A Cuban Emigre Looks at the Revolution
2004 February 15, Sunday - Book World
By Reviewed Ann Louise Bardach
February 15, 2004
LOVING CHE
By Ana Menendez. Grove. 229 pp. $22
In her first book, In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd, Ana Menendez assembled an enchanting collection of short stories. Crafted with a lush, poetic prose, the stories were lyrical, wise and affecting, offering up a vision of Cuban exile life filled with aching loss and absurd hilarity. Loving Che, Menendez's first novel, has many of the same qualities, but her hand is not as deft, her footing not as sure.
Menendez begins her story in Miami, where her protagonist has been raised by a kindly but dour grandfather who fled Cuba soon after the revolution with his infant granddaughter in tow. Menendez's nameless narrator claims to have had "an uneventful, even pleasant childhood," growing up in a home with "no television set, no magazines, no photographs, only books and the quiet turning of pages." Her life history is threadbare, almost a tabula rasa. The only clue to her past is some lines of verse by Pablo Neruda that were pinned to her sweater by her mother the night her little girl left Cuba.
After college and the death of her grandfather, she travels to Havana hoping to find some links to her past -- but always in vain. Then a box arrives at her Miami Beach home -- filled with letters, writings and photographs -- from a woman who reveals herself as her mother, Teresa.
At this point, Teresa takes over as narrator, telling her story in fragments of memory, remorse and heartbreak. She is a daughter of privilege who married a scholar and a gentleman. Through her husband, a sympathizer with the revolution against the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, she meets the Argentine-born guerrilla Ernesto "Che" Guevara and falls hopelessly in love.
Teresa seems to have been inspired to some degree by Naty Revuelta, the beautiful, bored, aristocratic wife of a Cuban doctor, who became besotted with Fidel Castro in the 1950s. After a brief affair, which spawned a daughter, Castro moved on to other loves and his primary passion, power. Content with her narrow niche of history, Naty -- unlike her daughter -- remained in Cuba. Likewise, Menendez's Teresa chooses to live in Cuba, feasting on memories of her former lover.
Among the most compelling parts of Teresa's account is her retelling of some crucial events in Cuban history, from the fall of Batista to the destruction of the swank department store El Encanto, which was mysteriously firebombed in 1961. There is the death of the glorious student revolutionary Jose Antonio Echeverria at age 25 and the stunning rise of Eddy Chibas, the reformer-radio commentator who could have been his country's great hope but instead, as in the last act of a bel canto opera, shot himself to death during a live radio broadcast.
"One year later, the coup, like a great shot in the dark, ended the illusion that the future was forever," Menendez writes, describing the devastation wreaked by Batista's coup in 1952, which historian Hugh Thomas likened to a national nervous breakdown. "Suicide is our one constant ideology," Menendez observes darkly, "our muddy heart's single desire." Such passages searingly render Cuba's history in human terms and costs, but they are scattered thinly about the narrative. The reader yearns for more information to anchor this fanciful, ambitious novel.
At its best, Loving Che has some of the quality of Wide Sargasso Sea (also set in the Caribbean), Jean Rhys's haunting novel about the imagined life of Mrs. Rochester, the mysterious wife of Jane Eyre's love. Rhys took advantage of the perquisites of fiction, while Menendez is burdened and challenged by history and the iconography of her subject. Notwithstanding Che's grievous delusions, he has been mythologized as the Achilles of our time -- a legend requiring only a nickname for identification. With his movie-star good looks plastered on coffee mugs and T-shirts around the globe, Che is as much of an icon as James Dean or the Beatles.
Understandably, the folks at Grove Press (who had a successful turn at publishing a Che biography a few years back) have seized the opportunity to exploit their charismatic subject. They have studded the text with almost a dozen black-and-white images of the photogenic Che -- ostensibly the very ones Teresa sends to her daughter. But the photos both enhance and detract from the work. While intriguing to look at, these powerful images underscore the novel's central weakness: Che himself, beyond Teresa's fevered obsession, never roars to life.
Also troubling are contrivances in the storytelling. How is it possible that our unnamed protagonist obtains so little information from her grandfather about her mother -- his daughter? Can it really be that Teresa dispatches her infant daughter to Miami so that she will not be reminded of her barbudo (bearded) lover? "I read him in every move of your hands," Teresa inadequately explains. Curiously, the author fails to exploit the process of her daughter's sleuthing, with its attendant drama and suspense.
Menendez does not have the powerful narrative line or confident exuberance of fellow exile writers Cristina Garcia or Ernesto Mestre. She does, however, have a keen ear for dialogue, along with perfect pitch for the nuances of Cuban culture. Unforgettable is the lunch with a desperate habanera, who prattles on ceaselessly as she cooks: "Do you have any idea of the boredom we endure here? There's no police state here; that would at least be exciting. . . . Instead they have anesthesized us with boredom. Cuban days are the longest in all the world. You could disappear for three months and no one would notice." But we hear very little from characters other than Teresa and her daughter, and Teresa's long, rambling account often veers into a hushed portentousness. While there are pleasures in reading this novel, its central conceit -- Teresa's affair with the legendary Che -- never loses its sense of being a confection.
Menendez's strengths are her idiosyncratic, poetic prose and her unsentimental insights about all things Cuban. "Miami seemed to me in those years to be living in reverse," says the daughter-narrator. "They named even their stores after the ones they had lost; and the rabid radio stations carried the same names as the ones they had listened to in Cuba, as if they were the slightly crazed sons of a once prominent family. This endless pining for the past seemed to me a kind of madness, everyone living in an asylum, exiled from the living, and no one daring to say it plainly." This is fascinating stuff, and it grounds Menendez's emotionally charged characters and not entirely convincing storytelling. Would that she had told us more. *
Ann Louise Bardach, a commentator for PRI's "Marketplace," is the author of "Cuba Confidential: Love and Vengeance in Miami and Havana" and the editor of "Cuba: A Traveler's Literary Companion."
