Recently interviewed on NPR’s All Things Considered and featured in The New York Times, Condé Nast Traveler, and The Oregonian.
Julia Cooke and her new, captivating book The Other Side of Paradise: Life in the New Cuba (Seal Press / $17.00 / April 2014), will be in Miami at Books & Books Coral Gables (265 Aragon Ave) on Wednesday, May 14th at 6:30pm. Evocative and revealing, The Other Side of Paradise combines vivid narrative with detailed reporting and shares the unique stories of those Cooke encountered in Havana.
About The Other Side of Paradise:
Change looms in Havana, Cuba’s capital, a city electric with uncertainty yet cloaked in cliché, 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, Santería 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.