Volume 51, Number 9 · May 27, 2004
Memories of Underdevelopment
By Sarah Kerr
Dancing with Cuba: A Memoir of the Revolution
by Alma Guillermoprieto,translated from the Spanish by Esther Allen
Pantheon, 290 pp., $25.00
In the epilogue to her new memoir, Dancing with Cuba, Alma Guillermoprieto notes that she became a journalist 'more or less by accident' in the 1970s, when she was living in Nicaragua, and Sandinista rebels took up arms against the dictator Anastasio Somoza. The discovery of her true vocation is thus dispatched, like one of those sentences that flits by at the end of a movie based on real events, informing us where the characters ended up years later. Guillermoprieto's distinguished career is a postscript to the adventure she wants to relate here. So she does not mention that a few years after she began reporting 'by accident' from Nicaragua, she found herself in El Salvador, stringing for The Washington Post and bravely risking her safety to reveal one of the worst Central American war atrocities of the 1980s. Unlike memoirists who've taken every last advantage of the opportunity, she skips over her life at The New Yorker, where she found an audience in the following decade for elegant 'Letters' from various Latin American countries. She doesn't elaborate on her decision in recent years to leave New York and work out of her native Mexico, and she skips over her experience, surely fascinating, as an instructor in the art of literary reportage to students at a foundation in Cartagena, Colombia, created by Gabriel García Márquez.
Review, 3296 words
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