Loving Che

I became a fan of Ana Menendez after reading her first published book, In Cuba I was a German Shepard, a collection of short stories written about the Cuban immigrant experience in Miami. Because I was so enchanted with her first book, I quickly purchased her first novel, Loving Che.

Menendez continues to traverse the terrain of her Cuban heritage in her second book, covering many of the same issues: exile, love, family, politics, and Miami, but this time she abandons magical realism, opting for a more traditional narrative.

            The story is told in two voices: that of the main character, an adult woman who is haunted by her mother whom she has never met, and diary accounts from Teresa de La Landre, a woman who describes her passionate affair with revolutionist Ernesto “Che” Guevara, and whom the daughter believes is her mother.  The voice of the unnamed main character is less poetic, more reporter-like, while the voice of Teresa gushes with romantic turmoil:

“I remembered another night when the wind sang with ghosts. He lay beside me in the dark, listening. Memory, he’d say, is a way of reviving the past, the dead.”

            Growing up in Miami under the care of her grandfather, the young woman is given little to no information about her mother. Her grandfather, it seems, has fallen into a quiet avoidance of his past, of his life as a Cuban exile in Miami separated by miles of water from his disowned daughter.

 It is only after she has gone on to college that the grandfather finally shares a cryptic poem written by her mother that was pinned to her sweater as a baby: “Farewell, but you will be/ with me, you will go within/a drop of blood circulating in my veins.”

Soon after the woman begins her own search for her mother, she receives a mysterious package on her doorstep filled with old photographs, letters, and diary entries about an illustrious affair with Che Guevara. After carefully studying the contents of the package, the woman becomes obsessed with finding out if Teresa de La Landre is in fact the mother she never knew.

To me, the whole concept of portraying the romantic life of a revolutionist is a fascinating premise for a novel. Instead of politics and gore, Menendez decides to portray Che as an ordinary man, to reveal his lust, his vulnerability. What unravels is a torrid and steamy account of bodily exchanges between these two lovers, mixed with Teresa’s obsessive yearning:

“I sit in bed, all heaviness gone from my head, and watch a flock of white birds fly past the window. And beyond the birds the green leaf of the ceiba and beyond that the blue sky that cradles the clouds and arches over the world and whispers to me a sharp and infinite rebuke to my secret longing.”

I’m not at all saying that I didn’t enjoy reading some of these erotic passages; however, I couldn’t help but notice an unbalanced connection between Teresa and Che. After a while it seemed unnatural to me that a woman would focus purely on the physical aspects of the affair, with little to no emotional or intellectual exchange between the lovers. Although this may sound like a criticism, in the end, Menendez had me thinking this was all part of her grand scheme, and that she managed to sneak in some magical realism after all, and that there was a method to what seemed like a hopelessly mad love affair.

But I’m not going to elaborate on these suspicions for fear of robbing the reader of the discovery of yet another pocket on that moon we call “soul”.