49 pages • 1 hour read
Ana MenéndezIn Cuba I Was a German Shepherd
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2001A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Beta“In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd” and “Hurricane Stories”Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Story Summary: “In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd”
Widowed in middle-age, Máximo plays dominoes in a Miami park with Antonio, Carlos, and Raúl. The story alternates between his time in the park with his friends and his memories.
In the park scenes, Máximo tells jokes about Cubans and Castro. In one, a politician resurrected in the future discovers that Cubans continue to be hopeful that Castro will fall. In another, Fidel Castro attempts to leave Cuba on a raft. A third features Castro asking a young boy what he would like to be when he grows up; the boy responds, “a tourist” (20).
Not wanting tourists to gawk at him, Máximo had not wanted to play dominoes in the park, but Raúl convinced him. One day, as they are playing, a young woman walks by and stares at the men. Raúl reminisces about beautiful Cuban women and looks at Máximo for confirmation, but Raúl looks away. His wife died the previous year, and he had been having nightmares that she was trying to tell him something.
Máximo and Raúl had been neighbors in pre-revolutionary Havana. When Máximo was 36 years old, he left Cuba, thinking he would return in a few years. Too old for manual labor and unable to use his Cuban university credentials, he went into food service with his wife, Rosa. Their staff consisted of other exiled Cuban professors, lawyers, and bankers. After-hours, they would reminisce about Cuba, telling stories that “opened in sun” but “always narrowed into a dark place” (14).
When tourists arrive at the park to take photos, some of the men “act out,” shouting and gesticulating when normally they would not. Máximo finds being a “spectacle” (25) unbearable. A tourist guide comments that most of the domino-playing men are Cubans who are “keeping alive the tradition of their homeland” (25). Máximo curses at him in Spanish and starts to rush the fence. His friends restrain him, while the tourists wonder whether his outburst is “part of the show” (25).
In the last joke of the story, a homesick dog, Juanito, arrives in Miami. Eventually, he meets “an elegant white poodle” (26) and propositions her, but she turns him down because he is “a short, insignificant mutt” (27). Juanito replies that he may be a mutt in America, “but in Cuba I was a German shepherd” (27). Finishing the story, Máximo turns away so that the other men will not see the tears in his eyes. He hears someone leaning on the fence behind him and asks the other men to tell them “to go away” and “no pictures” (27).
Story Summary: “Hurricane Stories”
A first-person female narrator tells her lover the story of a hurricane she and her family prepared for when she was 12, and she recalls a story her father told her about a hurricane that he had lived through as a child.
Her lover asks if she was afraid, and she replies that she was excited. She tracked the storm’s progress, helped her father board the windows, and watched him put away their lawn chairs and mower. She remembers frantic crowds stocking up at the supermarket. Her lover asks what they bought, but she remembers only that her mother allowed them to buy candy.
She then tells her lover a story that her father had told her about riding out a particularly ferocious hurricane with relatives in Cuba. He claimed that “the seas joined over Varadero” (32) that day. Her lover asks if she thinks her father was telling the truth, but she had “never thought about it” (32). She realizes the man does not understand that something “could be true and never have happened” (32). She feels the mood slipping and wants to keep talking.
While preparing for the hurricane, she imagined later exchanging hurricane stories with her friends. Her father stayed home from work, and her family spent the morning watching the weather reports and eating popcorn. Despite the destruction outside, she felt safe in her house. She asks the man if he has ever felt safe, “even if you’re not” (34), and he replies that he has never thought about it.
After lunch, her family filled the bathtub with water and took out flashlights in case the power went out. She noticed the silence—no cars or wind. At the end of the day, they went outside, and she noticed that theirs was the only boarded-up house. She watched her father for a while, noticing the lines around his eyes for the first time. That night, she lay in bed feeling embarrassed for her house and wanting to hug her father.
The narrator tells her lover that the storm never hit. He asks her if she thinks her “father’s stories were true” (36). The woman wonders whether any stories are true and why people tell them. The man recalls the first time he noticed a flaw in his father, marveling that “[s]omething so small” could change “the way you think about a person” (37).
The woman knows that she and the man do not tell each other everything and anticipates him leaving her. She wonders what he knows about her and thinks of memories she wants to share with him—most of all the memory of the thrilling summer of the hurricane.
Story Analysis: “In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd” and “Hurricane Stories”
These stories explore the extent to which storytelling can preserve memories and capture truth, a key concern throughout the collection. Both Máximo and the unnamed narrator of “Hurricane Stories” discover, in different ways, the fallibility of memory and its selective nature. Both also use storytelling as a way to connect, memorialize, and communicate truths irrespective of their factual accuracy.
Máximo recalls exchanging stories about Cuba with his restaurant employees, immigrants like him who had lost their professional identities and communities when they fled. Stories become a way for them to keep their memories of Cuba alive despite being tainted by the pain of leaving. Máximo does not understand why their stories always end up “in a dark place” (14), but later stories reveal that longing can shape memories into idealized untruths that fall apart under scrutiny. Máximo’s jokes provide another potential explanation. His tragicomic jokes, though not factually accurate, reveal painful truths about the Cuban experience, prompting Raúl to respond, “That is so funny it breaks my heart” (20). They also start out sunny but end in darkness.
The jokes are not “true” events but do contain emotional truths. The joke about the politician brought back to life in the future reveals Cuban immigrants’ lack of confidence that anything will change in their native country. The jokes about Castro attempting to leave Cuba on a raft and the boy who wants to be a tourist when he grows up demonstrate how destructive Cuban immigrants believe his policies are: No one can thrive within them, not even Castro himself. The final joke, whose punch line is the story’s title, mocks the loss of identity and respect that professionals like Máximo have experienced in America.
The unnamed narrator of “Hurricane Stories” tells stories to her lover in an attempt to keep him close, despite believing this endeavor will fail, and he will leave her. Ultimately, their beliefs about storytelling reveal a deeper disconnect between them, dividing them. For the narrator, what matters is not factual accuracy but whether the story expresses an underlying truth. Her hurricane story is not about the hurricane itself, which never even happened, but about her excitement at its newness—her mother allowing them to buy candy, her father staying home from work, the family enjoying time together. Later, she felt embarrassed that her father over-prepared for a hurricane that never hit, but as an adult, she still recalls the thrill she felt fondly.
When she tells her father’s hurricane story, she mentions an outrageous detail: The hurricane was so ferocious that the oceans met over the land. Cuba sits at the juncture of three bodies of water: the Gulf of Mexico, the Atlantic Ocean, and Caribbean Sea. Her lover fixates on the improbability of the oceans uniting and questions her father’s factual accuracy. For the narrator, this is beside the point. The exaggeration exists to make a larger, true point—that the hurricane was destructive. The couple also diverges in how they respond to perceived flaws in their loved ones. When the narrator realized that her father overreacted to the hurricane possibility, she felt embarrassed but also wanted to comfort her father. When her lover noticed a hole in his father’s socks and realized that his father was not aware of it, it demeaned his father in his eyes.
The friction between the couple represents the difficulty of reconciling opposing perspectives, experiences, or desires. The story collection explores this on a micro level through personal relationships in the stories “The Perfect Fruit,” “Why We Left,” “The Story of a Parrot,” and “Confusing the Saints.” Meanwhile, the stories “In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd, “Miami Relatives,” and “Her Mother’s House” express this difficulty on a macro level through Cuban immigrants’ struggles to acclimate to a new world in the shadow of loss.
