Fictional geographies and repetitive identities: Imagining Cuba as an archipelago in the works of Ana Menéndez

ABSTRACT

By definition, the experience of exile is one of separation, and one of the ways this experience is articulated is through nostalgia. Ana Menéndez’s works complicates this definition by focusing on how Cuban exile needs to be understood both in terms of individual or diasporic movement, as well as through shifting understandings and representations of the nation. Drawing on Antonio Benítez-Rojo’s examination of the Caribbean as an archipelago, this essay explores how two works by Menéndez, “In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd” and Adios, Happy Homeland!, construct Cuba in transit, as unlocatable, and by so doing rethink how Cuban exile—especially for later generations—is to be understood.

KEYWORDS:

• Exile
• Cuba
• archipelago
• memory

Notes

1. In a 1940 lecture Fernando Ortiz provides multiple definitions of cubanidad, examining possible links to birth and citizenship. Even though these emphasize the place of Cuba, they do not automatically include the cultural values he sees as part of the term. Ortiz ultimately states, “Cubanidad is most of all the specific quality of a culture, the culture of Cuba. To speak in contemporary terms, cubanidad is a condition of the soul, a complex of feelings, ideas, and attitudes” (459).

2. In Bridges to Cuba, Ruth Behar retells a story she heard about a doctor who, after meeting a filmmaker from Cuba, seemingly confused Cuba with Nepal: “’Oh, so you’re from Cuba? Nice to meet you. I lived in Nepal for five years’” (2).

3. Modesto Arocha includes a version of Máximo’s joke in his Chistes del Cuba, adding to the confusion over ownership. The version is slightly altered as references to Ireland and the Middle East are changed to Bosnia-Herzegovina and the “Third World.” Instead of a U.S. president it is a cubano who dies in 1993 and is resuscitated in 2100 (16).

4. This detail leads to a friend claiming that Juanito/Máximo is wrong, and that Cuba also has similar tall buildings. Máximo responds by shifting the joke into the future, after Castro (22), emphasizing that this contrast to Cuba is important for the joke.

5. This punchline underscores the difference between the two versions of the joke, since, in the earlier version, it is the United States that leads to his cousins’ success.

6. This redirectionality situates Cuban history through the early nineteenth-century Irish migration or through the historical parallels of the Cuban and Irish revolutions, the latter of which has fostered present-day protests about the building of a statue of Che Guevara in Galway, a debate heightened by the fact that Guevara, though born in Argentina, traces his heritage back through Ireland.

7. This becomes more complicated by the fact that Herberto is the editor of the text. If he is the one who writes the footnote, the question becomes why did he not change the original sentence, unless the reader is meant to see Cuba as both.

8. Part II includes such chapters as “The Ships of the Archipelago,” “The Ports of the Archipelago,” and “From Island to Island.”

9. Though there are many references one can use, one of the most obvious is when Solzhenitsyn is arrested and he needs to direct the soldiers, who become lost, from his camp to where he will be imprisoned (20).

10. Similarly, Herberto argues his hometown, Roscommon, derives from “the Irish ‘Ros,’ which means land of trees; and ‘Conman,’ which does not mean what you think it means. Actually, Conman was the name of our famous Irish saint, who was also the see’s first bishop and a man of almost supernatural humility and goodness” (3). Herberto attributes this information to Dunstable Ramsay, a fictional character in Robertson Davies’ The Fifth Business, who wrote a book titled Celtic Saints of Britain and Europe.

11. Much as Ram replaces Aries in this story or Fish replaces Pisces, the impossibility of saying “exile” suggests a replacement, leading one to wonder what term becomes the surrogate for exile, and whether that term might be Cuban.

12. Herberto closes this letter to the contributors with three mathematical equations that he directs “to the one mathematician among you” (106). The first is familiar to readers of the Borges text, since it presents the equation that defines the structure of Herbert’s work. The other two Herberto argues “modifies” this one. Both examples speak of patterning that occurs through difference, through the sequential repetition of different numbers. The equations highlight another way of thinking about how national identity is defined by recognizing forms of similarity that cut across examples of difference.

13. Quiroga states: “Living outside of the island does not necessarily privilege exilic memory. To pursue this point further: There are Cuban exiles in Havana […] Nostalgia for Cuba does not take place only in Miami” (23).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kevin Concannon

Kevin Concannon is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of English at Texas A&M–Corpus Christi. He is presently working on a manuscript on representations of nation space in contemporary U.S.-Latin American literature and culture.