In rhythm with the revolution

About the only forced note in Alma Guillermoprieto’s affecting memoir about her years as a young, hopeful dancer lies in its reaching title. This small clumsiness catches the ear only because her coming-of-age story, set in New York City and revolutionary Havana, is otherwise so gracefully told.

Born in Mexico, Guillermoprieto went to Manhattan to become a modern dancer, living with her mother and supporting herself by waiting tables. Her evocation of the gritty, high-stakes dance world of New York in the late 1960s is pitch perfect with sharp and sassy portraits of some of the dance greats of the 20th century. The brilliant and terrifying dance matriarch Martha Graham “was very old and more or less pickled in alcohol,� while Twyla Tharp, “an odd woman with a funny name,� “forged her own dance language, an idiosyncratic mix of Fred Astaire, George Balanchine and street cool.�

Guillermoprieto’s most enduring dancer debts would go to Merce Cunningham. Her life would be inexorably changed by a brief conversation with Cunningham, when he suggested that she consider some teaching possibilities -- one in Caracas, another in Havana. To the 20-year-old aspirant, Cunningham’s well-meaning proposal that she teach “a thousand miles away� was a death knell -- confirmation that she simply was not going to make it into the big leagues. “My flat feet, my lack of ‘turnout,’ � she writes with unflinching candor. “I was never going to achieve technical virtuosity; that was a fact.�

Guillermoprieto arrived in Havana on May 1, 1970, a big day, as it would turn out -- May Day of a historic year. Within 24 hours, she confronted the best and worst of the Cuban revolution. She learned that Cuba was in the throes of a mini-Cultural Revolution: rock ‘n’ roll, even the Beatles, had been banned by demented ideologues on a loony quest for a “New Man� revolutionary soul.

At the same time, Guillermoprieto was the recipient of the revolution’s largess. When she became desperately ill, she found herself in a state-of-the-art hospital being nursed back to health gratis -- quality medical care that she could ill afford in New York or Mexico, she notes. Though a talented writer in English, Guillermoprieto penned her memoir in Spanish. It is splendidly rendered into English by Esther Allen -- so splendidly that it is hard to know who deserves the kudos for its lush prose. Even while recuperating in the hospital, the author’s eye, ear and memory do not fail: “A robust black nurse cheerfully came and went. Her buttocks jiggled like playful little animals, and laughter spurted out of her on any pretext, as if the little animals were tickling her.�

The young dancer had been recruited by Elfrida Mahler, a former American dancer, who, utterly seduced by the Cuban revolution, transplanted herself to the island to direct its National School of Modern Dance. Guillermoprieto seems to have had an instant antipathy toward Mahler, which runs throughout her memoir. And not without cause, it seems. It was Mahler (who died in 1998) who decreed that the vitally crucial mirrors in the dance studios -- needed for dancers to critique their progress -- be removed on ideological grounds: “Elfrida understood so little about dance that she thought mirrors were a symbol of vanity and decadence.... ‘We’re revolutionaries!’ she declared with a defiant thrust of the chin. There would never be mirrors in the dance studios of Cubanacan.� For the next six months, Guillermoprieto taught students blessed with agility and passion but often clad in ragtag leotards, undernourished and sleep-deprived.

“Dancing With Cuba� is also the bittersweet memoir of a profoundly unhappy woman -- so much so that depression and dread even led her to contemplate suicide. Her existence, she writes, had become the drudgery of “carting my hollow shell around, [when] all I wanted was to deposit it in bed for a while, though bed was the place of my terrors.� And Cuba seems to have alternately deepened her despair while rescuing her from its vise.

Guillermoprieto says she arrived in Cuba politically illiterate (this is her one claim that strains credulity, owing to the towering profiles of Che and Castro in Mexican culture and the historically close ties between Cuba and Mexico), but it was not long before she was caught up in the fever known as fidelismo. Her rapid conversion to revolutionary politics was tied to her psychic turmoil. “Other people my age were abandoning themselves to the pleasure-seeking chaos of the times,� she writes perceptively, “but we were afraid of the void and longed for the order of the Revolution ... giving ourselves over to the relief of its absolute truths.�

Guillermoprieto suggests that Castro’s movie-star revolutionary status in Latin America bloomed in his seductive brew of anti-Americanism and nationalism. On watching Castro give a three-hour speech on television about the failed zafra (sugar cane) harvest, she writes: “His physical beauty itself was the confirmation of his extraordinary spiritual energy.... His thin voice, like silver paper, the long hands that moved like fish, the Roman profile ... the high flights of rhetoric and infinite gaze -- it was all spellbinding.�

Though Guillermoprieto offers a litany of quotidian outrages about life in Havana -- including the bugged rooms of the Habana Libre Hotel -- she is, nonetheless, enraptured by the young revolution (not to mention some of its insolently handsome revolutionaries). There were the odd flings with wannabe guerrillas, and then there was the Maximum Leader: “We lived for news of Fidel’s love life, in the secret illusion ... that there might be some chink through which those of us who aspired to his illuminated embrace could wriggle,� she writes, with characteristic transparency. “That’s why I didn’t much care for Celia Sanchez [Castro’s trusted companion] -- because she was the competition.�

Guillermoprieto’s six-month Havana sojourn coincided with crucial events and disasters of the Cuban revolution: There was the desperate, mad and ultimately failed campaign to produce the 10-million-ton sugar harvest and Castro’s doomed courtship of the noted sociologist Oscar Lewis. Along the way, her memoir offers intriguing cameos of some of the movers and shakers of the revolution, gleaned perhaps from the sidelines but at least firsthand. There was Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton (slain by his comrades five years later in an internecine feud), who befriended her and shared his infectious exuberance for revolution and literature. Then there was Manuel Pineiro, the legendary red-bearded rum-fueled master spy, the man “officially responsible for the Revolution’s paranoia.� A confidant of Castro, Pineiro was the longtime head of the Americas Department charged with exporting revolution around the world.

It was Pineiro who orchestrated the visit of Lewis, author of the acclaimed “The Children of Sanchez,� in the belief that Lewis would be susceptible to Fidel fever. Promised freedom to pursue his research by none other than Castro himself, Lewis and his team set up shop in a Miramar mansion. But in a matter of months, Pineiro’s men descended on Lewis’ home, confiscated his research materials, denounced his project as “counter-revolutionary� and sent the sociologist and his team packing. Guillermoprieto, who had a friend on Lewis’ team, does a historical service here as Lewis never spoke or wrote publicly about the humiliating debacle. Six months later, he was dead of a heart attack.

Inexplicably, Guillermoprieto evinces a peculiar hostility to Pineiro’s wife, Lorna Burdsall, even though Burdsall went to extraordinary lengths to make Guillermoprieto’s stay as comfortable and pleasant as possible. The daughter of a Boston Brahmin family, Burdsall was a pretty, ebullient former Graham student who met Pineiro at a mambo dance at Columbia University in 1953. She would in time be tossed overboard by Pineiro for a bevy of cubanitas and another wife. But she never left Cuba and continues, at age 75, to perform in her seventh-floor walk-up apartment in Vedado.

Among the refreshing pleasures of this memoir is that Guillermoprieto has resisted the temptation, typical of so many political conversos, to swing from the far left to the extreme right. She writes with political skepticism from the mid-distance, knowing there are no easy answers for Cuba -- nor does she offer any. In the current phase of hyperbolic Cuba partisans -- dim-witted Castro apologists on the left and the likes of National Security Council staffer Otto Reich and the shrill columnist Mary O’Grady on the right -- this is no small relief.