New Immigrant Literatures in the United States: A Sourcebook to Our Multicultural Literary Heritage

and dissolves borders with the same exhilarating force of liberation that we find in the poeticized theoretical work of Gloria Anzaldúa, in her Borderlands/La Frontera. In addition to this, we find in a film like Mambo Kings a utopian rather than nostalgic vision of a Cuba that, because of its unique historical and geographic positions, holds in itself both the memory and the promise of a pan- racial culture; historically, we know that Cubans were not exclusively of African and Hispanic descent but were also, and as significantly, Chinese, Arab, Jewish. While I have not addressed matters of racial and ethnic differences among Cubans directly in this chapter, it bears mentioning that the mostly white Cuban writers I have discussed in the preceding pages all embrace a view of Cuban cultural traditions as intrinsically multicultural, and that, despite the work of Afro-Cuban writers like Nicolás Guillén and Lydia Cabrera to bring to light the African foundations of much of Cuba's culture, there remains a great deal of work to be done on the part of non-European Cubans living in exile to sustain this endeavor. History leaves no doubt that there never really was "one" Cuba; Cuba, as a singular term, paradoxically denotes a complex of profoundly differential qualities, tastes, rhythms, passions, and pleasures. To write, therefore, "in Cuban" is not one thing, one act, one performance; it is, as Cabrera Infante observed, flight, dance, and song, impossible and necessary at once, a pleasuring that simultaneously loves and resists itself. It may be in this contradictory, paradoxical combination of the pleasure and pain in being Cuban that Cuban writers inscribe themselves.

Arenas Reinaldo. Antes que Anochezca. Barcelona: Tusquets Editores, S.A., 1992.

-----. Before Night Falls. Trans. Dolores M. Koch. New York: Viking, 1993.

-----. The Doorman. Trans. Dolores M. Koch. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991.

-----. Farewell to the Sea. Trans. Andrew Hurley. New York: Penguin Books, 1986.

Cabrera Guillermo Infante. Tres Tristes Tigres. Barcelona: Editoria Seix Barral, S.A., 1983.

Estefan Gloria, and Emilio Estefan. Mi Tierra. Epic Records, 1993.

Fernandez Roberto G, Raining Backwards. Houston: Arte Público P, 1988.

García Cristina. Dreaming in Cuban. New York: Knopf, 1992.

Hijuelos Oscar. The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1993.

-----. The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1989.

Lázaro Felipe, ed. Poetas Cubanos en Nueva York. Madrid: Editorial Betania, 1986.

Medina Pablo. Exiled Memories: A Cuban Childhood. Austin: U of Texas P, 1990.

Muñoz Elías Miguel. Crazy Love. Houston: Arte Público P, 1988.

-----. The Greatest Performance. Houston: Arte Público P, 1991.

Padilla Heberto. Self-Portrait of the Other: A Memoir. Trans. Alexander Coleman. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1990.

Pau-Llosa Ricardo. Bread of the Imagined. Tempe: Bilingual P, 1992.

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