Cuban Fiestas

In the Cuban town of Sagua la Grande, a young Roberto González Echevarrìa peers out the window of his family home on the morning of the Nochebuena fiesta as preparations begin for the slaughter of a feast day pig. The author recalls "watching them at a distance, though thinking, fearing, that once I grew older I would have to participate in the whole event." Now an acclaimed scholar of Latin American literature, González Echevarrìa returns to the rituals that defined his young life in Cuban Fiestas. Drawing from art, literature, film, and even the national sport of baseball, he vividly reveals the fiesta as a dynamic force of both destruction and renewal in the life of a people.

Roberto González Echevarrìa masterfully exposes the distinctive elements of the fiesta cubana that give depth and coherence to more than two centuries of Cuban cultural life. Reaching back to nineteenth-century traditions of Cuban art and literature, and augmenting them, in the twentieth, with the arts of narrative, the esthetic pe