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

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.