Publishers Weekly
05/16/2022
Novelist Álvarez (The Fallen) delivers an immersive depiction of life in modern Cuba. Highlights among the 19 essays include “Black Pitcher, White Socks,” an evocative account of MLB pitcher José Contreras’s visit home in 2013. Since 1959, Cuban athletes who pursued a professional career in a foreign league had been prohibited from returning home, and news of their accomplishments was censored in the Cuban press. Thanks to a new immigration policy enacted by Raúl Castro’s government, Contreras, who had joined the New York Yankees in 2002 after defecting from the Cuban national team, was the first pro athlete to return home, a joyful occasion tempered by his mother’s serious health issues. Elsewhere, Álvarez details how the restoration of diplomatic relations with the U.S. in 2014 forced Cubans “to reinvent our language, the words we commonly used, the concepts to which we had adapted ourselves as a nation,” and profiles Cuban refugees attempting the risky journey to the U.S. through Central America. Throughout, Álvarez conveys the Cuban landscape and its people with crystalline prose and captures the degradations of living under an authoritarian regime with precision. Readers will be riveted. (June)
From the Publisher
"Displacement is a state of unlimited potential: when you are nowhere, you could be anywhere. The Tribe: Portraits of Cuba depicts a Cuba in-between, haunted by infinite possibilities."—Morgan Graham, Chicago Review of Books
“That rarest of books about a people that achieves a restorative function without idling in a documentarian mode, The Tribe’s gift to its subjects is not raising them as a hot topic, but by preserving their dignity in spite of the headlines.”—J. Howard Rosier, Words Without Borders
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2022-04-16
Pungent snapshots of life in Cuba both before and after the death of Fidel Castro.
Cuban journalist Álvarez has an excellent facility with dialogue and story, showing readers the distinct personalities of a diverse swath of Cuban citizens. First published in 2017, the book opens with a tender transitional moment as Presidents Barack Obama and Raúl Castro announced the restoration of diplomatic relations between the two countries on Dec. 17, 2014. “This news,” writes the author, “is not as momentous to Americans as it is to Cubans. Hence the fact that the announcement leaves no gringos bewildered, wondering what is happening and what will happen next. Cubans, on the other hand—we who effortlessly make an epic of the everyday, who don’t hesitate to declare the slightest skirmish or governmental whim a historic event—are instantly eaten up by questions, and frantically searching for some kind of clarity in our neighbors’ opinions in a way we never have before.” Throughout, Álvarez renders multifaceted portraits of a wide variety of memorable characters: American fugitives from justice; José Contreras, the Yankees pitcher who was finally allowed to return to his home country; members of the breakout Cuban orchestra Los Van Van; Rafael Alcides, a revered dissident poet in seclusion; a butcher and other shopkeepers who have learned to squeeze out a living by working the black market; impoverished intellectuals and beleaguered performance artists; and those walking along Havana’s famed esplanade, the Malecón, where the author visited “to do battle with an age-old canard: the syrupy, sentimental claptrap that third-rate poets, hack journalists, and miserable minstrels have poured over the long wall that girdles the city’s entrails.” Most of the author’s subjects love their country despite suffering under an authoritarian system that has left them with meager wages, food scarcity, and significant emotional drain. Álvarez captures it all in a satisfyingly kaleidoscopic narrative portrait.
Beautifully composed authentic vignettes about Cubans of all stripes.
