Cuban-American Literature

doi:10.4324/9780203097199-50

ABSTRACT

While the country of Cuba did not emerge into full political sovereignty until the decades following the 1898 settlement of the Spanish-American War, Cuban society had been acquiring a mature national culture since well before the turn of the nineteenth century, and therefore something like a mature process of Cuban/American literary and cultural exchange had been ongoing for a century before Cuba ﬁnally became independent. This process of complex and reciprocal exchange means that what we might term “Cuban-American literature” can do more than merely name the literary production of Cuban-descended writers based in the US as they contribute to the American literary and cultural tradition; indeed, for every José Martí (1853-95) or Cristina García who, while born in Cuba, spend most of their active adult writing years in and at least in part writing about the US, there is a Langston Hughes (1902-67) or an Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) who ﬁnds an equivalently compelling set of reasons both to spend considerable time either visiting or even settling on the island and to devote some of their own creative energies to producing a richly diverse American-Cuban literary tradition. Cuba and the United States have therefore loomed large in each other’s collective literary imaginations since at least the early life of the US republic, and the late twentieth-century emergence of a Cuban-exile or Cuban-immigrant literary project can only serve as one particular moment in a much longer, richer history of both collaborative and conﬂictive, but decidedly mutual, and simultaneous, imaginative literary elaboration. In the nineteenth century, much of the US-Cuban literary exchange was both

motivated and framed by the interconnected forces of new world geopolitics and the politics of the new world slave trade. From the earliest decades of its existence, the US republic had considered the islands of the Caribbean archipelago as ripe for eventual annexation. The young republic knew, however, to take a cautious approach in this endeavor; the Monroe Doctrine of the early 1820s declared the US’s intentions to play at least active referee to the ongoing process of decolonization and emancipation of other former European colonial holdings in the new world. At the same time, the US paid acute attention to the evolving politics of slavery in neighboring societies as its own political fortunes continued to be shaped signiﬁcantly by its domestic politics of slavery. Cuba, the largest island in the

Caribbean and the largest and most populous Caribbean society, remained a slaveholding economy into the late 1800s and remained a colony of Spain until the very end of the century; the US, therefore, could spend much of that century working in various ways to weaken Spanish domination of its wealthy neighbor, a robust society with many qualities in common with the slave-holding US South, in order to test possible outcomes to Cuba’s very likely eventual independence from Spain. For this reason, the US was happy to host in exile a number of signiﬁcant Cuban public ﬁgures, such as Félix Varela (1788-1853), José María Heredia (1803-39), and most famously José Martí, all of whom were also inﬂuential literary artists and cultural ﬁgures foundational to what would eventually become the deﬁning Cuban national literary tradition. At the same time, many non-Cuban US-based writers (such as Mary Tyler Peabody Mann, 1806-87) found in the combination of Cuba’s cultural and topographic exoticism on the one hand, and its proximity to and similarity with the US on the other, fodder for an active and robust dynamic of discursive and literary renderings. Cuban-American literature in the nineteenth century would, however, come to be

dominated by the work of José Martí, the Cuban-born son of Spaniard parents whose education in Havana’s schools in the 1850s and 1860s would shape him into one of the most ardent advocates for Cuba’s cultural distinction and political independence from Spain. Martí would spend years traveling and living away from Cuba, between Spain and various parts of “Spanish” America, before settling for a long, productive, if ambivalent exile in 1880 in New York City, where he would remain for most of the rest of his life. Martí’s discursive output during his exile years in New York would encompass a wide variety of genres. That work would be dominated by his journalism, primarily reporting on signiﬁcant historical events and composing pieces of detailed cultural commentary about the US for papers circulating in a number of Latin American cities, most of them major capitals like Mexico City, Montevideo and Buenos Aires. In those years, Martí also composed his major poetry, his formal experimentations with which eventually earned him a prominent place in the larger Latin American poetic tradition. Given the linguistic orientation of the audiences to whom he addressed his writing, Martí produced most of it in Spanish, a common practice for many writers of the period who were based in the US but would now be identiﬁed as “Latino.” Perhaps justly, Martí’s two most famous compositions remain a piece of verse and a piece of prose. The former is the ﬁrst of his Versos Sencillos, or Simple Verses (1891), which opens with the lines that later became the verses for the song “Guantanamera,” which by the mid-twentieth century had become the unoﬃcial national anthem of all Cubans everywhere; those most famous lines read: “Yo soy un hombre sincero / De donde crece la palma / Y antes de morirme quiero / Hechar los versos del alma” [I am a sincere man / From where the palm tree grows / And I want, before I die / To cast these verses from my soul]. The latter is “Our America” (also 1891), a political oration later rendered in essay form, and a decidedly literary political manifesto, one of the most inﬂuential articulations of the complex hemispheric geopolitical dialectic whose poles Martí in Spanish names “Norte América” and “Nuestra América.” Martí’s substantial, proliﬁc oeuvre exceeds, however, the inﬂuence of these brief if

monumental pieces. His reportorial and critical pieces for the Latin American press

comprise one of the most signiﬁcant bodies of non-ﬁction prose work in Spanish devoted to life, culture, and politics in the United States; his essays on ﬁgures as important to US intellectual and cultural life as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman stand as part of a dense practice of American-Latino public discursive encounter and exchange in the nineteenth century uncovered since the 1990s by scholars such as Kirsten Silva Gruesz and David Luis-Brown. In addition, more reportorial and explicitly political pieces – like his accounts of US commemorations of the death of Karl Marx, or a convention in upstate New York on Native American aﬀairs, or the 1889 inauguration of Benjamin Harrison – all contribute to a fascinating, rare minoritarian and critical rendition of Gilded Age America. Finally, any account of Martí’s contribution to late nineteenth-century US literary culture must include mention of his translation into Spanish of Ramona by Helen Hunt Jackson (1830-85), the 1884 sentimental protest novel about the oppression of California’s native populations. Martí rarely dabbled in narrative ﬁction, and never traveled to the US West Coast, but his commitment to a vision of social and political justice in all of his América drove him to identify intensely with Jackson’s commensurate vision of justice for indigenous Californians. The early decades of the twentieth century, which saw Cuba emerge into full

political sovereignty after a period of remaining a colonial holding of the US, were marked by the kind of literary and cultural exchange that brought such prominent US writers as Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), Langston Hughes, and Ernest Hemingway to Cuba, and which in turn gave such Cuban writers as Nicolás Guillén (1902-89) and Alejo Carpentier (1904-80) notoriety in the US. But much of what we might term an early twentieth-century Cuban-American literary project remains to be recovered by scholarship ongoing into the twenty-ﬁrst century; most of it was likely composed and published in Spanish, and it was also likely very irregularly archived, depending on the community where the work was produced and circulated. What rises more readily to historical memory is a rich, vibrant process of cultural exchange in such areas of cultural work as music, dance, and performance; and this exchange could rise to national (and even international) prominence when it took place between the metropolitan centers of Havana and New York, but it was certainly also taking place in other US cities with signiﬁcant Cuban populations, such as New Orleans and Tampa. Two Cuban-American literary pieces composed at the turn of the twentieth into the twenty-ﬁrst centuries contribute something to our literary “knowledge” of this period of Cuban-American cultural life. One is the 2003 play by Nilo Cruz, Anna in the Tropics, which tells the story of a Cuban-American family running a cigar factory in 1920s Tampa; the other is the 1989 novel by Oscar Hijuelos, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, which is set both in Cuba and in the US, but mostly depicts the life of New York City’s Cuban and Caribbean musical club scene in the 1950s. It happens that Hijuelos’s novel was the ﬁrst by a Latino writer to win the Pulitzer Prize for ﬁction, and that Cruz’s play was the ﬁrst by a Latino playwright to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama. Everything in the course of what we can call a “Cuban-American” historical

experience changed with the 1959 Cuban Revolution on the island, in some ways ironically making possible the emergence of the considerable amount, and the extraordinary quality, of what comprises in the early decades of the twenty-ﬁrst

century the body of post-Revolution Cuban-exile and Cuban-American literature. About a million Cubans left the island seeking political refuge in the US in the course of the 1960s, most of them fully expecting to return to Cuba as soon as Fidel Castro’s Communist Revolution failed; for this reason they considered themselves exiles rather than immigrants, and while the US tried to settle many of these early emigrants across the country, most eventually settled in Miami, Florida, making that city the powerful exile enclave it would become by the end of that decade. While a distinct post-revolutionary Cuban-exile and Cuban-American literary project would take until the 1980s to begin making a mark on the larger US American and Americanimmigrant literary and cultural scene, from the beginning of the earliest years of the exile presence in Miami, US-based Cubans set about building on the work that especially Cuban musicians, dancers, and other performers had done to deﬁne a distinctly and richly Cuban-American cultural practice. By the 1970s such celebrities as Desi Arnaz (1917-86), Pérez Prado (1916-89) and Celia Cruz (1925-2003) were already quite well known both in the US and internationally, and in the course of the 1970s, the exile community produced at least one signiﬁcant piece of popular cultural work that crossed over past Spanish-language television in the US to reach an admittedly focused national audience: this was US PBS’s fully bilingual situation comedy, ¿Qué Pasa USA?, which was produced for four seasons starting in 1977 and made it to a number of urban markets with large Latino populations. In many ways the roots of a post-Revolution Cuban-American literary voice can be found in the verse work of early exile musical composers, like the writer of the exile anthem “Cuando Salí de Cuba” (written by the Argentine Luis Aguilé, 1936-2009), and in the four-year dramalogue that comprises the life of the historic PBS sitcom created by Luis Santeiro. In the early and mid-1980s, one can begin to track the early stirrings of Cuban-

exile and Cuban-American literary production in work like the poetry of Carolina Hospital, and the short ﬁction and novels of writers such as Roberto G. Fernández and Elías Miguel Muñoz. Hospital and Fernández especially were beginning to articulate the Miami-based exile experience, while Muñoz, who was raised in Southern California, used his work in part to provide an alternative to the stereotype that all Cubans in the US lived in Miami, and were exclusively driven by hardline, conservative, anti-Castro politics. The establishment of smaller CubanAmerican communities in cities other than Miami, such as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, would contribute to the kind of inter-community contact across US Latino cultures that could work against those communities’ regional segmentation, and would lead to a more complex, hybrid Latino cultural formation in the US in the following decades. The evolving political and cultural dynamics of CubanAmerican and US Latino life in the decades following the emergence of both a US Latino civil rights movement and a coherent, organized academic ﬁeld of US Latino Studies have also continued to inform not only Cuban-American literary practice, but also the formation of the speciﬁc ﬁeld of Cuban-American literary and cultural studies. That scholarly ﬁeld, reﬂected in much of the work listed below as “suggested reading,” has been driven less by internally divisive conﬂicts or even debates, and more by a shared set of disciplinary questions and concerns that mostly reﬂect both the newness and the ambition of the project of Cuban-American studies. These questions and concerns include: marking the historical phases of Cuban-American

literary practice, across the relevant centuries and with respect to epochal moments such as the 1898 War and the 1959 Revolution; situating Cuban-American literary practice in the informing contexts of US Latino literature, other minority-, immigrant-, and diasporic-American literatures more generally, as well as “American” literature writ large; understanding Cuban-American literary practices as exceeding and challenging the conventional, canonical literary genres (ﬁction, drama, poetry) and thus also operating in the spaces of popular, performance, visual, and emerging electronic media; establishing a productive understanding of exile Miami culture’s relationship to the greater diaspora; and delineating the internal complexities and heterogeneities of Cuban-American experience across prevailing dialectical forces of diﬀerence such as class, race, gender, sexuality, and ability. Cuban-American life in the 1980s was profoundly transformed by two causes.

One was the signiﬁcant collective shift from an “exile” to an “immigrant” mindset among inhabitants of the US-based Cuban diaspora; that shift motivated many to accept the possible permanence of their settlement on US ground, and in turn motivated many of them to declare US citizenship, a move that fundamentally transformed political life in South Florida, but also everywhere else in Cuban America. The other was the arrival in the US in 1979 of more than 100,000 additional Cubans in what came to be called the Mariel Boatlift; that historic purging from island Cuban society of masses of individuals deemed “undesirable” to the Revolution brought to Cuban America signiﬁcantly larger numbers of Cubans of color, Cubans whose families had been poor before the Revolution, and others whom the Revolution wanted gone: political dissidents, sexualminorities, and persons suﬀering from various pathologies that the Revolution could not or refused to treat. Mariel also brought the outspoken and openly gay novelist, poet, and ﬁrebrand

Reinaldo Arenas (1943-90) to US shores. Arenas had risen to prominence in 1960s Cuba as a young writer and protégé of such important Cuban writers as the novelist José Lezama Lima (1910-76) and the playwright Virgilio Piñera (1912-79). Arenas, unlike his mentors, insisted very publicly on all his freedoms, but especially sexual and artistic, and this brought him into very close scrutiny, and eventually outright persecution, in succeeding years; he continued to produce a voluminous amount of mostly literary ﬁction through the 1970s, most of it either conﬁscated by authorities or smuggled for publication abroad. Arenas spent years in Cuban prisons before his release and eventual move to the US; in the 1980s he entirely rewrote most of his destroyed work, started new literary and artistic projects that more directly reﬂected his experiences in the US, and agitated quite vocally against both the excesses of the Cuban regime for its repressiveness and the Cuban exile hardliners for their conservatism and intolerance. Arenas’s most “Cuban-American” major literary work is the 1989 novel El Portero [The Doorman], set in New York City in the 1980s and very powerfully focused on the qualities of its main Cuban American character’s alienation from US American life and culture. The eponymous portero/doorman of the title is a young marielito named Juan, who in the course of the narrative discovers he can communicate better with the pets of the privileged residents of the building where he works than he can with the residents themselves, despite their putatively “common” humanity. The novel’s narrative departs as it unfolds from a pointed, realist social critique to a fantastical, global vision of a redemptive new world order

liberated by Juan and his benevolent animal friends, one that positions Juan somewhere betweenNoah, Gulliver, andDoctor Doolittle, and one that conforms to Arenas’s general literary aesthetic of excess of vision as pivotal to any resistance to the repressions of power. Arenas’s alienation from what he saw as the multiple hypocrisies of US/ Cuban/exile society only deepened with his diagnosis and subsequent suﬀering of the worst eﬀects of AIDS; these he narrated in his other major work written entirely in the US, the memoir Antes que anochezca/Before Night Falls, ﬁrst published posthumously in Spanish in 1992 (Arenas ended his own life in 1990). The memoir was adapted into a very ﬁne ﬁlm by the director Julian Schnabel and released in 2000. Arenas’s suicide and the subsequent emergence into notoriety that his work

experienced in the early 1990s occurred simultaneously with the ﬁnal, deﬁnitive arrival of the Cuban-American literary voice into the US literary and cultural scene. Roberto G. Fernández had spent the 1980s adding English to Spanish as his signature literary languages; his critically acclaimed 1988 novel Raining Backwards set the standard for a bilingual, experimental literary ﬁction that could get at some of the hardest, as well as some of the most surreal, aspects of Cuban Miami’s exile experience. In 1989, Oscar Hijuelos’s Mambo Kings had won the Pulitzer Prize for ﬁction; Hijuelos, born in New York City in 1951 to Cuban immigrant parents, is (unlike many of his contemporary peers) not so directly deﬁned by the post-Revolution “exile” experience. His is, ironically, the minority case in Cuban-American letters for being so conventionally “immigrant,” and not deﬁned by the aftermath of the Revolution. His evocation of Cuban and Caribbean New York City’s vibrant musical club scene in the 1950s therefore does the vital work of imagining a US-based Cuban life imaginable outside the frame of the Revolution/Exile dialectic, even as it subtly comments on exactly that struggle’s dominance of Cuban-American life in the following decades. Mambo Kings, even more ambitiously than Raining Backwards, embraces an experimental, postmodern literary aesthetic; it also explores in very complicated ways the macho patriarchal sexual politics of Cuban and Cuban-American life. Another pivotal work to appear in ﬁnished form by the early 1990s was The Floating Island Plays, playwright Eduardo Machado’s monumental four-play cycle, which he had been developing since the mid-1980s, and which, in the course of its four constituent pieces, traces the history of a prominent Havana family across the twentieth century from the 1920s (The Modern Ladies of Guanabacoa) to the years around the 1959 Revolution (Fabiola; In the Eye of the Hurricane) to eventual exile in 1970s Los Angeles (Broken Eggs). Machado’s epic is rarely performed in its entirety due to its ambitious scope and its eight-hour running time, but it remains a signiﬁcant contribution to Cuban-American letters and American theatre by a writer of prodigious talent and ambition. Machado, like Arenas, is openly gay, and like Arenas he devotes his work in part to a very provocative critique of the moral and political hypocrisies of a national culture and sensibility that he nevertheless undeniably loves. The Floating Island Plays appeared in book form in 1991. While male writers such as Fernández, Hijuelos, andMachado were busy establishing

a Cuban-American literary voice and presence through the 1980s, Cuban-American women writers would assert their own literary vision of the Cuban-American experience in earnest during the 1990s. While a writer such as the multiple Obie Award-winning dramatist María Irene Fornés could make a signiﬁcant mark on the

US national theatrical scene starting with her very successful experimental pieces of the 1960s, she mostly kept explicitly Cuban/American themes out of her work through most of her career; by the 1990s, however, Cuban-American women writers such as the novelists Cristina García, Achy Obejas and Carolina García-Aguilera would begin to produce a signiﬁcant body of work in both literary and popular ﬁction that would easily match if not exceed the volume and success of their male compatriot writers. Of these writers, Cristina García has received a signiﬁcant amount of critical praise and scholarly attention. Her ﬁrst novel, Dreaming in Cuban, was nominated for a National Book Award in 1992, and in the 20 years after its appearance, García has followed Dreaming with four additional works of literary ﬁction: The Agüero Sisters (1997), Monkey Hunting (2003), A Handbook to Luck (2007) and The Lady Matador’s Hotel (2010). She also published an intimate verse memoir in 2011 entitled The Lesser Tragedy of Death. Across all of her major literary work, García has explored the Cuban-American experience in its full complexity and diversity, with a strong but not exclusive focus on the experiences of Cuban and Cuban-American women, as well as (especially in Monkey Hunting) Cubans of color. The same can be said for the work of Achy Obejas, who has written one collection of short ﬁction and three novels across the 1990s and the ﬁrst decade of the twenty-ﬁrst century. Like García, Obejas’s work has enjoyed critical success and earned serious scholarly attention; her explorations, especially of the experiences of Cuban-American queer women (Memory Mambo, 1996) and of Cuban Jewish identity (Days of Awe, 2001), have marked her work’s contributions to a full and diverse articulation of all the varieties of Cuban-American life. Carolina García-Aguilera has in the same two decades devoted herself to the more speciﬁc exploration of life in Cuban-exile Miami, and through the prism of popular genre ﬁction, in her case through the “Lupe Solano” series of detective novels. García-Aguilera’s material does the valuable work of complementing the more conventionally literary contributions of García and Obejas; through Lupe Solano’s eyes, readers can see the Miami Cuban world from within, as much in its own ironic, self-knowing terms as audiences saw in the 1970s through ¿Qué Pasa USA? The same two decades that saw the appearance of García, Obejas, and García-

Aguilera also saw a great deal of notable literary production on the part of a growing population of emerging Cuban-American writers. Fernández, Hijuelos, and Machado all continued to publish important works of ﬁction and drama, and they were joined on the literary stage by such writers as the novelist and poet Virgil Suárez; the poet, memoirist, and literary critic Gustavo Pérez Firmat; and the poet and art collector Ricardo Pau-Llosa. These writers, like most of the generation of Cuban-American writers emerging into prominence in the two decades after 1990, choose to cast their literary work almost exclusively in English, while many of them either consider Spanish their ﬁrst language, or are at least as ﬂuent in Spanish as they are in English; many, although not all, also play with bilingual code-switching between Spanish and English in their work, and some have also taken on important projects of translation, like Achy Obejas’s resonant translation into Spanish of Junot Díaz’s 2007 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Two writers whose careers have also spanned the two decades after 1990 together

help to measure the success of the Cuban-American literary project of the period.

One is the poet, memoirist and medical doctor Rafael Campo, who was born in New Jersey to a Cuban exile father and an Italian-American mother, but whose verse work especially focuses very powerfully on his Cuban-American genealogy. Campo, like Arenas and Obejas and a number of other writers discussed here, is also very openly gay; since 1994’s The Other Man Was Me, his ﬁrst verse collection, Campo has developed a rich and growing body of literary work, most but not all of it in disciplined, formal, and beautiful verse, and all of it equally devoted to the elaborations of his simultaneous experiences as a Cuban-American gay man, a doctor embracing his profession in the era of HIV and AIDS, and a poet of serious ambition. Since that ﬁrst collection, Campo continued to produce additional verse collections, as well as a well-received memoir, for the following 15 years; his considerable body of verse work stands as one of the most signiﬁcant contributions of poetry in English by a Latino poet to the American literary tradition. The other writer is the playwright Nilo Cruz, who was born in Cuba in 1960 and left with his family for Miami a decade later; Cruz began working in theatre in Miami as a young man, eventually making his way to New York City, where he caught the attention of María Irene Fornés, whose support was pivotal to his eventual professional success. Based again in Miami since the early 2000s, Cruz has written a variety of very successful plays, prominent among them Two Sisters and a Piano (1998), A Bicycle Country (1999) and The Beauty of the Father (2006); Cruz’s plays are set in Cuba, the US and even Spain, and are often as interested in questions of gender, sexuality, desire, and aesthetics as they are with themes that more explicitly attach themselves to the cultural and political forces shaping Cuban and Cuban American experience since the early twentieth century. This artistic ambition is no more visible than in his 2003 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Anna in the Tropics. Anna, set in a Cuban-American cigar factory in 1929 Tampa, tackles questions of tradition and modernity as they confront an immigrant family trying simultaneously to maintain age-old techniques of manual tobacco-rolling and to compete in an increasingly mechanized industry in their new home country; layered onto these questions of material production are corollary concerns over cultural identity, sexual empowerment for women, and the work of the literary imagination in a world increasingly saturated by the logics of proﬁt and commodity. By setting his play in 1929 Tampa, Cruz also explores aspects of the Cuban-American experience that are not directly dominated by the politics of the Revolution/Exile dialectic, although Anna’s themes do oﬀer themselves to be elaborated in that context as well. As the ﬁrst decade of the twenty-ﬁrst century comes to an end and the second

begins, the post-1959 Cuban-American experience is coming to terms with its ﬁftieth year of existence. Such historical markers as the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, which left Cuba’s political isolation from the world intact, and the balsero and Elián González episodes that occurred over the next decade, even through the premature news of Fidel Castro’s possible death in 2006, all attest to an ongoing and deepening frustration among Cuban-Americans over the failure of meaningful political change in and for Cuba, a historical failure that regardless does not keep Cuban life in the US from evolving, deepening, and expanding. The Cuban presence in Miami has since the 1960s transformed cultural and political life in South Florida forever, and as Miami itself becomes for this reason more diversely Latino and less

exclusively Cuban, outposts of Cuban America can, since the turn into the twentyﬁrst century, be detected not only everywhere across Florida and the American South, but also in the greater US Northeast, Midwest and West Coast. For every Cuban-American writer who, like Roberto Fernández or Carolina García-Aguilera, might still devote his or her work to Cuban Miami’s always vibrant life, there are other writers, such as the Chicagoan Achy Obejas, the Bostonian Rafael Campo and the New Yorker-Angelena Cristina García, who are as devoted to representing the equally vibrant Cuban life in their adopted cities and regions of the United States. As many of the Cuban-American writers who came to prominence after 1990

continue to write as of 2012, many indeed ﬁnding themselves in the middle of very active, productive careers, a signiﬁcant number of younger and more recently published writers of note continue to join their ranks. These include the Yale University historian and memoirist Carlos Eire, who has published two autobiographical works, 2003’s Waiting for Snow in Havana and 2010’s Learning to Die in Miami. These texts together tell the story of a Cuban son of privilege and the extraordinarily challenging fate that befell him as a result of his experience in “Operation Pedro Pan,” a post-Revolution airlift of tens of thousands of Cuban children away from their families on the island and into youth camps and foster homes in the US. Many but not all of the Pedro Pan children were reunited either with their parents or other family members eventually, but the trauma of separation damaged many of these children for life, and the memory of that pain drives much of the very lively writing that Eire pours into both texts. Waiting for Snow in particular made a signiﬁcant impact on the US national literary scene, winning the National Book Award for Non-Fiction in 2003. Operation Pedro Pan also ﬁgures prominently in the narrative of Sonia Flew, the 2004 play by Melinda López. López’s play, which premiered in Boston and has since been produced almost as often as Cruz’s Anna across the US, connects the Pedro Pan experience of the 1960s to life in post-9/11 America; it traces the life of a Cuban-American woman, married to a Jewish husband and mother to a grown son who insists on enlisting in the military in order to ﬁght terrorism in Iraq, back in time from the trauma of war in the 2000s to the trauma of Sonia’s separation from her family in 1960s Cuba. Sonia Flew thereby weaves Cuban-American experience fully into the larger fabric of American life following the attacks of 9/11 and the ensuing epoch of geopolitical violence and insecurity. Other writers rising to prominence in the early 2000s continue to expand the

scope, reach and resonance of the Cuban-American literary voice. Cecilia RodríguezMilanés, whose shorter pieces have been anthologized in various collections since the mid-1990s, published a collection of short ﬁction (Marielitos, Balseros and Other Exiles) in 2009, and a verse collection (Everyday Chica) in 2010. Rodríguez-Milanés, a self-proclaimed Cuban “Jersey Girl,” also spent many years in Miami; perhaps no other Cuban-American writer has more evocatively captured the experiences of working-class Cubans (in pieces such as “Abuelita Marielita”), Cuban-American women and girls from poor families (“Muchacha, After Jamaica”), and Cuban working families in an increasingly diverse Latino America (“Beast of Burden”) than Rodríguez-Milanés. Another writer with a distinct Jersey-Cuban, working-class focus is the Los Angeles-based novelist Eduardo Santiago, whose début work, 2006’s Tomorrow They Will Kiss, follows the lives and entanglements of a group of Cuban

exile women co-workers in the same New Jersey doll factory, who spend their free moments discussing the lives of the glamorous characters in their favorite telenovela, and remembering the entanglements they left behind in their Cuban hometown. In addition to Rodríguez-Milanés and Santiago, Cuban-American literature in 2011 could look to a number of additional emerging writers as the basis for a bright, exciting future. These include ﬁction writers as diverse from one another as Ana Menéndez, Herman (H.G., Hache) Carrillo, Alisa Valdés-Rodriguez, and Johnny Díaz, and poets as diverse in experience and verse aesthetic as Richard Blanco and Vanessa Libertad García; as rich as island-based Cuban national literature has continued to be in spite of the damage that the Castro experiment and the US reaction to it have done to Cuban cultural life, so has a rich, living US-based, Cuban diasporic literature come to claim real ground in the space of an American national literary tradition. What began centuries before as a process of complex and mutual exchange and inﬂuence between Cuban and American literatures continues past 2012 as a robust imaginative project, one that draws on the complex, often painful legacies of the past to envision both alternatives to that past, and paths toward a future marked by inevitable, if oft-deferred, change and real, tangible hope.