Entangled Terrains and Identities in Cuba
Memories of Guantánamo
By (author) Asa McKercher, Catherine Krull
Publication date:
10 October 2019Length of book:
188 pagesPublisher
Lexington BooksISBN-13: 9781793602770
Entangled Terrains and Identities in Cuba: Memories of Guantánamo explores the challenges and conflicts of life in the transnational spaces between Cuba and the United States by examining the lived experiences of Alberto Jones, a first-generation black Cuban who worked at the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay. Asa McKercher and Catherine Krull take readers on a journey through Jones’s life as he crossed the entangled political, racial, cultural, and economic boundaries, both in Cuba and living as a black Cuban in central Florida. McKercher and Krull argue that Jones’s story encapsulates the reality of recent Caribbean and Cuban experiences as they deconstruct the events of his life to reveal the broader cultural and social implications of identity, boundaries, and belonging throughout Caribbean and Cuban history.
This is a fascinating, revealing, and always-challenging book, which--by breaking with many standard patterns of oral history--gives us a deep and very human picture of one individual life within the confusing context of the Cuban revolution, a life which, while being atypical in so many ways, nonetheless gives us invaluable insight into the complexities of being Cuban (inside and outside Cuba) since 1959.