Cubanisimo!: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Cuban Literature

by Cristina García (Editor)

¡Cubanísimo! is the first book to gather Cuban stories, essays, poems and novel excerpts in one volume that summarizes the richness and depth of a great national literature. From the turn of the century to the present, from Havana to Miami, New York, Mexico City, Madrid and beyond, the spirit and diversity of Cuban cultureconverge in one vibrant literary jam session. Cristina García has ingeniously grouped her selections according to “the music of their sentences” into five sections named for Cuban dance styles.

¡Cubanísimo! begins with an elegant classical danzón section that includes poems and diaries from the father of Cuban literature, José Martí, and Antonio Benítez-Rojo’s hallucinatory story A View from the Mangrove . As it moves to more contemporary dances, the book offers, among other delights, the essay by Alejo Carpentier that was the first to define magical realism; the scandalously sensual eighth chapter from José Lezama Lima’s controversial 1966 novel Paradiso ; Ana Menendez’s Little Havana-inspired story, In Cuba I was a German Shepherd ; a passage from Reinaldo Arenas’s acclaimed memoir Before Night Falls and six witty musings—or mambos—on language from Gustavo Pérez Firmat’s Life on the Hyphen .

A brilliant introduction for readers who want to explore Cuban literature, as well as a collectible volume for those who love Cuba, ¡Cubanísimo! is a celebration of Cuban culture, from the island to its farthest flung voices.

Genres: Latinx, Poetry, Nonfiction, Latino

400 pages, Paperback

First published April 22, 2003

About the author

After working for Time Magazine as a researcher, reporter, and Miami bureau chief, García turned to writing fiction. Her first novel, Dreaming in Cuban (1992), received critical acclaim and was a finalist for the National Book Award. She has since published her novels The Agüero Sisters (1997) and Monkey Hunting (2003), and has edited books of Cuban and other Latin American literature. Her fourth novel, A Handbook to Luck, was released in hardcover in 2007 and came out in paperback in April 2008.

Reviews

[Julio The Fox · Rating 5 out of 5]

What's the most Cuban thing in the world? Prison and exile, of course. I've endured both, along with Jose' Marti', Fidel and Raul Castro, Guillermo Cabrera Infante and even those Cubans born in the U.S.A., who live in "El exilio", not Miami, Los Angeles or New York. We are all lost wanderers from an island "some dance to remember, some dance to forget." Novelist Cristina Garcia, whom I had the pleasure of once meeting via my mother, has collected poems, essays, extracts from novels, poems and non-fiction musings in the form of a dance. One entry leads to another by musical step, not chronology or theme. Marti' is here, naturally: "I love two things, Cuba and the night", but also Jose' Lezama Lima, whose homoerotic novel PARADISO somehow got past Cuban government censors. (Lezama Lima loved literature, food and sex, though not necessarily in that order.) The late Reinaldo Arenas, born in Cuba, imprisoned in Cuba for his homosexuality and finally dying of AIDS in exile in the U.S. gets his due by way of the memoir BEFORE NIGHT FALLS: "I blame one man for my forthcoming demise: Fidel Castro". Jose' Perez-Firmat, the Cuban-American literary critic, puts in a contribution on negotiating "life on the hyphen", or what it is like to be Cuban-American, negotiating politics, language and political language. ( A confession: he loathes me but I do not return his hatred.) This anthology is caliente, divisive and controversial, just like Cuba itself.

[Fifi · Rating 1 out of 5]

Out of all the stories, only one was great, and the translation was decent the other stories it wasn’t deep enough, and I feel like it didn’t emphasize on Cuban culture

[Norma · Rating 3 out of 5]

A delightful taste of Cuban literature.