Goodbye, My Havana: The Life and Times of a Gringa in Revolutionary Cuba by Anna Veltfort (review)

Recommended background reading: Frances Negrón-Muntaner and Yolando Martínez-San Miguel, "In Search of Lourdes Casal's 'Ana Veldford'" Social Text 25, no. 3 (2007): 57–84.

Anna Veltfort's Goodbye, My Havana is one of the most important and innovative books about Cuba to be published recently. A graphic designer and illustrator, Anna Veltfort has produced a graphic memoir that is riveting and visually enticing. Originally published in Spanish in 2017, the book is now available in an English paperback edition with Redwood Press, a new trade imprint of Stanford University Press. This story of a German American woman, a "gringa," coming of age as a lesbian in Cuba during the tumultuous years of revolutionary fervor fills a huge blank in our understanding of Cuban history.

For years, when I taught the work of Reinaldo Arenas and discussed the harassment and persecution of gay men in Cuba in the 1960s and 1970s, students would ask me what the situation had been like for lesbians. There wasn't a parallel experiential account that I could recommend—until now. With Veltfort's book in the world, I can finally say, to know what it was like to be a lesbian during the height of the revolution in Cuba, read Goodbye, My Havana.

Readers in the Cuban studies community have heard of Anna Veltfort (also variously spelled Ana Veltfort and Ana Veldford) through the famed poem dedicated to her by writer, scholar, and activist Lourdes Casal, who led the Antonio Maceo Brigade and advocated for reconciliation between the diaspora and the island. First published in Areíto in 1976, and reprinted in 1981 in Palabras juntan revolución, following Casal's death and burial in Cuba, the poem's much-quoted closing lines became a canonical expression of the angst felt by the Cuban American children of exiles: "I carry this marginality, immune to all turning back / too habanera to be newyorkina, / too newyorkina to be /—even to become again—anything else."

Yet for years, no one seemed to know who Anna Veltfort was, or why Lourdes Casal had chosen to dedicate the poem to her. This "mystery," as described by Frances Negrón-Muntaner and Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel in a superb article in Social Text (2007), led them to go in search of Anna Veltfort, "a lesbian legend in Havana," engaging in an interview with Veltfort in which she shared many of the stories about her life in revolutionary Cuba that would eventually find their way into her book. Casal, also a lesbian, felt a bond with Veltfort after meeting her in New York. Though they weren't close friends, and Veltfort wasn't born in Cuba, they shared the feeling of being foreigners wherever they went. But in regard to sexuality in Cuba, their lives led them in vastly different directions. Casal chose queer invisibility to carry out her political work and be accepted as a revolutionary. In turn, Veltfort, arriving in Havana at the age of sixteen in 1962 and entangled in intimate relationships during the decade she lived there, couldn't hide her lesbianism in a surveilled society. Casal, in dedicating her poem to the visibly queer Veltfort, left a secret (or not so secret) inscription of her lesbian self.

With Goodbye, My Havana, Veltfort finally comes out of the closet of Casal's poem. After such a long literary silence, she gets to tell her own story. And what a story it is.

Veltfort settles in Cuba, not through her own volition but because her stepfather, Ted Veltfort, a fervent communist who served in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War and was...