Loving Che A Novel

A young Cuban woman has been searching in vain for details of her birth mother. All she knows of her past is that her grandfather fled the turbulent Havana of the 1960s for Miami with her in tow, and that pinned to her sweater-possibly by her mother-were a few treasured lines of a Pablo Neruda poem. These facts remain her only tenuous links to her history, until a mysterious parcel arrives in the mail. Inside the soft, worn box are layers of writings and photographs. Fitting these pieces together with insights she gleans from several trips back to Havana, the daughter reconstructs a life of her mother, her youthful affair with the dashing, charismatic Che Guevara and the child she bore by the enigmatic rebel. Loving Che is a brilliant recapturing of revolutionary Cuba, the changing social mores, the hopes and disappointments, the excitement and terror of the times. It is also an erotic fantasy, a glimpse into the private life of a mythic public figure, and an exquisitely crafted meditation on memory, history, and storytelling. Finally, Loving Che is a triumphant unveiling of how the stories we tell about others ultimately become the story of ourselves.

Ana Menendez is the daughter of Cuban exiles who fled to Los Angeles in the 1960s before settling in Miami in the 1980s. She worked as a journalist for six years, first at The Miami Herald where she covered Little Havana, and later with The Orange County Register in California. Menendez is a graduate of NYU's creative writing program, where she was a New York Times fellow. Loving Che is her first novel and has been translated into eleven languages. Her story collection In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd has also been translated into eleven languages. She lives in Miami Beach.