GOODBYE, MY HAVANA

Veltfort recalls her adolescence in newly Communist Cuba through the lens of homophobic suppression.

The graphic memoir opens in 1962, when the author arrived in Havana from California with her family; her stepfather was a committed Communist excited by the new regime. Veltfort was 16 at the time, struggling to adjust to a new language, a new culture, and a newfound attraction to women. The last was a particular challenge in a country that routinely spouted homophobic rhetoric and imprisoned, beat, and otherwise punished suspected LGBTQ people. (“You have to deny everything. Remember that,” the author’s first girlfriend told her.) Veltfort’s drawings aren’t especially splashy or dynamic, and her dialogue is often flat and didactic. However, she captures her teenage self thoughtfully and on a number of emotional registers. At home, her parents could be dismissive and abusive; her sexual relationships were, by necessity, often furtive and anxious; and her feelings toward her new homeland were deeply conflicted. On one hand, her travels around the island to gather information about everyday lives outside Havana stoked her curiosity and compassion, and she was as enchanted by Castro in person as any fellow traveler. But as she began college and purges of “counterrevolutionaries and homosexuals” began in earnest, she sought to escape. She and a girlfriend were beaten on the street, a setup for disciplinary meetings that made her a pariah at school. Castro’s late 1960s crackdown of anything that smacked of alternative culture, including the forced closings of clubs and cabarets, tested Veltfort’s savvy at dodging the authorities. Yet she maintained a certain affection for the country and its people. Rather than playing the victim, she savvily confronted or evaded the regime’s absurdities, striving to maintain a semblance of normalcy amid them.

Plainspoken to a fault, but a revealing portrait of sexual intimidation under an authoritarian regime.