Next Year in Cuba: A Cubano's Coming-Of-Age in America - Softcover

Firmat, Gustavo Perez

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1558854614 ISBN 13: 9781558854611

Publisher: Arte Publico Press, 2006

Synopsis

Poet, fiction, writer, and scholar Gustavo Perez Firmat writes a heartfelt memoir of a Cuban-American's lifelong search for identity and a sense of roots in his adopted land.

About this title

From the Publisher:

Gustavo Pérez Firmat arrived in America with his family at the age of eleven. Victims of Castro's revolution, the Pérez family put their life on hold, waiting for Castro's fall. Each Christmas, along with other Cuban families in the neighborhood, they celebrated with the cry, "Next Year in Cuba."

Growing up in the Dade County school system, and graduating from college in Florida, Pérez Firmat was insulated from America by the nurturing sights and sounds of Little Havana. It wasn't until he left home to attend graduate school at the University of Michigan that he realized, as the Cuba of his birth receded farther into the past, that he had become no longer wholly Cubano, but increasingly a man of two heritage's and two countries.

In a searing memoir of a family torn apart by exile, Pérez Firmat chronicles the painful search for roots that has come to dominate his adult life. Now married to an American woman, and a father to two children who are Cuban in name only, Pérez Firmat has finally come to acknowledge his need to celebrate his love of Cuba, while embracing the America he has come to love.

"Next Year In Cuba is a valuable and heartfelt addition to the canon of Cuban-American writing. A fine portrait of a family and culture in transition." -- Oscar Hijuelos, author of Mambo Kings Play Songs Of Love.

"With his highly intelligent critical essays on Cuban-American cultural experience, his charming and witty poems, and now his autobiographical meditation, Next Year In Cuba, Gustavo Pérez Firmat has established himself among our very best writers of Cuban heritage." -- Leonard Michaels, author of The Men's Club.

From the Inside Flap:

"Next Year in Cuba is a valuable and heartfelt addition to the canon of Cuban-American writing. A fine portrait of a family and culture in transition." —Oscar Hijuelos, author of Mambo Kinds Play Songs of Love "The Cuban-American memoir we’ve all been waiting for . . . a rare and exceptional jewel of a book . . . the pleasures and perils of the Cuban-American experience become our own in this moving and engrossing read." —Virgil Suárez, author of Latin Jazz and Havana Thursdays

About this edition

• Publisher: Arte Publico Press
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1558854614
• ISBN 13: 9781558854611
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 213