Dancing With Cuba
by Alma Guillermoprieto
Pantheon
On May 1, 1970, a 20-year-old Mexican-American dancer named Alma Guillermoprieto arrived in Havana to begin a yearlong teaching position at the National School of Dance. The basis for her memoir, "Dancing With Cuba," Guillermoprieto's stay there changed her from a naïve starving artist to a political adult. She suffered the typical emotional turmoil of adolescence over new and old loves. But the confrontation with Castro's revolution — about which she knew nothing before her arrival — plunged her into a personal struggle with her place in the world. Like many others, Guillermoprieto found it increasingly difficult to be both an artist and a revolutionary.
In New York, where she studied with modern dance legends Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham, Guillermoprieto was an admittedly mediocre dancer: "I was painfully conscious of my intrinsic physical limitations," she writes. "I was never going to achieve technical virtuosity; that was a fact." When Cunningham offered her the position in Cuba, she got the hint. The planned year in Cuba became only six months, but by the time she returned to New York, Guillermoprieto began participating in protests against the Vietnam War and dedicating "long hours of work to Latin America's struggles for liberation." Forever changed by her new revolutionary politics and solidarity with "the world's suffering," Guillermoprieto also stopped dancing and became a reporter and then a writer.
Guillermoprieto is best known to readers of the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, which frequently feature her essays on Latin American politics and society. Her subjects have ranged from the favelas to the Salvadorian civil war, the Mexican peso crisis and the personality cults of such figures as Che Guevara and Eva Perón. Her observations are always lucid, her writing fluid and accessible with the occasional literary flair for magical realism.
"Dancing With Cuba," a self-consciously honest memoir, is no exception. Guillermoprieto admits that her memoir is written with the clarity of hindsight. Still, she tells an intimate story pieced together from fragments of memories and "invented dialogue" seemingly "dictated from some intact corner of memory." She paints an often forgotten picture of early revolutionary Cuba, when the revolution seemed to have succeeded in bringing equality and shared prosperity to the island. It was a time when contempt for the war in Vietnam, the jubilant election of a socialist leader in Chile and leftist guerrilla movements across Latin America gave idealists from Havana to Montevideo (as well as Berkeley and New York) hope for a new world of solidarity.
Swept up by this revolutionary spirit, Guillermoprieto quickly became ambivalent toward its contradictions. She tells of being understandably disturbed by the scarcity of food, the wiretap in her hotel room, the censors reading her letters to long-distance lovers in New York and Mexico City and the "flunky from Minint, the Interior Ministry" who watches her every move. She befriends a group of homosexuals and quickly learns of Castro's increasingly hostile treatment of them. Though some spent years in Castro's agricultural labor camps for "antisocial elements," they are still wedded to his revolution. "This revolution is the only thing that has given my life any meaning," one of them tells her, adding, "Do you know what it is to wake up in the morning and know that what you're eating hasn't been stolen from anyone else's mouth?" Guillermoprieto understands, and wants to share in their idealism, but it still seems unjust.
Her experiences at the National School of Dance are no less ambivalent. The dance studio has no mirrors, she is told, because mirrors are "a symbol of vanity." The modern dance students have little to aspire to after graduation — there is only one mediocre modern dance company and besides, Castro's revolution has always feared artists and intellectuals. Her students, in the final years of their dance education, openly grapple with these discrepancies, eventually staging a strike that yields meager concessions.
Like her students, Guillermoprieto struggles with the conflicted position of being an artist and wanting to be a revolutionary. "What worries me," she tells her guerrilla lover, "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."
One has the sense that Guillermoprieto remembers these conflicted months with a mixture of nostalgia and remorse. Nostalgia for those rare, surreal moments in life that so profoundly affect how we see the world and leave us feeling forever changed. And remorse for the revolution that once seemed so hopeful and today seems like little more than demagoguery. It is perhaps the way many leftist Cuban exiles also remember those early years of the revolution. Guillermoprieto does well to remind us that indeed there was a time when many people — even many Americans — saw hope in Fidel Castro.
— Noam Lupu (noam at flakmag dot com)
