Cuban-American Literature and Art: Negotiating Identities (review)

This intriguing collection of essays explores diverse representations of Cuban identity in novels, poems, and paintings by writers and artists both on the island itself as well as in exile. While the majority of the essays focus on post-Revolutionary cultural production, the Revolution clearly remains the touchstone of all that is written about Cuba. Though the essays celebrate nuanced visions of Cuban and Cuban American identities, a tone of melancholy informs the volume. The editors establish this longing in the epigraph: a quotation from Roberto G. Fernández narrates the process by which two peoples come together only to fight in an attempt to destroy each other, leaving both groups mortally wounded. Irrespective of the debates about Fidel Castro’s Revolution, the editors imply that the Cuban psyche has been damaged irreparably by the last fifty years; this text details the cultural works that have emerged in the midst of the instability.

The collection is divided into two parts, the first dedicated to literature and the second to art. In their introductory essay, Alvarez Borland and Bosch review recurrent themes that mark discussions of Cuban national identity, mentioning “hybrid identities, biculturation, bilingualism, immigration, adaptation, and exile” (4). They go on to explain that the goal of the volume is to foment discussion about Cuban American literature and art and the relations between these varied creative expressions. In the first essay, “The Spell of the Hyphen,” Gustavo Pérez Firmat examines the writings of Orlando González Esteva, comparing them with two of his own poems, “Bilingual Blues” and “The Tongue Surgeon.” He argues that both he and González Esteva work in a void, in an in-between space that exists between Cuba and the United States; they write on the hyphen. Pérez Firmat calls attention to the lingering nostalgia many Cubans and Cuban Americans feel for the island, a characteristic that distinguishes them from other Latino groups. He writes: “Cuban-American literature may originate in exile but it is not exile literature, because it is not sufficiently grounded in the facticity, in the raw reality of the island” (28). And so it is the weight of absence that marks the literary works produced by this group.

With “Figures of Identity: Ana Menéndez and Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s Photographs,” Isabel Alvarez Borland looks at Menéndez’s Loving Che (2003), arguing that this novel is in dialogue with Cabrera Infante’s Vista del amanecer en el trópico (1974). These works include embedded images (photographs) and texts (diaries) that come to signify exile. For Alvarez Borland, both novels “explore the nature of historical contexts and in different ways debunk the idea that historical and fictional writing are all that different” (32). History is neither objective nor impartial; rather, it is something that is invented and adjusted at will, even on an individual basis. Alvarez Borland identifies this desire to rewrite the past, thereby generating a new and different narrative, as a defining characteristic of Cuban American identity.

Loving Che is also the subject of Adriana Méndez Rodenas’s essay, “Engendering the Nation: The Mother/Daughter Plot in Cuban American Fiction.” Comparing this novel with Cristina García’s Dreaming in Cuban (1992) and The Agüero Sisters (1997), Méndez Rodenas argues that the “coming-of-age of [the] female protagonists [is] a repressed yet crucial factor in the refashioning of Cuban identity across the island/diaspora divide” (48). She presents a brief and useful overview of French feminist theory as well as Marianne Hirsch’s theory of female development. These narratives encourage a revision of Cuban history to include those voices that have been silenced. For Iraida H. López, it is women writers who bridge the divide between Cuba and its diaspora in the United States. In “Reading Lives in Installments: Autobiographical Essays of Women from the Cuban Diaspora,” she provides an instructive overview of the tradition of the autobiographical essay in the Cuban American community. She...