The Review of Contemporary Fiction

In Cuba I Was a German Shepard by Ana Menédez
Anne Foltz

Ana Menéndez. In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd. Grove, 2001. 229 pp. $23.00.

This collection of short stories vividly captures the intense emotions experienced by Cubans, Americans, and all those caught in between during the long years since Fidel Castro’s assumption of power in 1959. What was once thought to be a temporary political and economic situation in Cuba has evolved into heartbreaking tests of loyalty and faith, which Menéndez clearly shows will have no discernable resolution with Castro’s passing. Most of her characters once belonged to Cuba’s pre-Revolutionary elite and have now become the nearly invisible inhabitants of Miami’s Little Havana. In the title story, a distinguished gentleman by the name of Máximo recalls his flight from Cuba two years after Castro took power and his belief that he and his wife would return with their children after only a few years. This is an unrealized dream, and Máximo is now old and widowed, with his grown children scattered across the country. In another story, a woman awaits news of her husband’s arrival in Miami-a man she believes she married only to allow him entry into America. When she receives word of his unexpected departure from Havana on a raft, she must face not only the possibility of his death at sea but also reassess the powerful emotions concerning her long unseen husband. Stylistically, Menéndez’s stories range between realistic, linear narrative and an unnerving magical realism; yet in each she masterfully re-creates characters imbued with a sense of pride, dignity, and family cherished by Cubans regardless of what city they call home. With Castro’s hold on Cuba coming to what has seemed for many to be a nearly endless close, Menéndez’s work highlights what it means to have a shared heritage and history and-for far too many-to have endured them for so long in the solitude of silence and memory. [Anne Foltz]