In this essay, I examine the work of Gustavo Pérez Firmat, a well-published, exile-identified Cuban-American writer. In many ways, his Next Year in Cuba: A Cubano's Coming-of-Age in America and his Life on the Hyphen: The Cuban American Way are illustrative of the exile-imagined nation. In these texts, Pérez Firmat, like many exile writers, locates the real Cuba in a grand past and a triumphant future - a future without Castro. He employs a disturbing sort of erasure that claims Cuba for real Cubans, that is, those elites who left after the revolution. To a startling degree, Pérez Firmat participates in the acutely gendered dimensions of Cuban exile-community nationalism 1 and politics, even as he constructs a complex sense of biculturated identity. His work, which includes essay, criticism, fiction and poetry, continues to configure Cuba as a mother - often fearsome and castrating. However, Pérez Firmat defines Cuban and Cuban-American identity not merely as a matter of male honor, but as a matter of white, male privilege and unquestioned, hyper-heterosexual masculinity. In Pérez Firmat's work, maternal bodies - coded as monstrous or as part of Cuba's oceanic landscape itself - serve to illustrate a sense of emasculation and powerlessness.

Maternal metaphors Cuban exile politics Cuban-American literature Exile nationalism

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