Politics & Power Quote by Federico Garcia Lorca

Lorca’s line lands like a backhanded compliment delivered with a poet’s perfect timing: America has exported height, improvisation, and intoxication - and even the intoxication, he needles, is better done elsewhere. The wit is doing cultural triage. Skyscrapers reduce U.S. modernity to vertical ambition, a civilization measured in floors. Jazz gets singled out as the genuine miracle, but it’s also telling that Lorca picks an art born from Black suffering and invention, not from the country’s official self-myth. Cocktails round out the trio: pleasure engineered, desire commodified, the good life poured and marketed.

The subtext is less anti-American than anti-boosterism. Lorca wrote after visiting New York in 1929-30, as the crash and the city’s machinery of wealth and anonymity collided in real time. Poet in a metropolis, he saw spectacle and hunger in the same frame, and the quote compresses that shock into a clean list. “That is all” isn’t ignorance; it’s an aesthetic verdict: a nation loud about its destiny, thin on spiritual or moral exports.

Then comes the sly pivot to Cuba, “our America.” It’s a claim of belonging that redraws the hemisphere away from U.S. dominance and toward a Latin, Caribbean modernity with its own sophistication. The cocktail comparison isn’t trivial; it’s colonial history in a glass. Who gets to brand pleasure, who grows the sugar, who sells the fantasy. Lorca’s joke stings because it’s accurate: empire loves to take credit for the party, even when someone else stocked the bar.