Bridges to a Misunderstood World: Seven Memoirs That Show the Many Sides of Cuba

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.

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Ruth Behar, An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba

A deep and poignant dive into the story of the Yiddish-speaking Jews who made Cuba their home in the early twentieth century, An Island Called Home tells the story of Behar’s journey back to the island decades after her family became caught up in the exodus of Jewish families who opposed Castro’s rise to power. Documenting her search to discover what traces of Jewish presence might remain, the author couples vignettes of the individuals she meets with photographs of Havana-based photographer Humberto Mayol.

The inclusion of these photos resonates with me. In My Mother in Havana, a series of photographs taken of my mother in Havana in 1951 become a trail of breadcrumbs that allow me to connect in tangible ways with the mother I lost at age nineteen.

Similarly, Behar leans on Mayol’s photos both to hold and tell her story: “Just as my family had taken photographs of Cuba by which to remember the life they were leaving behind, when I sat down to write this book I had Humberto’s photographs, my new memoryscape, in my suitcase.”

Thanks to Behar, we too have access to this memoryscape. Told through exquisite photographs and timelines, research and interviews, the book is not only an expertly woven chronology and ethnography of Cuba, but it is also an altar to the faith and people Behar comes to know and document so brilliantly.

Daisy Hernández, A Cup of Water Under My Bed

“The first man I love and the first woman I adore, my father and my mother with their Spanish words, are not in these cards,” Hernández writes about the flash cards her teachers use to render a language that sounds—to a child growing up among her half-Cuban, half-Colombian family in 1980s and 90s New Jersey—”like marbles in the mouth.”

Through lyrical prose that dances between the English of the country she inhabits and the Spanish of those who raise her, Hernández invites us into a world where “cuarticos” hold African gods and women read cups of water that “ferry messages between us and the santos and the dead.” As someone who writes in My Mother in Havana about discovering Santería as an adult, I was delighted to read how Hernández stumbles upon its rituals through the eyes of a child.

In her father’s workroom, a gray rock with cowrie shells for eyes and a mouth that sits on a clay plate filled with candies becomes the author’s enticing introduction to Santería’s gatekeeper deity, Eleggua. “There’s nothing odd about any of this, because it has always been this way. In my house, grown people hide candies and toys, even roosters,” Hernandez writes, illuminating the ways in which her young self finds her place in a world where not flashcards but cartas foretell destinies, and a young woman neither here nor there, ni aquí, ni allá, learns to find her place.

María de los Reyes Castillo Bueno, Reyita: The Life of a Black Cuban Woman in the Twentieth Century (trans. Anne McLean)

A rare and fascinating glimpse of one woman’s experience growing up poor, Black and female in Cuba’s Oriente Province, Reyita’s story—as recorded by her daughter Daisy Castillo—begins in Africa with her grandmother’s abduction by slave traders and continues through a century of experience with prejudice, struggle, and change. The story is both personal and political.

Her firsthand accounts of the aftermath of Cuba’s wars for independence, the 1912 massacre of the Independent Colored Party, her involvement in the Popular Socialist Party in the 1940s, and the 1959 rise of Fidel Castro all share space with the narration of her experiences as a woman and a mother navigating a life both for herself and her children.

Alma Gillermoprieto, Dancing with Cuba: A Memoir of the Revolution

In 1970—eleven years after Fidel Castro’s rise to power—a young dancer named Alma Guillermoprieto left New York to take a job teaching at Cuba’s National School of Dance. For six months, she worked in mirrorless studios, helping poorly trained but passionate students achieve dreams of greatness amidst a revolutionary backdrop that heralded the arts while eschewing individual glory.

As Guillermoprieto struggles to adapt her avant garde dance training to a culture in the throes of redefining itself, she wonders: How to explain to a teenager raised in the Cuban Revolution, a world in which a human being without aim or intention was inconceivable—that the most important word in the vocabulary of her own modern dance hero Merce Cunningham was still?

What kind of dance was needed in Cuba? What did she, who had been raised in Mexico and the U.S., have to say to people living in a country that faced, day after day, the danger of atomic annihilation and invasion? And what did they have to teach her about her home country’s ruthless economic ambitions and the atrocities of its War on Vietnam?

Ada Ferrer, Cuba: An American History

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History, Cuba: An American History tells the sweeping history of Cuba and its complex ties to the U.S., from before the arrival of Christopher Columbus to the death of Fidel Castro and beyond. While technically not a traditional memoir, I include this book because it provides such a comprehensive history of the island and because the author’s intent in writing it is so deeply personal.

Born in Havana between the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, Ferrer spent decades reconstructing the island’s past, and her own. Or as she writes: “I began translating Cuba for Americans and the United States for Cubans. Then I used all that to see myself, my family, and my own home—the United States—with different eyes.”

Mirta Ojito, Finding Mañana

Mirta Ojito was sixteen when she arrived in the U.S. as part of the Mariel Boatlift of 1980. And while she is not the only memoirist to write about this event, both the beauty of the writing, and the way she weaves so much history into her personal story of leaving Cuba, make this memoir particularly compelling.

Through Ojito’s voice and eyes we learn not only about the Mariel boatlift but also about the larger history of Cuba that would lead to that exodus. We learn about the plight—and successes—of Cuban immigrants in Florida; the anguish of families separated by politics; and the larger history of the U.S. that led President Carter to allow 125,000 Cubans to enter the U.S.

But what really makes this book remarkable is Ojito’s ability to bring the characters that make up these stories to life—from her own family to the Vietnam vet on whose boat, Mañana, she finally crossed the treacherous Florida Strait.

Richard Blanco, The Prince of Los Cocuyos 

“Part cubano, a little americano and un galleguito from Spain” where he was born, U.S. Presidential Inaugural poet Richard Blanco invites us into a Miami childhood and adolescence experienced between the author’s parents’ nostalgic world of 1950s Cuba (a Cuba young Riqui knows only through photos and stories) and his own imagined America filled with Disney characters and Easy Cheese, a life he yearns for as much as he longs to see the homeland of his parents’ memory.

Through young Riqui’s eyes, we experience the Miami of the 1970s and 80s that would shape him: a suburban backyard transformed by his abuelito into a farm with chickens and rabbits—”a place of memory and imagination” the author likens to his own version of his grandfather’s lost Cuba. The abuela-bookie who tries to make him un hombre.

El malibú that is his father’s pride and joy, Cuban music playing on the eight-track tapes as the Blanco family rushes to see the Magic Kingdom of El Ratoncito Miguel. “Was this what my parents had felt when they left Cuba,” the author ponders as they leave that Magic Kingdom, “not knowing whether they’d ever see such a magical place again?”

And the family market named after the fireflies that once lit up the family village in Cuba. “Not just a grocery store,” Blanco writes,

it felt like that village to me, a pueblo where everyone knew each other and where, for a few minutes every day, they could pretend they were still in Cuba, surrounded by their own fruits and vegetables, their own sweets and cuts of meat, their own language and fireflies, as if nothing had ever disrupted their lives.

My Mother in Havana: A Memoir of Magic and Miracle by Rebe Huntman is available via Monkfish.