a word from the
publisher
I
VIEWS OF CUBA
t is hard to believe that Christina Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban—a book club favorite of the early 1990s and a National Book Award Finalist—is celebrating its 25th year of publication in 2017. The Denver Post wrote of the novel, “With tremendous skill, passion and humor, Garcia just may have written the definitive story of Cuban exiles and some of those they left behind.” Garcia was prompted to write the novel in part, she says, because “The sense of not fitting in either in Havana, or in Miami, the heart of the Cuban exile community, made me start questioning my own identity. Where did I belong? What did it mean to be Cuban?” In this annual Read Global issue featuring books in translation, we remember that just 3 percent of books published in the United States are translated from other languages. And yet, these books in translation are our best opportunity to learn about and empathize with our neighbors across the globe. Photographer Abe Kogan’s compelling black-and-white photos of the people of Cuba taken in 2015 are a cornerstone of this issue. In his photography book Split Seconds Havana, he writes, “[A] majestic city such as Havana and its urban footprint remains throughout time. Through the good times and the bad ones. Great cities will sometimes flip a historic page, occasionally even re-branding themselves. But a great city is always there as a platform for humanity’s expressions and moods and modalities. This is true, be it for a split second or for an eternity. … Havana is one of those cities.” Enjoy the issue. Margaret Brown publisher
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OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2017
Photograph: Debra Pandak