Tales of Cuban exiles map their longing, grief, humor

E-mail this article Print this article

James Joyce left his home city of Dublin for Paris, leaving behind a place he had mapped and memorized exhaustively, but felt too confined by ever to go back to. His defining collection of short stories, "Dubliners," was an elegiac portrait of disappointed, reduced and sorrowful characters who would never martial quite enough courage or imagination to leave the confines of the city.

Author reading Ana Menéndez will read from "In Cuba I was a German Shepherd" at 7:30 p.m. tonight at the Elliott Bay Book Co., 101 S. Main St., Seattle. Information: 206-624-6600.

Cuban American Ana Menéndez has shed elegiac light on a group of characters that did flee their home, never to return. Yet, as her superb collection of interweaving stories reveals, the exile community of Miami's Little Havana portrayed in this debut work left much of their imagination and so many of their dreams behind.

In the title story, Maximo is an old man who entertains his playing buddies at Domino Park with jokes while tourists snap quaint photos. But he is also a former professor whose punch lines are suffused with distance, melancholy and rancor. "Here in America, I may be a short, insignificant mutt, but in Cuba I was a German shepherd." Indeed, everyone's stories in this community of reparation and longing trail off into nostalgia - or sputter with anger.

Menéndez links the 11 stories, as a central character such as Maximo appears at a party in a later story or behind the counter at a local restaurant in still another. It is, however, a steadfast devotion to the past that truly connects the stories. Regardless of age, or whether the Cuban Revolution was experienced firsthand or simply through family memories, the specter of a lost idyll haunts each story: elegant homes turned in for back yards choked by banana trees and bluer skies, dreams of becoming Marlene Dietrich, Joe DiMaggio or Frank Sinatra replaced by waitressing, banking, cooking and, above all, recounting lives deferred.

Isolation seems to flower in the heart of each character as some sort of consoling force, pushing away reality in favor of something adrift.

In "Hurricane Stories," a woman recounts her childhood memories of the impending hurricane of 1972 to her doubtful lover and her father's exaggerated tales of "the storm of '37." "Day after day, I burden my flat Florida childhood with meaning ... and suddenly there is so much more I want to tell him. About waiting and the rain. That my father was going to be a grand singer and my mother was beautiful. I want to tell him how our first year in Miami, my parents spoke only in gestures, all sound gone out of our lives like air."

The inability to forget a supposedly better, more colorful way of life echoes obstinately through three generations. And yet, just as one character pines for the fleeting past, another seeks to disavow it. Of a former dissident who has finally left Cuba 30 years after the revolution, the author writes in "The Party": "Ernesto is weary of language, weary of words and the memories they trap and kill for viewing. ... He thinks now, old as he's become, that he would like to welcome blankness, to live in a white house with white walls and white floors. He would banish film and photographs, everything that dulls the moment with yesterday's light."

The story "Miami Relatives" and its understanding of Cuban exiles' intimate relationship with Fidel Castro is worth the price of the book alone. The community that emerges in these pages is one of humor, acute grief and gifted storytelling.