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.

IVÁN DE LA NUEZ is an essayist, a critic and an art curator. In 1995, he received the Rockefeller Fellowship for the Humanities. He has written art and literary criticism in numerous media, such as El País and the cultural magazine, La Maleta de Portbou. He has been director of the Center for the Image of Barcelona, La Virreina, as well as curator of several highly relevant exhibitions. Author of different anthologies, such as Cuba: The Possible Island (1995), Landscapes After the Wall (1999) or Cuba and the Day After (2001), his essays The Perpetual Raft (1998) and Red Fantasy (2006) have achieved a great reception amongst the critics and the public, and they have been translated into several languages.

ELLEN JONES is a literary translator from Spanish to English, an editor, and an occasional writer based in Mexico City. Her book Language in Motion: Translating Multilingualism Across the Americas is forthcoming from Columbia University Press. You can find her at www.ellencjones.com.