My Mother in Havana
My Mother in Havana

Author: REBE. HUNTMAN

Publisher:

Published: 2025-02-18

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781958972557

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A daughter's search for her deceased mother brings her face to face with the gods, ghosts, and saints of Cuba. "My Mother in Havana lifts the veil between the living and the dead and makes believers of us all. This story of a mother's absence and a daughter's need is written with a lyricism that filled my heart with beauty while also making it ache for loved ones lost. This is a stunning debut." --Lee Martin, author of the Pulitzer Prize Finalist, The Bright Forever "I closed this book believing more than ever that the people we love, including the people we've been, never really leave us." --Maggie Smith, New York Times bestselling author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful Writing with a physicality of language that moves like the body in dance, Rebe Huntman, a poet, choreographer, and dancer, embarks on a pilgrimage into the mysteries of the gods and saints of Cuba and their larger spiritual view of the Mother. Huntman offers a window into the extraordinary world of Afro-Cuban gods and ghosts and the dances and rituals that call them forth. As she explores the memory of her own mother, interlacing it with her search for the sacred feminine, Huntman leads us into a world of séance and sacrifice, pilgrimage and sacred dance, which resurrect her mother and bring Huntman face to face with a larger version of herself.

Find Me in Havana
Find Me in Havana

Author: Serena Burdick

Publisher: Harlequin

Published: 2021-01-12

Total Pages: 331

ISBN-13: 1488073902

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From the bestselling author of THE GIRLS WITH NO NAMES, a new historical novel based on the dazzling story of one of Hollywood’s most celebrated Hispanic actresses and her daughter’s search for closure. “Told in a series of letters, FIND ME IN HAVANA is a beautiful and heart-wrenching story of mothers and daughters, and the American Dream that comes with the biggest price of all. I couldn’t put it down!” — Heather Webb, USA Today bestselling author Cuba, 1936: When Estelita Rodriguez sings in a hazy Havana nightclub for the very first time, she is nine years old. From then on, that spotlight of adoration—from Havana to New York’s Copacabana and then Hollywood—becomes the one true accomplishment no one can take from her. Not the 1933 Cuban Revolution that drove her family into poverty. Not the revolving door of husbands or the fickle world of film. Thirty years later, her young adult daughter, Nina, is blindsided by her mother’s mysterious death. Seeking answers, the grieving Nina navigates the troubling, opulent memories of their life together and discovers how much Estelita sacrificed to live the American dream on her own terms. Based on true events and exclusive interviews with Nina Lopez, Estelita’s daughter, Find Me in Havana weaves two unforgettable voices into one extraordinary story that explores the unbreakable bond between mother and child, and the ever-changing landscape of self-discovery.

Waiting For Snow In Havana
Waiting For Snow In Havana

Author: Carlos Eire

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2012-12-11

Total Pages: 579

ISBN-13: 147110835X

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A childhood in a privileged household in 1950s Havana was joyous and cruel, like any other-but with certain differences. The neighbour's monkey was liable to escape and run across your roof. Surfing was conducted by driving cars across the breakwater. Lizards and firecrackers made frequent contact. Carlos Eire's childhood was a little different from most. His father was convinced he had been Louis XVI in a past life. At school, classmates with fathers in the Batista government were attended by chauffeurs and bodyguards. At a home crammed with artifacts and paintings, portraits of Jesus spoke to him in dreams and nightmares. Then, in January 1959, the world changes: Batista is suddenly gone, a cigar-smoking guerrilla has taken his place, and Christmas is cancelled. The echo of firing squads is everywhere. And, one by one, the author's schoolmates begin to disappear-spirited away to the United States. Carlos will end up there himself, without his parents, never to see his father again. Narrated with the urgency of a confession, WAITING FOR SNOW IN HAVANA is both an ode to a paradise lost and an exorcism. More than that, it captures the terrible beauty of those times in our lives when we are certain we have died-and then are somehow, miraculously, reborn.

Next Year in Havana
Next Year in Havana

Author: Chanel Cleeton

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2021-03

Total Pages: 401

ISBN-13: 0593337204

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A HELLO SUNSHINE x REESE WITHERSPOON BOOK CLUB PICK "A beautiful novel that's full of forbidden passions, family secrets and a lot of courage and sacrifice."--Reese Witherspoon After the death of her beloved grandmother, a Cuban-American woman travels to Havana, where she discovers the roots of her identity--and unearths a family secret hidden since the revolution... Havana, 1958. The daughter of a sugar baron, nineteen-year-old Elisa Perez is part of Cuba's high society, where she is largely sheltered from the country's growing political unrest--until she embarks on a clandestine affair with a passionate revolutionary... Miami, 2017. Freelance writer Marisol Ferrera grew up hearing romantic stories of Cuba from her late grandmother Elisa, who was forced to flee with her family during the revolution. Elisa's last wish was for Marisol to scatter her ashes in the country of her birth. Arriving in Havana, Marisol comes face-to-face with the contrast of Cuba's tropical, timeless beauty and its perilous political climate. When more family history comes to light and Marisol finds herself attracted to a man with secrets of his own, she'll need the lessons of her grandmother's past to help her understand the true meaning of courage.

The Sugar King of Havana
The Sugar King of Havana

Author: John Paul Rathbone

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2010-08-05

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 1101458917

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"Fascinating...A richly detailed portrait." -Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times Known in his day as the King of Sugar, Julio Lobo was the wealthiest man in prerevolutionary Cuba. He had a life fit for Hollywood: he barely survived both a gangland shooting and a firing squad, and courted movie stars such as Joan Fontaine and Bette Davis. Only when he declined Che Guevara's personal offer to become Minister of Sugar in the Communist regime did Lobo's decades-long reign in Cuba come to a dramatic end. Drawing on stories from the author's own family history and other tales of the island's lost haute bourgeoisie, The Sugar King of Havana is a rare portrait of Cuba's glittering past—and a hopeful window into its future.

Leaving Havana
Leaving Havana

Author: Conchita Hernandez Hicks

Publisher: AuthorHouse

Published: 2011-02

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 1452086060

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Cuba was a playground for the wealthy in the 1950s. It was a place to bask in the sun during the day, and enjoy many fine nightclubs, restaurants, theaters, and casinos after the sun went down. Many wealthy Americans traveled to Cuba for both business and pleasure. In January of 1959, everything changed. I was a little girl in Cuba at that time. I was living a life of luxury with practically anything that my little heart desired. My family had a chauffeur and homes in the city, in the country, and at the beach. I had my own nanny. I had parents and grandparents that loved me and lived close by so that I could see them almost every day. I was truly living a fairy-tale existence. In what seemed like the blink of an eye, my world came crashing down around me. Fidel Castro took over Cuba and made devastating changes to the country - and to the lives of those who lived there. The fairy tale quickly came to an end. Many difficult decisions had to be made by my parents and by many others. The world that we knew no longer existed. We had to leave loved ones and property behind. We had to move forward to a new life in a different country, with different customs, and a different language - and there was no turning back.

Letters from Cuba
Letters from Cuba

Author: Ruth Behar

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2021-08-31

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 0525516492

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Pura Belpré Award Winner Ruth Behar's inspiring story of a Jewish girl who escapes Poland to make a new life in Cuba, where she works to rescue the rest of her family The situation is getting dire for Jews in Poland on the eve of World War II. Esther's father has fled to Cuba, and she is the first one to join him. It's heartbreaking to be separated from her beloved sister, so Esther promises to write down everything that happens until they're reunited. And she does, recording both the good--the kindness of the Cuban people and her discovery of a valuable hidden talent--and the bad: the fact that Nazism has found a foothold even in Cuba. Esther's evocative letters are full of her appreciation for life and reveal a resourceful, determined girl with a rare ability to bring people together, all the while striving to get the rest of their family out of Poland before it's too late. Based on Ruth Behar's family history, this compelling story celebrates the resilience of the human spirit in the most challenging times.

The Maids of Havana
The Maids of Havana

Author: Pedro Pérez Sarduy

Publisher: AuthorHouse

Published: 2010-03-23

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 1467005088

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Normal.dotm 0 0 1 55 314 Escritor/Periodista 2 1 385 12.0 Set in Cuba and Miami, from the 1940s to the present, two Afro-Cuban women narrate their life stories. One leaves a small town in the central part of the island to work as a maid in Havana in prerevolutionary Cuba. The other, her friend's daughter, educated in revolutionary Cuba, leaves Havana in the 1980 Mariel boatlift, to find work as a maid in Miami A history full circle?

Dreaming in Cuban
Dreaming in Cuban

Author: Cristina García

Publisher: Ballantine Books

Published: 2011-06-08

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 0307798003

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“Impressive . . . [Cristina García’s] story is about three generations of Cuban women and their separate responses to the revolution. Her special feat is to tell it in a style as warm and gentle as the ‘sustaining aromas of vanilla and almond,’ as rhythmic as the music of Beny Moré.”—Time Cristina García’s acclaimed book is the haunting, bittersweet story of a family experiencing a country’s revolution and the revelations that follow. The lives of Celia del Pino and her husband, daughters, and grandchildren mirror the magical realism of Cuba itself, a landscape of beauty and poverty, idealism and corruption. Dreaming in Cuban is “a work that possesses both the intimacy of a Chekov story and the hallucinatory magic of a novel by Gabriel García Márquez” (The New York Times). In celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the novel’s original publication, this edition features a new introduction by the author. Praise for Dreaming in Cuban “Remarkable . . . an intricate weaving of dramatic events with the supernatural and the cosmic . . . evocative and lush.”—San Francisco Chronicle “Captures the pain, the distance, the frustrations and the dreams of these family dramas with a vivid, poetic prose.”—The Washington Post “Brilliant . . . With tremendous skill, passion and humor, García just may have written the definitive story of Cuban exiles and some of those they left behind.”—The Denver Post

The Bright Forever
The Bright Forever

Author: Lee Martin

Publisher: Crown

Published: 2005-05-03

Total Pages: 319

ISBN-13: 0307238164

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A dark, harrowing novel about a nine-year-old girl's disappearance and the lasting impact it has on her close-knit community On an evening like any other, nine-year-old Katie Mackey, daughter of the most affluent family in a small town on the plains of Indiana, sets out on her bicycle to return some library books. This simple act is at the heart of The Bright Forever, a deeply affecting novel about the choices people make that change their lives forever. Fact, speculation, and contradiction play off one another as the details about Katie's disappearance--and about the townspeople--unfold, creating a fast-paced story that is as gripping as it is richly human. A nuanced portrayal of the complicated give and take among people struggling to maintain their humanity in the shadow of a loss, The Bright Forever is a compelling and emotional tale about the human need to know even the hardest truth.