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Chapter 5 examines the vicarious returns appearing in novels by Cristina García, Achy Obejas, and Ana Menéndez, the first two writers among the youngest members of the one-and-a-half generation, and the latter from the following generation. Yet, most of the work penned by these three writers revolves around Cuba, demonstrating the island’s continuing allure. The selected novels wrestle with somewhat overlooked aspects of Cuban culture, such as mestizaje, marginalized religions, and the private lives of revolutionary icons, all from the vantage point of women characters. Donning metaphorical guayaberas, García, Obejas, and Menéndez draw from a “usable past” (Lois Parkinson Zamora) that infuses all three novels with cubanidad.

Recently, a number of Latina authors in the United States have reflected on their Sephardic heritage and experiences in the Americas either in public or in their writings. These authors, such as Kathleen Alcalá, Achy Obejas, Denise Chávez, and Demetria Martínez, have discovered their Jewish roots and identity as adults, even as they continue to be known and marketed more as Latina or Chicana writers than as Jewish authors. This chapter examines sephardism in the fiction of Alcalá and Obejas, with an emphasis on the implications of representing Jewish-Spanish experiences in Latina/o and Jewish literature today. Instead of providing a comprehensive analysis of Sephardic history in Latina literature, the chapter considers how sephardism works to bring together Jewish and Latina/o diaspora literature and criticism. After a synthetic reading of Alcalá's Spirits of the Ordinary (1997) and Obejas's Days of Awe (2001), it explores what it means to bring Latina/o and Jewish experiences together through sephardism in the current context and looks at the crossroads that arise from these U.S. Latina/o and Jewish American literary and cultural projects.

This chapter discusses and addresses the sometimes uneasy fit that Cuban Americans have historically had with the imagined “Latino” collective. It looks at the ways in which various Cuban American writers—including Cristina Garcia, Achy Obejas, Margarita Engle, and Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez—have explicitly attempted or, as in Engle's case, more implicitly attempted, to address and negotiate a relationship between Cuban Americans and a panethnic Latino whole.

This chapter examines the figure of the patriarch as dictator, analyzing how Cristina García’s King of Cuba interrogates the two main characters’ heteropatriarchal and hypermasculinist hero narratives. They are depicted as foil characters whose many similar character traits foil their imaginations of themselves as polar opposites and reveals their similar investments in the regime of heteropatriarchy; at the same time, the novel foils both characters’ desires to die heroically, thereby demythologizing the celebratory narratives of the revolution and the freedom fighters that have dominated in Cuba and in Miami, respectively. It further demonstrate how the novel incorporates notes, vignettes, and theatrical production to create a resolver aesthetic that captures the creative forms of survival and strategic negotiation of characters who survive amid scarcity on the island. The chapter ends by focusing on marginalized, defiant second-generation Cuban American daughters of the conservative exile generation who are artist figures so as to illuminate an alternative articulation of revolution and art in the service of decolonial critique.