Cuban-American literature of exile has experienced a boom during the nineties and, consequently, the variety and quantity of critical and theoretical works about this experience has increased considerably. Within this corpus, Alvarez Borland's book provides a comprehensive history and analysis of the Cuban Diaspora after 1959, emphasizing the complex relationship between literature and history as she examines the way Cuban-American writers, at different times, have re-created historical events after the Revolution through their personal experiences in exile.

Cuban-American Literature of Exile: From Person to Persona is an all-encompassing work that recognizes linguistic, ideological and methodological differences among Cuban writers in exile. Alvarez Borland approaches these differences by dividing the relevant writers into two main groups: the first and the second generation. The first generation includes writers who were educated in Cuba and left the island as adults. The second generation (Alvarez Borland's own) consists of writers whose parents belong to the first generation but who either left Cuba as children or were born in the United States. This second generation, in turn, is divided in two subgroups: the "one- and-a- half" --a term coined by one of these writers, Gustavo Pérez Firmat--, and what the author calls "Cuban-American ethnic writers."

Alvarez Borland structures her study in three main sections. In the first of these, "Exile as Loss: Bearing Witness," which analyses writers from the first generation, the authoress emphasizes the nostalgia and anger expressed by these Cuban-Americans as they deal with historical events of the Revolution and their subsequent exile. It is very interesting that Alvarez divides the book by generation rather than by waves of immigration. In doing so, she can analyze writers who left Cuba during the sixties along with those who arrived in the United States during the Mariel boatlift in 1980. Although there are clear differences among these writers, all of whom write in Spanish and whose stories, without exception, contain distinctive political and ideological recollections, Alvarez Borland successfully demonstrates that, above all, they share the same vision of Cuba and exile based on their own personal histories as adult emigrés.

For the one-and-a-half generation, discussed in the second part of the book ("Self-Writing as Search: The Second generation"), language is a constant reminder of their lives "on the hyphen" (56). These writers share the experience of being part of two cultures and the dramatic effort to compensate for their linguistic loss. In this part, Alvarez Borland examines some autobiographical writings as well as personal essays. She asserts that these writers seek a kind of reconciliation with the past and that autobiography serves here as a mode of self-evaluation.

The Cuban-American ethnic writers analyzed in the third part of the book ("Encountering Others: Imagined U.S. Cuban Communities") move from a personal autobiography to a collective revision of the past. In some of these works we still find the autobiography, but it is the fictional writer within the text who collects the experiences of different sectors of the Cuban communities in exile. Other writers from this generation dramatize the experiences of Cuban-American communities as they interact with one another, and with the dominant culture. The issue of identity becomes crucial in the presentation of their own vision of community, as they explore different ways to represent the tension between acculturation and preservation of their Cuban identity. For others, identity is further problematized by the incorporation of the issue of sexual preference. In their search for identity and community, Cuban-American homosexuals have to negotiate their space within both the heterosexual Cuban-American communities and the dominant Anglo-Saxon culture.

The sense of community and identity will become even more complex in the new millennium, as there looms the possibility of new waves of immigration and the reality of the upcoming third generation of Cuban-Americans. Alvarez Borland's work provides an excellent foundation for the study of Cuban literature, since it presents a comprehensive history of the development of this literature during the last three decades. This book will undoubtedly be a useful tool for scholars, both for itself and for the excellent bibliography it contains.