Ay, Cuba!

First lines

On the first school day after New Year's, 1959, Comrade Papadopolou, our "discipline teacher" and chief communist ideologue at the Gheorghe Lazar Lyceum in Sibiu, Transylvania, came to class exultant, flushed like a long-distance runner and beaming with the good news that another country had joined the glorious socialist camp.

About this book

During a Historic visit to Cuba - on the eve of Pope John Paul ll's own trip - National Public Radio's Andrei Codrescu and photographer David Graham turned an unsparing but compassionate gaze upon Cuba. Registering the architecture, the bizarre two-tier economy of peso and dollar, the revivals of both Catholicism and the Afro-Cuban religion of santeria, and the sexual and social mores of a post-cold war communist society, Codrescu's words and Graham's photographs offer a vision of Cuba's brutally stark and sometimes-tragic reality, as seen through the fascinating prism of Codrescu's own eccentric genius. Through interviews with Cuban architects, writers, hustlers, prostitutes, and common working folk, Ay, Cuba! reveals a passionate society deeply in conflict with itself. This is not a cold, cross-sectioned study of Cuba, but rather a highly personal, human portrait of a proud, musical, smart, and sexy people.

Themes & subjects

About the author

Andrei Codrescu

20 December 1946

Andrei Codrescu is a Romanian-born American poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and commentator for National Public Radio. - Wikipedia