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..."Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
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.

From Booklist
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 Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
“Not merely a marvelously lively and sympathetic memoir but also a resonant evocation of precisely what it’s like to be young.” --O, The Oprah Magazine

“There is no clear course to the past but only a kind of dead reckoning. It is such reckoning that gives authenticity to Ms. Guillermoprieto’s uneasy and fascinating account, and more than 30 years after the events, a pulsing sense of discovery.” “One of the most astute and eloquent chroniclers of contemporary Latin America. . . . Guillermoprieto’s description of everyday life under the revolution is intimate and poignant, and also tough-minded and shrewd.” --San Francisco Chronicle

“Dancing with Cuba is about falling in love with this mythic place or, more precisely, trying to. . . . A sympathetic yet ultimately unsparing account of a personal odyssey that ends not triumphantly but nonetheless extraordinarily.” --The Nation

"A pleasure to read, full of humanity, sly humor, curiosity and knowledge." —Katha Pollitt, The New York Times Book Review

"Written with the deftness that has made Guillermoprieto's dispatches in The New Yorker some of the best writing on Latin America, Dancing with Cuba makes a significant contribution to the in-depth understanding of contemporary Cuba." -The Miami Herald

“Few dancers write memoirs, and so the world of dance remains an elegant mystery to many of us… This is a tale, then, of artists and poets, dancers and architects — bewildered, always in conflict, trying to keep alive standards which they knew were essential, but which were also suspect, not to say dangerous.” —Doris Lessing, The New York Observer

"An honest memoir filled with the struggles most young people wrestle with: love, identity and idealism." -USA Today

"The memoir's greatest strength is its ability to infect the reader with the feverish, hopeful and heartbreaking sense of the early days of the revolution." —Elle

"As much a pleasure as an astonishment." - Harper's

"Written with dignity and without rhetoric or undue emotion: when this author flays her feelings, it's because she is utterly alive with protest." -Kirkus Reviews

“Guillermoprieto is one of the most perceptive commentators on Latin America, a writer whose political analysis is sensitive to culture and history and punctuated by telling details that illuminate larger dilemmas. This bittersweet remembrance of youthful hopes and disillusionment, of the contrast between the idealism of revolutionary aspirations and the clay feet of day-to-day revolutionaries, is set against the story of six months she spent in Cuba as a dance teacher in 1970…this marvelous book is almost impossible to put down.” —Foreign Affairs

"Gracefully told...splendidly rendered into English by Esther Allen." - Los Angeles Times Book Review

“A vivid chronicle.” —The Boston Globe

“In exploring her own evolving relationship to art and politics…[Guillermoprieto] proposes a genuinely original take on history. To the traditional discussion of events and ideologies she adds psychology, rhetorical analysis, and, most provocatively, ideas about how one’s physical body participates in the experience of cultural identity.” —Sarah Kerr, The New York Review of Books

“ [A] beautifully written novelistic memoir.” San Antonio Express-News

“A compelling look back — from the safe wisdom of middle age — at the role a revolution played in transforming this young dancer into a journalist.” —Sacramento News & Review

“An insightful account of a time when the revolution was past its dawn but had not yet descended into cynical political bankruptcy…also a powerful memoir of a sometimes painful journey that ‘thoroughly unraveled’ its author’s life, turning a naïve young artist into a confusedly politicized adult.” —The Economist

“Excellent…Guillermoprieto writes so well.” —Newsday

“Guillermoprieto brings out the flavor of the time…insightful.” —Street Weekly (Miami)

“[Dancing with Cuba] is a loose mix of half-memories, reporting and musings on the place and meaning of art…The mix works for some of the same reasons Guillermoprieto had such difficulty in Cuba — the sophisticated, intelligent singularity of her voice, her insistence on recognizing life’s grays and her sly wit.” —Associated Press

“A bittersweet page-turner.” —Dance Teacher

“[Dancing with Cuba] is elegantly written and captures both the spirit and rhythms of Cuba during a period of dramatic change and political upheaval.” —Tucson Citizen (Tuscon, AZ)

“A vivid memoir.” —The Wall Street Journal

“In recalling and reconstructing those days, [Guillermoprieto] 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.” —The
Washington Post Book World


From the Inside Flap
In 1970 a young dancer named Alma Guillermoprieto left New York to take a job teaching at Cuba’s National School of Dance. For six months, she worked in mirrorless studios (it was considered more revolutionary); her poorly trained but ardent students worked without them but dreamt of greatness. Yet in the midst of chronic shortages and revolutionary upheaval, Guillermoprieto found in Cuba a people whose sense of purpose touched her forever.

In this electrifying memoir, Guillermoprieto–now an award-winning journalist and arguably one of our finest writers on Latin America– resurrects a time when dancers and revolutionaries seemed to occupy the same historical stage and even a floor exercise could be a profoundly political act. Exuberant and elegiac, tender and unsparing, Dancing with Cuba is a triumph of memory and feeling.

About the Author
Alma Guillermoprieto writes frequently for The New Yorker (where the first chapter of this book appeared in 2002) and The New York Review of Books. She is the author of Looking for History, The Heart That Bleeds, and Samba, and she was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1995. Raised in Mexico and the United States, she now makes her home in Mexico City.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In 1970 A Young Dancer named Alma Guillermoprieto left New York to take a job teaching at Cuba's National School of Dance. For six months, she worked in mirrorless studios (it was considered more revolutionary) where her poorly trained but ardent students worked without them but dreamt of greatness. Yet in the midst of chronic shortages and revolutionary upheaval, Guillermoprieto found in Cuba a people whose sense of purpose touched her forever.

In this electrifying memoir, Guillermoprieto-now an award-winning journalist and arguably one of our finest writers on Latin America-resurrects a time when dancers and revolutionaries seemed to occupy the same historical stage and even a floor exercise could be a profoundly political act. Exuberant and elegiac, tender and unsparing, Dancing with Cuba is a triumph of memory and feeling.

FROM THE CRITICS

The New York Times

Guillermoprieto writes with a novelist's zest for particulars, from the taste and smell of Galo's mother's lemon meringues (and the process by which she bartered for the egg whites to make them) to the shape of her students' feet. Yet she says she has only a few pages of notes and letters from her Cuban stay. As so often with memoirs, especially the best-written ones, you do find yourself wondering how anyone could possibly remember so much. Guillermoprieto explains that she has improvised a bit -- her students are composites, dialogue is invented, her letters are reconstructed -- yet, she writes, the result is not fiction, but ''a faithful transcription'' of her memories, including the partial, hazy, revised ones, and the ones ''completely invented by the stubborn narrator we all have within us, who wants things to be the way they sound best to us now, and not the way they were.'' (Perhaps the intimacy of the subject is the reason she chose to write this memoir in Spanish; it has been gracefully translated by Esther Allen.) — Katha Pollitt

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." Agent, Gloria Loomis. (Feb. 10) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Foreign Affairs

Spanish investment in Latin America ranks second only to that of the United States. For a time, this investment brought large returns, especially during the lucrative privatization of utilities, telecommunications companies, and banks in the 1990s. But the onset of a regional economic downturn in 2001 meant massive losses for investors. In the year after the Argentine economic crisis, the worth of the 11 Spanish companies with the biggest operations in Argentina fell by 83 percent. In this excellent book, Chislett provides a detailed and well-documented account of Spanish investors' infatuation and subsequent disillusionment with Latin America. Spanish banks, he argues, have come to believe that they concentrated too much attention on Latin America, to the detriment of domestic markets. Spanish investors on the whole are now looking at the region much more skeptically — having discovered, as their ancestors did, that El Dorado is not all it was cracked up to be.

Library Journal

A celebrated observer of Latin American politics recalls her 1970s sojourn in Cuba-as a dance instructor. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews