La Habana en un espejo
Alma Guillermoprieto

NONFICTION | 2005/2019 | 304 pages

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.

RIGHTS: spanish LITERATURA RANDOM HOUSE | english KNOPF | french MARCHIALY

“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.”
— The New York Times
“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
“As much a pleasure as an astonishment.”
— Harper’s