's parents, Spain and Africa, and ends in the early 1950s. (A second volume is said to be in the works.)

"The masked ball was the perfect metaphor for the time," Sublette writes of the mid-19th century, when slavery prospered under Spanish rule, "gaiety masking the great tension in the air." It is this sort of observation that Sublette, a musician, producer, co-founder of a small record label and for many years a producer of the program "Afropop Worldwide" on public radio, makes so well. He tells us that many Cuban musicians abandoned the country between 1930 and 1936 during some exceptionally autocratic, unstable and violent years, yet in 1937 "an explosion of pent-up creativity appeared on every musical front." Sublette leaves nothing out, even making the outlandishly logical suggestion that Elvis Presley's early music and movies were derivative of Cuban culture. There have been few, if any, social and political developments in Cuba, he implies, that have not been inextricably related to music and its diffusion. The musicians who created the extraordinary sounds emanating from the island during the last five centuries are the true heroes of Cuba and Its Music. It ranks with works on the same theme by Alejo Carpentier and Helio Orovio.
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Free Press (February 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1416568263
• ISBN-13: 978-1416568261
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,503,874 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The beat of modern Cuba throbs on every page, October 16, 2004

By	Jonathan Miller (Hérault, France) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Last Dance in Havana (Hardcover)

Eugene Robinson is a fine journalist who writes with style and confidence. His reportage is highly original. He completely avoids the well-worn path of hoary political analysis and gets out onto the streets and into the clubs of Cuba to produce a fascinating account of modern Cuba at the end of the Castro era. Some of the passages in this book really resonate - travel writing of a high order that illuminates a big picture by reference to the everyday culture of a people who have learned to escape from their oppression by means of the language of music. Arriba Eugene Robinson! This book really does add to the sum of collective knowledge about Cuba.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars good intro to the music scene in Havana, March 4, 2005

By	kashasu (Switzerland) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Last Dance in Havana (Hardcover)

The book is an easy read and gives a good feel of Havana in the last few years, especially as regards the music scene. Robinson's ability in capturing the atmosphere, more than anything else, earns him points. The often-made claim that music and culture are intimately tied together in Cuba is given substantial anecdotal evidence based on observation and interviews. His knowledge of the Cuban music scene prior to the advent of rap in the late 90's seems sketchy though, and the book could certainly have been helped with more research here.
Robinson also scores by pondering the intriguing question of whether music might be the source for a nascent civil society in Cuba, though the idea is not entirely new.
His penchant for Afro-Cuban culture and the problematics of racism has its merits, though his presentation of these being the most urgent and potentially boat-rocking social issues lose a little of their thrust when considering that most of his narrative takes place in Havana, and to a lesser extent Santiago and Matanzas, all of them bastions of Afro-Cuban culture. His North American optic is overly obvious at times, and he actually devotes a chapter to US exiles in Cuba.
Unfortunately, Robinson is prone to exaggeration and over-simplified evaluations that he serves en passant as offhand remarks. In quite a few instances, what is passed off as factual is actually speculatory, and all in all his arguments seem based largely on personal experience and not on any serious research. His antipathy toward Europeans (portrayed grossly as pot-bellied sex-seekers) also does little for his credibility.
Definitely worth a read for those who want to know the temperature on Havana's streets and how to read it, and for such sharp and sweaping comments as this one: "In the land of chronic scarcity, about the only things in perpetual surplus are vanity, ingenuity, and time."

5.0 out of 5 stars Loved it, October 22, 2004

By	Love to Read (Santa Barbara CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Last Dance in Havana (Hardcover)

I thought this was a very well done book....both about the music scene and the changes in life in Cuba in the past few years. Clearly Mr. Robinson knows his subject, and writes beautifully. It took me back to the clubs and streets and to the people whom he obviously cares about. Well worth the time.