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THE OTHER SIDE OF PARADISE By: Julia Cooke
Life in the New Cuba
Seal Press
April 2014
On Sale: April 8, 2014
248 pages ISBN: 1580055311 EAN: 9781580055314 Kindle: B00HTQ34K6 Paperback / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
Change looms in Havana, Cuba's capital, a city electric with uncertainty yet cloaked in clichΓ©, 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, SanterΓa 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.
 Media BuzzAll Things Considered - April 13, 2014
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