Cuba Libre
The distance between Kansas City and Cuba is a scenic 1,700 miles of land and water. Maria Finn Dominguez, KC native and editor of the new anthology Cuba in Mind, headed 3,700 miles in the other direction to get there. “I wanted to travel to Latin America, but I’d never saved any money, so I thought I’d go to Alaska, work on fishing boats and canneries and save some money,” Dominguez says. “Of course, that didn’t really work out, either.” Dominguez ended up moving to New York for grad school and taking salsa dancing lessons at the same time her sister was taking scuba lessons. With New York a less than ideal locale to fully explore either pursuit, they finally headed for the island.
“The first time, I went illegally, from Jamaica to Cuba,” Dominguez confesses. The next time, she went as a teacher from Hunter College with twenty students in tow for a writing class. Their experiences led Dominguez to gather 31 pieces that explore the heart of life lived in Cuba, from Ernest Hemingway’s essay on why he lived in Cuba to Langston Hughes’ meditation on hip-shaking Cuban music. “When you teach, you end up creating an anthology for every class,” Dominguez says. “For this class, every day we had a lecture from a professor on history, musicology, dance, religion — which was an eye-opener on things the students and even I hadn’t given much thought to.”
Cuba in Mind works as a travelogue (in which even reptile experts write melancholy prose poems on the landscape) as much as a cultural memoir, one populated by characters such as Nitza Villapol, the embittered TV chef whose cookbook is considered the Cuban Joy of Cooking and who receives no money and no credit for it. The book’s sections — “Travelers,” “Expatriates,” “Aficionados” and “Exiles & Immigrants” — contain fictional people who seem poignantly real and real people who read like creations of Graham Greene, Elmore Leonard or Stephen Crane.
Dominguez, who got married in Havana in January, counts herself as an aficionado. “A lot of people travel to Cuba and come back with a certain degree of enthusiasm, feeling like a lightning bolt has gone through them,” she says. Cuba in Mind tries to translate some of that in the tension of a baseball game or the hypnotic drums of a Santeria dance. “All these things had a huge impact on me, like the way old cars are rigorously maintained or looking at how the Chinese and Jewish populations influence the culture,” Dominguez says.
Along with enthusiasm and love, regret is the book’s third main theme. A scattershot history, Cuba in Mind documents the country’s evolution from a palace of delights to a Communist dictatorship and the poverty that resulted. For example, novelist Robert Stone recalls the hedonistic Cuba of 1955 while visiting the muted 1991 version.
“This was supposed to be part of a light literary anthology series, but Cuba’s so politically charged that it’s a dream thinking it would come out any different,” Dominguez says.
