Cubanthropy: Two Futures That Happened While You Were Busy Thinking

Cuban art critic and curator Iván de la Nuez explores the cultural effects of the policies that have tried to constrain or liberate Cuba in recent decades.

In this intellectual autobiography, the concept of cubanthropy, rather than a doctrine, is more like an energy. It’s a coinage that’s useful for defining the growing whirlwind between anthropology and entropy, the street and the library, the nightclub and the museum, the island and the world. These collected essays, written in Iván de la Nuez’s trademark ironic, erudite style, range in subject matter from the Berlin Wall to Havana’s Malecón. This book examines recent clashes between the market and democracy, the digital era and post-colonialism, utopia and tourism, the diaspora and the nation, racism and Big Data, Guantánamo and Reggaeton, soccer and baseball, Obama and the Rolling Stones, Europe and Donald Trump.

Equally critical of both and of geopolitics in the age of globalization. Cubanthropy doesn’t try to explain Cuba to the world, but rather, on the contrary, to use Cuba model that contains that world and its conflicts.