In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd

“They were stories of old lovers, beautiful and round-hipped. Of skies that stretched on clear and blue to the Cuban hills. Of green landscapes that clung to the red clay of Güines, roots dug in like fingernails in a good-bye. In Cuba, the stories always began, life was good and pure. But something always happened to them in the end, something withering, malignant. Máximo never understood it. The stories that opened in sun, always narrowed into a dark place.”

In this passage, Máximo reflects on the stories he and his restaurant staff, all Cuban immigrants, exchange at the end of their shifts. These stories both romanticize the Cuba they have lost and recognize the country’s fraught history and present. Máximo struggles to understand how and why what is “good and pure” becomes so tarnished. Though they arrive at no definitive answer, the stories in the collection all ruminate on this question, whether in relation to the country and its politics or within individual relationships.

“‘You see, in Cuba, it was very common to retire to a game of dominos after a good meal. It was a way to bond and build community. Folks, you here are seeing a slice of the past. A simpler time of good friendships and unhurried days.’”

A Miami tour guide brings a group of tourists to the park where Máximo and his friends play dominoes. Rather than being seen and respected as people with complex and painful pasts, the men are treated as objects in a quaint scene, another Miami landmark for tourists to check off their to-see list. The guide’s words echo Máximo’s own feelings about the past but make a spectacle of them. They trivialize and objectify the immigrants’ devastating loss of identity and community.

“Now he stood with the gulf at his back, their ribbony youth aflutter in the past. And what had he salvaged from the years? Already, he was forgetting Rosa’s face, the precise shade of her eyes.”

After Máximo tells the story of Juanito, the dog who is a mutt in America but was a German Shepherd in Cuba, he tearfully turns away from his friends and reflects on his present.