Iraida H. López's book is refreshing in three ways. First, it studies Cuban diaspora dynamics the other way round, as it focuses on returns and not on emigration. Secondly, it mixes art and literature (envisioning Cuba as a dreamed, imagined country) with social science (with its conceptual introduction and historical first chapter), in order to understand both the politics and the poetics of return. And thirdly, it focuses on the study of a specific cohort, the ‘one-and-a-half generation’, i.e., those who were taken out of Cuba into the US as children. This peculiar perspective on Cuban diasporic dynamics allows the author to explore ‘exile sentiment’ (p. 19) with a renewed perspective, as it gives a voice to those who ‘lay claim to the homeland of their childhood and early adolescence without suppressing their ties to the receiving society’ (p. 29).

In order to do so, López uses Paul Gilroy's conceptual framework on the Black Atlantic (1993), as it allows her to underline the tension between exile narratives (emphasising ‘roots’) and reconciliation narratives (emphasising ‘routes’), and thus better understand fluid cultural identities. Her objective is indeed to explore how Cuban Americans of the one-and-a-half generation search for home and their homeland and contribute to delineating ‘the increasingly indeterminate boundaries of Cuban culture’ (p. 16). She thus needs to find the right words : volver, not regresar, diaspora (or transnationalism), not exile, to tackle the complex relationship Cubans entertain with their homeland, and to multiply the perspectives (history, fiction, literary autobiography, visual arts) with which she can grasp her subject.

Chapter 1 provides the reader with contextual elements about the politics of exile. The author explains the dramatic consequences of Operation Peter Pan (a programme for the exodus of unaccompanied minors, whose parents feared their children would be taken away from them by the new communist regime) in order to underline the entanglement between migratory issues and politics. She shows in particular how such a programme stemmed from the convergence of the interests of exiled Cuban and US interests (p. 40), thus making the homecoming of the one-and-a-half generation a politically oriented choice, as it defies the political rift between pro- and anti-Castro sentiment. This homecoming takes place progressively as young Americans (1969) and then young Cubans start travelling to Cuba (1973, 1977, 1979) and later on dare write about it (from the 1990s and on).

Chapter 2 explores the logics of dis-identification of the one-and-a-half generation, which claims neither patria nor exile. Through the experience of return trips presented in autobiographical narratives, López underlines the deep ambivalence felt by the writers. On the one hand, the homeland is not entirely home any more; on the other hand their use of their adopted country's language (although most also write in Spanish) widens the gap with their already debilitated memory of the island. This ambivalence makes them ‘ambidextrous writers in cultural and linguistic respects’ (p. 66) and sheds light on the fact that the exile's desire to remember and act with a single Cuban identity is an illusion. It is all the more so since most already experienced multiple identities before the revolution (as Cuban and gay for instance), an experience which continued during and after exile. Especially interesting are the author's pages on Ruth Behar's quest for identity as a Jewish Cuban: her family settled in Cuba for only two generations and she had no memories of her childhood on the island, as she had been only four when her parents took her to the United States. She thus develops a strategy not to forget again: travel to Cuba with a photographer in order to create a ‘memoryscape’ (p. 72).

Chapter 3 is entirely devoted to recalling artist Ana Mendieta's involvement with Cuba's art scene. Such a focus on one single artist is justified by Mendieta's unique (and successful) struggle to carve a space for herself in the Cuban visual arts world. Although a Peter Pan exile, Ana Mendieta managed to ‘circumnavigate the divide’ (p. 100), as she became one of the select few Cuban Americans artists allowed to work and exhibit their work in Cuba and build bridges between the American and the Cuban art scenes. Her untimely death at age 35, as well as the shifting politics of Cuban art, has blurred her institutional legacy in Cuba, but she survives in Cuban artists’ collective memory and imagination.

The last chapters build on the reflections developed in Chapter 3, as they deal with the process of remembering childhood on an imagined island. In Chapter 4, the author explores the works of two visual artists and two writers, who ‘struggle against rupture, dispersion, and fragmentation’ (p. 132), but nevertheless never quite manage to bridge the divide, as they engage in the search for the homeland from afar (three out of four have chosen not to go back to Cuba). Chapter 5 shows, on the contrary, through the works of writers whose characters go back to Cuba, that it is possible to ‘subvert the grand narrative of both Cuban and Cuban-American exile culture’, by moving away from nostalgia and challenging the essentialisation of the past. And finally, Chapter 6 concludes the book by acknowledging the transforming representation of returnees in Cuba, despite the prominence of art works, especially films, which tend to emphasise otherness or, on the contrary, claim the returnees as Cubans only once they have been stripped of all American attributes. Indeed it theorises a ‘boomerang aesthetic’, which stems from cultural exchange and artistic opening to foreign influences.

All in all, López's book is a must read. She not only manages to subvert the too many boundaries erected by the governments and hardliners on both sides of the Florida Strait. She also gives the reader the sense that s/he is a fellow traveller, as her multiple ways of exploring the journeys of the Cuban returnees echo their own multiple ways of searching for the homeland and bridging the gap between childhood experiences and adult remembering. The book thus lives up to its expectations, as both a social science study and a literary object in its own right.