The Other Side of Paradise: Life in the New Cuba (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781580055314)

Change looms in Havana, Cuba's capital, a city electric with uncertainty yet cloaked in clich (c)90 miles from U.S. shores and off-limits to most Americans. Journalist Julia Cooke, who lived there at intervals over a period of five years, discovered a dynamic scene: baby-faced anarchists with Mohawks gelled with laundry soap, whiskey-drinking children of the elite, Santer -trainees, pregnant prostitutes, university graduates planning to leave for the first country that will give them a visa.

This last generation of Cubans raised under Fidel Castro animate life in a waning era of political stagnation as the rest of the world beckons: waiting out storms at rummy hurricane parties and attending raucous drag cabarets, planning ascendant music careers and black-market business ventures, trying to reconcile the undefined future with the urgent today.
Eye-opening and politically prescient, The Other Side of Paradise offers a deep new understanding of a place that has so confounded and intrigued us.

Author: Julia Cooke
ISBN-10: 1580055311
ISBN-13: 9781580055314
Publisher: Seal Press (CA)
Language: English
Published: 04/01/2014
Pages: 248
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.55lbs
Size: 8.10h x 5.50w x 0.80d

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 02/17/2014
Kirkus Reviews 02/15/2014
Booklist 03/01/2014 pg. 15
Library Journal 04/15/2014 pg. 98
Library Journal 11/01/2014 pg. 40