Reviewed by Timothy Peters
The pain and loneliness of exile -- surely a cornerstone of Cuban American fiction -- permeates this poetic, fragmentary first novel by Ana Menéndez, a former journalist born in Los Angeles to Cuban emigres and the author of a well-received book of short
stories (In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd, 2001). But in telling the story of a young woman abandoned by her mother during the early days of the Cuban revolution, Menéndez connects the understandable loss of exile with a much more profound "trauma of separation." Raised in Miami by her grandfather, the unnamed narrator longs to know the truth of her parents, but the grandfather only supplies "the understanding that my father had been in prison, and had died there, and that in her grief my mother had sent me away."
Such a cursory explanation fails to answer the questions that haunt this detached young woman, and she begins to search for her mother or, at least, for a glimpse of her mother's experience. But the quest is largely fruitless until a mysterious package, postmarked in Spain but without a return address, arrives containing a bundle of handwritten notes and photographs. Its contents supply the core narrative of the book, an account of her mother, Teresa de la Landre, and her love affair with the legendary revolutionary, Ernesto Che Guevara.
Related in disjointed shards of prose and illustrated by news photos of the scruffy leader, Teresa's story amounts to an impressionistic autobiography: a privileged upbringing, her marriage to an academic named Calixto de la Landre, her vocation as a painter. These fragments also form an idiosyncratic and evocative portrait of Cuba, from the "yellow-green heat like liquid" to, as the revolution begins, "gunfire ... like thunder from a demented half-world. "
The revolution, of course, is the signal event in Teresa's life, and she writes that "cataclysmic events, whatever their outcome, are as rare and transporting as a great love." In this case, one small by-product of that violent, ugly upheaval is the encounter between Teresa and Guevara. She is at first "repulsed ... with his smell and filth" and put off by his vulgarity, feelings that mask her attraction to the bearded rebel. They become lovers when Guevara visits her studio, and the story of their affair is told in some of the finest writing in the novel, handled with palpable erotic heat and refreshing decorum (not an easy balance to achieve): "A kiss. The first parting of flesh. Everything that comes later is sweet elaboration."
But is the affair real or imagined? That's the essential mystery at the heart of this novel. The narrator's attempt to fathom the nearly unfathomable nature of truth, particularly personal truth, enables Menéndez to conjoin love and history and politics into a powerful melange. One of the strengths of this book is that while its backdrop is one of the most politically charged events since World War II, Menéndez's focus is on a much more intimate drama; she uses the revolution because it illuminates her theme of separation. She doesn't romanticize it, but there's no attempt at neutrality either; she provides a devastating portrayal of Cuba's postrevolutionary failure.
Her narrator observes that contemporary Havana, "so lovely at first glance, was really a city of dashed hopes." And later: "Everywhere, the socialist experiment seemed dead and buried, awaiting only the death and burial of its maximum leader."
Even Teresa realizes that Che and the new government were devolving into corruption and terror when she writes that "a thin black core of doubt has begun to burrow into the revolution's heart."
Literature should never be purely polemical or political, but that doesn't mean that politics and literature cannot intermingle in interesting, insightful ways.
Menéndez's literary sensibility also reveals itself in strongly, often beautifully poetic prose: "Where the cement had cracked, small purple flowers blossomed, as if every house held a garden prisoned within its walls." But she occasionally stretches her gifts as a stylist too far, and the language becomes so self-consciously precious that it fails to contain any truth, literal or fictive ("Women ate their dreams and bloomed like orchids in the rain").
More seriously, the novel suffers from the thinness of the plot; Loving Che can feel more like an impressionistic memoir than a fully formed narrative. One of Menéndez's concerns is the elusiveness of a clear story line ("Life is not a tidy narrative," Teresa's mother observes), but the essence of a story's power is to provide shape and form to the shards of memory and experience.
That's probably why the framing narrative -- the narrator's story -- is in some ways the most compelling part of the novel, even though her life is nowhere near as dramatic as her mother's. As she researches the history of Guevara and the revolution, then returns to Cuba to look for evidence of her mother's, her quest propels the reader along, a hopeful search that takes her into some strange and compelling little narrative corners. All of us want to understand where we came from; all of us want to understand the early forces that shaped our lives. Perhaps it's true that definitive answers are hard to come by, but the search for them is an essential component of life itself. This finely wrought, emotionally nuanced first novel reminds us that it's not just Cubans who have a "fetish for the past."
Timothy Peters is a Berkeley writer.
[This article appeared on page M - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle, Sunday, January 11, 2004]
Bezoekers bewonderen de werken van George Struikelblok. (Foto: Ramon Keijzer) 
De atlas begint in Suriname en bouwt een beeld op van de wereld steeds verder weg vanuit de eigen omgeving. Centraal in de atlas staat Suriname, dat is ook de eigen omgeving voor de Surinaamse leerling. Op de foto's en de districtskaarten kan ieder het gebied herkennen waar hij of zij woont. In het tweede deel van de atlas wordt het Caribisch gebied gedetailleerd, tot de kleinste eilanden, behandeld. Daarna volgen Zuid- en Noord-Amerika. Steeds verder weg van Suriname volgen Europa, Afrika, Azië en de rest van de wereld. Met 240 kaarten in prachtig heldere kleuren, integratie van historische kaarten, aparte districtskaarten, actuele onderwerpen, thematische kaarten en satelietbeelden.
