LAUSR

with a single Cuban identity is an illusion. It is all the more so since most already experienced multiple identities before the revolution (as Cuban and gay for instance), an experience which continued during and after exile. Especially interesting are the author’s pages on Ruth Behar’s quest for identity as a Jewish Cuban: her family settled in Cuba for only two generations and she had no memories of her childhood on the island, as she had been only four when her parents took her to the United States. She thus develops a strategy not to forget again: travel to Cuba with a photographer in order to create a ‘memoryscape’ (p. ). Chapter  is entirely devoted to recalling artist Ana Mendieta’s involvement with Cuba’s art scene. Such a focus on one single artist is justified by Mendieta’s unique (and successful) struggle to carve a space for herself in the Cuban visual arts world. Although a Peter Pan exile, Ana Mendieta managed to ‘circumnavigate the divide’ (p. ), as she became one of the select few Cuban Americans artists allowed to work and exhibit their work in Cuba and build bridges between the American and the Cuban art scenes. Her untimely death at age , as well as the shifting politics of Cuban art, has blurred her institutional legacy in Cuba, but she survives in Cuban artists’ collective memory and imagination. The last chapters build on the reflections developed in Chapter , as they deal with the process of remembering childhood on an imagined island. In Chapter , the author explores the works of two visual artists and two writers, who ‘struggle against rupture, dispersion, and fragmentation’ (p. ), but nevertheless never quite manage to bridge the divide, as they engage in the search for the homeland from afar (three out of four have chosen not to go back to Cuba). Chapter  shows, on the contrary, through the works of writers whose characters go back to Cuba, that it is possible to ‘subvert the grand narrative of both Cuban and Cuban-American exile culture’, by moving away from nostalgia and challenging the essentialisation of the past. And finally, Chapter  concludes the book by acknowledging the transforming representation of returnees in Cuba, despite the prominence of art works, especially films, which tend to emphasise otherness or, on the contrary, claim the returnees as Cubans only once they have been stripped of all American attributes. Indeed it theorises a ‘boomerang aesthetic’, which stems from cultural exchange and artistic opening to foreign influences. All in all, López’s book is a must read. She not only manages to subvert the too many boundaries erected by the governments and hardliners on both sides of the Florida Strait. She also gives the reader the sense that s/he is a fellow traveller, as her multiple ways of exploring the journeys of the Cuban returnees echo their own multiple ways of searching for the homeland and bridging the gap between childhood experiences and adult remembering. The book thus lives up to its expectations, as both a social science study and a literary object in its own right.