The Tribe

Portraits of Cuba

By: Carlos Manuel Álvarez, Frank Wynne - translator, Rahul Bery - translator

Narrated by: Gary Tiedemann

Teeming with life and compulsively listenable, the pieces gathered together in The Tribe aggregate into an extraordinary mosaic of Cuba today. Carlos Manuel Álvarez, one of the most exciting young writers in Latin America, employs the cronica form—a genre unique to Latin American writing that blends reportage, narrative nonfiction, and novelistic forms—to illuminate a particularly turbulent period in Cuban history, from the reestablishment of diplomatic relations with the US, to the death of Fidel Castro, to the convulsions of the San Isidro Movement.

Unique, edgy, and stylishly written, The Tribe shows a society in flux, featuring sportsmen in exile, artists, nurses, underground musicians and household names, dissident poets, the hidden underclass at a landfill, migrants attempting to make their way across Central America, fugitives escaping the FBI, dealers from the black market, as well as revelers and policemen in the noisy Havana night. It is a major work of reportage by one of Granta's Best of Young Spanish-Language novelists.

©2017 Carlos Manuel Álvarez; English translation of “Offside,” “Broken Doll,” and “Fidel, the Butcher” copyright 2022 by Rahul Bery; English translation of all other essays copyright 2022 by Frank Wynne (P)2023 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books