Read an essay about cutting down the word count of Es Cuba.
In Es Cuba, Lea Aschkenas goes to Cuba to satisfy a curious nature and a lack of knowledge about the country. What she finds is complexity, a sense of optimism mixed with the futility of working for change. Es Cuba is the response she so often hears when she asks why things are the way they are. A simple answer: Es Cuba.
Es Cuba is a poignant and passionate travel memoir about falling in love with a country and with one of its compañeros. A seasoned traveler and a discerning observer, Aschkenas never strays from her acute awareness that there is no way to separate her foreignness (intensified by U.S.-Cuba relations) from the complex mix of emotions, devotion and rejection, enrapture and apprehension that she develops toward the country and its people. This is conveyed through her relationship with Cuba, her access into the inner lives of the women she meets, and her budding love affair with a young Cuban named Alfredo. As her story unfolds, readers are taken on an unforgettable journey filled with beautifully woven descriptions of Cuba and the customs and habits of its people.
In telling her tale, Aschkenas paints a vivid portrait of the elusive island and discloses a world far beyond Fidel Castro, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and popular images of Cuba. She gives readers a captivating tale of culture and politics, history and romance, and how they all collide and coexist when two people from conflicting countries fall in love.
Praise for Es Cuba
Es Cuba transcend[s] the easy bounds of non-fiction lite [because of] the intellectual depth of the narrator’s self-discovery. [It] convey[s] the raw emotions and tangled web of Cuban reality in ways that not only break with traditional foreign-policy perspectives but with the easy-to-digest clichés that often characterize cultural studies of Cuban society. [A] welcome and exciting example of [a] personally engaged account of Cuba.
—The Chicago Tribune
[Aschkenas] learns that there are two Cubas. There’s the one tourists see from their hotels…And then there’s the one experienced by locals, where survival requires inventiveness and a flexible view of the law…The young Cuban Aschkenas meets, loves and eventually marries is, like his country, a bundle of contradictions….Together they try to move between the two Cubas, but sometimes their patience is tested beyond its tensile strength. All the better for the reader, who learns about Cuba from their struggles in it.
—The Washington Post
Aschkenas is never content to accept the superficial. Woven in [to her writing] are keen insights, simply expressed.
—The San Francisco Chronicle
This is a remarkably sensitive and clear-eyed look at the complex realities of people’s lives in a country caught between communism and capitalism.
—The Globe and Mail
A fascinating book about loving and living in post-Soviet Cuba.
—The Tampa Tribune
[An] intimate, detailed memoir of 10 months spent exploring life in Cuba.
—Publishers Weekly
The author tells an engrossing story that weaves the history and culture of the people…a beautiful tale.
—Transitions Abroad
Es Cuba is a captivating love story as well as a detailed and perceptive tribute to the resilience of a people.
—World Pulse
In lively, illuminating prose, Lea Aschkenas introduces us to the Cuba beyond headlines, beyond Castro and Communism, and offers us a vivid glimpse of a complex country that remains a mystery to most Americans.
—Dana Sachs, author of The House on Dream Street
How refreshing to read Lea Aschkenas on Cuba! Forget the bitter ravings of the old exiles in Miami, the silly romances of generations of American lefties, the lurid macho tales from almost fifty years of travel writing about the Island and Revolution. No posing here, just a profound, moving honesty: Aschkenas has written a clear-eyed ode not just to Cuba, but to women and men, to the possibility of love across impossible frontiers.
—Ruben Martinez, author of Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail
A story of true love for a country, a culture, and a man, told with grace and insight. It’s both sad and uplifting, and will leave you rooting for the millions of people who have been victimized by the strange, anachronistic politics of U.S.-Cuba relations.
—Larry Habegger, Executive Editor, Travelers Tales
In Es Cuba, Lea Aschkenas discovers that love can triumph in the most unlikely places, that amor cannot be embargoed, and that travel has its reward in the heart.
—Tom Miller, author of Trading With the Enemy: A Yankee Travels Through Castro’s Cuba
An unflinching, unsentimental journey, both physical and emotional. This is a wonderful book, by a very promising young writer.
—Achy Obejas, author of We Came All The Way From Cuba So You Could Dress Like This?
A beautiful story told with gentle compassion for a culture and country. I would have finished it in one sitting but for it being the wee hours of the morning.
—Christopher Baker, author of Cuba Handbook