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90 Miles
Selected And New Poems
Virgil Suarez
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005

Ninety miles separate Cuba and Key West, Florida. Crossing that distance, thousands of Cubans have lost their lives. For Cuban American poet Virgil Suárez, that expanse of ocean represents the state of exile, which he has imaginatively bridged in over two decades of compelling poetry.

"Whatever isn't voiced in time drowns," Suárez writes in "River Fable," and the urgency to articulate the complex yearnings of the displaced marks all the poems collected here. 90 Miles contains the best work from Suárez's six previous collections: You Come Singing, Garabato, In the Republic of Longing, Palm Crows, Banyan, and Guide to the Blue Tongue, as well as important new poems.

At once meditative, confessional, and political, Suárez's work displays the refracted nature of a life of exile spent in Cuba, Spain, and the United States. Connected through memory and desire, Caribbean palms wave over American junk mail. Cuban mangos rot on Miami hospital trays. William Shakespeare visits Havana. And the ones who left Cuba plant trees of reconciliation with the ones who stayed.

Courageously prolific, Virgil Suárez is one of the most important Latino writers of his generation.

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Constructing Cuban America
Race and Identity in Florida's Caribbean South, 1868–1945
Andrew Gomez
University of Texas Press, 2024

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Cuban Miami
Levine, Robert M
Rutgers University Press, 2000

For two centuries, Cuban exiles have found their way to the United States, especially to Florida. But since Castro's victory in 1959, Miami has seen almost one million Cubans arrive by sea and air. The impact on this area has been enormous. Miami---known as the "Exile Capital"---has a greater cultural affinity to Havana and the rest of Latin America than to Tallahassee, Florida's capital.

Cuban Miami is the first analytical, photographic record of Cuban migration to south Florida. Robert M. Levine and Moises Asis have interviewed members of every sector of the Cuban exile community, from the first pioneers to the mass waves in the early 1960s to those who arrived by raft during the late 1990s. In their wide-ranging investigation of Cuban-U.S. history, they touch upon all aspects of Cuban influence: politics, cuisine, music, assimilation, discrimination, and institution buildings. Miami has more Cuban food establishments than the nearby island does. The city has been fertile ground for germinating a unique synthesis of Cuban and Americans are the most prosperous immigrant group in the United States today, this success has come at a price---living in exile can exact a personal toll.

Cuban Miami is a feast for the eyes, including 180 photographs and original cartoons drawn for the book by Jose M. Varela, a well-known member of the Cuban-American community.

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The Cubans of Union City
Immigrants and Exiles in a New Jersey Community
Yolanda Prieto
Temple University Press, 2009

As a result of the conflicts between Cuba and the United States, especially after 1959, Cubans immigrated in great numbers. Most stayed in Miami, but many headed north to Union City, making it second only to Miami in its concentration of Cubans. In The Cubans of Union City, Yolanda Prieto discusses why Cubans were drawn to this particular city and how the local economy and organizations developed. Central aspects of this story are the roles of women, religion, political culture, and the fact of exile itself. 

As a member of this community and a participant in many of its activities, Prieto speaks with special authority about its demographic uniqueness. Far from being a snapshot of the community, The Cubans of Union City conveys an ongoing research agenda extending over more than twenty years, from 1959 to the 1980s. As a long-term observer who was also a resident, Prieto offers a unique and insightful view of the dynamics of this community’s evolution.

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Cultural Erotics in Cuban America
Ricardo L. Ortíz
University of Minnesota Press, 2006
Miami is widely considered the center of Cuban-American culture. However vital to the diasporic communities’ identity, Miami is not the only—or necessarily the most profound—site of cultural production. Looking beyond South Florida, Ricardo L. Ortíz addresses the question of Cuban-American diaspora and cultural identity by exploring the histories and self-sustaining practices of smaller communities in such U.S. cities as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York.

In this wide-ranging work Ortíz argues for the authentically diasporic quality of postrevolutionary, off-island Cuban experience. Highlighting various forms of cultural expression, Cultural Erotics in Cuban America traces underrepresented communities’ responses to the threat of cultural disappearance in an overwhelming and hegemonic U.S. culture. Ortíz shows how the work of Cuban-American writers and artists challenges the heteronormativity of both home and host culture. Focusing on artists who have had an ambivalent, indirect, or nonexistent connection to Miami, he presents close readings of such novelists as Reinaldo Arenas, Roberto G. Fernández, Achy Obejas, and Cristina García, the playwright Eduardo Machado, the poet Rafael Campo, and musical performers Albita Rodríguez and Celia Cruz.

Ortíz charts the legacies of sexism and homophobia in patriarchal Cuban culture, as well as their influence on Cuban-revolutionary and Cuban-exile ideologies. Moving beyond the outdated cultural terms of the Cold War, he looks forward to envision queer futures for Cuban-American culture free from the ties to restrictive—indeed, oppressive—constructions of nation, place, language, and desire.

Ricardo L. Ortíz is associate professor of English at Georgetown University.
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Directions to the Beach of the Dead
Richard Blanco
University of Arizona Press, 2005
In his second book of narrative, lyric poetry, Richard Blanco explores the familiar, unsettling journey for home and connections, those anxious musings about other lives: “Should I live here? Could I live here?” Whether the exotic (“I’m struck with Maltese fever …I dream of buying a little Maltese farm…) or merely different (“Today, home is a cottage with morning in the yawn of an open window…”), he examines the restlessness that threatens from merely staying put, the fear of too many places and too little time.

The words are redolent with his Cuban heritage: Marina making mole sauce; Tía Ida bitter over the revolution, missing the sisters who fled to Miami; his father, especially, “his hair once as black as the black of his oxfords…” Yet this is a volume for all who have longed for enveloping arms and words, and for that sanctuary called home. “So much of my life spent like this-suspended, moving toward unknown places and names or returning to those I know, corresponding with the paradox of crossing, being nowhere yet here.” Blanco embraces juxtaposition. There is the Cuban Blanco, the American Richard, the engineer by day, the poet by heart, the rhythms of Spanish, the percussion of English, the first-world professional, the immigrant, the gay man, the straight world. There is the ennui behind the question: why cannot I not just live where I live? Too, there is the precious, fleeting relief when he can write "…I am, for a moment, not afraid of being no more than what I hear and see, no more than this:..." It is what we all hope for, too.
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In the Land of Mirrors
Cuban Exile Politics in the United States
Maria de los Angeles Torres
University of Michigan Press, 2001
In the Land of Mirrors is a journey through the politics of Cuban exiles since the 1959 Cuban Revolution. It explores the development of Cuban exile politics and identity within a context of U.S. and Cuban realities, as well as within the broader inquiry of the changing nature of nation-states and its impact on the politics and identity of diaspora communities. Topics covered include: the origins of the post-revolution exile enclave of the 1960s; the evolution of the Cuban community over the 1960s; the pluralization of exile politics in the 1970s, particularly regarding the relationship with the island; the emergence of Cuban-American political action committees in the 1980s; post-Cold War developments; and the transition of Miami by the coming of age of a second generation of Cuban-Americans and the arrival of a new wave of exiles.
Interspersed with vignettes from the author's own experiences and political activism, In the Land of Mirrors explores the meanings and ramifications of exile, of belonging, and of seeing the self in the other. It will appeal to political scientists, Latin Americanists, and those studying the politics of exile.
María de los Angeles Torres was born in Cuba and came to the United States as a young child. She is Associate Professor of Political Science, DePaul University.
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An Island Called Home
Returning to Jewish Cuba
Ruth Behar, Photographs by Humberto Mayol
Rutgers University Press, 2007

Yiddish-speaking Jews thought Cuba was supposed to be a mere layover on the journey to the United States when they arrived in the island country in the 1920s. They even called it “Hotel Cuba.” But then the years passed, and the many Jews who came there from Turkey, Poland, and war-torn Europe stayed in Cuba. The beloved island ceased to be a hotel, and Cuba eventually became “home.” But after Fidel Castro came to power in 1959, the majority of the Jews opposed his communist regime and left in a mass exodus. Though they remade their lives in the United States, they mourned the loss of the Jewish community they had built on the island.

As a child of five, Ruth Behar was caught up in the Jewish exodus from Cuba. Growing up in the United States, she wondered about the Jews who stayed behind. Who were they and why had they stayed? What traces were left of the Jewish presence, of the cemeteries, synagogues, and Torahs? Who was taking care of this legacy? What Jewish memories had managed to survive the years of revolutionary atheism?

An Island Called Home is the story of Behar’s journey back to the island to find answers to these questions. Unlike the exotic image projected by the American media, Behar uncovers a side of Cuban Jews that is poignant and personal. Her moving vignettes of the individuals she meets are coupled with the sensitive photographs of Havana-based photographer Humberto Mayol, who traveled with her.

Together, Behar’s poetic and compassionate prose and Mayol’s shadowy and riveting photographs create an unforgettable portrait of a community that many have seen though few have understood. This book is the first to show both the vitality and the heartbreak that lie behind the project of keeping alive the flame of Jewish memory in Cuba.

Reader Guide (http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu/pages/behar_reader_guide.aspx)

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Kissing Fidel
A Memoir of Cuban American Terrorism in the United States
Magda Montiel Davis
University of Iowa Press, 2020

What does it mean to be instantly transformed into the most hated person in your community? After meeting Fidel Castro at a Havana reception in 1994, Cuban-born Magda Montiel Davis, founder of one of the largest immigration law firms in South Florida, soon found out. The reception—attended by hundreds of other Cuban émigrés—was videotaped for historical archives. In a seconds-long clip, Fidel pecks the traditional protocol kiss on Montiel Davis’s cheek as she thanks him for the social benefits conferred upon the Cuban people. The video, however, was mysteriously sold to U.S. reporters and aired incessantly throughout South Florida. Soon the encounter was an international cause célèbre.

Life as she knew it was over for Montiel Davis and her family, including a father who worked with the CIA to topple Fidel, a nohablo-inglés mother who lived with the family, her five children, and her Jewish Brooklyn-born attorney husband. Kissing Fidel shares the sometimes dismal, sometimes comical realities of an ordinary citizen being thrown into a world of death threats, mob attacks, and terrorism.

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Landscape with Human Figure
Rafael Campo
Duke University Press, 2002
In Landscape with Human Figure, his fourth and most compelling collection of poetry, Rafael Campo confirms his status as one of America’s most important poets. Like his predecessor William Carlos Williams, who was also a physician, Campo plumbs the depths of our capacity for empathy. Campo writes stunning, candid poems from outside the academy, poems that arise with equal beauty from a bleak Boston tenement or a moonlit Spanish plaza, poems that remain unafraid to explore and to celebrate his identity as a doctor and Cuban American gay man. Yet no matter what their unexpected and inspired sources, Campo’s poems insistently remind us of the necessity of poetry itself in our increasingly fractured society; his writing brings us together—just as did the incantations of humankind’s earliest healers—into the warm circle of community and connectedness. In this heart-wrenching, haunting, and ultimately humane work, Rafael Campo has painted as if in blood and breath a gorgeously complex world, in which every one of us can be found.
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Life on the Hyphen
The Cuban-American Way
By Gustavo Pérez Firmat
University of Texas Press, 2012

An expanded, updated edition of the classic study of Cuban-American culture, this engaging book, which mixes the author’s own story with his reflections as a trained observer, explores how both famous and ordinary members of the “1.5 Generation” (Cubans who came to the United States as children or teens) have lived “life on the hyphen”—neither fully Cuban nor fully American, but a fertile hybrid of both. Offering an in-depth look at Cuban-Americans who have become icons of popular and literary culture—including Desi Arnaz, Oscar Hijuelos, musician Pérez Prado, and crossover pop star Gloria Estefan, as well as poets José Kozer and Orlando González Esteva, performers Willy Chirino and Carlos Oliva, painter Humberto Calzada, and others—Gustavo Pérez Firmat chronicles what it means to be Cuban in America.

The first edition of Life on the Hyphen won the Eugene M. Kayden National University Press Book Award and received honorable mentions for the Modern Language Association’s Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize and the Latin American Studies Association’s Bryce Wood Book Award.

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Nuevo South
Latinas/os, Asians, and the Remaking of Place
By Perla M. Guerrero
University of Texas Press, 2017

Latinas/os and Asians are rewriting the meaning and history of race in the American South by complicating the black/white binary that has frequently defined the region since before the Civil War. Arriving in southern communities as migrants or refugees, Latinas/os and Asians have experienced both begrudging acceptance and prejudice as their presence confronts and troubles local understandings of race and difference—understandings that have deep roots in each community’s particular racial history, as well as in national fears and anxieties about race.

Nuevo South offers the first comparative study showing how Latinas/os and Asians are transforming race and place in the contemporary South. Integrating political, economic, and social analysis, Perla M. Guerrero examines the reception of Vietnamese, Cubans, and Mexicans in northwestern Arkansas communities that were almost completely white until the mid-1970s. She shows how reactions to these refugees and immigrants ranged from reluctant acceptance of Vietnamese as former US allies to rejection of Cubans as communists, criminals, and homosexuals and Mexicans as “illegal aliens” who were perceived as invaders when they began to establish roots and became more visible in public spaces. Guerrero’s research clarifies how social relations are constituted in the labor sphere, particularly the poultry industry, and reveals the legacies of regional history, especially anti-Black violence and racial cleansing. Nuevo South thus helps us to better understand what constitutes the so-called Nuevo South and how historical legacies shape the reception of new people in the region.

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One Island, Many Voices
Conversations with Cuban-American Writers
Eduardo R. del Rio
University of Arizona Press, 2008
Cuban-American writers have been studied primarily within the context of Latino literature as a whole. Seeing a need to distinguish and define this unique literary perspective, Eduardo del Rio selected twelve important well-known authors and conducted interviews. He chose writers who were born in Cuba but have lived in the United States for a significant amount of time and whose works include themes he considers elemental to Cuban-American literature: identity, duality, memory, and exile. But rather than a cohesive, homogeneous group, these conversations unveiled a kaleidoscope of individuality, style, and motive. The authors’ bonds to Cuba inform their creative work in vastly different ways, and attempts to categorize their similarities only highlight the range of character and experience within this assemblage of talented writers.

From playwright Dolores Prida to author and literary critic Gustavo Pérez Firmat, these voices run the gamut of both genre and personality. In addition to the essential facts of literary accomplishment, the interviews include a wealth of insight into each writer’s history, motivations, concerns, and relationship to language. These personal details serve to humanize and illuminate the unique circumstances and realities that have shaped both the authors and their work.

What del Rio has ultimately brought together is a series of intimate sketches that will not only serve as an important reference for any discussion of the literature but will also help readers to develop for themselves a sense of what Cuban-American writing is, and what it is not.

CONTENTS
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Nilo Cruz
Roberto Fernández
Cristina García
Carolina Hospital
Eduardo Machado
Dionisio Martínez
Pablo Medina
Achy Obejas
Ricardo Pau-Llosa
Gustavo Pérez Firmat
Dolores Prida
Virgil Suárez
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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Palm Crows
Virgil Suárez
University of Arizona Press, 2001
Hibiscus, banyan trees, and royal palms. Mango jam, white slices of sugarcane, and oxtail stew. Childhood games with fireflies and snail shells. These are images of a Cuba that many remember and others have never known, captured here in the powerful poems of Virgil Suárez.
 
Born in Havana in the wake of the Cuban Revolution, Suárez is now one of more than a million Cubans living in the United States. In Palm Crows Suárez offers a compelling canción of loss, longing, and memory as he explores the meaning of exile. In poems that range from playful and fantastic to elegiac and meditative, he writes about “the in-betweenness of spirit” of those who have left their home and must try to forge a new one in the United States.
 
Palm Crows shows us an almost mythical Cuba, offering a compelling testament both to the immigrant experience and to our own search for home.
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Traveling Heavy
A Memoir in between Journeys
Ruth Behar
Duke University Press, 2013
Traveling Heavy is a deeply moving, unconventional memoir by the master storyteller and cultural anthropologist Ruth Behar. Through evocative stories, she portrays her life as an immigrant child and later, as an adult woman who loves to travel but is terrified of boarding a plane. With an open heart, she writes about her Yiddish-Sephardic-Cuban-American family, as well as the strangers who show her kindness as she makes her way through the world. Compassionate, curious, and unafraid to reveal her failings, Behar embraces the unexpected insights and adventures of travel, whether those be learning that she longed to become a mother after being accused of giving the evil eye to a baby in rural Mexico, or going on a zany pilgrimage to the Behar World Summit in the Spanish town of Béjar.

Behar calls herself an anthropologist who specializes in homesickness. Repeatedly returning to her homeland of Cuba, unwilling to utter her last goodbye, she is obsessed by the question of why we leave home to find home. For those of us who travel heavy with our own baggage, Behar is an indispensable guide, full of grace and hope, in the perpetual search for connection that defines our humanity.

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