Cuban Fiestas

In the Cuban town of Sagua La Grande, a young Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria peers out the window of his family home on the morning of the Nochebuena fiesta as preparations begin for the slaughter of a feast-day pig. He recalls "watching them at a distance, though thinking, fearing, that once I grew older I would have to participate in the whole event." Now an acclaimed scholar of Latin American literature, Gonzalez Echevarria returns in Cuban Fiestas to the rituals that defined his young life. Drawing from art, literature, film, and even the national sport of baseball, he vividly reveals the fiestas as a dynamic foce of both destruction and renewal in the life of a people.