The Tribe

Carlos Manuel Alvarez, one of the most exciting young writers in Latin America, employs thecronica form - a genre unique to Latin American writing that blends reportage, narrative non-fiction, and novelisticforms - to illuminate a particularly turbulent period in Cuban history, from the re-establishment of diplomatic relationswith 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 tomake their way across Central America, fugitives escaping the FBI, dealers from the black market, as well as revelers andpolicemen in the noisy Havana night. It is a major work of reportage by one of Granta's Best of Young Spanish-Languagenovelists.

'There is magic in these pages...[T]his book tells the actual story of Cuba as it exists today.'- Jon Lee Anderson

'Alvarez does not try to instruct or speculate. He does not write on whether the Revolution succeeded or failed. He doesnot determine whether the leader was a hero or a tyrant. His book is not an explanation: it is ... the history of a countrytold through its people.'- Maria Teresa Hernandez, AP News