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  • Impossible Returns: Narratives of the Cuban Diaspora by Iraida H. López
  • Ada Ortuzar-Young
Impossible Returns: Narratives of the Cuban Diaspora. López, Iraida H. Gainesville: U of Florida P, 2015. Pp. 295. ISBN 978-0-81306-103-0.

This timely and well-researched study comes at a moment of great historical changes for Cubans both inside and outside the island. Stories of diasporas are always complex and often focus on traumatic events of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. One characteristic of diasporic discourse is its tendency to place itself simultaneously in the threshold of the past and the present, in a Janus-like fashion evoking the Roman god who faces two ways. The literature of the Cuban diaspora is no exception.

According to López, the return motif shapes the artistic production of the one-and-a-half generation children or adolescents born in Cuba who had reached adulthood in the United States. Her book "attempts to recognize the robust quest for home and homeland cultivated in one's imagination through stories of physical and metaphorical return" (xi). Among those studied are renowned authors, artists and scholars Ana Mendieta, Ruth Behar, María Brito, Cristina García, Carlos Eire, Achy Obejas, Ernesto Pujol, and Gustavo Pérez Firmat. While this book centers on the last Cuban diaspora resulting from the 1959 Cuban Revolution, these writers follow in the footsteps of successive previous Cuban diasporas, most notably that of many nineteenth century intellectuals, such as José Martí, José María Heredia, José Antonio Saco, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda (to name a few), that preceded them and who maintained strong connections with the island even during long absences from it.

"An Uphill Battle. The Contentious Politics of Return" (chapter 1) provides a broad overview of various waves of migration since 1959—those who eventually would consider (or not) returning to the island. Chapter 2, "Daring to Go Back: In Search of Traces," focuses on the physical [End Page 307] return of four writers. Among those seeking out her eroding Cuban past is Ruth Behar, who goes back in search of her once vibrant Jewish community. Her work (and her return) serves to reflect on the subject of successive diasporas, as is the case of her Jewish parents who first migrate to Cuba and later to the United States. The writings of these in-between generations are often interspersed with photographs seemingly as a resource to keep their memories from fading away. Tony Mendoza's photographic book uses them to supplant his lack of personal memories. Overall, these writes encounter a changed Cuba, in ruins, suffering physically and economically under the ravages of the Special Period. That is, a Cuba new to them.

Chapter 3, "Chiseling (in) Cuba," centers on visual and performance artist Ana Mendieta. Her rupestrian sculptures become a lieu de mémoire leaving a real and emotional imprint on Cuban soil signaling both her absence and her presence. "Cuban Childhood Redux" (chapter 4) begins with an epigraph from Pablo Medina's Exiled Memories: A Cuban Childhood. It serves as an excellent reminder of the complexities of remembering a place that one left as a child: "The truism that one can never go home again becomes a special predicament for the young exile: my childhood lies inside the bowl of distance and politics, unapproachable and thus disconnected from my adulthood. The two revolve around each other like twins starts, pulling and tugging, without hope of reconciliation" (121), as the narratives in this chapter show. Two writers (Carlos Eire and Gustavo Pérez Firmat) and two visual artists (Ernesto Pujol and María Brito) are discussed in this chapter. Although Cuba is a key subject in their works, only Pujol has returned to Havana to show his work. The others reach Cuba through their works, thus inextricably linking the present to the past. Eire's Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy (2003) and Learning to Die in Miami: Confessions of a Refugee Boy (2010) vividly recall his Havana childhood. Pérez Firmat, on the other hand, focuses on growing up in Miami in Next Year in Cuba: A Cubano's Coming of Age in America...

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