In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd

“‘You see, in Cuba, it was very common to retire to a game of dominos after a good meal. It was a way to bond and build community. Folks, you here are seeing a slice of the past. A simpler time of good friendships and unhurried days.’”

A Miami tour guide brings a group of tourists to the park where Máximo and his friends play dominoes. Rather than being seen and respected as people with complex and painful pasts, the men are treated as objects in a quaint scene, another Miami landmark for tourists to check off their to-see list. The guide’s words echo Máximo’s own feelings about the past but make a spectacle of them. They trivialize and objectify the immigrants’ devastating loss of identity and community.

“Now he stood with the gulf at his back, their ribbony youth aflutter in the past. And what had he salvaged from the years? Already, he was forgetting Rosa’s face, the precise shade of her eyes.”

After Máximo tells the story of Juanito, the dog who is a mutt in America but was a German Shepherd in Cuba, he tearfully turns away from his friends and reflects on his present. When he fled Cuba, he had to give up everything he had built and start from the beginning. Now that he is middle-aged, his daughters have moved away. His wife has died. All he has left are his memories, and even these are failing him.

“I remember something else my father used to say: It could be true and never have happened. But he wouldn’t understand. This man who is like a straight line, an idea without interruption.”

The narrator speaks to the power of interpretation and the way so-called facts can be shaped into a narrative that, as a whole, creates fiction. The man “who is like a straight line” does not understand this. He marches forward, collecting facts like talismans, never recognizing that they are not isolated occurrences but items that exist in juxtaposition with one another to create meaning. To ask whether her father’s stories are “true” is beside the point.

In “Hurricane Stories,” neither the narrator nor her lover is named, functioning more as archetypes than individuals. The friction between them represents the struggle to reconcile opposing perspectives, experiences, or desires. This could exist on a micro level, within romantic relationships, as in “Why We Left,” “The Story of a Parrot,” and “The Perfect Fruit.” At the macro level, Cuban immigrants struggle to acclimate to a different culture in the shadow of loss, as in “In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd, “Miami Relatives,” and “Her Mother’s House.”

“He leans back on the sand. And I think now, What stories are true? We awake and a lover is gone, has been going and now his body is gone too, and we are left in a clutch of stories. Why do we tell them?”

The narrator feels her lover slipping away and tells stories hoping to bring him into her world and thus hold him close. Instead, the stories she and her lover tell each other highlight their differences and push them further apart. When her father over-prepared for a hurricane that never came, she saw his human frailty and wanted to comfort him. Conversely, when the man noticed a flaw in his own father, he felt let down by it. The narrator wonders what the purpose of storytelling is if it pushes people further apart.

“The day Anselmo was born, Matilde had thought: There he is, and there is not another like him in the world. Now this woman walks into the middle of his life as if she’s been there all along.”

In this scene, Matilde watches Anselmo push pieces of flan around his plate and thinks about how he has changed since beginning his relationship with Meegan. Matilde had begun cooking for him to fill the empty space left by her distant relationship with her husband, Raúl. Cooking for and feeding Anselmo, and seeing him grow in the process, gave her a sense of meaning and control when she could not change other aspects of her life. Where flan once comforted Anselmo, under Meegan’s influence he now avoids it and has lost weight, making Matilde feel her sense of control slipping away.

“In the streets, the parking meters still lay shattered where months before the crowd had passed through like one giant, ecstatic animal, devouring the past. Matilde had felt herself physically buoyed along by the momentum, her own thoughts riding the crest of something new and young. Now she walked among the shards of glass, afraid of the crackle under her feet.”

Menéndez weaves multiple meanings into a single moment. In the scene, Matilde is young, pregnant, and alone, waiting in Cuba for her visa to come through so that she can join Raúl in Miami. Though her due date is two months away, she goes into labor while walking down an empty street destroyed by the recent revolution. The setting reflects both Matilde’s mood and the mood of the country. She feels about her future with Raúl as Cubans feel about the future of their country. Hers is one of the relationships in the collection—romantic and political—that begin with optimism and ideals, but end in decay and corruption.

“‘You and Fidel should have a contest for the longest-running pointless endeavor in world history.’”

Hortencia criticizes Felipe for his lack of progress as a writer by comparing him to Fidel Castro, who led the Cuban revolution and served as the country’s leader in the ensuing decades. According to Hortencia, both Castro and Felipe have been toiling for some 40 years without a tangible positive outcome. More significantly, comparing Felipe to Castro demonstrates that Castro functions as a touchstone in immigrants’ lives. Though it may seem that their daily lives are unaffected by him once they leave Cuba, his impact continues to be felt. He is the “old uncle in Havana” of the story “Miami Relatives,” whose presence looms large in their imaginations, no matter how far away they get from him.

“If only baseball had held him like a tender parent. How different it all would be. He would have come to see me on the beach that day. He would have married my mother.”

The stories in In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd are loosely linked, with characters reappearing, sometimes in cameo roles, other times to explore a familiar theme from a new point of view. Clarity, when it occurs, evolves gradually. Ambiguity in one story may only be cleared up in a later story, as occurs with “Baseball Dreams” and “The Party.” Though never explicitly stated, the events in “The Party” suggest that Mirta’s father is Joaquin.

The connection between Mirta and Joaquin is strongly implied through this passage, when Mirta wishes that baseball had kept her father’s attention. Then, he would not have become an imprisoned revolutionary and thus could have come to the beach the day she and her mother waited at the beach prior to the revolution’s success. This passage also suggests the narrator’s longing for a more structured and predictable world, a feeling echoed by characters throughout the story collection, especially about the disruption and chaos they associate with Cuba.

“Beneath them lay the magnificent wood houses with the curved porches and Mirta saw that one of them, the round white one with even whiter trim, was boarded up, even though the heavy clouds of summer had almost all blown out to sea and the sky was preparing itself for the blue Caribbean autumn that had brought high winds and […] the Americans. The following summer, three more houses would be boarded up, their owners gone to wait out the revolution across the straits. And after that, new families would come. […] But Mirta would be many years gone by then and the lonely brush that she remembered […] would be gone too […].”

Menéndez’s incorporates multiple allusions into a single moment. This passage evokes Mirta’s and Cuba’s past, present, and future through the description of the homes along the coastline where she waits for her father. Some of the houses are improbably boarded up, perhaps due to political instability, evoking a past when tourists flocked to the region. More houses would be boarded up the following summer, as Cuban left to escape the revolution. New families in the homes are indicative of the country reinventing itself post-revolution, but by then, Mirta and her mother will have already resettled in America, their landscape irrevocably changed.

“I picture the old uncle sad and alone in his big house. At night he lights a cigar and sits on the roof looking over the water. Does he think of us? Does he wonder what it’s like where we are?”

“Miami Relatives” is an allegory for exiled Cubans’ relationship with Castro, who is described as the “old uncle in Havana” (100). The narrator’s attitude toward and descriptions of the old uncle shift and morph across the story. His presence can be menacing or caring, violent or tender, representing complex feelings that Cuban immigrants may have for the Communist leader. The narrator pictures the old uncle with a cigar—Castro was often famously photographed holding a cigar—and wonders if he thinks about the family (or refugees) who fled him as much as they think about him.

“‘There is no curse. There is no bleeding moment when it all began. It is all very simple and funny: He is crazy because of us and we are crazy because of him.’”

The narrator rejects her mother’s assertion that the family has been cursed, and decides that her mother is mistaken. There is no curse imposed from without or invited by bad behavior—curses can be lifted. The cause of the family’s problems is, instead, their relationship with the old uncle. Though narrators throughout the stories in In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd evoke Cuba’s political situation, their personal feelings about it are rarely directly addressed and never substantively debated. Menéndez focuses instead on the emotional and psychological toll of Cuba’s political situation, succinctly expressed by the narrator in the above quotation.

“He didn’t sleep. But as he lay there, an image began to form in Ernesto that was very much like a dream. It happened more and more, these images that bubbled into his consciousness as if his collected memories had grown too vast to be contained.”

Ernesto has just gotten off the phone with Máximo, having learned that Joaquin is being released from Cuba. The “image” that comes to him is a memory of a day out with friends, Joaquin included, before politics consumed their focus and tore them apart. Ernest feels overwhelmed by his memories and unable to control or suppress them. Joaquin’s identity remains unclear throughout the collection. He may be Mirta’s father. He was likely a revolutionary, though his imprisonment apparently lasted long into the Castro era. He may have caused the death of Ernesto’s brother. The narrative across stories allows for these interpretations but not for certainty. Likewise, characters, such as Ernesto, cannot always control their memories or shape events into tidy narratives.

“He stands on the landing watching Joaquin bound ahead, life enough for the three of them. This is how it was before politics and leaving; this is the image that Ernesto rubs like an amulet against the others.”

Ernesto recalls Joaquin’s passion for living, the energy with which he attacked the day, and the uncomplicated affection the friends had for each other before politics divided them. Recalling this affection enables Ernesto to maintain a complex picture of Joaquin rather than reducing him to the one choice he made that resulted in Ernesto’s brother being imprisoned. Similarly, throughout the collection, Menéndez maintains a complex view of Cuban politics.

“And he thinks of a story heard: of two men who were no longer friends or enemies, joined only by the same frail history. When they met again in exile, they hugged each other with such ferocity that they broke three ribs between the two of them.”

As Ernesto prepares to see Joaquin again, he recalls a story in which two men rejoice in seeing one another again after a long separation and after both have experienced loss. Their joy in being reunited lies in their shared history and humanity, irrespective of whether they were friends or enemies in the past. This story expresses hope for reconciliation in which pain can be acknowledged and old wounds overcome. As he prepares to see a man who was both friend and enemy, Ernesto has the same hope implicitly expressed across the collection, as Cuban immigrants grapple with a fraught past.

“The paper lanterns lengthen Raúl’s shadow along the floor and Ernesto wonders what the light is doing to the figure of himself. Could people warp under the lights like shadows?”

At the party for Joaquin, Ernesto reflects on how his perception of people changes over time. He notices that Hortencia’s behavior can seem rehearsed, that Mirta does not resemble her mother as much as he initially thought, that Joaquin’s alleged conquests may have been more in his head that reality. Light and its capacity to alter a shadow represent perception and its capacity to alter. Ernesto is wondering whether others see qualities in him that he himself is not aware of or ones that he has tried to hide.

“Suddenly, Ernesto is weary of language, weary of words and the memories they try to trap and kill for viewing. He is tired of all the layers in a sentence, the phrases that live only to conceal.”

Ernesto is emotionally exhausted listening to the way people talk about the past. He has listened to Raúl refer to “tough times, idealism, the struggle,” while Matilde scatters “pretty words like rice at a wedding” (119). Words try to tame the past and the pain associated with it. People like Raúl and Matilde craft narratives like they would spread a balm on a wound. Ernesto longs to be free of the artifice and to find “a single truth” that he can pin to a wall and memorize.

“Twenty years from now she will remember this moment and think of the right words and be sorry that she didn’t say them. Only much later will she know it was best to say nothing at all.”

After Ernesto suddenly reveals that his brother died in jail, Mirta moves towards him as if to comfort him, but he prevents her. She regrets not coming up with comforting words to say in the moment, although she imagines finding the perfect words that she should have said. Still later, she will realize that no words could have comforted him. Some truths cannot be contained, controlled, or comforted through words—the very feeling Ernesto himself expresses earlier in the story (see quote 16).

“For years, Lisette thought Batista Castro was one man, the all-powerful tyrant of the Caribbean, the bearded mulatto who shot poor workers in the fields and stole her mother’s house with all her photographs in it.”

Lisette’s parents both fled Cuba but for opposite reasons. Her father ran from Batista, the military dictator who imprisoned and executed revolutionaries, while her mother’s wealthy land-owning family escaped Castro and his communist policies. For a young Lisette, these differences are invisible and irrelevant, since the net result is the same: Both of her parents had to flee their native country and suffered loss of identity and community as a result. Lisette’s conflation of Batista and Castro echoes throughout the collection in the way Menéndez conceals characters’ political affiliations, particularly in “The Party.”

“It was terrible the way he kept believing that history would reignite the now. He really thought they could be like they were. Not just them. Everything. Everybody. It made Lisette want to scream. The past wasn’t something you could play again like an old song.”

Lisette refers to her ex-husband’s persistently loving treatment of her despite her evident coldness towards him. No matter how distant she became, he continued to express love and desire for her. As in earlier stories in the collection, Lisette’s attitude toward her husband speaks also to the relationship between exiled Cubans and their native country. No matter how much frustration and pain Cubans experienced, their love for their country remains.

“Her mother had shut her eyes when Lisette told her she was going to Cuba. It was a simple reporting trip, a stroke of luck. She wasn’t going to explain to her mother things she could barely explain to herself. How every story needed a beginning. How her past had come to seem like a blank page, waiting for the truth to darken it.”

Lisette expresses a sentiment familiar to children of immigrants: the desire to know what they have lost by not being born or growing up in their parents’ native country. Being Cuban is part of their parents’ identities and thus part of their own, but they have never experienced the place for themselves. Visiting Cuba will provide Lisette with first-hand experience—the “beginning” (124) she craves.

“In the mornings, when everything was fresh and new, she had thought that they had something here that her parents’ generation had lost in exile. The feeling evaporated by the end of the day, replaced by a watery feeling that she would never understand herself, much less this country that seemed intent on killing itself slowly. And before she fell asleep each night, despair took her again.”

Lisette’s daily emotional journey in Cuba reflects one expressed by Cuban immigrants throughout the collection’s stories. She begins the day hopeful, but ends it feeling disheartened and hopeless. This is also true for Máximo in the title story, “In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd.” Recalling the stories he and his friends exchange about Cuba, he notes that they begin with hope and end in despair. Menéndez begins and ends her collection with characters expressing dismay and confusion about Cuba’s circumstances. Both Máximo and Lisette struggle, and ultimately fail, to understand why tragedy shadows a country that is so beautiful and has such a strong sense of community.

“It was as if the whole country had agreed to stop caring. Only Miami still cared.”

Prior to this passage, Lisette has received directions to her mother’s house and been warned to hide her camera because the house is in a military zone. She encounters a lone, very young soldier who “held his rifle carelessly” (126). Lisette slows down as she drives by. The soldier salutes her but does not follow, bringing into stark relief the gap between Cubans immigrants’ ideas about Cuba and the reality of Cubans still living in their native country.

“His eyes never changed expression until he closed them and bowed ever so slightly. Gratitude and reproach, the small space between knowing and forgetting.”

Matún accepts Lisette’s gift of money with ambivalent gratitude. In one part of his conversation with Lisette, he muses, “In some ways, it was better” (131) before the revolution because the Arunas, Lisette’s grandparents, were egalitarian and sat with their employees as equals. He thinks of himself and his wife as the home’s caretakers rather than owners and insists on giving Lisette a tour of the house, pointing out everything that belonged to her mother. As Lisette prepares to leave, however, Matún notes how good the post-revolution government has been to him and his wife, gifting them the land and house after her grandparents left. This dual perspective echoes in his response to Lisette’s gift. He is both grateful for it and resents it. Lisette’s monetary gift is a reminder that the house and land belong to him and his wife only because Lisette’s grandparents and then Lisette herself have relinquished their claim.