Cuban-American Writers Research Articles

Depiction of Machismo through Castillo Brothers in Oscar Hijuelos’ The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989) is a novel by Oscar Hijuelos, a Cuban-American writer. It talks about the lives of Cesar and Nestor Castillo, Cuban immigrants who live in America to pursue their dreams as musicians. The novel strongly connects to Latin American culture. The Castillo brothers are known for embracing their "Cubanness" as men. Men in Spanish-speaking countries are recognized for their masculine solid pride. Their strong masculine pride is often associated with an exaggeration of their masculinity. People often call it machismo. Machismo, derived from destructive aspects such as aggressiveness, womanizing, emotional withdrawal, and male chauvinism, is known for having harmful outcomes for men who embed it. Operating Hall's Theory of Representation and Kupers' concept of toxic masculinity, this research aims to show how the Castillo brothers represent machismo and reveal the ideology of Oscar Hijuelos' regarding machismo. This research is conducted as qualitative research, utilizing narratives and dialogues. The study found that Cesar's practice of machismo through the act of being a Latin lover affects his participation in alcoholism and resistance to professional help. Besides, Nestor's practice of machismo for being a "man with muscle" eventually leads him to depression, anxiety, and rejection of therapy. It is acknowledged their status as immigrants heighten their practices of machismo. Through his writing, the author expects to criticize machismo.

Miamiando: Performing Cubanness in the Time of Elián in Jennine Capó’s Make Your Home Among Strangers

This essay scrutinizes the 2015 debut novel Make Your Home Among Strangers, written by Cuban American writer Jennine Capó Crucet. Through the methodology of textual analysis, it aims to critically examine and demonstrate how this novel center on the process of shaping and re-shaping one’s constructed identity in its intersections with a complex web of traditions, history, immigration, politics, power struggles, place and displacement, socio economic and class determinants. Guided by J. Butler and J. Blocker’s ideas on performativity, the essay posits that Cuban “exiles” occupy their exile “as a discursive position” to create and stage an identity. It examines the intersectional performativity of being Cuban in the United States, and the power/identitarian struggles of claiming Cubanness, as presented by Capó Crucet in her excellent first novel.

Gulf Coast tales

Gulf Coast tales Jillian Brenner (bio) Moon Trees and Other Orphans Leigh Camacho Rourks Black Lawerence Press www.blacklawrence.com/moon-trees-and-other-orphans/ 175 Pages; Print, $15.95 Moon Trees and Other Orphans is the debut collection of Cuban American writer Leigh Camacho Rourks and a winner of the St. Lawrence Book Award. The collection is set along the Gulf Coast, where the natural beauty of the environment and the fragility of characters suffering with sickness, poverty, and mental illness combine with the harshness of their reality, resulting in unforgettable stories of impossible strength in impossible places. Camacho Rourks does not shy away from pushing her characters to their limits and examining the fallout as they break, with a style that invites both comedic commentary and sobering realizations about what it means to be disenfranchised in the South. Of the array of memorable and nuanced characters, the most remarkable of them all is perhaps the setting itself. With a characterization of place reminiscent of Flannery O’Connor’s writings of the South, Camacho Rourks brings the Gulf Coast of Louisiana to life. Though each story varies in plot and detail, the theme of hard-shelled characters nursing weaknesses — often hidden behind a veneer of wit and sarcasm — and pushing through brutal circumstances is consistent in the collection. These characters fall, they make bad decisions, and they seem very much alive. The titular story, “Moon Trees,” follows Essie and her brother, Stute, as Essie struggles to provide a stable home in the midst of their mother’s struggle with paranoid schizophrenia. Essie, a teenager, shows her mother a culmination of kindness, love, pity, and rage as Essie narrates the “myths” of their family’s history. The title comes from the family’s fascination with a 1970’s space mission, in which Stuart Roosa took an “unborn forest” into orbit before returning to plant the seeds on earth. Though the basic plot is not new, the narrative style brings a freshness and originality to the story. The commentary on the stigmas of mental illness, the difficulty of finding adequate treatment, and the failure of inequal access to education for children in low income homes is there, but they work as the subtext of the narrative. Instead, Comacho Rourks asks her readers to consider what it means to be special or how far the strands of family can be pulled before they break. Though setting is not as prevalent here as other stories, details of New Orleans and a secret “moon tree” along the River Walk are woven in. Comacho Rourks’s writing is well paced and concise, yet, despite the harshness of her subjects, inarguably beautiful. One such example is Essie’s description of her mother’s story of finding one of Roosa’s seeds and her mother’s belief that her subsequent pregnancy with Essie resulted in her illness: I can tell you how one day, when she was very lonely, she gobbled that seed up to make me. When I was a child, I did not fall asleep to Cinderella’s broom strokes and ballroom dancing. Instead, my mother told me of how her white fish-belly, iridescent with life, grew heavy and catered with my weight. I branched out inside of her, and my fetal limbs, long and searching, pierced her brain and left her addled. While “Moon Trees” is the collection’s ode to character, “Pinched Magnolias” is among the best at juxtaposing Louisiana swampland as both hero and villain. By the end of the second page, Dalia — a clear image of femininity at a height of five feet and wearing a floral sundress — has started her day by shooting her husband and then making a pot of coffee. Dalia and her sister, the sheriff, grew up on a large property alongside the bayou, where they learned to skin animals from their loving father whose murdered corpse was found in the swamp years before. The women speak to each other calmly as they dismantle the body of Dalia’s husband to be dumped for alligators. Dalia and Mary are both as much products of their environment as they are bound to it...

Gears and God: Technocratic Fiction, Faith, and Empire in Mark Twain's America

Gears and God: Technocratic Fiction, Faith, and Empire in Mark Twain's America

Calypso Magnolia: The Crosscurrents of Caribbean and Southern Literature by John Wharton Lowe

Reviewed by: Calypso Magnolia: The Crosscurrents of Caribbean and Southern Literature by John Wharton Lowe Matthew Teutsch John Wharton Lowe. Calypso Magnolia: The Crosscurrents of Caribbean and Southern Literature. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2016. 464pp. $95.00 cloth/$39.95 paper. Constructing the South through a circum-Caribbean lens, John Lowe’s Calypso Magnolia calls us to expand our definitions of the South and Southern literature in much the same way that scholars such as Michael Bibler, R. Scott Heath, and others proposed in “Adjust Your Maps: Manifestos from, for, and about United States Southern Studies” in a recent issue of PMLA. Lowe’s study is “mindful of the complex history that has shaped and reshaped the circum-Caribbean and how the invention of national units has obscured a conception of a cultural and geographical region,” and he highlights the crosscurrents that bind the Caribbean, southern United States, and Mexico together in one contiguous region made up of varying [End Page 331] intersecting cultures (7). To trace this “complex history,” Lowe examines a wide range of texts spanning almost two hundred years and multiple geographic locales. Through discussion of the “tropical sublime,” Lowe highlights the ways that writers from the contiguous U. S. Southern states wrote about their experiences and encounters with the Caribbean and Mexico during the Mexican-American War and its aftermath. Serving as a crucial event in regards to the relationship between the circum-Caribbean and the U. S. South, the Mexican-American War provided the nation with texts that presented Mexico and the Caribbean as “feminized in order to be ‘taken’ by her northern lover, the United States” in order to expand plantation slavery into new regions (21). The intersections with Southern ports, particularly New Orleans and its Spanish and French cultural history, prepared soldiers for their experiences during the war in Mexico and beyond. In his examination of Raphael Semmes’s and Arthur Manigault’s military/travel memoirs during the Mexican-American War and William Clark Falkner’s The Spanish Heroine (1851), Lowe shows how the war exposed Southerners to Caribbean culture. Semmes, Manigault, and Falkner all present the Caribbean and Mexico as spaces that must be tamed and “civilized”; however, as Lowe points out, the war also led to “a massive intercultural dialectic” between the regions (56). This is the most important aspect that leads us to an understanding of what Lowe terms the “South of the South,” an exchange of cultures across constructed nationalistic boundaries. During the nineteenth century, Cuba, an island only about ninety miles off the coast of Florida, had long existed as a site where Southern slaveholders and others sought to extend the boundaries of the United States. Thomas Jefferson even claimed that it would make a great addition to the nation. However, the island also served as a space for possible revolution and insurrection against racial injustice and the institution of slavery. As such, Lowe explores these two aspects in regards to the “Cuban imaginary” by looking at Lucy Holcomb Pickens’s 1854 novel The Free Flag of Cuba and Martin Delany’s 1859 serialized novel Blake; or, the Huts of America: A Tale of the Mississippi Valley, the Southern United States, and Cuba. Deftly, Lowe uses Pickens’s and Delany’s novels to highlight the historical milieu leading up to the Civil War and to show how even someone like Delany can fall prey to becoming a colonizer. However, this does not diminish the fact that Delany’s text worked as a plow to plant the seeds of revolt in the South through its hemispheric representations of slavery. While the nineteenth century saw Cuba as a space for expansion and/or revolution, Lowe concludes Calypso Magnolia with an examination of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Cuban American writers such as Virgil Suarez, Roberto Fernández, Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Christina García, and others as they seek to reconstruct Cuba as a homeland while living in exile. Here, Lowe looks at the works in relation to the sentiment of the “lost cause” that U. S. Southerners had after the Civil War, and well into the twentieth century. Like the U. S. South, texts by authors...

Haunting Pasts: Ghosts of Exile in the Poetry of Nancy Morejón, Nilda Cepero, and Andrea O'Reilly Herrera

In this article, I examine how the appearance of ghosts and the spectral language in the works of three generations of Cuban poets represent a changing relationship with exile and Cuban identity. In Nancy Morejón's "Ante un espejo" (1999), the poetic voice warns that choosing exile will mean an empty, unfulfilling, and haunted life. "Tropical Flavor" (1997) and "Burialground" (1998) by Nilda Cepero illuminate an exile's relationship with a home country that she remembers vaguely and that importantly influences her identity, but that she has not been able to experience firsthand since childhood. Andrea O'Reilly Herrera describes a woman's body as haunted by the ghosts of her ancestors in "Inhabited Woman" (1999). Through a spectral lens, I explore how these Cuban and Cuban American writers engage with ghostly elements to tell stories of exile and shift the trope of haunting from one of eerie, melancholic longing to that of spirits embodied and recognized with pride.

Diary of Fire by Elías Miguel Muñoz

Reviewed by: Diary of Fire by Elías Miguel Muñoz Isabel Álvarez-Borland Muñoz, Elías Miguel. Diary of Fire. New Jersey: Tincture Lethe, 2016. Pp. 333. ISBN 978-1-59021-580-7. In Elías Miguel Muñoz latest book, Diary of Fire (2016), the narrator’s moving reflections structure a fictional diary that explores sexuality, childhood trauma, and family relationships. At the center of the memoir is the narrator’s deep desire to understand himself. This self-search however is deeply intertwined by the abuse the narrator suffered as a child and by his broken relationship with his father. Muñoz was born in Cuba in 1954, and emigrated with his parents to the United States when he was fourteen years old. Like many of his Cuban American writer peers who came over during adolescence, his writing shares a sensibility based on the division or rupture with a childhood that took place in a different language and in another geography. A sense of unresolved contradictions colors most of Muñoz’s previous works, a body of work that spans several genres: novel, poetry and literary criticism. With greater urgency, and now from the perspective of a writer in his early sixties, Muñoz’s Diary of Fire (2016) returns to the issues of self-understanding and to the individual’s need and right for living an authentic life. Diary of Fire fluctuates between past and present and between Cuba and the United States keeping the trauma of displacement and discovery of sexuality as important centers of the memoir. In so doing its speaks of the narrator, Camilo Macías, breaking away from his father’s homophobia, the scars of child abuse, and Camilo’s coming to terms with his sexual identity. Several chapters titled “Cuba in Silence” return to Camilo Macías and the traumatic events of his Cuban childhood. It is precisely the reader’s experience of witnessing both the present and the past of the narrative that adds significance to what is being read and renders poignancy as well as pathos to the events related. The prominent scar in this fictional diary is the abuse Camilo suffered in Cuba as a seven year-old child by a family friend, Eduardo, a thirty year-old man who lived near his home and who had won the confidence of his unsuspecting parents. It is those scenes that deal with molestation that seem to torture the narrator as he fights to erase them from his mind: “Memories brought anguish; they made him confront the horrors of what was done to him. Yet he kept reliving them, writing about them. “I write because I remember the pain,” he said. “And it’s still with me” (118). In fact, it is the frustrating memory of the sexual abuse that remains deep in Camilo’s unconscious and often reappears as the narrator tries to grapple and analyze what [End Page 498] exactly happened to him as a child. Camilo describes sordid instances of this abuse in a distanced tone that at times contrasts vividly with the horror of what is being related. Camilo’s child voice also recalls with grief the homophobia of his father and his verbal and sometimes physical abuse for suspecting the sexual preferences of his son. As a child, his spirit was broken by a father’s brutality and lack of approval. The family fits the Cuban stereotype, the father exudes machismo, the mother is pictured as understanding but unable to stop the father’s behavior. As someone betrayed by his country, the father is deeply hurt by historical circumstance and refuses to have any positive interactions with those around him. Sad scenes are narrated about how the father forbids Camilo to develop his artistic interests and how the child was forbidden to have friends who were not macho enough for his father. When the family decides to leave the island of Cuba as exiles, a time of loneliness and resentment against his father grows inside the child’s heart. The past lurks close as the Cuban memories of sexual prejudice and physical violence keep returning to Camilo’s mind. The present of the narrative relates...

Literature in the contact zone: Emily Apter’s ‘A new comparative literature’ and Achy Obejas’s ‘Sugarcane’

Abstract This article analyses the poem ‘Sugarcane’, by the Cuban American writer Achy Obejas, in reference to Emily Apter’s essay ‘A new comparative literature’. The connections between these two writings, including their links to certain aspects of Caribbean literary and cultural theory, are explored. The theoretical arguments of Edouard Glissant in particular are considered, Apter and Obejas being put into conversation with Glissant and other theorists such as E. K. Brathwaite in order to discuss the classification of Obejas’s text as a literature of the contact zone. As part of this classification, the ways in which Obejas’s poem elucidates Apter’s project of rupturing the links between language, nation and identity are examined.

On the "Ragged Margins" of History: Burdens of Truth and National Identity in Ana Menéndez's The Last War

On the "Ragged Margins" of History:Burdens of Truth and National Identity in Ana Menéndez's The Last War Susan Kollin (bio) In her 2009 novel, The Last War, Cuban American writer Ana Menéndez constructs an authorial stand-in who consistently lacks self-insight and who serves as narrator, protagonist, victim, and perpetrator in a story about the United States in the post-9/11 period. Throughout the novel, Menéndez chronicles the experiences of a freelance photographer living adrift in Istanbul during the early years of the U.S. invasion of Iraq as she debates whether to leave her marriage or join her husband who may or may not have been unfaithful to her while working in Baghdad, events that the author has revealed were based on her own life with and marriage to reporter and writer Dexter Filkins.1 While autobiographical novels often face criticism for a number of reasons—for exposing the author's artistic laziness, for foregrounding a certain poverty of the imagination, or even for betraying the author's supposed narcissism—and while Menéndez's novel in particular could have veered into solipsism or even self-pity, the author blurs the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction as a way of revealing the very forms of indulgence often found in such literature and as a way of laying bare various kinds of self-deception that have often shaped American identity in the early twenty-first century.2 The Last War is a story about the consequences of belated self-knowledge as the narrator resists understanding her own complicity in the demise of her ten-year marriage and in the unsettling political events unfolding around her. Reflecting on their early life together traveling abroad as "war junkies . . . endlessly drawn to the ragged margins where other people hated and died," the narrator recalls how the constant movements of war across the globe at first promise an escape "from the disappointments of an ordinary [End Page 131] life," but eventually result in a troubled marriage, a stalled-out career, and an uncertain future.3 The narrator retreats into the role of Penelope, faultless in her self-sacrifice and immobility, a figure whose long-suffering devotion to duty enables a disavowal of her own capacity for betrayal and brutality. Throughout the novel, Menéndez draws connections between the decline of the marriage and growing disillusionments about the United States in the post-9/11 era, and between the narrator's flawed self-knowledge and the nation's larger myths of innocence and exceptionalism. What is often perceived to be a self-indulgent literary device thus comes to have other critical possibilities for Menéndez, who examines how strategies of evasion and dishonesty have dire consequences as a multitude of repressed truths about privilege, power, and identity surface in the narrator's life and in the larger global conflicts unfolding around her. While Menéndez has acknowledged similarities between the plot of the novel and events in her own life, she also notes that the story soon departs from autobiography into what she calls "total invention."4 Like her fictional Latina counterpart whose parents moved to the United States from the Dominican Republic, Menéndez is the daughter of Cuban immigrants who settled in California in the 1960s. Like her narrator in The Last War, the author also lived and worked in Istanbul, during which time she received news about the alleged infidelity of her then-husband, Dexter Filkins. And like her novel's narrator, Menéndez once traveled the world with her husband, a reporter who covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for The New York Times and who wrote a critically acclaimed book based on his experiences, the title of which—The Forever War—connects meaningfully with the title of her novel, The Last War. While Filkins' title points to the ongoing tyranny of war across the ages, Menéndez's title is a bit more ambiguous. Like Filkins' text, the title may call to mind Paul Virilio's observations about the technologies of war as the driving force of modern culture. In that sense, it may refer merely to the end of just one...

Frank Reade, Jr., in Cuba: Dime-Novel Technology, U.S. Imperialism, and the “American Jules Verne”

Williams's essay examines the complex portrayal of imperialist themes in the long-running series of nineteenth-century dime novels featuring boy inventor Frank Reade Jr. Authored primarily by Cuban-American writer Luis Senarens under the pseudonym “Noname,” these works provide a case study into dime-novel authorship and the cultural work of American proto-science fiction. The prevailing understanding of these novels asserts that their repeated retellings of a technocratic expansionist narrative shaped U.S. audiences' understanding and acceptance of subsequent American global imperial endeavors. Approaching the novels utilizing Franco Moretti's “distant reading” approach demonstrates precisely how the works' expansionist themes developed as newer, more powerful martial and transportation technologies were imagined by Senarens between 1880 and 1895. The recurring narrative of the Reade novels, however, also contains motifs that resist direct analogues to imperialism. Senarens's earliest stories frequently feature elements that undermine the conceptualizations of race and nationalism that enabled U.S. global territorial expansion. This approach reaches its fullest expression in Frank Reade, Jr., in Cuba (1895), a novel that presents Reade Jr. aiding the Cuban revolution against Spain and interacting with fictionalized portrayals of Cuban patriots Máximo Gómez and Antonio Maceo. By applying the Reade novels' narrative formula to create an overtly political text valorizing Cuban sovereignty in the era just prior to U.S. imperial involvement in Cuba after the Spanish-American war, Frank Reade, Jr., in Cuba demonstrates how central elements of the boy inventor novel simultaneously imagine technocratic expansion while subverting foundational concepts of empire.

“Her body was my country”: Gender and Cuban-American exile-community nationalist identity in the work of Gustavo Pérez Firmat

In this essay, I examine the work of Gustavo Perez Firmat, a well-published, exile-identified Cuban-American writer. In many ways, his Next Year in Cuba: A Cubano's Coming-of-Age in America and his Life on the Hyphen: The Cuban American Way are illustrative of the exile-imagined nation. In these texts, Perez Firmat, like many exile writers, locates the “real” Cuba in a grand past and a triumphant future – a future without Castro. He employs a disturbing sort of erasure that claims Cuba for “real” Cubans, that is, those elites who left after the revolution. To a startling degree, Perez Firmat participates in the acutely gendered dimensions of Cuban exile-community nationalism and politics, even as he constructs a complex sense of biculturated identity. His work, which includes essay, criticism, fiction and poetry, continues to configure Cuba as a mother – often fearsome and castrating. However, Perez Firmat defines Cuban and Cuban-American identity not merely as a matter of male honor, but as a matter of white, male privilege and unquestioned, hyper-heterosexual masculinity. In Perez Firmat's work, maternal bodies – coded as monstrous or as part of Cuba's oceanic landscape itself – serve to illustrate a sense of emasculation and powerlessness.

Cultural Erotics in Cuban America (review)

Although belonging to the medieval period, one misses mention of the historical development of slavery during the middle ages (Charles Verlinden, etc.) and the uses of genealogy (biblical and modem) in conditioning the European emergent views on race. After all, the races of man descend from the sons of Noah (Shem, Cham, and Jafet), who populate different parts of the world (Asia, Africa, and Europe), and who are in different hierarchical relationship to each other. That story constantly appears in European chronicles and paintings , relating to the myth of the Visigothic origins of the Spanish, and conditions the treatment of the subaltern. The introduction also suffers from overuse of critical terminology, often not privileging the texts it explores but what the critics have written about them or about the concept of race. It also makes early reference to some critical concepts (narrativized and denarrativized vision, defamiliarization, subaltern approach, the hegemonic eye, etc.) that often are not explained until pages after their first use. There other aspects of the work are bothersome. Beusterien often tells anecdotes (21, 141, 151, etc.); summarizes what each chapter will treat (25, 29-34, 59, 101-102, 142-143, 173, etc.); and, engages with critics (36, 44, 141, 143 etc.) using the first person. The book also varies labels (for example, Afro-Hispanics 40 and Afro-Iberians 41), and cites titles of works in English followed by Spanish in brackets or Spanish followed by English in brackets. (He clearly indicates that he is doing this on purpose, but one wonders why Eye on Race does not stick to one type of citation.) Many of these stylistic faults (including the occasional typo) should have been caught by an editor and are not the fault of the writer, but good editors are an increasingly rare commodity. In spite of these observations, Professor Beurestein’ s study of this enticing array of texts dealing with race gives much food for thought. The book breaks new ground in the field. FRANK A. DOMÍNGUEZ The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Ortiz, Ricardo L. Cultural Erotics in Cuban America. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007. 337 pp. In response to the growing interest of the last two decades in Cuban-American diasporic studies, in his latest study Ricardo Ortiz looks at the sexual wars that have accompanied various political and cultural wars since the 1959 Cuban Revolution. Reaching beyond the typical Miami community and incorporating diasporic cultural expressions from New Jersey, New York and CaliRese ñas 135 fornia, he proposes that these conflicts have taken a “rather distinctive, certainly spectacular form [of] ‘erotics,’ sexuality, passion, kinship, and other often body-based manifestations of nonrational forms of human connection and interaction” (8). Throughout the book, the critic successfully addresses the ramifications of Cuban-American writers and artists that confront the cultural heteronormativity both on and off the island, in order to portray what remains of a Cuban in [North] America. Divided into three distinct parts with a total of eight chapters, the book focuses almost entirely on post revolutionary, U.S.-based, Cuban-American writers . Singling out the novels Antes que Anochezca (1992) and El Portero (1989), in his first chapter Ortiz suggests that Reinaldo Arenas’s writing wrestles with the transition of one cultural and economic environment to another. He effectively adds that within this transition there exists a particular “erotics” that works in and between spaces and subjects of the Cuban-exile imagination. In short, Ortiz analyzes the “the symbolic construction of Cuban political reality as a function of a quasi-oedipal struggle between the hysterically, murderously hated Fidel, el hombre, él, and Cuba bella, la patria…” (44). Accordingly, in his second chapter the critic investigates the unique production of Cuban exile prison writing, concentrating on the literary works of Senel Paz, Ricardo Pau-Llosa, Reinaldo Arenas and Severo Sarduy, as well as Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s film, Strawberry and Chocolate (1993). Arguing that Pau-Llosa’s work is actually more political than the poet cares to admit, Ortiz uses his poetry as an example of how patriarchal traditions and repressed homophobia are carefully hidden among many Cuban and Cuban-American works. By comparing “bodies” of prison...

Still Hands: Celia's Transgression in Cristina García's Dreaming in Cuban

This paper highlights the association between creativity and madness in Cuban American writer Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban (1992), focusing on the portrayal of the novel's matriarch Celia. Although Celia's artistry feeds into her categorization as mentally imbalanced, she turns to art to resist the labels of aberrance thrust her way. As the articulation of her defiance, art is what causes her to be labeled deviant. In this depiction, Garcia draws from dominant ideologies that frame creativity and madness together. However, she challenges such notions by questioning the grounds for Celia's institutionalization, underscoring how Celia's diagnosis as mentally ill is gendered, racialized, and ethnicized. Evoking the literary figure of the archetypal “madwoman,” yet illustrating how this figure is marked by gender as well as race and ethnicity, Garcia claims a space within traditional literary analyses of madness that have tended to focus on gender at the expense of race and ethnicity.

An Interview with Beatriz Rivera

The increased presence of Latino/a writers of Cuban descent continues to reshape radically the landscape of contemporary American letters. Ruth Behar, Sandra Castillo, Rafael Campos, Cristina Garcia, Oscar Hijuelos, Gustavo Perez-Firmat, Virgil Suarez, Jose Yglesias, to name a few, have variously penned novels, short stories, poetry, and essays that map territories of identity and experience in the US. Novelist and short story writer Beatriz Rivera is one such Cuban American author who breathes life into the manifold everyday struggles of the Cuban emigre and exile living in a xenophobic and sexist US. As with many one-and-a-half generation Cuban writers (Rivera was born in Cuba but grew up in Miami where her family settled in the early 1960s), Rivera's fiction gravitates around Cuban-identified characters who grew up in either Miami or New York. As a response to their condition of political and/or self-imposed exile, however, Rivera's characters learn to survive not through isolation from the mainstream (the weaving of myths of a return to a prelapsarian homeland as with first generation Cuban American writers), but in creating a complex hybrid space where Cuban and American cultures, histories, and aesthetic practices fluidly mix to express new Latino/a experiences and in-flux identities. In Rivera's debut collection of short stories, African Passions (1995), she plunged her readers into the deep end of contemporary Cuban Miami with its dynamic syncretic fusions of mainstream Anglo, Spanish, African, Chinese, and Taino cultures. When Rivera published her first novel, Midnight Sandwiches at the Mariposa Express (1997), she invented Cuban American characters who resisted assimilationist pressures by recycling, translating, and transforming their everyday US Cuban/Caribbean cultures to respond to their sense of an in-between identity. In her novel Playing with Light (2000), Rivera invents a world where the lines between national histories, collective myths, and individual memories blur, foregrounding the dynamic interplay of time and geopolitical space as experienced by old and new generation Cuban American women. Rivera's women characters look to Cuba's past--when novels were read to tobacco factory workers in the nineteenth century--to form a Latina-based tertulia (get-together) for reading counter-resistant histories and stories. Under the stress of living in a patriarchal US mainstream and a macho Cuban culture, the characters learn to look to the past to assert their presence as Latinas in the present with the power to shape their own lives. Beatriz Rivera's work speaks to the Cuban American experience--especially those of the one-and-a-half generation who seek to inhabit those vital spaces where histories, myths, languages, and experiences rub together and make room for new hybrid Latina/o identities. I interviewed Beatriz Rivera in Houston on December 1, 2000, during her book tour for Playing with Light. FLA: You were born in Havana, grew up in Miami, and lived in Europe. Tell me a little about your life in these different places. BR: Well, I was mostly lost all over the world. 1 finished high school in Switzerland, and then I wanted to stay in Europe forever, so I went to Paris where I studied philosophy. I got a Master's degree in Paris [at the Sorbonne], and then I hung out in Paris for another ten years. I got married there, taught English and Spanish, and wrote novels. FLA: How was it living in Paris in the 1970s? BR: Oh, it was great. They were my years of youth. It was fantastic. I was writing, but I wasn't publishing anything. I didn't have much of an identity, though. I wasn't an American in Paris. I didn't have that identity. I wasn't a Cuban in Paris either, like there were. FLA: There were Cubans in Paris? BR: Well, like Severo Sarduy and Eduardo Manetti, who were really Cubans--not that I'm not really Cuban--but who were totally culturally Cuban. …

Guillermo Cabrera Infante. Assays, Essays, and Other Arts

Guillermo Cabrera Infante. Assays, Essays, and Other Arts. Ed. Ardis L. Nelson. New York: Twayne, 1999. 242 pages. Cuban-American Literature of Exile: From Person to Persona. By Isabel Alvarez Borland. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1998. 198 pages. Cuban Writers on and off Island: Contemporary Narrative Fiction. By Pamela Maria Smorkaloff. New York: Twayne, 1999. 100 pages. Although these three books revolve around Cuban and Cuban-American literature since 1959, their premises and objectives could not be more diverse. The book on Cabrera Infante is a monographic study of writer's sizable body of essays. Alvarez Borland's study deals with representative works by exiled Cuban and Cuban-American writers. And Smorkaloff's book focuses on a cross-section of literature from both sides of Florida Straits. Nelson's volume is a compilation of thirteen articles on Cabrera Infante's essays as journalist, cineaste, critic, and commentator. Under these rubrics, each of book's four sections includes several articles written by scholars such as Raymond D. Souza, Suzanne Jill Levine, Ardis L. Nelson, and Kenneth Hall who, for most part, are familiar with writer's rich and versatile oeuvre. While some of texts under scrutiny have been collected in volumes like Holy Smoke (1985), Mea Cuba (1992), and Cine o sardines (1997), others are still scattered in newspapers and journals throughout two continents. The first articles by Souza and William Luis, highlighting Cabrera Infante's early years at Bohemia, Carteles, and Lunes de Revolution, from 1947 to 1961, provide a useful context for texts that follow. They dwell at some length on writer's all-consuming interest in Hollywood movies and in literature around a time when utilitarian view of arts and narrow interpretation of culture espoused by cultural bureaucracy of Cuban Revolution brought about an ideological rift and writer's subsequent exile. This background information is especially useful when reading articles on Mea Cuba by Nedda G. de Anhalt and co-writers Justo C. Ulloa and Leonor A. Ulloa, which underscore political circumstances that inspired many of writer's essays and personal and professional alliances. Additional articles consider, among other topics, Cabrera Infante's irreverent obituaries or mock encomia of film personalities (by Kenneth Hall), his and Manuel Puig's shared interest in popular culture (by Levine), his film scripts (by Souza), his musings on cigars (by Regina Janes), his readings of English literature in translation (by way of an interview with Levine), his fascination with Borges (by Carlos Cuadra), and his commonalities with Bunuel (by Nelson). In addition to critical essays, a foreword by Alfred MacAdam, an introduction by Nelson, a chronology covering a seventy-year period, and a lengthy, selected bibliography of writer's essays offer a well-rounded view of Cabrera Infante's non-fiction work. Though arranging essays in chronological rather than alphabetical order by title would have facilitated task of researchers, mere gathering of a significant number of Cabrera Infante's essays in bibliography for an English audience, combined with their incipient critical assessment, should encourage scholars to approach his fiction and non-fiction work holistically. Future studies should be able to determine whether all these threads-novels, short stories, journalistic work, political and non-political essays, and film scripts-can be interwoven into a tapestry, one that blends stylistic brilliance and transcendental meaning. Not surprisingly, Cabrera Infante is one of authors that Isabel Alvarez Borland analyzes in her study of fiction by Cuban exile writers and Cuban American writers. In this book, critic chooses to emphasize themes of exile and displacement. She explores writers' relation to revolutionary events that gave rise to Cuban diaspora since 1959, evaluating tension between the historical person of writer and his or her created persona (x). …

From Alienation to Reconciliation in the Novels of Cristine Garcia

In Life on Hyphen: The Cuban-American Way (1995), Gustavo Perez Firmat speaks of 1.5 ers, that generation of Cuban-Americans who were children at time of migration, but grew into adults in United States. (1) They feel fully comfortable in neither culture but are able to circulate effectively in both. Unlike their parents, who will never be North Americans, they will never be Cubans. As Firmat says, is an enduring, perhaps an endearing fiction. Cuba is for them as ethereal as smoke and as persistent as smell of their grandfather's cigars (5). For this uprooted generation, fiction can provide home of sorts, place to explore meaning of past, and one's personal place in it and present. Cuban-American poet Ricardo Pau-Llosa has said that the exile knows his place, and that place is imagination (qtd. in Firmat 10). Though Cristina Garcia's parents left shortly after revolution, it is probably inaccurate to describe her as an exile. Born in 1958, she does not remember revolution and has lived almost all of her life as Cuban-American. Nevertheless, despite her early departure from Cuba, Garcia has described her childhood as bifurcated, sort of hyphenated existence of which Firmat speaks. Living her public life in Brooklyn neighborhood populated by white ethnics, her Cuban background did not seem that relevant to her, but at home she felt Cuban because her mother, who recognized connection between language and culture, insisted on Spanish. As Garcia matured, her sense of Cuban identity, affair, became important to her (And There Is 102). 1984 trip to island to visit her mother's family, supporters of Castro, focused her interest on her identity and larger questions of history and politics, opening up complexities of Cuban revolution. Before that visit, she had viewed Cuban situation in unambiguous black and white of many Cuban-Americans (And There Is 104; A Fish Swims 65). Paradoxically, by meeting other side of her family and immersing herself in personal, she began to see larger sociopolitical contexts of being Cuban and began thinking about how historical events affect individuals and families (And There Is 107; A Fish Swims 71). Hearing stories from her grandmother, who lived in house on beach similar to Celia del Pino's in Dreaming in Cuban, she became especially interested in how such events affected women's relationships. As many feminist writers have alleged, Garcia believes that traditional history obviates women and evolution of home, family, and society and concentrates instead on wars and doings of men (And There Is 107). Another event affecting Garcia's fiction was working for Time magazine in Miami. Here she met Cuban-American community for first time and felt very alienated from them. Accused of being communist because she was Democrat, she became convinced that others besides right-wing extremists need to speak as Cuban-Americans in order to heal profound rifts created by revolution. According to her and many other Cuban-American writers, loud voices do not necessarily represent dominant Cuban-American viewpoint. (2) For example, some would like to see blockade lifted and to see more dialogue with Castro regime and more tolerance in exile community. This call for dialogue and tolerance is reflected in work of other Cuban-American writers and scholars, such as Ruth Behar, whose recent anthology by Cuban-Americans and Cubans attempts to build bridges between extreme views of right and left. Behar believes that Cubans need a nuanced and complex view of how Cubans on island and in diaspora give meaning to their lives, their identity, and their culture in aftermath of battle that has split nation at root (2). Certainly Garcia's work gives that nuanced and complex view that could bring about reconciliation called for by Behar. …

Cuban-American Literature of Exile: From Person to Persona. ISABEL ALVAREZ BORLAND: Charlottesville & London: University Press of Virginia, 1998.

Cuban-American literature of exile has experienced a boom during the nineties and, consequently, the variety and quantity of critical and theoretical works about this experience has increased considerably. Within this corpus, Alvarez Borland's book provides a comprehensive history and analysis of the Cuban Diaspora after 1959, emphasizing the complex relationship between literature and history as she examines the way Cuban-American writers, at different times, have re-created historical events after the Revolution through their personal experiences in exile.

Prologue to revolution: Cuba, 1898-1958

Jorge Ibarra, Prologue to Revolution: Cuba, 1898-1958 (trans. Marjorie Moore. Boulder and London: Lynne Reinner Publishers, 1998), 229pp.This is the first work by Jorge Ibarra, Cuba's most distinguished social historian, to appear in English. First published in Cuba in 1995 (Editorial de Ciencias Sociales), it appears now in Reinner's Studies in Cuban History Series, edited by the Cuban-American historian Louis A. Perez, Jr. It is a welcome addition to the slowly growing list of works by Cuban historians now available to anglophone readers in a field hitherto dominated by US and Cuban-American writers. This is more particularly the case, since it provides us for the first time with a Cuban historian's perspective on a period which has already attracted worldwide as well as much Cuban scholarly attention.The book presents a forceful, rigorously documented and keenly analytical interpretation of the economic, social and political circumstances which produced the 1959 Cuban Revolution. It is densely written and comprehensively conceived. Building on a swathe of carefully critiqued Cuban statistical, periodical and secondary sources, Ibarra investigates the shifting economic and political conditions of each class and stratum within the class: its composition is carefully defined and its history is then traced across the whole period. This innovative approach establishes that the impetus for revolution derived not, as other writers (Blackburn, 1963; Sabbatini, 1968) have suggested, solely from the proletarianization of the middle class, but from the proletarianization of the people, middle class, peasant, proletarian and youth as a whole.Central to this process was the operation of US capital which moved into the island on a substantial scale in the wake of the 1895-1898 War of Independence and, assisted by US tariff policies and reciprocal trade treaties (1902, 1934), siphoned off Cuba's national surplus. It dominated sugar, tobacco, transport, utilities and, increasingly from 1934, the Cuban import market. Cuban governments depended on loans from US banking houses (they were not allowed to borrow in Europe) and, from 1927, on US government bodies which could exert (like the IMF) even closer control of Cuban government policies.Within this framework, however, elements of Cuban and Spanish capital survived and one of Ibarra's most interesting findings is that among the import and export merchants, traditionally considered simply as pillars of US neocolonialism, there were some who played a dual role as merchants and industrialists. They maintained significant interest in sugar and tobacco, expanded into paper and textile mills, cement and crackers, beer and footwear, and also into banking.This trend accelerated, as in most of Latin America, in World War II when US imports were reduced. Most enterprises, however, were small scale (almost 50 percent had five workers), so a nationwide working class did not develop. And although large-scale Cuban landlords and leaseholders maintained and expanded (1932-1959), their hold on agricultural production - more than 50 percent of sugar production in 1958 came from Cuban-owned mills - they did not use their profits to modernize production. Cuban capital gains, instead, increasingly took refuge in foreign banks, real estate investments and illicit activities. These investments generated what Ibarra calls an absentee bourgeoisie whose interests were allied with international capital and the US mafia. This was the economic structure which under the impact of the 1930s world depression resulted in the unfinished 1933 revolution and the successful 1959 uprisings.In the first decades of the Republic the middling classes (small merchants, manufacturers, proprietors and professionals) joined forces to defend their political interests, opposing US exploitation and its corrupt Cuban government agents, and playing a leading role in the movement to topple Machado. …

The Sounds of Silence: Remembering and Creating in Margarita Engle's Singing to Cuba

Nobody knows you. No. But I sing to you. --Federico Garcia Lorca, rebellious Spaniard who'd visited Cuba many decades ago. (84) While discussing her inspiration by poets and singers, narrator in Margarita Engle's Singing to Cuba quotes above words from Garcia Lorca's poem Absent Soul--words which capture novel's themes by articulating narrator's mission not only to remember her relatives but also to tell their story. In this novel, which vacillates between first person account of a Cuban-American woman in United States and third person story of her uncle Gabriel in Cuba soon after revolution, remembering signifies more than keeping people and events alive in memories. Remembering means creating a life for these memories by making them come alive on paper, and through this task of remembering and creating, narrator comes to embrace her identity as a writer--a role concurrently appointed by relatives and self-imposed. By writing her family history and uttering words her relatives and most Cubans in Cuba are forbidden to speak, narrator succeeds in singing not only to Cuba, but for Cuba--an achievement Engle simultaneously accomplishes with this novel. Through fictional, personal story of her nameless U.S.-born narrator, Engle tackles controversial issues of Cubanness and exile consciousness(1) and creates a story which embraces general Cuban-American experience of disillusionment, loss, and oppression. Stressing remembering and creating, Engle and narrator break through silence of alligator-shaped isle (15) and create sound and song with power of written word. Before discussing Engle's work in detail, it is important to place Singing to Cuba in context of emerging body of Cuban-American literature. Focusing on one-and-a-half generation--those born in Cuba but raised in United States--Carolina Hospital and Gustavo Perez Firmat, prominent Cuban-American writers and critics, have tackled issue of exile consciousness--a consciousness which emerges in Cuban-American literature as a nostalgia not for what was but for what could have been.(2) This consciousness is most evident in Cuban-American poetry, such as in works of Lourdes Gil, Hospital, Iraida Iturralde, Elias Miguel Munoz, and Ricardo Pau-Llosa, primarily in their most autobiographical writings. Engle joins ranks of such Cuban-American writers who use personal narrative voices, for the autobiographical model employed by Cuban-American writers exhibits a desire to connect with a larger community of Cubans as well as Cuban-Americans in process of telling their life stories (Alvarez-Borland 43). However, while most Cuban-American novels, like poetry, focus on loss, they do so in a broader manner, often employing techniques of magical realism to express effects of revolution and need to find a home. Therefore, use of double narratives is crucial, as Cuban-American writers express displacement of exile/ethnic through multiple voices which reflect divided self, such as Engle's use of narrator and Gabriel, and Cristina Garcia's focus on Pilar and her grandmother in Dreaming in Cuban. In fact, as Alvarez-Borland notes of Engle's contemporaries, narratives of Pablo Medina, Omar Torres, and Cristina Garcia are representative of a pivotal movement in contemporary Cuban-American writing. Medina, Torres, and Garcia belong to a generation of younger writers of Cuban heritage who, in words of Eliana Rivero, `are in midst of effecting transition from emigre/exile categories to that of ethnic minority members' (191). (43)(3) Focusing on identity, loss, and remembering, Engle is such a writer whose work entails never-ending quest to reconcile homeland and self. In Singing to Cuba, Engle creates a truly unforgettable story, using a pattern Tomas Rivera stresses in Chicano literature: Remembering, retelling, reliving (340). …