Bridges to Cuba / Puentes a Cuba

Through personal essays and poetry, short fiction and painting, book reviews, interviews, performance pieces, and hybrid creations of text and image, Bridges to Cuba/Puentes a Cuba opens a window onto the meaning of nationality, transnationalism, and homeland in our time. For more than thirty-five years, US-Cuban relations have been couched in terms of the Cold War, often pitting Cubans in the diaspora against Cubans who remain in the island. Bridges to Cuba/Puentes a Cuba celebrates the informal networks that Cubans in both countries have maintained through artistic, academic, family, and other ties. The book brings together, for the first time in English, Cuban voices of the second generation, both on the island and in the diaspora. The multivocal and multigenre collection includes both scholarly and creative writing and an impressive range of visual art by artists such as Zaida del Río, Coco Fusco, and Ernesto Pujol. The participants are earnest, angry, witty, and hopeful. They are sometimes visionaries, but they are not deluded about Cuban or North American realities. Their voices offer testimony to the continuing efforts of Cubans and Cuban-Americans to look beyond the animosities and failings of their respective societies and find possibilities for personal and international reconciliation, dialogue, and renewal.