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Borland, Isabel Alvarez, and Lynette M. F. Bosch, eds. Cuban-American Literature and Art: Negotiating Identities. Albany: SUNY P, 2009.
This intriguing collection of essays explores diverse representations of Cuban identity in novels, poems, and paintings by writers and artists both on the island itself as well as in exile. While the majority of the essays focus on post-Revolutionary cultural production, the Revolution clearly remains the touchstone of all that is written about Cuba. Though the essays celebrate nuanced visions of Cuban and Cuban American identities, a tone of melancholy informs the volume. The editors establish this longing in the epigraph: a quotation from Roberto G. Fernández narrates the process by which two peoples come together only to fight in an attempt to destroy each other, leaving both groups mortally wounded. Irrespective of the debates about Fidel Castro's Revolution, the editors imply that the Cuban psyche has been damaged irreparably by the last fifty years; this text details the cultural works that have emerged in the midst of the instability.
The collection is divided into two parts, the first dedicated to literature and the second to art. In their introductory essay, Alvarez Borland and Bosch review recurrent themes that mark discussions of Cuban national identity, mentioning "hybrid identities, biculturation, bilingualism, immigration, adaptation, and exile" (4). They go on to explain that the goal of the volume is to foment discussion about Cuban American literature and art and the relations between these varied creative expressions. In the first essay, "The Spell of the Hyphen," Gustavo Pérez Firmat examines the writings of Orlando González Esteva, comparing them with two of his own poems, "Bilingual Blues" and "The Tongue Surgeon." He argues that both he and González Esteva work in a void, in an in-between space that exists between Cuba and the United States; they write on the hyphen. Pérez Firmat calls attention to the lingering nostalgia many Cubans and Cuban Americans feel for the island, a characteristic that distinguishes them from other Latino groups. He writes: "Cuban-American literature may originate in exile but it is not exile literature, because it is not sufficiently grounded in the facticity, in the raw reality of the island" (28). And so it is the weight of absence that marks the literary works...