Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Amazing in its detail, The House on G Street is both personal family history and a way of encountering Cuba's history.Many noted scholars of Cuba-including Ada Ferrer, Alejandro Portes, and Alejandro de la Fuente-endorse the book on the back cover, mentioning the book's uniqueness and the way Pérez intertwines general Cuban history with his own history.I agree with them, but am also concerned that a reader who doesn't know much about Cuba might get the wrong idea about Cuba's demographics and Cuban-U.S. relations.I do not believe that Pérez intended to occlude the fact that at least half of Cuba's population is of total or partial African descent, that many urban and rural Cubans were poor over much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, or that the U.S. economic infiltration of Cuba from the late nineteenth century until the 1959 Cuban Revolution was profound and problematic.After all, Pérez offers his story as that of an elite Cuban family, and as a result, it is about a world that no longer exists.But my concern is that he misses many opportunities to comment on the broader issues of Cuba's society, politics, and economy, even while discussing the individuals in his family's past-their work, their differences, their sources of wealth, and their trajectories.I am surprised because I do not think that Pérez ignores these things in his overall work, but I do worry about this book as an account of Cuban history.The research behind this book is indeed astounding.It is easy even for scholars who know much about Cuban history to learn many things about Cuba, the tobacco industry, the immigration of Spaniards from the north and the Canary Islands to Cuba in the early twentieth century, the ways the Cuban upper class worked and the distinctions within it, and the way U.S. businesses approached land, production, and capitalism in both the United States and Cuba.Pérez gives readers detailed accounts of all these things through the lives, changes, and moves of many of his family members.Although he was quite deliberate about how he depicted these things, it is less clear to me that all his choices were good ones.The book is largely chronological.It has 15 sections of varying lengths, plus many photographs, an epilogue, endnotes, a bibliography, an index, a lengthy acknowledgement, and an unusual appendix (which is largely an extended recipe).The sources are elderly relatives, archival research, and Pérez's own memory; in some instances he counters what he has heard from relatives, but not often.I do love the stories of his grandfather's stamp collection and what that meant to him.I admire Pérez's incredibly detailed accounts of the many steps in the production, buying, and selling of tobacco leaves, and I can under-
Author: Virginia R. Dominguez
Institution: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Language: English
Topic: Cuban History and Society
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4408238537