Embracing Cuba

Photographs of the art, culture, and everyday life of Cuba taken from 2005-2015.

An author and photographer recalls her long exile's journey from the shores of Cuba to an American citizen in this memoir of the Cuban-American experience.

"[DePalma] renders a Cuba few tourists will ever see . . . You won't forget these people soon, and you are bound to emerge from DePalma's bighearted account with a deeper understanding of a storied island . . . A remarkably revealing glimpse into the world of a muzzled yet irrepressibly ebullient neighbor."--The New York Times Modern Cuba comes alive in a vibrant portrait of a group of families's varied journeys in one community over the last twenty years. Cubans today, most of whom have lived their entire lives under the Castro regime, are hesitantly embracing the future. In his new book, Anthony DePalma, a veteran reporter with years of experience in Cuba, focuses on a neighborhood across the harbor from Old Havana to dramatize the optimism as well as the enormous challenges that Cubans face: a moving snapshot of Cuba with all its contradictions as the new regime opens the gate to the capitalism that Fidel railed against for so long. In Guanabacoa, longtime residents prove enterprising in the extreme. Scrounging materials in the black market, Cary Luisa Limonta Ewen has started her own small manufacturing business, a surprising turn for a former ranking member of the Communist Party. Her good friend Lili, a loyal Communist, heads the neighborhood's watchdog revolutionary committee. Artist Arturo Montoto, who had long lived and worked in Mexico, moved back to Cuba when he saw improving conditions but complains like any artist about recognition. In stark contrast, Jorge García lives in Miami and continues to seek justice for the sinking of a tugboat full of refugees, a tragedy that claimed the lives of his son, grandson, and twelve other family members, a massacre for which the government denies any role. In The Cubans, many patriots face one new question: is their loyalty to the revolution, or to their country? As people try to navigate their new reality, Cuba has become an improvised country, an old machine kept running with equal measures of ingenuity and desperation. A new kind of revolutionary spirit thrives beneath the conformity of a half century of totalitarian rule. And over all of this looms the United States, with its unpredictable policies, which warmed towards its neighbor under one administration but whose policies have now taken on a chill reminiscent of the Cold War.

Excerpt from Slavery in the Island of Cuba: With Remarks on the Statements of the British Press Relative to the Slave Trade Having been incited by the English Press to answer certain charges utterly void of foundation, directed against the Govern ment of Spain and the Cuban authorities, I have considered it my duty to accept the challenge; but as the question of slavery and its incidents afl'ord very ample scope for discussion, I have considered that it would not be easy to develop my ideas with propriety in separate articles in the newspapers; and hence I have resolved to publish a Memoir, embracing all the requisite data for the illustration of this question in all its phases. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Gustavo P?rez Firmat arrived in America with his family at the age of eleven. Victims of CastroÍs revolution, the P?rez family put their life on hold, waiting for CastroÍs fall. Each Christmas, along with other Cuban families in the neighborhood, they celebrated with the cry, ñNext year in Cuba.î Growing up in the Dade County school system, and graduating from college in Florida, P?rez Firmat was insulated from America by the nurturing sights and sounds of Little Havana. It wasnÍt until he left home to attend graduate school at the University of Michigan that he realized, as the Cuba of his birth receded farther into the past, he had become no longer wholly Cubano, but increasingly a man of two heritages and two countries. In a searing memoir of a family torn apart by exile, P?rez Firmat chronicles the painful search for roots that has come to dominate his adult life. With one brother beset by personal problems and another embracing the very revolution that drove their family out of Cuba, Gustavo realized that the words ñNext Year in Cuba,î had, for him, taken on a hollow ring. Now, married to an American woman, and father to two children who are Cuban in name only, P?rez Firmat has finally come to acknowledge his need to celebrate his love of Cuba, while embracing the America he has come to love.