Through a glass, darkly: collective memory in the works of Cristina Garcia and Ana Menendez

Cristina Garcia and Ana Menendez are Cuban American writers with remarkably similar backgrounds. Their fiction, too, shares key characteristics, especially a sense of nuance and a criticism of fantasies of mastery, a turn to the past and an attention to collective memory, and strong suggestions that the past is unknowable. But in their works dealing with icons of the Cuban Revolution, the two authors diverge strongly. When writing about a Castro figure, Garcia employs choteo, the Cuban humor which is certainly hilarious but unfortunately oversimplified. Menendez, on the other hand, writes rich, complex accounts of both Castro and Che figures, adding nuance to the Cuban narrative and hopefully creating possibilities for more complex understandings of Cuba and Cuban-American relations.