CUBA Rediscovering Cuba: A Personal Memoir

Jorge Reyes, author of the highly acclaimed, Rediscovering Cuba: A Personal Memoir, ISBN # 0-595-19457-5.

Rediscovering Cuba: A Personal Memoir, ISBN # 0-595-19457-5.

Now in it's second edition, Jorge Reyes, author of Rediscovering Cuba: A Personal Memoir, brings up to date a book he originally wrote in 1999. In this updated and rewritten edition, Reyes talks about his second trip to the island in January 2003, a seven-day road trip that took him from Havana to Santiago with his mother Grisell and an American friend, Josh Taylor.

In 1982, at the age of eight, Jorge Reyes left Cuba with his parents via a third-country, Costa Rica, before settling permanently in Miami. Never thinking of returning, in 1999 however, almost twenty years later, Reyes, along with his mother and an aunt, returned to Cuba hoping to say his final farewells to his grandmother who was living through her last stages of cancer and passed away a month after their trip to the island. And so begins a poignant story that takes the reader from the busy streets of Miami one summer afternoon and into the surreal, far-away loneliness of Boniato, a small town on the outskirts of City of Santiago de Cuba, twelve hours later after leaving Miami, at 2:00 a.m.

In an unexpected way, Reyes brings to life an unforgettable cast of characters you easily forget: his great-grandmother, Pepilla, an embittered old woman who died arguing with a flock of pigeons; his aunt Mimi, who sent her two children to the United States in the 1960s hoping that they could be reunited in a few months time-- a reunification that was not to happen until 1990, and only for a few weeks; we even get to read about ghosts rumored to haunt Reyess small family house in Boniato.

But Reyes doesn't stop here. Opening a small door into the pain that to this day divides his family, Reyes describes how his dad's parents left him in 1968, a teenager of seventeen, hoping, again, to be reunited within a few months. Like it happened to Mimi, it was a family reunification that would not happen for another fifteen years!

There is palpable pain in this book and Reyes does a marvelous job trying to heal it with humor, grace and understanding. The book, however, is a humorous account of life itself and about the power to forgive. In what is a surprising revelation, towards the end of the book, Reyes expresses a feeling that exists among many of Cuban-Americans of his age, his inability to feel the impassioned connection his ancestors feel about Cuba, or about the Cuba they imagine: the Cuba hued by nostalgia and sepia-toned pictures. As Reyes asks, Where was the paradise of his parents dreams? Indeed, where is Cuba?

Written with immediacy and charm, Rediscovering Cuba: A Personal Memoir, is a short book that will leave you breathless.