The Maids of Havana

by Pedro Pérez Sarduy


Formats

Softcover
£10.99
Softcover
£10.99

Book Details

Language : English
Publication Date : 23/03/2010

Format : Softcover
Dimensions : 6x9
Page Count : 256
ISBN : 9781449070700

About the Book

Set in Cuba and Miami, from the 1940s to the present, two Afro-Cuban women narrate their life stories. One leaves a small town in the central part of the island to work as a maid in Havana in prerevolutionary Cuba. The other, her friend's daughter, educated in revolutionary Cuba, leaves Havana in the 1980 Mariel boatlift, to find work as a maid in Miami… A history full circle?


About the Author

Born in 1943 in Santa Clara, Cuba, Pedro Pérez Sarduy is a poet, writer and journalist, now resident in London. His poetry includes Surrealidad (1967), Cumbite and Other Poems (1990), and Malecón Sigloveinte (2005), and is featured in The Oxford book of Caribbean Verse (2005). He co-edited with Jean Stubbs AfroCuban Voices: On Race and Identity in Contemporary Cuba (University Press of Florida, 2000) and Afro-Cuba: An Anthology of Cuban Writing on Race, Politics and Culture (1993); work in progress includes Journal in Babylon, chronicles on contemporary Britain. In 2008, he was awarded Le Prix du Livre Insular Ouessant for the French version of this novel, Les bonnes de la Havane; and in 2009, he was awarded the UNESCO Victor Hugo medal for his writings, ‘which contribute significantly to the protection and promotion of the rights of man/woman and the oppressed’.