Of Home and Remembrance: Two Recent Works of Cuban-American Literature

Abstract

IT IS A TRUISM that Latino/a writers are obsessed with the past; from the first blossoming of Chicano literature in the 30s and 40s with the fiction of Am?rico Paredes, to the more recent crop of memory-laden works by Julia Alvarez and Pulitzer winner Oscar Hijuelos, Latino/as have often shown a penchant for reminiscence. Much recent Cuban-American literature especially bears this mark of memory, this compulsion to re construct worlds within what Harold Augenbraum and Ilan Stavans have dubbed air of nostalgia. And indeed, two of the newest additions to the Cuban-American canon (for those of us who believe in such things) exhibit just such a predilection for the past: Gustavo P?rez Firmat's Next Year in Cuba, a moving, lyrical memoir of the author's exile from Cuba as a child and his experiences growing up in the U.S.; and The Secret of the Bulls, the debut novel by Jos? Ra?l Bernardo, a powerful and in tensely earthy rendering of one Cuban family's joys and struggles in pre-Fidel (and pre-Batista) Cuba. At first glance these titles would seem to have little in common be yond the ethnicity of their authors and their common fortune at having attracted the attention of major publishers; they do not share an interest in a particular historical period, a writing style, or even a genre (although generic distinctions become increasingly irrelevant as one reads the texts). What they do share, however, is a desire to remember, to re construct a heritage and a history from the fragments left them by experiences of loss and exile. Far from constituting mere chronicles of (and longing for) the good old days of pre-Castro Cuba, that is, far from being sat isfied with nostalgia, these are works that seek to examine a turbulent