Blessed by Thunder
Memoir of a Cuban Girlhood
-
- 6,99 €
-
- 6,99 €
Publisher Description
“Flor Fernandez Barrios ushers readers into startling proximity to a Cuba seen through the eyes of a woman whose childhood was both shaped and shattered by the beautiful island. The indelible quality of Barrios’s observations, specific and true, make Blessed by Thunder an important chronicle of the Cuban experience.” —The Bloomsbury Review
“Fernandez’s book is a visually rich portrait of a tumultuous era. Fernandez knows how to craft a compelling narrative best of all are [her] enchanting cast of characters.” —The Miami Herald
“Flor Fernandez Barrios reminds us what we can never forget, that ties to one’s homeland endure. When she calls on her grandmother for strength in America, the invisible bonds of all our ancestors appear. This book holds healing words as we begin to restore our relations with Cuba.” —Terry Tempest Williams
“A stunning portrait of what binds life together despite our terrible tests. It is gorgeous in the telling. I could not put it down.” —Joy Harjo
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Offering a striking child's-eye view of the Cuban revolution, Barrios begins her memoir with her birth during a hurricane, which convinced her curandera grandmother that the child would be a spiritual healer like her. When Barrios was a year old, Castro's 1956 Radio Rebelde broadcasts disrupted evening domino games in her hometown in Santa Clara province. In 1958, her father was falsely accused of being a Castro sympathizer and detained. Though he was returned to his family, their lives were soon upended: "agrarian reform" forced her grandfather to give his land to Castro's government and Barrios was sent to the countryside for two years as a child laborer. To win a weekend pass to visit her parents, she picked tobacco until her fingers were bloody. "All I knew was that the word communist meant lack of freedom," she writes. Though Castro had promised racial equality (Barrios was nicknamed negrita, "little black one," by her grandmother), Barrios did not find that much changed. When her father was later sent to a labor camp as an anti-Castro gusano (a slang term meaning "maggot"), he shared frogs and fish with guards who were as hungry as he was. A decade later, Barrios's family was allowed to emigrate to Los Angeles, where most thought she was Mexican. She initially sought acceptance by "toning down the bright colors of her Cuban culture," but after completing a UCLA pre-med program, Barrios embraced her roots and the Afro-Cuban spirituality instilled in her by her grandmother and nanny, Carmen. The book includes a Spanish glossary, but even without it, the rich context of Barrios's memories fluently conveys the nuances of her idioms and offsets the uneven writing.
