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In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd
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Máximo
Máximo is the main character in the first and title story, “In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd.” He also appears in “The Party,” the second-to-last story in the collection, which is set before the events of “In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd.”
Máximo is described as “a small man” with a “grandiose name” that “inspired much amusement all his life” (12). His friends believe he enjoyed making people laugh, and in the title story, he tells four jokes, all in some way addressing Cuban exiles’ feelings and beliefs about the economic situation in their native country and the toll leaving took on their identity and self-respect. The jokes start off whimsical but feature depressing punch lines that express the exiles’ lack of hope for the future.
Before the revolution, Máximo had been a professor in Havana. He left in 1961, two years after the Cuban revolution and the year of the Bay of Pigs invasion by Brigade 2506, a C.I.A.-sponsored group of Cuban exiles. The invaders hoped to inspire Cubans to overthrow Castro. Instead, they were quickly and decisively defeated, and the 36-year-old Máximo joined the Cuban exodus that followed, fully expecting to return within a few years.
Unable to use his University of Havana credentials and too old to compete with younger men for jobs cutting sugarcane, he and his wife started a business providing lunch to laborers. Eventually, they opened their own restaurant, where they employed other Cuban professionals who had fled to Miami. Their shared sorrow forms the foundation of a new community in Miami, yet the pain of what they have lost stays with them, present in their stories and jokes.
When Máximo says that he does not understand why their stories always “opened in sun” but “narrowed into a dark place” (14), he is not only expressing his bewilderment at the situation in Cuba but also wondering why life must encompass so much sadness. “In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd” takes place 15 years after he first arrived in Miami. His daughters have grown, and his wife has died. He is alone, wondering what he has “salvaged from the years” since he no longer remembers “the precise shade” (27) of his wife’s eyes. The story ends with Máximo asking his friends to shield him from camera-toting tourists who have come to the park where Máximo and his friends play dominoes. Máximo’s plea frames the stories that follow, begging readers to see beyond divisive politics to the people impacted by them.Joaquin
In “The Party,” guests await Joaquin’s arrival from Cuba after he is released from prison. Events in “The Party” and “Baseball Dreams” suggest that he is also Mirta’s father. Joaquin is described as a rambunctious child who longed to be a baseball player when he grew up. He sought order, discipline, and a sense of history, but he did not find it in baseball.
In “The Party,” he is described as a charismatic, energetic young man who read poetry, became involved in the student revolutionary movement, and organized marches. His nickname was “The German” because of his fair skin and unusual strength (raising the possibility that he is also the blue-eyed boy Hortencia thinks of when she sings in “Story of a Parrot”). Hortencia attests that he was a gifted performer, while Matilde reveals that he enjoyed baking when he was upset. Mirta’s mother describes him as “serious and troubled” (117). Raúl says he was a ladies’ man. An old woman at the party refers to him as a murderer. The diverse stories speak to complexity of character and motivation as well as memory’s ability to shape truth, perhaps to the point of warping it.
Though Joaquin never appears in the stories, his presence is the cause of disparate characters coming together. His actions also unintentionally caused the imprisonment and death of another young man, probably Ernesto’s brother. Joaquin represents young Cuban revolutionaries who are drawn to politics as an antidote to disaffection and corruption, but whose lives are eventually consumed by the struggle.
Ernesto
“The Party” is told from Ernesto’s point of view. The narrative reveals little of his backstory. As a young man, he was friends with Joaquin, who, alongside a common friend or possibly Ernesto’s unnamed brother, stridently opposed the dictator Batista. Ernest explains to Mirta that, although Joaquin’s actions resulted in the other young man’s death, Joaquin was not blamed because “the revolution came for him as well” (119).
Other guests express surprise that Ernesto has come to the party. He does not provide his motivation, but his manner suggests that he has become weary of artifice. He notes Hortencia’s theatrical behavior, how still Matilde grows when Raúl complements Mirta, and Mirta’s politely empty “How did you know Joaquin” (118). He does not want to hear anymore empty words that seek to tame and shape memories. Instead, he longs to find “a single truth” (119) that is tangible. At the end of the stories, he seems to accept that one truth is elusive and yearns only for forgiveness and reconciliation.
Lisette
“Her Mother’s House” is told from Lisette’s perspective. Like Menéndez herself, Lisette is a journalist and the daughter of Cuban immigrants. Her parents came from both sides of the political spectrum. Her father left Cuba to escape Batista, and her mother’s family to escape Castro—as a child, Lisette did not realize that Batista and Castro espoused opposing ideologies. The collection’s emphasis on seeing the individuals behind political divisions comes across in the fact that Lisette’s parents put aside politics and found harmony in their personal relationship.
Lisette was married to a fellow child of immigrants. He loved her deeply, but she felt suffocated by him, and the marriage ended in divorce. When given an opportunity to travel to Cuba on assignment, she grabs it. She sees going back to Cuba as an opportunity to go back to the beginning, to locate an essential truth that can explain herself to herself. Her mother rejects this notion, telling Lisette that she “wouldn’t find the answers to her failures there” (124).
Once in Cuba, Lisette vacillates between feeling hopeful and connected and feeling despair that the country is slowly killing itself. She notices billboards proclaiming the revolution and finds them as hollow as the proclamations of love that she and her ex-husband exchanged. Neither slogans nor expressions of love can ward off collapse when the foundation ceases to function.
While in Cuba, Lisette is determined to find her mother’s house, which she has always heard described in grand terms. When Lisette finally finds it, she discovers a massive disconnect between her mother’s lavish descriptions and reality. After she returns home, her parents throw her a party where everyone but Lisette’s mother wants to hear about the house. Lisette is faced with a choice: to tell her mother the truth, possibly destroying a delusion that provides her mother comfort, or maintain her mother’s idealized but factually inaccurate memory. Ultimately, Lisette claims the house was just as her mother remembers it, saying, “Somehow, it all made it through the revolution” (135). Whether her mother believes her is not revealed. What matters for Lisette is her realization that it is possible to feel nostalgia for something one never had.
The Old Uncle in Havana
“Miami Relatives” features elements of magical realism and functions as an allegory of Cuban immigrants’ complex relationship with their native country and its leader, Fidel Castro. In the story, the family in Miami, symbolizing Cuban exiles, obsesses about the long-lived “old uncle in Havana” (100), who represents Castro. The narrator pictures him smoking a cigar, the way Castro typically appeared in photographs.
The family keeps a photo of the old uncle in “a black closet” (100). His face in the photo is covered with cuts and scratches, evoking the immigrants’ anger at and frustration with Castro. The narrator recalls standing outside with the old uncle, pointing “a loaded finger at the shiny women” and crying, “National pie!” (102). This image is a cartoonish rendering of Castro’s communist policies that eradicated private ownership and redistributed wealth.
The narrator’s grandfather tells a story about the old uncle in which he apprehends robbers who broke into the family home and tried to steal their jewelry and money. He shot them over and over, “long after they had stopped moving” (104), forbade anyone from leaving the house, and when they ran out of food, fed them the robbers’ roasted corpses. This part of the story allegorizes revolutionary violence, the closing of national borders, and national emergencies. When the old uncle finally allowed family members to leave, they fled out the back door leaving everything behind, forced to escape like the rafters who fled the country as refugees with nothing.
The allegory incorporates immigrants’ conflicted feelings. When the mailman steals a letter from the old uncle, the narrator’s aunt shoots him because “Family is sacred!” (103). When the grandmother poisons the mother’s coffee, she grows another mouth and asserts how much love the family has for each other. Outsiders do not necessarily accept the immigrants’ version of events: The narrator’s friend, who is neither part of the family nor Cuban, points out that the family may be telling the story “wrong,” and the old uncle “kicked everyone out of the house because” they were “contagious or something,” or “because they were mean to him” (106).
The narrator tells her grandfather that she has spoken with the old uncle, and the “ancient family house is falling down” (106), perhaps a reference to economic crises in Cuba. The old uncle wears “the same uniform he wore” (106) as a railroad employee, which may be tied to the uniform Castro was always seen in. He goes out at night searching for lame animals to rescue and “sometimes, to help them, he shoots them dead” (106). The narrator calls him “the most tender of men” (106). This could be a concession to revolutionary slogans that assert change can be difficult and painful but ultimately beneficial.
At the end of the story, the narrator and her grandmother sit in a mango tree and discuss the old uncle. The grandmother says that they will never be rid of him, evocative of Castro’s legacy in Cuban émigrés’ imaginations. The narrator notes that she has heard “he is very sick” (108), while the grandmother is certain the devil himself with take the old uncle. In the last line of the story, the narrator whispers, “He is crazy because of us” and “we are crazy because of him” (108). Through the opposing views of the old uncle and the narrator’s concluding thoughts, Menéndez avoids direct commentary on political viewpoints and instead points out that conflict stems from the frustration two sides experience trying to hear and understand each other.
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