4 April 2015 ENCHANTED AIR: TWO CULTURES, TWO WINGS: A MEMOIR by Margarita Engle, Atheneum, August 2015, 208p., ISBN: 978-1-4814-3522-2

“I was walkin’ down the sidewalk not causin’ any harm.

The radio reported, it sounded with alarm.

The Russian ships were sailin’ all out across the sea.

We all feared by daybreak it would be World War Number Three.”

-- Bob Dylan “Cuban Missile Crisis”

“After those first soaring summers,

each time we fly back to our everyday

lives in California, one of my two selves

is left behind: the girl I would be

if we lived on Mami’s island

instead of Dad’s continent.

On maps, Cuba is crocodile-shaped,

but when I look at a flat paper outline,

I cannot see the beautiful farm

on that crocodile’s belly.

I can’t find the palm trees,

or bright coral beaches

where flying fish leap,

gleaming

like rainbows.

Sometimes, I feel

like a rolling wave of the sea,

a wave that can only belong

in between

the two solid shores.

Sometimes, I feel

like a bridge,

or a storm.”

Cuba has long been a place of mystery and interest to me. Havana was one of the ports of call on my parents’ honeymoon cruise in the early 1950s.  I grew up with photos, postcards, and tchotchkes from their trip, and occasionally I sampled a bottle of cloyingly sweet Cuban pineapple liqueur that gathered dust in the back of their liquor cabinet.

As an elementary school student in the 1960s, I was too young to understand the rationale for air raid drills and the futility of seeking shelter from nuclear war by ducking under our desks. As I grew and learned the darker side of American foreign policy, I came to understand more about Cuba and wondered whether the situation would eventually evolve.

It’s both magical and unnerving to experience Cuba of the 50s and early 1960s through the eyes of Margarita Engle. She grew up having summer relationships with four generations of her maternal relatives in Cuba before the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the Cuban Missile Crisis all but severed her connection to the island. There are tales of idyllic rides on bareback horses and warm days outdoors, working alongside a great-grandmother who was born back when Cuba still belonged to Spain. But we also see hints of the growing crisis: she begins encountering the bearded, khaki-clad soldiers. Then, one summer, Engle’s mother worries that she won’t be able to get the required paperwork to return home to California with her daughters.

Back in California, Margarita Engle was a bright young girl who was too often treated in a vile fashion by ignorant, oh-so-patriotic American adults who blamed her for America’s troubles with Cuba because she was of Cuban descent.

The beautiful poetry of ENCHANTED AIR transports us to a time and a place  that’s been unknown to most of us in the US. It will enlighten young people about a place so close to the US of which they likely know nothing.

The Obama administration has sought to move toward normalizing relations with Cuba. But given the war of words I’ve recently read--with Senator Marco Rubio taking one extreme position and Cuban President Raul Castro staking out another one-- ENCHANTED AIR might be as close as I ever get to that island.

Richie Partington, MLIS

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