Achy Obejas

The End of the Affair
by Achy Obejas

It's been a while since Cuba, that caiman-shaped Caribbean isle, ceased to be a place on the map. At some point, it came unhinged and floated away, transformed into a gilded reflecting pool, a repository of dreams. Those with hope or memory (true or false) called out: Here lies utopia, whether the socialist fantasy or the golden recollections of its exiles. Cuba is, or was, or could be, an exemplary nation, a veritable beacon, egalitarian and progressive.

For a small country--about 68,000 square miles and a population of just over 11 million, the navel of the Americas--this is an awesome, crushing burden. Because if Cuba inspires, it also provokes despair.

Alma Guillermoprieto's bittersweet memoir Dancing with Cuba is about falling in love with this mythic place or, more precisely, trying to. It is also about the tense relationship between realism and idealism, a sympathetic yet ultimately unsparing account of a personal odyssey that ends not triumphantly but nonetheless extraordinarily.

Guillermoprieto is no stranger to Cuba or Latin America. A longtime contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, she has covered the carnage between the drug cartels and Colombia's successively impotent governments, civil wars all over Central America, the assault on Grenada by US troops, urban life and poverty in Brazil, political corruption in her native Mexico and revolutionary victory in Nicaragua.

Her report from Cuba during the Pope's 1998 historic visit unfolded as a wrenching portrait of an ever more isolated Comandante, his military fatigues put away for the week in exchange for a designer suit, trying desperately to keep his dignity as he compromised and compromised in order to survive--and, ultimately, to hold on to power. Through her two essay collections in the last decade, Looking for History and The Heart That Bleeds, she has argued that Latin America's politics--and indeed its political destiny--are eternally cloaked in illusion, its own identity unequivocally tied to its complex, paradoxical relationship to the United States. (Cuba's version of this, of course, is total resistance to the United States in spite of enduring cultural and emotional ties.) While Guillermoprieto has never attempted to disguise her affinity for the leftist ambitions of Latin America's revolutionaries, it is also true that she has never gone out of her way to massage or rationaliz! e their prejudices and failures (and not even those that can be traced back to US actions or policies).

Dancing with Cuba is exquisitely detailed about the physicality of the place, the sensations, the conversations. Yet in the prologue Guillermoprieto is up front about the story's sources: "I've retained only fragmented memories and a few concrete souvenirs that help me prove to myself, when I have my doubts, that I really did go on that journey that so thoroughly unravelled my life." The book depends instead on documents, news reports and Guillermoprieto's re-created moments and conversations. Many of the characters are composites, though a number of historic figures flit in and out--most notably the late Manuel Piñeiro, the Cuban spymaster, whom she portrays with a measured sympathy. Still, the book never feels impressionistic; it's grounded in solid reporting, though the tone throughout is wistful.

Dancing with Cuba covers six months in 1970, including what is for many the pivotal moment of the Cuban Revolution: not the Bay of Pigs, not the missile crisis, but the Harvest of 10 Million Tons, a wildly ambitious campaign to produce about 3 million more tons of sugar than the country ever had, even during the exploitative "Dance of the Millions" in the 1920s or the golden age of greed under Batista. The campaign's goal was to wipe out Cuba's considerable debt to the Soviet Union in one fell swoop. (At the time, the island had taken out a loan from the USSR larger than its entire existing liability, essentially turning the island into the Soviet Union's indentured servant.)

But what was at stake was much more than just long-term economic independence. It was the very heart of all the revolution could be. After all, Cuban Communism, for all its orthodoxy and very un-tropical puritanism, was considerably different from the Soviet variant: much more personal, perhaps much more--let's just say it--Western. The Cubans wanted to loosen reliance on the Soviets because they wanted to do things their own way.

Guillermoprieto went to Cuba as a 20-year-old to teach modern dance (in a classroom with no mirrors, to avoid counterrevolutionary vanity) but wound up as witness to the historic mass mobilization of the country for the 10 million tons. Months after the campaign's failure, the island was still feeling the depth of its wound; indeed, at the end of Guillermoprieto's stay, the harvest of the 10 million was still too painful to talk about except in the most oblique ways.

That was a huge contrast to her arrival, when glassy-eyed, committed Cubans of all stripes talked feverishly about going to cut sugarcane in the countryside, or working double and triple shifts to relieve others so they could go cut cane. For Guillermoprieto, this kind of dedication was unheard of, exotic and alluring.

The island's media were filled with all sorts of happy-hued stories about the nation's superhuman effort and the certain success of the enterprise. Granma, the Cuban Communist Party newspaper, pictured a daily graph that measured the yield. The billboards exhorted: Diez Millones! ("Ten million!), A Cumplir! (Let's do our part!") and Comandante en Jefe, Ordene! ("Commander in chief, we're at your command!").

But then Murphy's Law went into effect: Nature was unkind; it soon became evident that urban volunteers, no matter how devoted, did more harm than good with their machetes; the sugar mills, many fallow since the revolution, didn't grind well; machinery arrived late, or not at all, or missing vital parts. The planning had been, to put it mildly, overoptimistic. Money that could have been used toward the revolution's more essential needs--food, transportation, medicine, education--had instead been diverted to cover the vast, unexpected costs of the disaster. In the end, Cuba was burdened with a much greater, more binding debt to the Soviets than it had ever had before.

Guillermoprieto touched down in Havana on May 1, 1970, just twenty days before Castro first acknowledged the dimensions of the catastrophe in a masterful, hourslong speech before hundreds of thousands at the Plaza de la Revolución. It was then that he first uttered what is perhaps the revolution's most chilling slogan: Convertir el revés en victoria! ("We must turn defeat into victory!"), a cry for mass rationalization.

The young Guillermoprieto, woefully ignorant not just of Cuba but of geopolitics, was thus thrust into a situation to which she could only respond emotionally. She immediately found herself as enchanted as the cultish masses by Castro's vigor, his audacity, his rage, his unapologetic apology, his shameless display of shame. "There had never existed a more lucid, heroic man," writes Guillermoprieto. "His physical beauty itself was the confirmation of his extraordinary spiritual energy."

She understood too that her rapture was more the result of cadence, heat, the masses, but it didn't matter, not then: She'd heard the siren call to revolution, trying from then on to find a way to fit the artist she was into the mold of revolutionary life and expectation. What Castro had tapped in her that day--and in so many others in his more than half a century of public life--was the desire for a meaningful life. Like many people of her generation, Guillermoprieto wanted to rebel against the status quo in those tumultuous times but was desperate for order, naïve but anxious for purpose. In the Cuban revolution, she found a paradoxical key to her dilemma: "To become a rebel was to train yourself in the discipline of absolute obedience," particularly to Castro and, to a lesser extent, Che Guevara.

And even though she was in Cuba at the request of the revolution, doing work that it had specifically requested, she soon began to question the utility of that work, and by extension, of art. What good was any of it if it didn't feed anyone, if it didn't clothe anyone? By the memoir's end, however, her questions had become as blunt as they were shattering.

Looking back over a debate from those days that appeared in the magazine published by Casa de las Américas, probably Cuba's most important cultural institution, Guillermoprieto interprets the messages between the lines and poses the questions the Cuban intellectuals dared not articulate: "Why do I have such a strong desire to say what I think?... Why can the proletarians say what they think, while I have the revolutionary obligation to shut up?... Why is the fieldworker's purpose accomplished when he cuts cane, and the mechanic's purpose accomplished when he repairs the motor, while I, after having written, or painted, or criticized, have to go out and cut cane in order to fulfill my commitment to the Revolution?"

Her half-year in Cuba in 1970 is startling more than anything for the way it serves as a template of Cuban life after the revolution. Yes, there were deprivations, most directly linked to the US economic embargo, just like now. There were outrageous bureaucratic bunglings, clumsy and scandalous abuses of power (at one point, the art school director places a gun on a table to start a self-criticism meeting), condescending acts of puritanism (guards at the hotel where she stays patrol the halls to keep away her suitors, regardless of the fact that everyone is over 21, not unlike hotel security today). Back then, everyday life in Havana crept along at a snail's pace, with all entertainment venues but the Cuban art of conversation exhausted in a matter of days--exactly like now.

"To me, what seems most bizarre about the Cuba that Fidel will leave behind," writes Guillermoprieto in her final pages, "is its current status as a curio. The revolution that was supposed to modernize the world is now treasured as a timeless relic by tourists from a world all too horrifyingly modern."

Time stopped in Cuba, it's true, but it's hard to know exactly when. And that creates a constant gush of nostalgia that is no longer the sole province of Cuban exiles. The left has its own dream of what Cuba was or should be, as enduring as the memory of falling in love for the first time. No matter how poorly it ages, you just don't forget your first revolution.

This article can be found on the web at:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20040315/bejas

My own private Cuba
The Chicago Tribune
January 19, 2002

By Achy Obejas
Tribune staff reporter

Editors note: Achy Obejas is the author of three books, most recently the novel, "Days of Awe." A Tribune staff reporter and native of Cuba, Obejas is writing an account -- in both English and Spanish -- of her most recent visit to Cuba.

Day 1

Havana is deserted.

It’s all I can think about since I got here. I walk in the plaza in front of the Cathedral and my footsteps rattle and echo.

There are, of course, still Cubans engaged in nearly every imaginable endeavor along the city’s seawall, jammed hump-backed public buses, open-air markets and
dozens of kiosks selling the revolution bit by bit without a hint of irony: here a Che Guevara t-shirt, there a plastic sheathed news photo of a young and vigorous Fidel
Castro, here a ceramic figure of a bulbous-chested mulatta.

What’s missing from the scene are the tourists.

“Finally,” says Tania, my girlfriend, a Havana resident, “Cuba for Cubans.”

Except that Cuba can’t survive with just Cubans.

With the world still reeling from September 11, the global economic slowdown is hitting Cuba especially hard. Some hotels have closed for lack of business.
Construction all over Havana is dead still.

In Cuba, I live in the capital’s historic district, equidistant between the Cathedral and the newly renovated Museum of Fine Arts. In other words, prime turf for
foreigners and hustlers. It’s usually packed with humanity. But not this time.

Now there are scores of empty tables at the cafe in Cathedral plaza, and bored and worried valets at the Seville Hotel, just off the museum. For the first time in my
experience, the only language heard on my street is Spanish, the open-mouthed, no consonant Cuban variety.

Cuba for Cubans.

Day 2

Whenever I used to come to Cuba, I would bring most of my toiletries with me. Friends of mine brought things too, sometimes even canned meats and powdered
milk. But in recent years that practice began to diminish when we found that, with dollars, we could usually find most anything, and usually at fairly reasonable prices.

Shopping here, though, isn’t like in Chicago. For starters, there are peso stores and dollar stores. The peso stores are really the bodega -- the place where you pick
up foods allotted on your state-issued ration card -- and the agro -- the state-subsidized veggie market. Prices are rock bottom and the veggies are organic and
tasty.

Then there are the dollar stores, or “shoppins.” These cater to anyone with dollars. Some are very slick, like the six-level Carlos III mall in Central Havana, where
you can even get gym equipment. Some are like the nearby Harris Bros. (named after the pre-revolution U.S. store that used to be there), with its basic deli,
hardware and furniture departments.

Recently, a new “shoppin” opened up around the corner, and I trotted over to buy some local butter, which is outrageously priced at $1.50 USD a stick. When I
asked for a receipt, the clerk balked.

“That’s because they pocket the money, it’s a bookkeeping trick,” explained a friend.

Looking at my overpriced little stick of Cuban butter, my friend warned me to stay away from domestic goods.

“The clerks take the real items home, dilute them, and resell them in recycled containers,” she explained. “That’s another way they make their money.”

The sad part is that they do it mostly to Cuban products, because expectations are already so low.

“Next time,” says my friend, “buy the Australian butter.”

Day 3

The Pope’s visit to Cuba in 1998 gave Catholicism a boost and made it seem as if this had always been a Christian nation.

But even when Cubans have professed Catholicism, practice has always been a bit dubious. During the Inquisition, Cubans were so lackadaisical that Spanish
authorities moved the tribunal to the Dominican Republic. Another time, the Archdiocese got so disgusted, it excommunicated the entire city of Havana.

The truth is that most Cubans practice a cocktail of beliefs: a little Judeo-Christian piety, a lot of African animism.

In Cuba, December offers a number of religious celebrations. One of the most popular -- and least touristic -- is the Feast of St. Lazarus, better known as the
Afro-Cuban god, Babalú-Ayé.

Officially, his day is December 17 but the observation lasts all month. The government sets up extra buses on the two-hour route from Havana to just outside the
town of Santiago de Las Vegas. From there devotees flock to El Rincón and the old St. Lazarus Hospital, the island’s former leper colony, and past the new AIDS
hospices.

Those making promises to Babalú-Ayé crawl on their backs or knees all the way to the shrine. They wear sackcloth, the color purple, and usually carry or push an
image of the god as an old man with several open wounds, on crutches, and surrounded by dogs.

The day we go to El Rincón, there’s a tarot reader on the church grounds, next to all the disabled people looking for miracles and asking for donations. He tells us
our path is filled with challenges, but also with good things and happiness. We consider his warnings and leave feeling extraordinarily privileged and a little ashamed of
our luck.

Day 4

Most tourists, I think, expect Cubans to drive classic Ford Fairlanes or ‘56 Chevys. And indeed, those gems can be found here -- but usually hidden away, waiting
for the embargo to be lifted and a buyer to step up.

The U.S. made cars that take to the roads are jalopies, nothing American about them except the shells, which hide auto parts from former socialist allies -- as well as
hangers, rope, and gadgets purely of Cuban invention.

In Havana, American clunkers cruise right alongside shiny new Daewoos, Toyotas, Daihatsus and Subarus. There’s a Fiat dealership. Mercedes Benz provides for
Fidel Castro’s convoy, upscale cabs and ordinary hearses.

Of course -- but for the hearses -- the average Cuban doesn’t get many opportunities to ride these. Day to day transportation is provided by humped-back buses the
Cubans call “camellos” (camels) or Chinese-made bikes with English names, such as Flying Pigeon. There are also the ubiquitous “bici-taxis,” bike-powered
rickshaws.

Finally, there are taxis. But getting one is not as simple as standing on the corner and flagging it down. For starters, there are many different kinds of taxis, from the
Mercedes -- stationed outside the 5 star hotels for tourists only -- down to illegal gypsy cabs whose drivers creep up and whisper their services, then dash quickly
away.

My favorites are the 10 pesos taxis (50 US cents), which are on fixed routes. These are usually beat-up Russian Ladas or American cars from the 40s. Hardly a
word is spoken during these interactions.

“Prado,” I say when I need to get home, and the driver either shakes hear head and pulls away or shrugs for me to climb in. Along the way we might pick up as many
as 8 other Cubans, all equally monosyllabic

At the end of the ride, I hand over my Cuban money and we both nod at each other in gratitude.

Day 5

There are times when Cuba is wonderful, when being here is as natural as breathing. For me, that often happens when I stroll up to the Plaza de Armas, a charming
little park in front of what used to be the office of the island’s colonial governors.

There are two things I love about this place. The first are the book sellers -- scores of them, with their wooden shelves and their yellowed treasures. Everything sold
here is used, often ancient: An 1864 edition of "Don Quixote," a first edition paperback of Ernest Hemingway’s "The Old Man and the Sea," a Soviet military manual
with its cryptic Russian letters, and Fidel Castro’s own "History Will Absolve Me" in as many languages as can be imagined.

The other thing I love is the music. Because Plaza de Armas is surrounded by little cafes, there’s a constant soundtrack provided by small combos that take turns
playing. And because the cafes are aimed at tourists, the music is of the Buena Vista variety: gentle and nostalgic.

Most Cubans today don’t listen to this; it would be like tuning into Benny Goodman in Chicago. They prefer contemporary dance bands like Los Van Van, pop
groups like Moneda Dura, or international artists such as Marc Anthony or Oasis.

When Cubans my age get sentimental, they listen to Silvio Rodríguez, Pablo Milanés and Sara González -- revolutionary troubadours whose songs are still played
throughout Latin America.

But growing up in the U.S., I missed all that. (I was listening to Lou Reed, Patti Smith and David Bowie instead.) So, for me, Cuban music of the heart means
swaying guajiras, elegant sones -- music long before my time, the music of longing; it also means "The Peanut Vendor" and "Guantanamera," the kind of songs people
all over the world recognize as Cuban.

In Havana on a mild and cloudy day, strolling through stacks of poetry by José Lezama Lima and Dulce María Loynaz, what makes me feel at home is,
paradoxically, the music of exile.

Day 6

In recent years there’s been a resurgence of interest in the island’s Jewish community. Month after month, there are Jewish delegations visiting Cuba from New York,
Chicago, Miami, Los Angeles and a myriad other American cities.

That there should be a link between the U.S. and Cuban Jewish communities isn’t surprising: The first official Jewish organization here, the United Hebrew
Congregation, was created in 1906 by a group of Americans.

But the first permanent synagogue is the one that really reflects the island’s Jewish roots: Chevet Ahim, founded in 1914, was established by Orthodox Turkish Jews.
Currently closed, it’s being renovated as a museum under a long, rather byzantine plan by a French Jewish architectural concern.

The very first Jews in Cuba came with Columbus fleeing the Spanish Inquisition.

"Still today, most Cuban Jews are Sephardic," explains Jose Levy Tur, head of Havana’s Centro Hebreo Sefaradi, the only Sephardic congregation of three temples
in Havana. "About 60 percent of the total population, and about 90 percent of the Jews outside Havana are Sephardic."

But more than 90 percent of the foreign Jewish delegations are from the U.S., and ethnically Ashkenazi.

"So what gets played up is Cuban Ashkenazi history, because that’s what they want to hear about," says Levy with a shrug.

At the Centro, they try to gently explain to the delegations what the situation really is by presenting lectures and cultural programs. Some of the visitors come well
prepared, others with hardly a clue.

"It’s hard for me to believe -- with the Internet and so many different sources of information -- that people could be surprised that there are Jews in Cuba, or what
we’re like, but it happens," he says.

Still, Levy considers the delegations, which began in the early 90s, as a positive trend.

"For starters, we’re recognized," he says. "There’s exchange, which is important. They’re also a big help with kosher products, money for different projects, and
donations to the community pharmacy, which is critical."

Day 7

At the beginning of each year, Cuba’s santeros and babalawos -- the high priests of the Afro-Cuban religion of santería -- get together and read the Letter of the
Year, a message from the gods designed to give believers something of a heads up.

Casa Yoruba’s Antonio Orestes Castaneda Marquez says his group’s membership includes more than 500 of Cuba’s most important santeros and babalawos, but
it’s a historically unruly community so every complaint has to be taken seriously.

Like the one about the cafeteria. Most santeros and babalawos live in poverty; it’s almost a rule. Yet the cafeteria at Casa Yoruba is charging in dollars, not Cuban
pesos. Hardly anyone can afford it except foreigners.

"We don’t have permission to change pesos into dollars, and we’re forced to buy supplies in dollars," explains a frustrated Castaneda. "Plus, we pay a lot of taxes to
be in business, to be part of Old Havana."

The pressure -- even in their own headquarters -- to deal in dollars is causing some shamans to consider altering the rules of their faith.

"I know it’s true -- a lot of people are adapting ceremonies for foreigners who pay in dollars," says Castaneda with a pained look. "But we’re against that, just like
we’re against filming the ceremonies or participating in any way in all the fetishism foreigners have with our animal sacrifices and that sort of thing. Commercialization
isn’t good for us."

Yet Castaneda recognizes the problem of trying to please foreigners isn’t just about making money.

"We come from a culture of slaves, so sometimes we bend," he says. "We don’t always realize we’re a free people now, and we can say no."

Finally, after more than an hour of practical explanations and apologies to those gathered, Castaneda finally gets down to Letter of the Year and the gods' message:
Not surprisingly, 2002 is going to be a difficult year.

Day 8

It’s about 1 a.m. and Pedro, the Tribune’s Havana bureau chauffeur, and I have been driving for hours on the backroads of Oriente, Cuba’s mountainous and
desperately poor eastern provinces.

Then we spy the Hotel Guardalavaca through the darkness, the only resort for miles, and we sigh, relieved that we’ll get a decent night’s rest and, hopefully, a hot
shower.

At the desk, the clerk looks at us warily. “You’re ... Cubans?” she asks cautiously.

Cuban hotels -- except for the occasional flophouse in the provinces -- do not allow Cubans to lodge, even if they have the money to pay for a room.

We produce our documents and my U.S. passport works its instant magic. The clerk pushes a sign-up form at me.

“But he can’t stay here,” she says chagrined, returning Pedro’s I.D. passbook, work permits and driver’s license to him.

“Look, it’s the middle of the night and the middle of nowhere,” I plead. “He’s our official driver -- I’m here working and I couldn’t do my work without him.”

“But he’s Cuban,” she says, and Pedro -- who’s a proud man -- reddens when he hears her words. “Look, if it were up to me ..." And with that she goes to get the
manager.

He turns out to be a nervous young bureaucrat who, initially, apologizes. “I’m just trying to make a living,” he says.

But I insist. “Don’t you think it’s a bit ironic -- if not pathetic -- that I, who left, can stay here, and Pedro, who stayed and who’s a revolutionary, can’t?”

The manager looks over our documents again. He goes outside and examines our SUV. Finally, he instructs the clerk to rent Pedro a room.

But as he returns Pedro’s documents to him, he notices his I.D. passbook is falling apart. “You should be ashamed,” he says to Pedro. “Your passbook is how
foreigners see us. What image are you projecting?”

“My passbook?” Pedro finally explodes.

“And what image are you projecting by denying lodging to Cubans?” I ask.

“Look, in your country, I don’t question your laws -- don’t come here to question mine,” he shoots back.

“What kind of law is that anyway?” Pedro asks, exasperated.

“That’s it,” says the manager, ripping the sign up form from Pedro’s hands. “I was going to take a chance with you two but for what? Please leave!”

We’re incredulous, as are the two Spanish tourists standing behind us. The manager stomps off. As we leave, the security guard shakes his head, averting his eyes in
shame.

Day 9

I’ve always dreamed of returning to Cuba with my father. For me, he has always been the link back to the island. Unfortunately, my father's politics keep him from
returning. Since escaping in 1963, he has maintained his promise not to go back until Fidel Castro is gone.

So there was a little bittersweetness when the opportunity arose on this most recent trip to Cuba to visit Oriente, the eastern provinces where he grew up. This is a
vast wonderland, mostly rural, often mountainous but also known for its pristine, unspoiled coasts.

Oriente is more than lush geography, though. It’s the place where all of the island’s revolutions have begun. It’s where the son, the island’s signature rhythm, was
born. It’s where both Fidel and Fulgencio Batista come from.

Before going, I dropped my father a quick note, asking if there was anything he wanted me to see in particular, anyone he wanted me to visit. He responded with a
list curiously void of family, but filled with markers like Gibara’s city hall, where my grandfather had held court as mayor, and the cemetery in Banes, where he’s
buried.

Traveling through Oriente, I quickly grew used to both its blazing beauty and its numbing poverty. So I was somewhat unprepared for Banes, where I went searching
for my grandfather’s tomb.

The town is almost storybook in character: The houses are painted pastel colors, the streets evenly paved and clean. There was an air of gentle prosperity all about.
Everything seemed so serene -- I couldn’t picture my father here at all, not with his intensity and his dreaminess.

After spending an hour of unsuccessful grave-hopping at the Banes cemetery -- unlike Havana’s, well-preserved and not all disturbed -- I had to get going back to
the city. As the car took the winding curves out of Banes, the land split open before us in a glorious view of the tropics at dawn. It was a little bit like peaking at
heaven.

And then, suddenly, my father’s intensity, his dreaminess, made sense after all.

Day 10

There is a deathwatch in Cuba.

Out on the streets, the phenomenon is referred to obliquely. "Después" -- later. "When the changes come ... " some will say. Others are more blunt, if perhaps a bit
naive: "When capitalism finally gets here ... " Among intellectuals, some dare to talk about a time that’s post-Revolution. Others joke: "When the Americans come ..."

Officially, Fidel Castro will be succeeded by his younger brother, Raul, the head of the armed forces, though some think the future rests with Felipe Perez Roque,
Fidel’s hand-picked foreign minister, who was practically raised by his side. Others say the real successor is Carlos Lage, the medical doctor who’s credited with
much of the economic strategy that saved Cuba after the collapse of the Soviet bloc.

But these are all the topics of conversation that flit on the surface of everybody’s real concern: Fidel’s death.

Because the curious thing here is that, even those who oppose him allow that, if nothing else, Fidel provides a strange stability. There’s no post-Fidel plan here, at
least not one that’s been made public, and there’s plenty of concern that the country will be plunged into chaos after he goes.

To think that Cubans will simply rejoice is both simplistic and wrong. Fidel has been here more than 40 years, for most Cubans, their entire lives. He looms huge, not
just as a political figure but as a vehicle of self definition. We are for or opposed or all mixed up about him.

A friend in Havana tells me that it’s us in exile who think about Fidel, that here, on the island, everybody’s beyond that already. And while it’s true that talk about
Fidel -- open, public talk, especially of his mortality -- is absolutely unheard of here, Fidel is as present as the horizon of blue water.

Fidel’s most famous speech is titled "History Will Absolve Me." But that, of course, depends entirely on who writes the story of my poor and proud and beautiful country.

Memory Mambo

Achy Obejas, whose short story and novel will open discussion of contemporary off-island writing, is clearly engaged in a dialogue with the Cuban canon. The title story of her debut collection, "We Came All the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress Like This?" positions itself as counterpoint to Cuban-American narratives of nostalgia by confronting head-on the selective, partial, rewriting of history under the heading of "things that can't be told." After invoking the taboo, Obejas proceeds to blast it wide open, telling all, revealing what it is that can't be told and why, and in so doing begins a journey, in the spirit of Carpentier, back to the source. In Memory Mambo, a complex, nuanced and masterfully crafted novel, Obejas continues the journey, exploding false memory, nostalgia, and the mythology of exile, along the way. In its entirety, the work is an extended exploration of the meaning of memory within the context of what it means to be Cuban for the diaspora of the late twentieth century. The novel achieves a definitive break with narratives of nostalgia and evocation. Its fearless and unmitigated interrogation of surrounding reality, her reality, that of the displaced Cubans of Chicago who live side by side with Puerto Ricans and Chicanos who hold contrasting views on Cuba, the U.S. and the wider world, brings Obejas in line with the marvelous-real. Obejas shares Carpentier's unwavering commitment to question surrounding reality down to the very bottom layer, and Lezama Lima's insistence on Cuban literature's intimate relationship with la realidad circundante, whether it is Havana, Santiago or Chicago. Obejas' close, knowing scrutiny of the local in Memory Mambo, with its slow accumulation of revealing detail, is what renders the narrative universal, in the best of the novelistic tradition.

The novel opens with an exploration of memory, raising pointed questions regarding the uses, misuses and meaning of memory. In fact, the entire first chapter is an extended meditation on memory, insisting on the insoluble connection between memory and historical consciousness. It is memory that will determine how the individual situates him or herself within the flow of history. This link between individual memory and historicity is manifest in the opening paragraph.

I've always thought of memory as a distinct, individual thing. I've read with curiosity about the large parts of our brains where memory resides--how these areas remain vital, as animated at seventy-five as at twenty-five years old. Scientists say that when we think we're losing our memory what's actually happening is that we've blocked or severed connections.(15)

The narrator, Juani Casas, intimates from the very beginning that if the individual's connections to the flow of history are "blocked" or "severed," distortion will reign, as is increasingly the case of the Cuban-Americans around her, the family and neighbors that make up the social fabric of her life. Their contaminated memories can spread, contagiously, the way the plague of forgetting spreads to the entire community in García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.

...I often wonder just how distinct my memories are. Sometimes I'm convinced they're someone else's recollections I've absorbed. I'm not talking about hooking into past lives, or other links established spiritually or psychically to other times. I'm not talking at all about suppressed memories. It's just that sometimes other lives lived right alongside mine interrupt, barge in on my senses, and I no longer know if I really lived through an experience or just heard about it so many times, or so convincingly, that I believed it for myself--became the lens through which it was captured, retold and shaped.(16)

There is much in Obejas' narrative, and the historical, ontological, existential questions raised by her narrator, Juani, that places the work squarely within the trajectory of the Cuban novel. In The Repeating Island, Benítez Rojo identifies the search for origins, for roots, the need for rediscovery of the divided self, and the cultural fragmentation that originated with the plantation as recurring elements in the Caribbean novel. Memory Mambo explores themes common to the Caribbean novel, with equal concern for historical specificity; in this case the historical specificity of Cuban émigrés in the United States. The origins remain the same, but the journey back is longer and more circuitous since the point of departure for the émigré writer is that of a Caribbean once removed. In the development of Cuban literature we find that the passage from lo criollo to lo cubano, from a sense of Caribbeanness to a Caribbean, Cuban nationalism, was, in broad strokes, a movement from Europe to Cuba. The conclusion of Mendéz Capote's Memorias de una cubanita que nacio con el siglo suggests precisely that swing away from Old World origins toward an embrace of Caribbeanness as the European-educated bourgeoisie comes to terms with the extreme limitations of independence as defined by the Republic in its second decade. Facing the present constructively, with an eye to shaping the future, for Méndez Capote and the class she inhabits and represents, meant letting go of the past, of traditions that were disintegrating, in any case, under U.S. dominance.

If there was a strong sense of unity among the early émigrés who, once uprooted, had no one to hold on to except each other, by the 1990s that coherence is severely eroded. The protagonist of Memory Mambo is adrift in a disintegrating universe with nothing but herself to rely on. Surrounded by émigrés who have done nothing but lie to themselves and each other since their arrival, Juani's is a journey into historical truth. Remembering and forgetting, truth and lies, both move the plot forward and shape the character's narratives. Juani's discourse rises to the challenge of not telling lies to herself, though the climax of the novel revolves around a lie she has presented to the others and must now retract. The protagonist's truth-seeking and truth-telling narrative is meant to serve as counterpoint to the false memories expressed in the collective narrative of the enclave of exile. As narrator, her function is that of Carpentier's novelistic Adam, naming and renaming the things of her world, a world in which nothing is solid and all appearances deceive. From the first line to the last, Memory Mambo describes the form and content of a disintegrating social reality. The identity of the émigré community is coming apart at the seams, in the family, the community, the enclave itself. Survival depends on abandoning the myth of cohesion, confronting the process of disintegration, and struggling to create something new with the pieces as they fall away. The narrator describes communication among exiles as one that takes place in a vernacular, a way of speaking, that is "neither Cuban nor American, neither genetic or processed." In a line that resonates throughout the narrative, the protagonist defines the linguistic and existential terrain negotiated by all the novel's characters: "We communicate, I suspect, like deaf people--not so much compensating for the lost sense, but creating a new syntax from the pieces of our displaced lives." The narrator succeeds while those around her fail. By rejecting false memory, she is able to regain the historical continuity others have lost and to reassemble the pieces of her displaced life, sorting out fact from fiction, from the multifaceted fictions that are shaped and reshaped in a vicious cycle that entraps. In her reflections on the meaning of memory and search for historical truth, the narrator begins at the beginning, recounting the facts--what she has been able to gather of the who, what, why, when, and where--of her family's departure from Cuba.

I didn't know what was going on. I was simply gathered up, like one more precious belonging, and packed into a stranger's bloated car in the middle of the night, then taken down through black, rural roads with the car lights turned off....
So if these are the facts, why do I remember so much more? (17)

-- Canon and Diaspora by Pamela Smorkaloff

We came all the way from Cuba so you could dress like this?

From Booklist:
Obejas' title, with its jokey promise of comic cross-cultural coming-of-age mishaps, misleads. Her collection contains seven pieces--personal memoirs and essays as well as short fiction--all exploring the outsider's pain and existential angst, all shot through with irrepressible wit and dark humor, but all ultimately sadly tragic, seeing little hope of redemption or insightful change either for the specific protagonists portrayed or for men and Women generally. With its population of refugees and exiles of all ilks--Cuban boat people, junkies, gays (some dying of AIDS, some not) and lesbians--the book's strongest pieces are its vignettes concerned with parts of Obejas' own life as a Latina lesbian refugee. Whether she chronicles the obsessions of a broken-hearted, jilted lover trying unsuccessfully not to circle the block of her ex-girlfriend's apartment, or the humiliation of being offered donated, unwashed clothing as part of the alternately boring and anxious "processing" into the U.S. as a political refugee from Castro's Cuba, Obejas' prose moves us. These writings of the disenfranchised are for any spiritual immigrant, huddled and yearning to be free.
-Whitney Scott

Achy Obejas is the queen of the quirky short story. Her prose hits you with a swift blow while entertaining you with its razor-sharp wit and intelligence. The Cuban/American writer describes the immigrants, gays, and outsiders she knows so well, while reflecting on her own painful and extremely funny break-ups. She reminds me of a grown-up Cuban/lesbian Holden Caulfield. Obejas proves you can engage the brain of your readers and still entertain them with good stories.

-- OutSmart

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From Havana with Love
By Achy Obejas
The Village Voice
February, 2001

A New Generation Faces Cuba's Dark Reality

In Havana, a life-size statue of John Lennon sits on a park bench, accessible enough so that his glasses were stolen by a passerby during a recent thunderstorm. Soon afterward, Cuban writer Arturo Arango anonymously e-mailed his friends a faux Internet column, claiming the thief had been caught in neighboring Matanzas trying to place Lennon's glasses on the statue of a deceased Cuban poet who had needed glasses throughout his lifetime. Taking a gentle jab at the island's cultural bureaucracy—which has yet to honor Cuban cultural heroes such as Bola de Nieve or Benny Moré—Arango quoted the writers' union president passionately declaring that, if anyone had petitioned for glasses for the Matanzas poet, glasses he'd surely have.

But almost immediately afterward, Arango had to send out notes to friends explaining it was all a joke. His satire was believable because, well, in Cuba, anything can and usually does happen.

Contrary to North American critical insistence that all things in the Latin American literary imagination are magic realist, life on the island is, as Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier once said, "real maravilloso," or marvelously real. Abilio Estévez's "Thine Is the Kingdom," Pedro Juan Gutiérrez's "Dirty Havana Trilogy," Antonio José Ponte's "In the Cold of the Malecón," and Abel Prieto's "El Vuelo del Gato" are glimpses into an unvarnished and ever shifting Cuba, absurdist perhaps, but still anchored in the tangible world. These writers—from Prieto, the current minister of culture, to Gutiérrez, a rumored pimp—also provide a curious status report on how the islanders view the Cuban revolution itself.

All four of these writers creatively came of age during the Special Period—the 1990s—when the island's economy became a wasteland and Cuba's ideas about its place in the world were forced to change. The literature of the Special Period is vastly different from what came before: often nihilistic and dark, but also darkly funny. The Cuban revolution ceases to be an axis or player in these books, written by writers from a generation born or raised completely within the revolutionary era. In these stories, no one dwells on the revolution or examines it critically. It is simply there. Of these four writers, all but Prieto are making their U.S. debuts.

Whether perceived as good or bad, the 1959 revolution that turned out Batista has always provided plenty of material for the island's writers. Castro's rebels sprung not from rage but hope, and they would focus their energies and resources—including culture—on creating a New Man. This New Man was, of course, the revolution's protagonist and therefore the lead character in its early literature. In Edmundo Desnoes's 1965 novel Memorias del Subdesarrollo (Memories of Underdevelopment)—in many ways the signature book of the early revolution—the narrator is ambivalence personified, a struggle between his old bourgeois self and the new revolutionary ideal.

But by 1980, when the Soviet presence in Cuba was peaking, there was a seismic shift in Cuban letters. That year, Carpentier died; the enigmatic Desnoes slipped away in Venice, and the brilliant Reinaldo Arenas escaped during the chaos of the Mariel boatlift. Not surprisingly, Cuban literature in the '80s retreated. Nonetheless, there were books like Un Mundo de Cosas by Soler Puig, and Las Iniciales de la Tierra by Jesús Díaz, considered by many the great critical novel of the revolution.

Estévez's Thine Is the Kingdom (Arcade, 327 pp., $13.95 paper) is a direct descendant of these novels. It's a big, expansive story about life, death, and dreaming in pre-Castro Cuba. In its original Spanish, Estévez's work is a feast of language. (Unfortunately, the English translation by David Frye is flat and colorless.) Set in a rundown Havana neighborhood called The Island, it boasts a formidable cast of characters, from Merengue the pastry vendor to a tropical Saint Sebastian. In Thine Is the Kingdom, Estévez also offers up Doña Juana, a nonagenarian who is caught in an eternal and insular dream, never waking and refusing to die. Though technically set in pre-Castro Cuba, Thine Is the Kingdom's wistful, dreamy state could just as easily unfold in the early '90s, during the worst years of the Special Period—immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union and the loss, for Cuba, of its considerable economic support.

But Estévez breaks with novelists of the past: Mightily nuanced, the presence of the revolution is felt somewhere beyond the page, not as a new dawn, but as something more ambiguous. The mood is expectant, as in today's Havana, where change is anticipated but the form it will take remains a mystery. Thine Is the Kingdom ends on the eve of the rebel victory, making it impossible not to speculate about Doña Juana and what she will wake to—or from.

If Estévez's work owes much to the revolutionary canon, Gutiérrez's Dirty Havana Trilogy comes from a bastard lineage. Though Estévez is considered an official heir of Virgilio Piñera—the openly gay author of Rene's Flesh, marginalized during his lifetime and now considered canonical—it is Gutiérrez who embraces the obscene and perverse in him. And though Gutiérrez surely lacks Piñera's grace, he embodies his profane spirit and inhabits a similar place in the margins of polite society.

Dirty Havana Trilogy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 392 pp., $25) is a novel made up of interconnected short stories, each featuring a protagonist named Pedro Juan. Though initially Pedro Juan seems sad and broken, by book's end he is king of the squalor, a player in and creator of wretchedness. Written in a thick and unique Havana street argot, Dirty Havana Trilogy presents particular translation problems that are mostly overcome by Natasha Wimmer's English version. Some passages are a little stiff, and some things don't translate well—for example, "negro" as a term of endearment—but Wimmer captures Gutiérrez's voice with both sympathy and clarity.

The stories portray a society in decay and a people determined to survive at any cost. Pedro Juan's only goal is to stay alive, so he does it all: deals marijuana and sells empty soda cans on the black market, hustles tourists, smuggles art, and has lots of sex. In Gutiérrez's hands, sex is not romantic, soothing, or even especially passionate. Sex is dirty, grimy, sticky; sex is a balm from the constant frustrations of survival; sex is entertainment in the face of boredom, as cheap as a matinee, as empty as the grocery store shelves.

I checked my pockets. I had ten pesos and two dollars. Jack shit. I couldn't pay the woman a dollar hot dog for giving me a handjob. And it would probably be with a dry prick because most likely she wouldn't want to wet it with her saliva. . . . Sitting down facing the sea, with my back to the city, I scrubbed away. A few minutes later, I ejaculated, shooting a good jet of come into the dark, calm water. The Caribbean received my semen. There was lots of it. Too many days without a woman, letting time slip away.

Yet Gutiérrez's bland sensationalism feeds the worst stereotypes about Cubans as insatiable sexual creatures, creating a strange tension: On the one hand, Gutiérrez's vivid testimonies to Cuba's terrible days are refreshing and necessary; on the other, they reintroduce Cuba as the most depraved brothel of the Americas. There is, however, an insistent sexism and racism in Gutiérrez's writing that can't be explained as either cultural difference or benign in content—a cool overall detachment, a disdain almost, that Gutiérrez might be aiming as much at his readers as at his characters or even himself.

In Dirty Havana Trilogy the revolution doesn't exist. Socialism's infrastructure has collapsed: Nothing works, not even the bread lines. Without ever acknowledging the revolution, Gutiérrez presents its results with a cold eye: the scarcities, the desperation, the humiliation of a people taught and trained to be avatars of change—the New Man—now exploited and dependent on international charity and personal pity.

Ponte's In the Cold of the Malecón (City Lights, 127 pp., $10.95 paper) mines the Special Period as well, but instead of Gutiérrez's disenfranchised, Ponte's characters are, for the most part, disaffected professionals (or what might be viewed as a Cuban middle class): A student returning from the former Soviet Union finds his knowledge of Russian now useless; a child prodigy travels to meet his chess-rival pen pal only to discover he is a disappointing old man; a historian and an astrologer fall in love and wind up homeless.

Ponte writes in a spare style more akin to Eastern European writers than anything usually associated with the bounty of the Caribbean, Cuban or otherwise. His sentences are short and sharp, his settings bleak and cold. There is an extraordinary amount of dialogue—the title piece is nearly all an exchange between an old married couple—but what's important is what's not said. The conversations are for the most part elliptical, like short bursts of thoughts rather than actual talking. (The translations, by Dick Cluster and Cola Franzen, are excellent.)

"He chopped the meat into small pieces. Too small."

"Like his apartment," the mother commented.

"Yes. . . . And you know what I thought, seeing him cut the meat in the kitchen of the tiny apartment?"

She could imagine.

"I thought how strange that we've had a son."

In contrast to Gutiérrez's characters—who brawl and jerk off for release—Ponte's are more educated and sophisticated, more repressed and resigned to their aimless fates. They are aware not just of their discomfort, but of the circumstances behind them. They make choices, perhaps, that Gutiérrez cannot, and so they are more complicated because they are complicit. Smart and haunting, In the Cold of the Malecón sees the revolution as neither Estévez's ambivalent cloud nor Gutiérrez's Roman ruins. It appears instead as defining and ever present as the sea, so much that to mention it at all would be redundant.

Prieto's El Vuelo del Gato, The Flight of the Cat (Letras Cubanas in Cuba, Ediciones B in Spain), is not currently available through U.S. publishers, although the Spanish edition is finding its way into U.S. Latino bookstores. (His manuscript is circulating among U.S. publishing houses, but his ministerial rank in Castro's government is likely to prevent him from receiving the same kind of institutional welcome as his compatriots.) Yet it is, in many ways, the book that fills in the gaps of the others, and so it becomes required reading in order to understand contemporary Cuban literature.

It was Prieto, with a handful of other writers of his generation and younger, who cooked up the idea of the Lennon statue in Havana. The monument was born because Prieto, now 50 and seated close enough to Castro to sell the idea, made it happen. Yet Prieto, a lifelong Beatles fan, didn't get a chance to say anything during the dedication—that was left to Castro himself. In other words, the new guard could have its hero, but the old guard still has the stage. El Vuelo del Gato reads much like that dedication scene: The children of the revolution want to play, but the adults are still watching.

Perhaps most ironic, this one—the story penned by the most official writer on the island—is also the one that portrays, with love, not the New Man but the Common Cuban. El Vuelo del Gato is told in the first person by an unnamed narrator, one of four high school friends who come of age alongside the revolution. Two principal characters embody the essential conflict—Freddy Mamoncillo is sensual and intuitive, gregarious and heroic, while Marco Aurelio is solitary and cerebral, cursed with a yearning for perfection that, no matter how correct his analysis, is always confounded by the unexpected beauty of human error.

El Vuelo del Gato is the most Cuban of all these books, aware of the inherent conflict between tropical sensuality and the ethics of stoicism required by socialism and other ways of thinking that reject materialism and sentimentalism, awed and humbled by the fruits of syncretism and, most appreciably, miscegenation.

Prieto writes in a familiar, conversational tone, full of puns and nimble wordplay, homages to the Greeks and the Beatles, asides about everything from the arrival of the mango in the New World to the fall of the Berlin Wall, as if the entire story were unfolding over a long night and a bottle of rum between friends.

El Vuelo del Gato is not about the revolution, but about being an ordinary Cuban during the extraordinary days of the revolution. Prieto writes about military service and Angola, shortages, university purges of gays and hippies, people seeking political asylum, civic corruption, and whiskey as "the enemy's drink," but he never names the enemy any more than he names the revolution beyond the acronym of this or that ministry.

Where Estévez is bemused by his characters, Prieto is in love with his; where Gutiérrez revels in his marginalization, Prieto tries mightily to paint a tableau so inclusive its heavenly pantheon boasts Greek, African, and Christian divinities alongside relatives exiled in Miami; where Ponte's characters wait for change, Prieto's move along, sometimes simply evading their guilt, other times embracing it, but each and every time exhibiting a singular optimism that Cubans on both sides of the Straits of Florida commonly claim as their own.

El Vuelo del Gato is not a revolutionary novel, nor is it a novel critical of the revolution. Yet it contains a long, passionate paean to Emperor Marcus Aurelius that can't be read as anything but a defense of Castro, and alongside it lists enough hard times and ideological deviations that—though you sense Prieto the party man putting the brakes hard on Prieto the artist—the reader feels discomfort and even dread about what could happen in Cuba after Castro.

The Philosopher-king wanted to touch his people's Reasonable Soul and transform it, and for science and philosophy to fill the Body of the empire intravenously, and that's why he brought to Rome well-known wise men from Greece, Egypt, Syria. But his efforts failed: The patriarchs and their families simply put the wise men up in their palaces as if they were exotic ornaments, or a new kind of buffoon, and the people laughed at the wise men's flea-infested hair and beards, and their torn robes, and nobody listened to their counsel. Marcus Aurelius confirmed the stupid arrogance of humankind, its love of kitsch and wrongful paths, its resistance (blind, stubborn, inconceivable) to living the Truth. (translation from the Spanish by Achy Obejas)

This unease is not about what comes after the revolution exactly, just after Castro: Cuba might well open up and blossom or come undone via foreign influences and exploitation. Will it be a fresh start? Or will darker forces prevail and turn the island into the gulag Castro's foes have imagined? No one knows. What is clear is that, with 42 years in power, the Cuban revolution commands about half of Cuba's history after independence from Spain. And what these four novels demonstrate is that, in that time, the revolution has become an indelible part of Cuban life. Long after Castro's bones are ashes, the revolution will show itself in the Cuban cellular makeup, for good and bad.

Achy Obejas is a cultural writer with the Chicago Tribune and author of a forthcoming novel, Days of Awe.

A Refugee's Emotional, Ethnic Awakening in Her Native Cuba

Days of Awe
By Achy Obejas
Ballantine $24.95, 384 pages

By PAULA FRIEDMAN, SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

Two years after the revolution, Cubans began leaving the island on anything that would float--less terrified of Castro's communism, novelist Achy Obejas intimates in "Days of Awe," than they were of the persistent rumors that an invasion and a terrible war would follow. As Obejas' narrator, Alejandra explains it, Cubans feared that their country would be besieged by "another one of those bloody skirmishes the U.S. periodically undertook in Latin America." With much sadness, but little hesitation, Alejandra's parents shipped out in April of 1961 with their 2-year-old daughter in tow, stopping first in Miami, but finally settling in Chicago, where Lake Michigan provides the family with a bit of watery solace that reminds them of their homeland. As Alejandra grows up, she begins to grasp her parents' passionate attachment to their home country, learning as well about their all-but-dormant Jewish roots. Obejas takes the novel's title from the English translation of the Hebrew "Yamim Nora'im," the time between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, those religious "days of awe." But Obejas wisely holds back this explanation until late in the novel after the reader has ample time to absorb the process of awakening that Alejandra undergoes about her own nationality and faith. While both her parents, Nena and Enrique, were born to Jewish families, neither was raised Jewish. Both of their families had turned from their Jewishness as anti-Semitism swept Cuba during and after World War II. Later, in Castro's Cuba, it was simply better to claim no religious faith at all.

An interpreter and oral translator, Alejandra makes her first trip back to Cuba in 1987 for professional reasons, working for a group of progressive Chicago politicians and activists. But her parents' response to her travel plans leaves her unsettled: "My parents are not fanatical refugees, they do not assume everything about the revolution is hideous. As much as they may be alienated in the U.S., they've made peace with the difficult decision to leave Cuba. Yet, when I said I was going back to the island, they paused as if they needed a moment to adjust their antennas, to rearrange their sense of disbelief into something coherent and civil. Then they kicked into exile-style paranoia.

"'Be careful--don't talk to just anyone,' my mother warned me about my upcoming visit. 'You will get them into trouble if you talk to them.' ... 'You could get yourself in trouble,' my father said. 'You could wind up in jail."'

Waiting to go through processing in the Havana airport, Alejandra realizes that she hadn't been entirely honest with herself about her reasons for visiting Cuba. The truth was that this trip marked for her a "return to the Land of Oz" she'd conjured in her dreams. With subtlety and grace, Obejas depicts Alejandra's intensifying awareness of her own identity, as a Cuban, a Jew and a woman.

Visiting family and friends, Alejandra encounters a range of attitudes about Castro's revolution, with some believing the man no more than a scoundrel, and others seeing him as merely a flawed revolutionary. Given her own parents' fear of the government, Alejandra is surprised to find the various ways in which Cubans have made peace with their lives under Castro. It would be easier for her to let go of her homeland and return to America, the land where she was raised, she muses, if she could see the world in blacks and whites.

Through Moises Menach, Enrique's childhood pal, Alejandra learns about the complexities of life in modern Cuba, and she also learns about her parents' ambivalent ties to their own Jewishness. Obejas has created a true wise man in Moises, a man who possesses vision, compassion and the fortitude to carry on, despite hardship.

With Moises' son-in-law Orlando (permanently separated from his wife, Angela), Alejandra experiences a profound erotic awakening, feeling herself deeply in love for perhaps the first time in her life. Obejas masterfully links identity with place, language and the erotic life, without ever descending into sentimentality.

Her descriptions render her characters' emotional lives with a precision that precludes exotic stereotyping. But the novel yields further delights, as Obejas allows Alejandra to meditate on the cultural and philosophical differences reflected in language.

We learn, for example, that in Spanish, it is simply not possible to speak of love for an object with the same word used to speak of human love. This focus on language accounts for one of the novel's most enchanting riches, revealing a capacity to neatly articulate in Spanish the concepts that English and other languages have no words for.

From Publishers Weekly:
Born the day Castro came to power, the protagonist of this thoughtful novel comes with her mother and father to the United States when she is two, but cannot ignore her tangled Cuban roots. Alejandra San José and her parents, Nena and Enrique, settle in Chicago, where Enrique works as a literary translator and Nena grows roses and sunflowers. Their neighborhood is predominantly Jewish, and as Ale grows up she picks up on small signs that her family has something in common with its neighbors. It is not until she is an adult, however, working as an interpreter, that she discovers that her father is Jewish, the grandson of a flamboyantly Jewish hero of the Cuban war of independence; her mother, though devoutly Catholic, has Jewish ancestors, too. On a series of trips to Cuba, Ale comes to know her father's oldest friend, Moisés Menach, and through him learns her family's history. In her stays with the Menachs, and her charged friendship with Moisés's son-in-law, Orlando, she learns about contemporary Cuba and gradually comes to terms with her own identity. The searching narrative digs deep into questions of faith, conversion, nationality and history, exploring philosophical issues in human terms. Though sharp, cleverly observed details bring Havana and Chicago to life, the novel is richer in ideas than in depictions of place. Obejas (Memory Mambo) is concerned most of all with relationships between Ale and her lovers, male and female; between Ale and her secretive father. If the near-plotless narrative drags in places, it is redeemed by Obejas's clear-eyed, remarkably fresh meditation on familiar but perennially vital themes.

From Library Journal:
Obejas's (Memory Mambo) second novel may be the first in the subgenre of both Jewish American and Cuban American fiction: the Jewish-Cuban-American novel. In this well-considered and heartfelt examination of exile and return, two-year-old Alejandra San Jos has left Cuba in 1959 with her parents. Her father is Jewish, though he hides it, even breaking a window in anger when his daughter and her friends spy him praying in his basement office in Chicago. Her mother is both Catholic and a sometime believer in the Santer!a gods. Ale's visits to Cuba in 1987 and 1997 lead her to extraordinary discoveries about herself, her cultures, and her family, as she slowly learns of her great-grandfather's and father's clinging to a religion whose Cuban adherents have become scarce over time. Her own sexual experiences, more vivid in Cuba than in the United States, help her recognize that Cuba, Judaism, and tropical eroticism make up a complex personality, which Ale bears on her back like a Bedouin. With intelligent, intense writing, Obejas approaches, in ambition, the heady climes of Cuban American stalwarts Oscar Hijuelos and Cristina Garcia. Highly recommended for collections strong in Latino and Jewish American literature.
- Harold Augenbraum, Mercantile Lib. of New York

From Booklist:
*Starred Review* Obejas has chosen the vocations of her protagonists with care: Enrique is a translator, and his daughter, Alejandra, is an interpreter. Their occupations take on a spiritual dimension as they find themselves dwelling on the threshold between two worlds as defined by Spanish and English. This linguistic duality is but one of many dichotomies that shape Alejandra's life. Born in Havana on New Year's 1959, the very day Fidel Castro comes to power, she is raised in Chicago after her parents' daring escape. She returns to Cuba in 1987, where she's ambushed by the island's material poverty and sensual wealth, all but adopted by the family of Enrique's boyhood friend, and galvanized by the complexities of her family history. It seems that their Catholicism is camouflage: her father's ancestors were conversos, Jews forced to convert during the Spanish Inquisition. As Alejandra, who comes to realize that she is not only bilingual and bicultural but also both the bounties and paradoxes of bireligious and bisexual, struggles to come to terms with her boundary-crossing existence, Obejas relates the compelling and disquieting history of Judaism and anti-Semitism in Cuba amidst evocative musings on exile, oppression, inheritance, the unexpected consequences of actions both weak and heroic, and the unruliness of desire and love. A journalist as well as a novelist, Obejas is also concerned with the biases and selectivity of history, politics, and the news. Richly imagined and deeply humanitarian, Obejas' arresting second novel keenly dramatizes the anguish of concealed identities, severed ties, and sorely tested faiths, be they religious, political, or romantic.
-Donna Seaman

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