A vivid and mesmerizing memoir of the six months the author spent in Cuba in 1970, a time when she began to develop her own fervent political conscience.

Alma Guillermoprieto—an award–winning journalist and arguably our most clear-eyed observer of Latin America—now turns her keen powers of observation onto her own, younger self. In this richly evocative chronicle, Guillermoprieto describes the remarkable, transforming journey she made as a twenty-year-old, when her love of dance—which had led her from her native Mexico to the New York dance studios of Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, and Twyla Tharp—took her to a job teaching poorly trained but ardent dance students in Cuba. At first unaffected by the revolutionary spirit and the adoration of Castro that pervaded the island, Guillermoprieto slowly fell under the spell of the idealism that buoyed the often destitute lives of the Cuban people. And as she opened herself to what became a complex, galvanizing revolutionary experience, she found, as well, the ideas and ideals that would shape her thinking for the rest of her life.
Beautifully written and deeply felt, Dancing with Cuba is a revelatory account of the making of an impassioned political heart and mind.

“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

“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

“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

“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

“A vivid chronicle.” —The Boston Globe

“Excellent…Guillermoprieto writes so well.” —Newsday

“A bittersweet page-turner.” —Dance Teacher

“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 Trade Paperback edition.

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.