"Exile Memoirs: Beyond the Confines of Obligated Memory" Memoirs Reviewed

Like all wars, the Cuban Revolution generated carefully constructed narratives of its history with heroes and villains starkly cast and storylines carefully scripted. Inversely, the opposition did the same. For the exile community, the revolution betrayed became a central theme, as did triumphs in exile. We became the golden exiles who thrived despite the loss of nation, family, property, and imagined futures. Our defiance included reproducing Cuba in the United States. And nostalgia was a way of not forgetting.

But with this process came an official narrative that demanded unanimity in the renditions of past and present. Paul Ricoeur calls this obligated memory; what we are expected to remember is not necessarily what happened to us, but it is what we must remember. The reality was more complex, as were the human experiences lived through multiple histories, and some of these have found themselves into testimonials and memoirs.

Some of the first cracks in the official narrative surfaced when young Cuban exiles started to return to the island, an act that in and of itself defied the official narrative of exile. With this movement came testimonies of life in the United States that for many of us, especially those raised outside the nestled confines of Cuban Miami, included ugly confrontations with racism and discrimination because we were Cubans. In Contra viento y marea, for instance, Lourdes Casal and a group of editors from Areíto gathered personal testimonies from those returning to Cuba with the Antonio Maceo Brigade. The stories did not fit neatly into the narrative of the golden exile. Much later Ruth Behar and Juan Leon initiated a project to collect personal narratives of those who did return to Cuba, further constructing alternatives to the tropes of survival and success. Bridges to Cuba, their two-volume publication of personal narratives, poems, and stories established a plurality of experiences. By Heart/De Memoria: Cuban Women's Journeys in and out of Exile, which I edited, brings together women's personal narratives of encounters with the island from those of us in exile and with narratives from those on the island. By the 1990s, returning had also generated its own mythologies and acceptable renditions, and these essays complicated the narratives on both sides of the Florida Straits. All these projects have sought to build alternative communities through texts.

Other memoirs sought to fill in the personal stories of immigration. Cuban immigration has been periodized by time and method of departure. The dramatic exodus of fourteen thousand unaccompanied minors in Operation Pedro Pan engendered its own deeply militarized memories that reflect the collective coping with the pain arising from the separation of parents and children. Pedro Pans become symbols of the origins of a community born of extreme sacrifice. The narrative called for presenting our experience as heroic, as we were saved from communism. Silence might have been expected about the pain or abuse encountered by the children. Still, memoirs like Carlos Erie's, Waiting for Snow to Fall in Havana, presented a more complex set of experiences, as did Flora Gonzalez's essay "House on Shifting Sand: in Bridges. Both the Cuban and the US government complicated the Mariel exodus by casting immigrants as criminals and unwanted escoria. But Mirta Ojito's Waiting for Mañana gave us the version of traveling through those hate-filled and racialized rhetorical waves...