Inverna Lockpez

Divorced from the historical question of Cuba, this is a very intense coming-of-age story with stark, memorable art. Of course you can't really divorce a story about a disillusioned Cuban revolutionary who eventually flees to Miami from context, can you? So of course the question is how does one put a story like this in context? A lot of people who fled Cuba were the folks who had done their fellow Cubans wrong, but pretending Castro never did any human rights violations is tankie nonsense, much like the health care and literacy gains of the island are real.

But back to Lockpez, it does mean that when you're reading this semi-autobiographical story, you do wonder "is this basically true?" and "is there important context being left out?" and that's kind of where I was left with the book.… (meer)