In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd

The stories in the collection incorporate multiple narrative points of view, time shifts and compression, and magical realism and allergy to illuminate the ways that perception influences memory. The stories characters tell may or may not be factually accurate, but factual accuracy is not the point of telling stories. Characters tell stories to preserve emotional truths, connect with others who have had similar experiences, and create meaning from their memories, with both salutary and destructive effects.

Collectively, the stories and their multiple perspectives show the mutability of memory and demonstrate that stories must be seen in conversation rather than as isolated truths. Only through such juxtaposition can the complex and multi-faceted nature of truth be revealed, as the stories told about Joaquin in “The Party” demonstrate. Characters have different individual memories of him that collectively create a larger understanding of his personality. He could be creative and empathetic, had personal demons, and sought order and meaning. His actions led to an outcome that torments Ernesto—the imprisonment and death of a young man who was possibly Ernesto’s brother—but that one outcome does not tell the whole story of who Joaquin was.

Just as Menéndez does not privilege a single reading of Joaquin, she also does not privilege a single reading of the revolution or the immigrant experience. This is most directly expressed through the allegorical story “Miami Relatives” and the final story “Her Mother’s House.”

“Miami Relatives” features characters who both detest and are sympathetic to the old uncle (i.e., Castro). How one feels about him depends on how one has been affected by him and how one interprets his intentions. Further, intention does not always dictate outcome: The old uncle’s actions may have had negative outcomes but grew out of good intentions. Similarly, Joaquin may not have intended for his friend’s brother to be imprisoned, yet that was the outcome.

Factual accuracy alone does not dictate truth. In “Her Mother’s House,” Lisette’s mother retained a memory of her house that was influenced by how she felt when she lived there. The grandness that she remembers may not factually match the home's exterior but reflects an emotional truth—feelings of safety and comfort she had as a child, before her family was forced to flee and relocate to a new country. Lisette chooses not to disrupt that memory when she describes the house in its present condition; instead, she chooses to allow her mother to keep the delusion.

The characters in “Why We Left” also attempt to control memories and render them sacred. Doing so disconnects them from the everyday and makes it more difficult for them to confront and ultimately recover from past pain. The story’s narrator accuses her love of wanting to “make of the past something sacred” (56)—by leaving Miami, he hopes to preserve it in memory as a place of both hope and pain. It was the place where they looked forward to raising their baby and where that dream was destroyed. He does not want time to alter his experience of the city, as it inevitably would if he remained and accumulated new memories there. Though the story is not about the Cuban immigrant experience, it illuminates the way immigrants tend to preserve their countries of origin in their memories as both idealized places and places of pain.