Ian Thomson

Carlos Acosta, the great dancer, should be a full-time novelist

Pig's Foot conjures up the salt-eaten arcades and collapsing promenades of Havana

Carlos Acosta, the greatest dancer of his generation, grew up in Havana as the youngest of 11 black children. Money was tight, but Carlos won a place at ballet school, and before long he was enthralling audiences at Covent Garden as a half Jagger, half Nureyev figure with a twist of the moon-walking Jackson in the mix. Now Acosta is about to leap into the world of literature with a debut novel, Pig’s Foot, written over a period of four years during rehearsal breaks. For all its manifest debt to Latin American so-called ‘magic realists’ (Marquez, Borges, Vargas Llosa), the novel stands triumphantly on its own. In pages of salty-sweetprose, it traces five generations of a black family through Cuba’s tumultuous recent history.

Acosta’s theme, broadly, is slavery. Cuba was once the greatest slave-importing colony in the Spanish empire. More than 780,000 slaves (among them, Acosta’s own forebears) were shipped in from Africa. The narrator, Oscar Cortico, is the great-grandchild of freed slaves who founded a village in the Sierra Maestra mountains called Pata de Puerco (Pig’s Foot). Why is unclear, but Oscar tells the story of his cane-cutting ancestors from within a Havana prison cell. The cell (reeking of ‘dog piss and death and despair’) is presided over by a brutish, pistol-toting cop with a fondness for electrode attachments. (You know the sort.)

In a narrative by turns lewd and poetic, Oscar guides us through Cuba’s history from the first anti-Spanish war of 1868 to the Castro revolución a century later in 1959. His grandparents, Benicio and Gertrudis, had settled in Havana in the late 1920s, we learn, when the Cuban capital was poised to become a mafia satellite of Las Vegas, with dancing girls in spangled head-dresses and nightclubs frequented by the likes of Lucky Luciano.

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