Scattering the ashes

the long version

Scattering the Ashes is a book about exile, about Cuba and her offspring, and about the power of history and politics over Cubans' daily lives. Maria del Carmen Boza tells that shared history through the private story of a family living and adapting awkwardly in an alien land. Boza and her parents left Cuba for Miami in 1960. Her father had been the managing editor of a Havana newspaper that ran afoul of Fidel Castro. Crushed by the botched Bay of Pigs invasion and increasingly disillusioned with U.S. policy toward Cuba, he committed suicide on May 19, 1989, the anniversary of the death of his hero, Jose Marti, Cuban journalist, poet, and patriot. In attempting to understand her father's life and death - and her ambivalent relationship to him - Boza essentially tells the story of all Cuban exiles.