In Literary Hub, Rebe Huntman writes about the prism of her Cuban experiences, as represented in her own memoir, My Mother in Havana: A Memoir of Magic and Miracle: “A daughter’s search for her deceased mother brings her face to face with the gods, ghosts, and saints of Cuba.” Read the full article for the author’s commentary on Ruth Behar’s An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba, Daisy Hernández’s A Cup of Water Under My Bed, María de los Reyes Castillo Bueno’s Reyita: The Life of a Black Cuban Woman in the Twentieth Century (trans. Anne McLean), Alma Gillermoprieto’s Dancing with Cuba: A Memoir of the Revolution, Ada Ferrer’s Cuba: An American History, Mirta Ojito’s Finding Mañana, and Richard Blanco’s The Prince of Los Cocuyos.
Writing memoir is an act of saying I am here. This is what I find beautiful. Troubling. Worth paying attention to. And there is a democratic invitation in this gesture that interests me—the way that writing and reading memoir allow us to push past a monolithic understanding of the world and experience it through a prism of multiple perspectives.
Perhaps nowhere is that roomier lens more needed than in the ways we look at Cuba. Only ninety miles from Miami and intricately tied in many historically and culturally significant ways to the U.S., I am often surprised at how little many of my fellow U.S. citizens know of the island, or how deeply entrenched and polarized their views can be. Or how the notion of an island “frozen in time” fuels a romanticized notion of a single Cuba, where ghosts of Hemingway and classic cars eternally patrol its uninterrupted shores.
My experience is that there are not one but many Cubas. There is an Indigenous Cuba inhabited by the Taino, and a colonial Cuba ruled by Spanish and fueled by the forced labor of an Atlantic slave trade. There is the Cuba of the early 1950s with its glittering casinos, and the Cuba of 1959 with its mountains filled with revolutionaries.
There is the Cuba for whom that revolution filled their hearts with either hope or dread, and the Cuba of those who’ve watched its aftermath morph into realities that challenge and complicate both emotions. There is a Cuba filled with Catholic saints and a Cuba filled with African spirits. There is an atheist Cuba and a Jewish Cuba. And there is a Cuba whose spiritual heart is large enough to celebrate miracle in all its manifestations.
It is this Cuba that I hold to the light in my memoir, My Mother in Havana: A Memoir of Magic & Miracle, a book that tells the story of a grieving daughter whose search to connect with her mother—thirty years after her death—brings her face to face with the gods and ghosts and saints of Cuba.
Drawing on years of study into Afro-Cuban dance, folklore, history, and religion, My Mother in Havana chronicles my journey to Havana to immerse myself in the ritual dances and sacrifices that pay tribute to Ochún, a beloved goddess of the Santería religion, and follows my pilgrimage to Our Lady of Charity, Ochún’s Catholic counterpart, in the mountain town of El Cobre.
The book is an offering—to the nineteen-year-old version of myself who lost her mother, and to the 50-year-old version who found her again among the Afro-Cuban spiritual traditions that keep the dead close.
And if the beauty and power of the memoir is its democratic invitation to point to that which we find beautiful and important, then it can also be said that no single memoir can hold everything that must be said and seen.
My Mother in Havana is one of many bridges to Cuba. Here are seven richly-rendered memoirs you’ll want to check out if you want to know more about the island. From exiles to historians, mothers to dancers, anthropologists to poets, each offers up its own distinct lens on the people and stories that make up the dynamic and ever-changing landscape that is Cuba. [. . .]
For full article, see https://lithub.com/bridges-to-a-misunderstood-world-seven-memoirs-that-show-the-many-sides-of-cuba/
In Literary Hub, Rebe Huntman writes about the prism of her Cuban experiences, as represented in her own memoir, My Mother in Havana: A Memoir of Magic and Miracle: “A daughter’s search for her deceased mother brings her face to face with the gods, ghosts, and saints of Cuba.” Read the full article for the