Cuban art critic and curator Iván de la Nuez explores the effects of the policies that have tried to constrain or liberate Cuba in recent decades in these sparkling essays of cultural criticism.Essays on Cuba and the Cuban diaspora, on racism and Big Data, Guantánamo and Reggaeton, soccer and baseball, Obama and the Rolling Stones, Europe and Donald Trump—de la Nuez approaches his criticism with singularity of purpose. In
Cubanthropy he does not set out to explain Cuba to the world, but rather to put the world into a Cuban context.
“Nothing explains our vexed world quite like Cuba and no one anywhere writes more brilliantly, more prophetically, more impossibly than Iván de la Nuez. As in all of his finest work, Cubanthropy delivers you beyond your old horizons into a realm of startling possibilities. Do not miss this extraordinary book or this extraordinary warlock of a writer.”
—Junot Díaz, author of This Is How You Lose Her“Cubanthropy may just be the smartest writing on Cuba—and beyond—I’ve read in ages. Insightful, unsparing, funny, and with an unerring eye for the paradoxical, Iván de la Nuez has written the definitive compilation on 21st-century Cuba. Essential reading for all who care about how the past, present, and future are disturbingly converging on the island, and off.”
—Cristina García, author of forthcoming Vanishing Maps
"Cubantropâia (Cubanthropy) is a work of cultural criticism whose title is a neologism coined by the author to describe the energy between anthropology and entropy, the space between the street and the library, the island and the world. These collected essays, written in Ivâan de la Nuez's trademark ironic, erudite style, range in subject matter from the Berlin Wall to Havana's Malecâon. This book examines recent clashes between the market and democracy, the digital era and post-colonialism, the centre and the periphery, utopia and tourism, the diaspora and the nation, racism and Big Data, Guantâanamo and Reggaeton, soccer and baseball, Obama and the Rolling Stones, Europe and Donald Trump. It is written between the socialist perspective of the Cold War and the neoliberal perspective of subsequent years, and is equally critical of both and of geopolitics in the age of globalization. The author, Cuban art critic and curator Ivâan de la Nuez does not seek to explain his motherland to the world but uses it as a scaled-down referent in which contemporary socio-political conflicts are intensified. Though Fidel Castro and his death are omnipresent in this collection of essays, the word "Castro" intentionally appears less often than "future," "art," "life," or "journey." In Cubantropâia, Cuba is not a separate, discreet place, but a miniature of the world and its conflicts. Cubantropâia can be read as an intellectual autobiography, a map of itineraries of New Men born out of the revolution, or a bacchanalia of the consequences that arise from a world obsessed with causes and culprits"--
