Alma Guillermoprieto

Magnificent memoir of a 20 year old dancer with Merce, Twyla and Martha, invited in 1969 to teach students in the National School for Modern Dance in Cuba. Her six months there are compellingly told, and raise profound questions about the contradictions inherent in the Cuban revolution—the decadence of a capitalist culture, the delights of a society searching for meaning, the role of the intellectual versus that of the soldier. She falls under the revolutionary spell, enchanted, along with the Cuban people, for a charismatic leader who includes a whole society in his vision of a life where all work for the benefit of each other. Fascinating contradictions abound in the story of the failure of the sugar harvest, the thoughts of other Latin American revolutionaries she meets, the success of the health care system. Her descriptions of the people she encounters—and their ways of incorporating Latino culture into the revolutionary precepts of Fanon and Lenin, etc., and their celebrations—bring life to the page.

As an artist still at the beginning of her career, she becomes aware of her shortcomings as she begins to teach at the school—she really isn’t qualified to teach what they need to learn. Merce’s style, based on abstraction and random connections of movement, is incomprehensible to the Cuban students. AND she has to teach without mirrors.

In that society, homophobic, sexist and not free of racism, art becomes extraneous to the furthering of revolutionary goals, though the government half-heartedly supports it. (In charge of the school of the arts is a revolutionary hero who has no idea what art is about). Her devotion to art, and the evolution of her revolutionary consciousness fall into such violent conflict that she falls prey to thoughts of suicide—what good does art do??? What has she ever done with her life? She is useless….Not until near the end of the book does she reveal what she finally figures out about the socialist argument/relationship to art that is fallacious. (And she only discovers it years later). “Not much is left in Cuba of the Revolution I knew,” she tells us.

This is an incredibly powerful descriptive odyssey of a young idealist through the theory and reality of the Cuban revolution, replete with questions that resonate about the value of art, the deadening spiritual effect of a capitalist consumerist culture, social responsibility, the need to act against evil, poverty, and injustice, and the significance of the individual in society.… (more)

Alma Guillermoprieto is a journalist specialising in Latin America (she's originally Mexican but now US-based). This book is an account of preparations for the Rio Carnival in 1988, by one of the 'samba schools' - loose organisations which compete with each other during the Carnival, each with a parade complete with elaborate floats, costumes, and a 'story samba' song encapsulating the theme, which can be surprisingly serious (in the 1988 carnival many of the schools chose to theme their parade around the 100th anniversary of the abolition of slavery).

Guillermoprieto was an avant-garde ballet dancer before she became a journalist (last year I really enjoyed her memoir of being a ballet instructor in revolutionary Cuba, Dancing With Cuba). She becomes a member of the samba school, learning to dance in the parade, and after some time moves to the favela where the school is based.

Her book would be a wonderful read even if it stuck only to the subject of the preparations for Carnival, because of her descriptive abilities:

Gradually a ripple set in, laid over the basic rhythm by smaller drums. Then the cuica: a subversive, humorous squeak, dirty and enticing, produced by rubbing a stick inserted into the middle of a drumskin. The cuica is like an itch, and the only way to scratch it is to dance. Already, people were wiggling in place to the beat, not yet dancing, building up the rhythm inside their bodies, waiting for some releasing command of the drums.

Or later:

She must have been about fourteen years old, but there was none of the sharp-edged busyness of the mosquito brigade's dancing in her movements, and none of the blatant sexual appeal coached into sambistas from toddlerhood. Delicately, she explored every interstice in the rhythm, dancing first to the light metal instruments, then to the drums, reshaping the music into movement and making all its different parts visible: the song line's rise and fall, the changes in rhythm, the backbeat of the mandolin.

But Carnival is much more than just a community event: it's mass entertainment, part of a major money-spinning industry. It's exclusive - I had assumed that Carnival paraded through the streets for all to enjoy, but in fact it takes place in a vast purpose-built Sambadrome, with the seats filled by the wealthiest Cariocas. And it's also an excellent window onto the relationships between classes and races in Brazil. "In Rio, when state of local officials want to show appreciation for black culture, they visit a samba school": but the only paid members of the samba school are the parade designers (carnavalescos), generally white, and the prestigious roles of singers on the floats are also generally handed out to the white and wealthy. The exhausting job of dancing in the parade, continuously while the floats are moving through the sambadrome, goes to the favelados who are perceived as the ones with the real 'samba spirit'.

I found this book absolutely fascinating and would love to read a 2011 update - I wonder whether Brazil's improving economy has had any impact on the lives of the favelados in the last twenty years.… (more)