Out of Havana: Memoirs of Ordinary Life in Cuba
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Out of Havana is a first-person narrative and creative non-fiction memoir that uncovers fifty years of Marxism through a myriad of human relations tangled with shocking historical events as lived by four generations of Cuban women. Form Batista’s dictatorship to Castro’s Revolution, from the idealism and the euphoria of the 60’s to the pragmatic survival of the 90’s after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, this book is a gallery where Cuban glories and miseries pass by. Out of Havana intertwines History and the lives and the stories of women and men, liberals and conservatives, revolutionaries and dissidents, those who stayed in Cuba and those who went to exile.
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Rosa, the primary narrative voice in the book, belonged to the generation of Cubans who fought for the Revolution and gave their entire lives to make Marxism work in the tropics. In 1959, nineteen-year-old Rosa joined the triumphant Revolution with enthusiasm and idealism, undertaking her participation as both a personal battle for her own rights and a duty to her Cuban society. As a young revolutionary, Rosa was called to become a heroine at work and to do better than her mother and grandmother; no more women maids in Cuba! In 2000, in her maid's uniform, black and white as European fashion dictated, Rosa vividly narrates the paradoxical entanglement of her life with the Cuban Revolution. Out of Havana is an attempt to preserve the voices who were silenced while striving for a better world of justice and equity for all.
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"Out of Havana" will be thought provoking for anyone fascinated by the complexities of social change. By creatively synthesizing her academic research into one woman's story, Dr. Alonso powerfully shares what she learned about the promises, joys, contradictions, disappointments,and failures of the Cuban Revolution.
Nancy Worcester, Professor Emerita, Department of Gender & Women's Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison |
Out of Havana provides an uncommon ordinary woman’s insight into the last half century of Cuba’s tumultuous recent history. More powerfully than an academic study or historical account, it allows us intimately to grasp the enthusiasm, commitment and sense of promise that defined many average Cubans’ experience of the 1959 Revolution and the first triumphant decades of the Castro regime. As the story shifts into the final decades of the last century (the 1980s Mariel Boatlift, the so-called “special period in time of peace” [from 1991 to the end of the decade], and the 1994 Balseros or Rafters Crisis), it starts gradually to reveal, with understated yet relentless eloquence, an ultimately insuperable rift between the high-flown official rhetoric of uncompromising struggle and revolutionary sacrifice and the harsh conditions and cruelly absurd situations that the protagonist, along with the majority of Cubans, begin routinely to live out. It is a rare and important document, a unique personal chronicle of an everyday Cuban reality that most Americans continue to know only fragmentarily.
Luís Madureira, Co-Editor of the Luso-Brazilian Review, Professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Wisconsin-Madison |