The sisters visit extended family in Cuba, ride horses, joyfully run between two houses that belong to a grandmother and the grandmother’s own mother. Her sister survives polio, they move houses in California, they see their American relatives almost weekly.
“It really is possible to feel / like two people / at the same time, / when your parents / grandparents / memories / words / come from two / different / worlds.” On Valentine’s Day of 1947, Engle’s peripatetic American artist father fell in love at first sight with her Cuban art student mother at the Museo Romántico while “breathing the enchanted air of Trinidad de Cuba.” They married, bringing forth two Cuban Californian daughters: older-by-two-years “Magdelena Madalyn Mad,” and Margarita. For most of her first decade, Margarita lives in two cultures, traveling on two wings, between her “mother’s small isla/island … father’s big ciudad/city” of Los Angeles. Engle herself opens her memoir with a dedication to “the estimated ten million people who are currently stateless as the result of conflicts all over the world.” Last August, Engle published her own personal story for the first time: “I never thought I would be brave enough to write about my life as a Cuban American child growing up in the United States during the hostilities of the Cold War,” she explains in her “Author’s Note.” But courage produces this resonating journey of Engle’s “true story of first fourteen years,” made even more timely by the news from around the world of ongoing displacements of victims, survivors, refugees desperate to start lives elsewhere. Most notably, her The Surrender Tree: Poems of Cuba’s Struggle for Freedom made Engle the first Latina to receive a Newbery Honor. Released December 17, 2014, the official Cuba Policy Changes have made the island nation quite the destination of choice – not just for the curious thrill-seekers and explorers – but most deservedly for those Americans of Cuban descent who have been too long estranged from their roots, culture, and especially families.Īward-winning author and poet Margarita Engle has long been writing about her Cuban connections in multiple titles: Cuba’s legacy of slavery in The Poet Slave of Cuba, Cuba and the Holocaust in Tropical Secrets. Exactly a year ago today, POTUS and Cuba’s President Raúl Castro announced a joint agreement reestablishing relations between two countries that have maintained a complicated half-century plus of separation.
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