Jorge Reyes

Rediscovering Cuba: a Personal Memoir Jorge Reyes

Alive and full of exquisite details, Jorge Reyes's Rediscovering Cuba: A Personal Memoir, is unlike any travel book you have ever read.  This is the riveting story of a Cuban-American's family trip to Cuba.  Almost twenty years later, in 1998, the author was informed of his grandmother's terminal illness-- the loving grandmother Reyes had not seen in all that time but whom he had always remembered lovingly. Curious to unravel the mystery that for many years has enshrouded Cuba, he convinced his mother and aunt to accompany him and revisit their native land. This, part diary, part memoir, is based on this trip.

Reyes takes us on this trip to the city of Santiago de Cuba and to the small town of Boniato, on the outskirts of the city, a town rumored to have been built atop an old Indian cemetery. Along the way, we meet colorful characters and eccentric family members set against a rich background of folklore, local color and politics. We meet his aunt Mimi who as a girl thought a cow was her mother; or his great grandmother who died arguing with a flock of pigeons; or even ghosts rumored to haunt his small family house in Boniato.

Highly acclaimed, Rediscovering Cuba: A Personal Memoir is a short testament that speaks to the deepest roots of who we are and that reveals yet another layer of that island only ninety miles away from the United States, the place many Cuban-Americans also call home.