About this item
Change looms in Havana, Cubas capital, a city electric with uncertainty yet cloaked in clich, 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, Santera 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.
About the Author
Julia Cooke's essays have been published in A Public Space, Salon, The Threepenny Review, Smithsonian, Tin House, and Virginia Quarterly Review, where she is a contributing editor. Her reporting has been published in Condé Nast Traveler, The New York Times, Playboy, The Village Voice, The Atavist, Saveur, and more. She was a finalist for a 2014 Livingston Award in International Reporting for her profile of a young Cuban sex worker; her article about the blossoming of architecture and design in Havana won a 2016 New York Press Club Award. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Travel Writing 2014, Best Women's Travel Writing (Volume 9) , One World, Many Cultures (10th edition) , and noted in Best American Essays 2016 and Best American Travel Writing 2017. She's written about the Portuguese seaside town that inspired Ian Fleming's James Bond and translating for a Guatemalan asylum-seeker, profiled the most prolific design writer in the U.S. and Mexico City's best-known contemporary artist, and considered why American TV watchers love female spies. Julia is the recipient of fellowships from The Norman Mailer Center, The Constance Saltonstall Foundation, and Columbia University. She holds an undergraduate degree from Georgetown University and an MFA from Columbia University. The Other Side of Paradise: Life in the New Cuba is her first book.
