Cuba

One Hundred Bottles

annette — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 08:00:00 +0000

An intensely vivid and riveting story of abuse, pain, honesty, erotica and discovery-this combination of words may not sound appealing, but the provocative and imaginative novel of these topics woven together creates a graphic fall from the literary world into our laps of reading desire. Crafted by Ena Lucía Portela, One Hundred Bottles is the story of a young woman named Z, who is incidentally an amazing storyteller (as well as a reluctantly educated person) and who leads us through her story while trying to find meaning behind her experiences. Given her challenging background, Z delivers a step by step account of her life (with creative backstory included) and you hope she will end up a champion. Z faces what seems the most challenging of all living through an unlucky survivorship; however, she keeps moving along through life, and author Portela puts you, the reader, right next to her. You feel the slaps, you feel the insults, and you breathe a sigh of relief with her at the climax.

Educated at the University of Havana, Ena Lucía Portela brings her life to fiction and brilliantly sets her story in the historic rocky era of Cuba in the early 1990s. All characters seek a chosen lifestyle and all are survivors; depending on their current resources, people enter and spin through Z's life while their own tales turn-and none are left unexplained.

Although she is called "stupid", Z is curious and insistent. Her friends and support range from her priest to a lesbian mystery author. At certain points in reading One Hundred Bottles, you feel like you are reading strictly a whodunit sort of detective novel, but actually the author (and best friend of Z) writes the detective novel based on Z's retelling of actual real events in her section of the world. Brilliantly juxtaposed, the work keeps you engrossed; at times powerfully violent, the novel reminds you that this is what a certain group in a certain culture experienced during this time; if a reader is intimate with abuse or violence, he or she may identify with these parts, but redemption triumphs and allows readers to breathe deeply a sigh of relief.

Published originally in Spanish in 2002, this novel holds up. Reminiscent of Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Brando Skyhorse's The Madonnas of Echo Park, One Hundred Bottles brings the reader a culture delightfully retold through the eyes of a woman who remarkably survives. As well, the story offers hope and fulfillment, both necessary traits for living in today's world.

Written by: Carolyn Espe, February 18th 2011

Cuba On My Mind

emily — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 16:00:00 +0000

By Katie Wainwright

Livingston Press

Cuba, in my mind: cigars, Fidel Castro’s beard, Elian Gonzalez, and a very murky high school level comprehension of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Let’s get more specific and, arguably, more self-incriminating. What comes to mind when I think of pre-Castro Cuba? The Godfather: Part II. That lavish New Year’s Eve party where Michael discovers Fredo’s betrayal. Oh yes, and the actual history: Fulgencio Batista stepping down (read: fleeing), leaving Cuba to Castro.

Clearly, I am not the most informed. But seriously, as an American who was born and educated well into Castro’s rule, how much objectivity, let alone compassion, has informed my understanding of Cuba’s people and culture? With this question, and the sincere hope of expanding my mental impression, I cracked the spine of Katie Wainwright’s first novel, Cuba on My Mind.

The novel begins as Gramma Catalina is waking up, her hand being held by her grandson, Wayne Olaf. In the present, Catalina is dying; receiving hospice care in her daughter’s mansion, paid for by her indifferent son-in-law. Feeling her body shut down, and uncomfortable with the medicines and contraptions unnaturally keeping her alive, Catalina longs for her final freedom. Unsure of how much time she has left, her grandson Wayne Olaf is there, wishing to record as much of her life story as he can. And of course, Wayne has issues of his own to overcome—a twenty-one-year-old Tulane law student, buckling under his parents’ pressuring control over his professional and romantic future. Turning to one another, grandmother and grandson forge a bond that bridges their fragmented family, and allows them both to grow.

Carried largely by Catalina’s narrative of her own life, Cuba on My Mind transitions between her childhood in Banes, Cuba and the present in New Orleans. Growing up, she is the only daughter of Scotsman McAuley, who is the Administrator for the U.S. Sugar Company, and Cuban mother, called Santa Caridad (Charity) by the people. From this position of privilege, Catalina’s memories allow the reader insight into the tensions between the gringos and the Cuban people. Divided by the Banes River Bridge, under which the most destitute and dying live, Catalina’s worldview is consistently influenced by the stark difference between the pueblo civil and the American company’s private land.

Given these juxtaposing realities, and the many anecdotes from her past, I wish Wainwright would have more forcibly commented on the clear economic and social inequalities within her Banes community. Almost all Catalina recounts alludes to these discrepancies, but I believe more evocative language could have made these instances more powerful to the reader. Further, I would have loved more about the strong Cuban women in her life. Loyally cared for and protected by her fierce Nanny Carmen, “an ornery creature…peasant from the hills, a square woman strong as any man,” and her mother, Santa Caridad, who has the compassion and courage to aid the rebels, even with Batista’s knowledge. To me, these women, and the other housemaids who gossip about and care for their colonizing employers are the novel’s backbone.

Although Castro’s revolution is the novel’s historical anchor, as I read, I realized the story is much more poignantly about family—from nuclear to national. In the present, the familial moments resonated. Having lost all but one of my grandparents in recent years, I have seen their deterioration and understood the tough decisions that come with properly caring for a dying loved one. It is taxing on any family, and again, although I wish she would have delved more, I commend Wainwright for taking this on as well.

The novel’s shortcomings stem from Wainwright's attempting to do too much. As much as I can quibble about the plot being too neat at times, and characters that are a bit underdeveloped, it is clear Cuba on My Mind is a work of love and nostalgia for the author's birthplace. And for a self-proclaimed hobby writer, Wainwright didn't do all that bad.

Written by: Alison Veith, November 3rd 2010

The Cuban Revolution (1959-2009): Relations with Spain, the European Union, and the United States

admin — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 01:00:00 +0000

By Joaquín Roy

Palgrave MacMillan

Joaquín Roy’s study is, to my knowledge, the most comprehensive attempt to define Cuba’s relationship to the Western World (Europe and the U.S.) in the past fifty years. There is no question of its timely publication—to coincide with the fifty year anniversary of the Cuban Revolution (1959-2009). Indeed, this is a moment when the world is questioning the ability of this small island nation to remain independent and politically isolated while in permanent conflict with the most powerful nation in the world and only 90 miles from its coast. How on earth did Castro’s Cuba survive? Why hasn’t it, like many other Latin American nations fallen prey to either an insidious or explicit United-States sponsored decline? In Nicaragua, the Sandinistas certainly did (1990), and in Chile, Salvador Allende did, almost twenty years before (1973). What specifically makes Cuba exceptional?

Roy is very well placed to deal with these questions since he is the author of more than thirty books on the European Union (EU), Cuba, and the U.S.’ diplomatic relations and policies. His study Cuba, the United States, and the Helms-Burton Doctrine: International Reactions previously explored some of the larger points that he develops in this more recent tome.

At a time when left-leaning governments are being elected in many Latin American countries and seemingly coming together, Roy’s analysis is precious. It details the ebb and flow of an ever-shifting diplomacy in great detail, ranging from the specifics of economic aid from individual countries or from the EU, to the intricate rapport between high level officials, the “butterfly-effects” of diplomacy—if ever there was one in the political sphere.

Roy’s study reviews the notorious aspects of the Cuban diplomacy, such as the Helms-Burton Law (Cuban embargo, or “blockade” [bloqueo] as the Cubans call it), and adds detail to this bigger picture. Because Cuba’s independence is such a novelty (it was the last Latin American colony to achieve sovereignty in 1898 after more than four centuries of colonial rule), the analysis goes back to the beginning of the island, providing much detail on the rocky foundations of the autonomous country, a period which lasted about 50 years before the Revolution. Roy also delves into more complex aspects of Cuba’s relations with Spain after the signing of the Treaty of Paris and the “end” of the Spanish Empire, navigating the contrasts and parallels between the Franco and post-Franco relations.

Of course, Roy’s attempt to separate the analyses of each country in individual chapters is futile since the aforementioned “butterfly effect” makes all diplomacy unavoidably intertwined. Many decisions are entangled and, especially in recent years, reactions to any statement are instantaneous. The rotating presidency of the EU is one of the most convoluted examples of this; each country has its diplomacy, and the EU has its own relations, but since the presidency is revolving, this provokes knotting and redundancies. Yet, while reading Roy’s text, one is never lost in his analysis and this despite the detail it contains. Because it synthesizes many different points of view, this work is essential to anyone endeavoring to understand just why the Cuban Revolution is still alive. Of course, Roy doesn’t provide us with the answer to that question, but then again, neither does (or can?) anyone else.

Written by: Sophie M. Lavoie, February 2nd 2010

How to Leave Hialeah

admin — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 01:04:00 +0000

By Jennine Capó Crucet

University of Iowa Press

In real life, I have had only a small glimpse of Miami, driving through on the way to the Florida Keys. After reading Jennine Capó Crucet’s story collection How to Leave Hialeah, I feel I have witnessed Miami life on the most intimate levels.

This debut story collection won the 2009 Iowa Short Fiction Award and was a finalist for the thirty-fourth Annual Chicano/Latino Literary Prize. The eleven stories, one of which is set in Cuba, are about characters who could be part of one big, extended family in Miami’s Cuban American community. With narrators and protagonists ranging in age from childhood to retirement, Capó Crucet demonstrates her ability to write in a believable voice for a variety of characters.

While Capó Crucet has brought to life a particular community, the themes in her stories translate across cultures: love and loss, familial and marital relationships, desire for success, the generation gap. Finding a balance between independence and familial obligations has a central place, and one narrator describes his family as being “like the heat in a car you’ve left parked in the sun.”

The stories deal with ordinary, painful struggles such as facing illness and making ends meet; the soap opera dramas of family resentments and grudges; and the challenges of transmitting values and culture to the next generation. Moments of beauty are sprinkled throughout, in the kindnesses shown to one another and the small, physical pleasures of daily life. My favorite story was "The Next Move," about a man whose wife had gone home to Cuba for a visit, and how he coped with a glimpse of life without her. This old man’s voice was so clear, vivid evidence of Capó Crucet’s gift for listening to real voices and transforming them into print.

Even when the stories have bizarre and outlandish plot devices, the results are fantastic. A couple of times I had to realize that what seemed odd to me would not to another reader (and vice versa), depending on life experience. (For example, the opening story has a young woman go from a dance club to church, and while at first surprising, that seemed reasonable to me.) I look forward to Capó Crucet’s next book, and will check her website regularly in the hopes of seeing information about new stories published.

Written by: Lisa Rand, November 9th 2009

Alicia en el Pueblo de Maravillas (Alice in Wondertown)

admin — Wed, 20 May 2009 17:05:00 +0000

Directed by Daniel Diaz Torres

First Run Features

As Alice in Wondertown begins, a sense of foreboding emanates from the screen. Alice is running along a beach, away from an invisible threat, and her ill-fitting boots are impeding her progress. She makes it to the main road, screaming to a truck full of workers for help. After what seems like a full minute of Alice screaming, the truck finally screeches to a halt and the occupants acknowledge the distressed woman in the street. Alice gratefully hops aboard the back of the truck.

As the truck begins to roll along again, a tall, hooded figure rises above the rest of the passengers and again Alice is sent into a screaming panic. With a look that can only be described as sheer mania, Alice rises to face the figure walking towards her and, in one swift movement, causes it to be thrown from the truck and off the bridge the truck is crossing. Later, investigators from the Cuban government scouring the crime scene can find no body, no clothing, and no evidence of a body having fallen from a 100-foot bridge to the grass below.

This scene can be considered a metaphor for how the rest of movie seems to work. There is always a form of tension or distress looming in the distance, but it is hard to explain how much of this distress and the resulting actions are actual or merely perceived by the protagonist, Alice. Much like Lewis Carroll’s Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the film straddles the line between the sane and the absurd, and absurdity seems to win out in the end.

The film is set in the small town of Maravillas, where Alice becomes a drama teacher after leaving her office job, and her lover Serafin. The night of her arrival, Alice settles into her roach infested hostel room and rips down a poster describing the virtues of hard work. While at the sink in the bathroom, she opens up the mirror to find that, rather than seeing a medicine cabinet, she is facing Omar Rodriguez, who will become her companion and defender throughout the film. They greet one another and partake in momentary small talk. Omar has a face full of shaving cream and Alice is still getting over the shock of finding a person in her medicine cabinet, so they say goodnight. Omar leaves her by saying, “Maravillas loves the theater, it’s in the blood.”

Throughout her days in Maravillas, a vision of Serafin repeatedly appears to Alice. He calls her naïve and tries to persuade her to return to her old life. She ignores his pleas, saying that she has no troubles in Maravillas and would like to stay. However, she never offers Serafin or viewers a reason as to why she decided to go to Maravillas in the first place.

Alice faces resistance and anger from town residents as she attempts to modernize their annual play. A rabid debate ensues over whether learning history is more important than creating change. Alice argues in favor of change, saying that it will make the play more interesting and more enjoyable for everyone involved. This assertion causes some of the Maravillans to become frenzied with anger, and Alice must leave the play rehearsal quickly.

After the tumultuous and non-sensical play rehearsal, Alice begins to become of aware of the many strange and backwards seeming sights, people, and situations that she sees daily in Maravillas. Sitting on a bench in the scorching Cuban sun, Alice confides in Omar that she has the desire to write about the strange stories of Maravillas. She is in disbelief that no one has published the ridiculous stories of the place already. Omar, who was always staunchly in support of Alice’s progressive ideas, now tells her that she is naïve. A loudspeaker vomits as he says these words. The distinction between reality and illusion is now completely non-existent.

Alice in Wondertown is worth seeing if for no other reason than to view a Cuban film that reflects the rich culture and struggle of this nation. After the movie set attendance records when it was initially released in 1991, the Cuban government stopped showing it on the grounds of indecency and absurdity. While the film is full of political observations masked in absurdity—like Alice’s closing moral, “You’ll never get far with fizzy water that you have to shake”—it offers a strong female protagonist and a cast of truly unforgettable characters. Are the political and artistic illusions in the film symbolic or merely 'theater'? That’s up to you to decide.

Written by: Rachel Muzika Scheib, May 20th 2009

Ruins

admin — Wed, 13 May 2009 17:23:00 +0000

By Achy Obejas

Akashic Books

Upon reading Ruins, I was struck by the urgency of the content. Set in post-revolutionary Cuba the characters exist in a state of stagnant ideologies and hopes. Throughout the narrative Achy Obejas exposes a world that is startlingly familiar, one in which political values change according to the realities in which they exist. Obejas is an award-winning novelist and poet who translated Junot Diaz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel into Spanish. A native of Havana, Obejas’ Cuba is both fantastic and forcefully real; this combination is precisely what makes her narrative so potent.

The protagonist of Ruins is a man who came of age during the Cuban Revolution in 1959. Usnavy has never let the patriotic ideals that were indoctrinated during youth escape his aging heart. Named both tragically and comically after the U.S. Navy ships moving in and out of the port of Havana, he has never been able to evade the “long shadow of the north” that haunts his life.

Usnavy lives in a dilapidated house with a wife and a daughter that have resorted to eating torn up carpet seasoned like meat in place of the real thing. Despite their real need for American currency, Usnavy refuses to participate in the growing dependence on the U.S. His dreams of Cuba’s past often conflict with his families hopes for the future. With more and more friends taking the dangerous journey to the shores of Miami, he does not merely give in. Usnavy fervently rejects the implication that America could hold anything greater than his beautiful revolutionary homeland.

Usnavy’s preoccupation with the past is manifested in his obsession with an antique lamp passed down to him from his deceased mother. The lone source of light in their otherwise dismal room, the lamp’s absurd garishness becomes a source of resentment for the two women in Usnavy’s life. Transfixed by the illuminated images of Africa created by the stained glass, he is content to live through the unpleasantries of life in post-revolution Cuba. It is not until the discovery of another lamp similar to his precious family heirloom that Usnavy begins to experience the desires that many of his fellow compañeros have expressed through their preoccupation with American wealth.

Obejas’ Ruins is full of contradictions that bring to light the complications of real life. She addresses the fluidity of values and ideologies when a young man returns from Miami as a woman, or when Usnavy’s role as caretaker is subverted when his wife’s resourcefulness saves the family. As time passes the hopes and dreams of a nation sway accordingly. Those who are lost in the past find themselves clinging to values that no longer hold the meaning they once did. Ultimately, Obejas reveals that political ideologies are as fluid as anything else, and they are not immune to the wearying effects of old age, a sentiment that resonates today.

Written by: Lizzy Shramko, May 13th 2009

Fidel's Last Days

admin — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 16:50:00 +0000

By Roland Merullo

Shaye Areheart Books

Fidel’s Last Days is a novel about a fictional conspiracy to kill Fidel Castro by applying a poisonous topical cream to his hairline. Supposedly the CIA has attempted to assassinate Castro 638 times, but Roland Merullo leads you to believe that maybe this time, with the cream, the secret society, and the beautiful woman, it will work. It has to.

The story moves effortlessly between Carolina Anzar Perez in Miami and Carlos Arroyo Gutierrez in Havana. Carolina is our likeable protagonist. She is powerful, wealthy, independent, and a trained agent of deceit: “At five foot five and 121 pounds, she could incapacitate a man twice her weight with one kick.” But hold onto your envy, because with that independence comes a concomitant void. Beyond her powerful uncle she has no family, no kids, and no peaceful daily existence. But we can tell Caroline won’t give up her espionage for the life of a “domestic would-be saint.” She’ll never back down, she’ll never fail—she is far too good at succeeding.

Carlos is Cuba’s Minister of Health, and in his opinion the country is sick, its strength ready to give way. He is our portal to Castro’s inner circle, where we see that fear, like a vicious school schoolgirl rumor, has infected contemporary Cuba. The torture, the corruption, the death—it’s real. People tell themselves it’s not so they can walk alone after dark to get milk for tomorrow, but Merullo reminds us that it’s real, and that a land governed by fear is a playground for evil.

When given the chance, Carlos risks his life and his loved ones to fight for his ideals. But he is untrained, paranoid, and disillusioned. So we turn the pages, wondering if he can survive under the weight of his task. Meanwhile, Carolina finds herself in the midst of her own inner turmoil, “being tugged gently back again, not all the way back, but closer, into her Cubanness, one high-heeled foot feeling around tentatively in the old world.” Eventually we don’t know who to trust, or just how much is at stake.

Fidel’s Last Days is clever and sneaky, with provocative characters and a transparent look at Cuba’s messy political calculus. Besides that it is thoroughly entertaining and at times even educational.

Written by: Katy Pine, April 17th 2009