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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.

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.

Chapter 3 extends the analysis of a developing, constructed sense of group identity around issues of the trauma of illegality by looking at fiction by Caribbean Latino/a writers. Drawing on Anthony Appiah’s explication of the notion of “partial cosmopolitanism,” the chapter argues that Caribbean-origin writers seek ways of extending a group identity so that it tentatively includes both undocumented immigrants and other groups of Latinos (such as Cubans or Puerto Ricans) who are not subjected in the same way to the conditions and risks of “illegality.” Junot Díaz’s story “Negocios” (in Drown) puts the trope of family at the center of contested versions of latinidad that might—or might not—successfully create communities of solidarity around both U.S. citizens and undocumented Latinos. Cristina García’s A Handbook to Luck and Julia Alvarez’s young adult novel Return to Sender construct an ethics of solidarity across difference that recognizes immigration status as a problem that requires an ethical response across national-origin lines.