LAURIE A. FREDERIK: Trumpets in the Mountains: Theater and the Politics of National Culture in Cuba. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011.

Abstract

The arduous physical work of creating and staging community theater in remote Cuban villages is documented in Laurie Frederik’s engaging anthropological study Trumpets in the Mountains: Theater and the Politics of National Culture in Cuba. Frederik carried out her fieldwork during Cuba’s severe economic crisis known as the Special Period, in the 1990s, which added layers of hardship to already difficult stagings. The logistical organization and labor of moving a theater group from town to mountain town—often without mechanized help—gives ethnographic insight into theater practice, rural living, and community involvement that is rarely discussed in dialogues about contemporary Cuban culture.