You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Why a book about Cuban-American Literature and Art in a psychoanalytic journal? These essays written by Cuban-Americans, beautifully crafted and covering the experiences of waves of Cubans going into exile, contain the essence of psychoanalytic praxis: reconstruction. Reconstruction of unconscious fantasies into conscious; the depiction of screen memories that glorify the past; collective memory that unites generations.
Albert Camus wrote,
A world that can be explained by reasoning, however faulty, is a familiar world. But in a universe that is suddenly deprived of illusions and of light, man feels a stranger. His is an irremediable exile, because he is deprived of memories of a lost homeland as much as he lacks the hope of a promised land to come. The divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, truly constitutes the feeling of absurdity.
Harry Stack Sullivan said that personality is an illusion, depending on many interpersonal experiences, yet self-identity remains embedded in a culture. The Cuban identity is described as a rich “stew” of ethnic and religious groups. Exiled Cubans after the 1959 revolution had no country to return to, replicating the immigrant experiences of European Jews. This is quite different from other exiles or emigrations—or from the sense of internal exile expressed on Quebec license plates, “Je me souviens (I remember),” the loss of French Canada, a symbiotic need and a glorification of the past based on trauma and loss.
The reparation of trauma into creativity, the “irony of exile” depicts Camus' loss of Algeria. Loss and trauma do lead to glorification of the past. The writers of the American south—Wolf, Faulkner, Percy and others—replicate this reparation.