Cuban stories show effects of Castro’s revolution
Nonfiction
CUBAN STORIES, ABOUT PEOPLE, TERRACES, FOOD, REVOLUTION, AND GOOD-BYES
By Maria Martinez Aenlle
Self-published, $10 paperback
Maria Aenlle had just passed her 13th birthday when she left Cuba in 1959. Fidel Castro had just swept to power and deposed dictator Fulgencio Batista. Life would never be the same for Aenlle, who immigrated to the United States, never to return to Cuba. In this short memoir, she writes movingly of her childhood there, describing the outings to the sea, shopping at “Tencen” — Woolworth’s — eating with her family and going to church. Hers was an upper middle class family who lived pretty well. Most of the families she describes were from similar social strata, but even the maids and other servants she mentions were not destitute nor suffered the kind of privation now associated with life in Cuba.
After painting a picture of the good life she led in Cuba (the food descriptions are quite detailed and will appeal to Louisiana readers who will recognize some of the ingredients of the dishes), Aenlle goes on to tell how Castro shocked the people after his revolution succeeded. That success, Aenlle believes, was a result of Batista’s heavy handed tactics.
“Many people were upset with Batista for his coup d’état years before (he had lived in the United States but returned to Cuba to run for president in 1952, but when it appeared he had no chance to win, Batista staged a military coup and took over the country), unsatisfied by the involvement of the mafia in gambling casinos, and frustrated by the violation of the Cuban Constitution. Batista, however, was popular before. He created social reforms to help the poor and built roads, schools, and hospitals. Still the country was unhappy with his coup d’état.”
Aenlle’s family lived much of the time outdoors on the terraces of their homes, and she writes eloquently about sitting there full of youthful hope.
“At times, I sat on our terrace to stare at the bright blue sky and fantasize about the universe. Later, as I grew older and heard the news about the revolutionary rebels fighting with Castro against Batista, I looked at the sky and wondered how life would be in Cuba under the rebels’ leadership. Our terrace was a great place to dream, but it would not remain so for long once the rebels came down the mountains to the cities, after the triumph of the Revolution.”
Aenlle’s book is short, well-written and told with a fond tone, yet it offers a hard lesson about the costs of corruption.
Greg Langley
UP FROM THESE HILLS, MEMORIES OF A CHEROKEE BOYHOOD
By Leonard Carson Lambert Jr. as told to Michael Lambert
University of Nebraska Press, $18.95 paperback
Both Leonard Carson Lambert Jr. and his son, Michael Lambert, are enrolled members of the Cherokee Nation Eastern Band. This memoir, told by the elder Lambert to the younger Lambert, is their effort to clear up some misconceptions about Indians. In his forward to the work, Michael Lambert writes, “The real message is simple and mundane yet unassimilated into our national psyche: Indians are people, just plain folks. This is a story about a family that had its roots in the North Carolina Mountains and who happened to be Indian. In fact there was and is a great deal of commonality in the lives of Indians and non-Indians in the mountains of North Carolina, as is pretty much true everywhere in the country today.”
The story bears out that assertion. After some backstory to establish his family’s undeniable Cherokee roots, Leonard Carson Lambert Jr.’s story moves to the Eastern Cherokee reservation in the 1930s. He grew up there, and from his description, life was very like life anywhere else in Appalachia: they “holed-up” potatoes, dried green beans into “leather britches,” held hog killings, ate what wild game they could kill and farmed a little. They never had much money while he was growing up. “It seems that mountain people, Indian and white alike, have always been poor, regardless of which political party was in charge in Washington,” he writes.
These Cherokee were not different from their white neighbors, many of whom were kin people. They were just plain folks, and that doesn’t sit so well with a lot of New Agey-types who want to wear feathers and beads and practice “native religions.” Neither Lambert is having any of that.
“In sharp contrast to the legions of members of the Cherokee groups that are not federally recognized, or individuals who self-identify as Cherokee (the self-proclaimed descendants of Cherokee princesses) — all individuals who for whatever reason desire to be seen as Indian — many enrolled members of federally recognized tribes rarely go out of their way to have others identify them as Indian. Arguably, nothing expresses Eastern Cherokee Indian identity more loudly than silence,” the younger Lambert writes. It’s not even a racial thing, he believes. “Most Indians who are enrolled — the vast silent majority of Indians who refuse to project their identities through the prism of the mystical super-Indian — simply pass silently and invisibly through American society.”
So the story that emerges is not one of being immersed in an archaic lifestyle or religion, it’s the story of a family fighting to cope with poverty through hard work and faith. The Lamberts sharecrop in Tennessee, work at a little college in North Carolina, never really go hungry but never have much beyond the necessities of life until the elder Lambert manages to go away to college and get an engineering degree. The younger Lambert also goes to college (Harvard), and he is now an associate professor of anthropology and African studies at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill — hardly typical, but the same kind of story that occurred in many families. Lambert’s book is clearly written and thought-provoking. If you are interested in Native American culture, you owe it to yourself to pick up this book and hear a different voice.
Greg Langley
LOUISIANA WILDFLOWER GUIDE
By Charles M. Allen,
Kenneth A. Wilson
and Harry H. Winters
Allen’s Native Ventures, LLC, $30 softcover
Louisianians live in a wildflower paradise. There are beautiful wildflowers blooming around us all year long. Most people love the sight of these colorful plants, but not very many people know the names of more than a handful of wildflowers. Even people who are hobbyists don’t know them all. As the authors note in their introduction to this book, “There are many many wildflowers in Louisiana (more than 3,000 flowering plant species) so don’t get discouraged if the task of identifying them becomes overwhelming.” So the authors made this whole book a primer on wildflower identification.
“This book is designed with you the reader in mind; we try to split the difference between the technical and too simple. This is a wildflower book and we attempt to include as many species as possible so it is approaching floral status. A flora, by definition, includes all of the species of an area.”
How do they do it? With detailed descriptions that include comparisons to similar plants, rudimentary plant structure information and, most importantly, vivid color photos. This book is printed on high quality slick paper which allows Wilson’s beautiful images to practically pop off the page. They’re plenty big too — you won’t need a magnifying glass to see them. It’s not just the showy flowers that are stars here. The green fly orchid doesn’t have a pretty name or Technicolor bloom, but it’s “the only epiphytic flowering plant native to Louisiana.” The flowers of the charmingly named littlebrownjug often hide beneath ground litter, and Indian blanket has such lovely colors that it’s often known by another name: firewheel.
This book is a bit pricey, but it’s worth it. It’s small enough to be portable (7 by 10 inches) but big enough to hold a state’s worth of information. Grab a copy before spring gets any further along.
Greg Langley
MARY BOLEYN: THE MISTRESS OF KINGS
By Alison Weir
Random House, $28
No one brings Tudor England to life like Alison Weir. Her non-fiction and fiction works alike are thoroughly researched and well-written, moving the reader through complex subjects like Elizabeth’s reign or Henry VIII’s marriages at a brisk trot. With Mary Boleyn: The Mistress of Kings, the research is there (and astounding), but Mary, unfortunately is not. Little is known about Anne Boleyn’s sister; we don’t even know the color or her hair or how she died. She has, however, enjoyed a recent popularity, thanks to Phillippa Gregory and The Other Boleyn Girl. In this book, Weir systematically attacks one “fact” after another: that Boleyn bore Henry VIII a male son, that she was wanton and yet another “Great Whore.” Weir uses the scant primary sources that exist, modern analyses of the Tudor era, and a prodigious amount of learned assumption.
While Mary Boleyn certainly fills a gap in Weir’s bibliography, and does contain a great deal of information, very little of Mary herself is present.
Beth Colvin