One Island, Many Voices: Conversations with Cuban-American Writers (review)

The twelve Cuban American authors Eduardo R. del Rio interviews in One Island, Many Voices were selected not only for their individual prominence but also for their collective power in delivering a diverse portrait of contemporary Cuban American writing. Representative of a spectrum of literary genres, cultural identities, and political interests, the group enables a new focus on Cuban American literature without neatly cohering into a unified canon with easily definable characteristics.

Because the interviewer’s project stems from personal as well as academic interests, his study reveals an intimate, insider’s view while articulating broader perspectives examining the field of Cuban American literature. Although del Rio admits that he fails to remain dispassionate, his “biased” tone lends greater characterization to these twelve encounters, probing deeply into the personal biographies and convictions that fuel each author’s published works. What results are not just interviews but vibrant conversations that include detailed descriptions of each subject’s unique appearance, style, mannerisms, speech patterns, and work environment.

Although the book’s main title suggests a focus on Cuban writers on the island, the authors examined in this volume all belong to the one-and-a-half generation of Cuban exiles, having migrated as children and spent most of their lives in the United States. This proves a key element in del Rio’s measured representation of Cuban American literature. While regarding the island as a common point of origin, the voices in this volume disperse to collect U.S. experiences in ways that design a richly bicultural approach to family, identity formation, language, and exile. While del Rio questions his subjects using these discrete categories, conversations evolve to prove that those qualities are inextricably linked. None of the twelve responses, however, is similar. This deliberate resistance to establishing common characteristics for Cuban American writers prompts del Rio’s vital declaration that we are to move “beyond the hyphen” (popularized by Gustavo Pérez Firmat, who is also featured as an author in this volume) if we are to comprehend the diversity inherent in this reputedly narrow literary field.

The book’s focus on Pérez Firmat (who defies classification as a scholar, essayist, novelist, poet, and critic—he is often all at once) and the incorporation of creative writers who are also anthologists and/or editors—Carolina Hospital, Virgil Suárez, Dolores Prida—permits elaborate, reflexive analysis as the Cuban American literary field comments on itself. Del Rio frequently poses questions to one author about another’s work and applies themes and terminologies produced by the writers as a critical tool to investigate Cuban American writing. In addition to Prida, two other dramatists, Eduardo Machado and the Pulitzer Prize–winning Nilo Cruz, are highlighted alongside the well-known novelists and poets Cristina García, Roberto Fernández, Dionisio Martínez, Pablo Medina, Achy Obejas, and Ricardo Pau-Llosa.

The volume’s rich introduction includes a cogent survey of U.S.-Cuban writing stretching back to the nineteenth century, dimensionalizing a tradition too often simplified as a Castro-era construct. It also raises important questions central to this critical examination of the field: What distinguishes Cuban American writing from other Latino literatures? Can both limitations and empowerment result from the process of labeling? How does the field connect to the American literary tradition? What happens when the idea of Cuban American becomes layered with additional nationalities or identities associated with gender or sexuality? Although such inquires provide a sturdy framework throughout the interviews, the epilogue falls short of concluding their application. Del Rio ends on a flat note, ignoring the deeper issues raised in the introduction and designing instead arbitrary pairings of the male authors— leaving one quartet of women—in a superficial comparison and contrast that bears little relationship to their writing.

Despite this and a few minor errors made in relating outside of the field (Machado’s mislabeling of Tom Stoppard as an American playwright is prominently featured twice...