Based on unprecedented research in Cuba, the direct testimony of scores of Cuban musicians, and the author's unique experience as a prominent jazz musician, Cubano Be, Cubano Bop is destined to take its place among the classics of jazz history. The work pays tribute not only to a distinguished lineage of Cuban jazz musicians and composers, but also to the rich musical exchanges between Cuban and American jazz throughout the twentieth century. The work begins with the first encounters between Cuban music and jazz around the turn of the last century. Acosta writes about the presence of Cuban mus... continue
“Impressive . . . [Cristina García’s] story is about three generations of Cuban women and their separate responses to the revolution. Her special feat is to tell it in a style as warm and gentle as the ‘sustaining aromas of vanilla and almond,’ as rhythmic as the music of Beny Moré.”—Time Cristina García’s acclaimed book is the haunting, bittersweet story of a family experiencing a country’s revolution and the revelations that follow. The lives of Celia del Pino and her husband, daughters, and grandchildren mirror the magical realism of Cuba itself, a landscape of beauty and poverty, idealism ... continue
"A wordless graphic novel in which twelve-year-old Marisol must adapt to a new life 1960s Brooklyn after her parents send her to the United States from Cuba to keep her safe during Castro's regime."--
In a series of letters to her dead mother, a young Afro-Cuban girl describes her struggles with racism, living on the goodwill of relatives, and self-acceptance. Reprint.
Out of Havana provides an uncommon ordinary woman's insight into the last half century of Cuba's tumultuous recent history. More powerfully than an academic study or historical account, it allows us intimately to grasp the enthusiasm, commitment and sense of promise that defined many average Cubans' experience of the 1959 Revolution and the first triumphant decades of the Castro regime. As the story shifts into the final decades of the last century (the 1980s Mariel Boatlift, the so-called "special period in time of peace" [from 1991 to the end of the decade], and the 1994 Balseros or Rafters ... continue
14 "BEST OF DECEMBER 2018" Lists Including Entertainment Weekly, BBC.com, New York Magazine / Vulture, Bustle, The Millions, Crimereads / LitHub, Book Riot, Asymptote Journal, Vol. 1 Brooklyn , Bust, Pop Sugar and Words Without Borders A novel of glamour, surveillance, and corruption in contemporary Cuba, from an internationally bestselling author--who has never before been translated into English Cleo, scion of a once-prominent Cuban family and a promising young writer in her own right, travels to Spain to collect a prestigious award. There, Cuban expats view her with suspicion--assuming she'... continue
"A composer, fleeing an empty existence in New York City, takes a journey with his mistress to one of the few remaining areas of the world not yet touched by civilization the upper reaches of a great South American river." -- Back cover.
Set in Cuba, "The Messenger" tells the story of a pair of doomed lovers-world-famous tenor Enrico Caruso and his Chinese-Cuban mullatta mistress. In June 1920 a bomb exploded at the Teatro Nacional in Havana at the very moment that Enrico Caruso was singing RadamEs in the opera "AIda." In a panic, he fled the theater and disappeared into the streets of Havana. What happened to him is the story imagined by Mayra Montero. As Caruso tries to escape the murderous agents of the Black Hand, he is drawn into a passionate love affair with Aida Cheng, a woman whose godfather is the powerful Afro-Cuban ... continue