LA MEZCLA / Natural rhythm

By Judy Cantor | Street Miami | 03/26/2004
Posted Friday, March 26, 2004

 E-mail this page    Printer-friendly page

IN DANCING WITH CUBA, ALMA GUILLERMOPRIETO RECOUNTS HER FIRST STEPS TOWARD PERSONAL AND POLITICAL AWARENESS

Now that Buena Vista Social Club fever has finally died down (and some of its elderly members have, alas, departed), dance in Cuba has lately taken the place of Cuban music as a hot topic and trend. The documentary Dance Cuba, recently screened at the Miami International Film Festival, took a romantic look at the ballet's evolution on the island, and the Dirty Dancing prequel Havana Nights seemed poised to re-ignite the American mambo craze -- that is, before the movie flopped.

In the past year, over 20 dancers left the island for opportunities abroad, recalling a similar wave of musicians' departures in the mid-'90s. Is Cuban dance the new Cuban music? Well, no, but, like music, it can serve as a captivating vehicle through which to explore an apparently inexhaustible subject: life in Cuba.

Hence, Dancing With Cuba, writer Alma Guillermoprieto's look back at the six months she spent teaching modern dance in Havana in 1970. The author, who went on to become an acclaimed journalist known for her eloquent in-depth coverage of Latin American social and political issues, subtitles her book ''A Memoir of the Revolution,'' and it's a story of struggle, both personal and political.

Guillermoprieto never wanted to go to Cuba. Unlike many of her contemporaries in New York's late '60s boho scene, she had no grand illusions about the island's utopian experiment, or any interest in politics at all. She just wanted to dance. Growing up in Mexico, Guillermoprieto had joined a modern dance company at age 12. She came to Manhattan, where her mother lived, to study with modern dance icons Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham.

She describes her time spent taking classes and sharing cheap meals with other dancers with a fondness that's still fresh in her heart. When avant-garde choreographer Twyla Tharp asks her to be one of 60 dancers performing in an open-air piece on Central Park's Great Lawn, she's ecstatic. ''For me, those bright mornings when we rehearsed were the first refutable proof that being alive was worth it,'' Guillermoprieto writes.

It is Merce Cunningham who alerts the young Guillermoprieto to an opportunity to teach modern dance in Cuba, although what she really wants is to be invited to dance in his company. Tharp propels her away. ''You're not going to get anywhere hanging around here,'' Tharp dismissively told the young dancer who had so hoped for recognition in the New York dance world.

And so at 21, Guillermoprieto ends up at the National Arts School on the grounds of the old Havana Country Club. She immediately falls ill with fever, and is treated to the benefits of socialized medicine at a Havana hospital, where she gets the most thorough check-up of her life.

She's then introduced to some of the less attractive realities of her temporary home. Mirrors in the classrooms -- essential for dance -- are forbidden since they promote unrevolutionary values of vanity and individualism. The cafeteria serves greasy rice and mystery meat in insufficient portions to meet dancers' physical demands. She adores her students, but they're poorly prepared and seem to have little idea what they're doing at the school. Then there's the school's director, Elfriede Mahler, an American communist who Guillermoprieto calls a witch, describing her as a cardboard revolutionary who maneuvers behind a wall of Cuban bureau-speak. ''This new, exhortatory way of speaking was different, and from the first it left me uncomfortable and perplexed,'' Guillermoprieto writes. 'What, for example, did `alienation of labor' mean?''

Guillermoprieto finds some solace in time spent with a group of intellectual gay friends, with whom she's free to ask questions. ''Conversation, a way of sharing time that in New York was ruled by the imperative of maximum speed and concision, was, here in Cuba, a baroque art,'' she notes. The drastic change in her surroundings spurs her to become increasingly aware of the world around her. For the first time, she's haunted by the atrocities of the Vietnam War. Her personal insecurities increase exponentially. She even fantasizes about committing suicide by jumping off the balcony of her room at the Habana Libre hotel.

As the dancer unravels, so does the revolution, which saw the end of its go-go years during Guillermoprieto's stay. ''Shoes, ham, meat, beans, toothpaste, deodorant -- everything was scarce and would go on being scarce,'' she writes. ``In all of the economic collapses Latin America had suffered over the last half century, no other crisis of even remotely similar proportions would occur until the collapse of the Soviet Union sank Cuba into an even deeper abyss.''

With humor, Guillermoprieto tells of the failure of the ''miracle'' mutant cows that Cuban agriculturalists promised would give plentiful milk and stand up to the island heat. More dire, and a central focus of the book, is the fiasco of the proposed ten million ton sugar harvest in 1970. Castro bet on it to bring economic security to the island, enlisting the entire workforce in the cutting of sugar cane. The goal was not met and Cuba never recovered economically or morally from the disaster. ''We had to fall back on what we are really good at, and what else is that but sugar?'' says one of Guillermoprieto's fellow dance teachers in the book. ``And now it turns out that sugar didn't work either. Was Fidel just terribly wrong, or is there no way out?''

Relying on her memory to reproduce situations and conversations, Guillermoprieto brings out the flavor of the time, particularly the confusion of everyday people who hoped for a better world, or at least a life unencumbered by repression and poverty. She shows how this befuddlement pervaded the newly appointed officials as well. In one scene, Mario Hidalgo, a former barbudo [Spanish for ''bearded one,'' the term refers to an early Fidel supporter] who has been made the director of the National Arts Schools, complains to top security official Manuel Piñeiro, Castro's right-hand man, that he's been assigned to watch over a bunch of artists, intellectuals, and ''fags.'' A baker by trade, he'd rather bake bread for the cause or go back to fighting in the bush. ''Coño, chico, get me out of here,'' he exclaims. Elsewhere in the book, Hidalgo presides at a meeting of dance school students with a pistol placed in front of him on a table.

Guillermoprieto's picture of the period will be insightful for those who have never been to Cuba. It could also help those who have traveled there in more recent times put things into perspective. Guillermoprieto may have found Fidel, then in his prime, ''handsome'' and his speeches bewitching, but she was not in the least seduced by life in Cuba -- as so many who have traveled there in the last decade, dollars in hand, have been. ''Not much is left in Cuba of the Revolution I knew,'' she notes in the book's afterward. `` . . . The hard years, when life was sometimes unbearably difficult and had meaning.''

Despite its title and context, Dancing With Cuba is most of all about Guillermoprieto's own quest for a meaningful life. While she decided that revolutionary Cuba is no place for a lost soul, and cut her intended year-long stay in half, she took with her a new conviction, what she calls ''solidarity with the world's sufferings.'' Back in New York, she protested the Vietnam War and worked for Latin American causes; during the Sandinista revolt in Nicaragua, she began working as a reporter.

Guillermoprieto did later return to Cuba as a journalist, but over the years she lost touch with the people she met during her time there. Some had moved to Miami. Others are still dancing in Cuba.